Hello dear reader, welcome to another quarterly edition of Occasion: projects, writing, reads, music, and life.
There's a lot in here… Feel free to skip around.
By the way, I'm Rosano from https://rosano.ca — if this isn't for you, there's a one-click eject button below; no hard feelings.
Comforting to be in Berlin again, even if it's the "worst weather of the year". I know lots of people here and feel it's more conducive than many places to the kind of life I enjoy.
After some months in Portugal of checking out places to settle long-term, my partner and I are seeking rest and familiarity. It was 'only' two cities but somehow felt like lots of moving around and figuring out how a new place works; I might be discovering that I now need at least three months in a place to feel relaxed. Still considering to try the same with France later.
Over the holidays, I rabbitholed on family tree data visualization and made some cool designs that I'll be proud to share soon.
I find myself reflecting on the connections between business, marketing, helping people, pedagogy, sustainable project work, and how I might incorporate these layers together in a way that's aligned with my values.
Last year, I might have spent half my time on private projects, so I'm looking forward to more public things. This year will mark twenty years of the rosano.ca domain name so I'd like to do some looking back as well as finally get to a newer homepage concept that reflects my current perspective.
My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.
Everything still works great and I've never stopped using them.
I released a notepad you can't edit and made it interoperable with some existing to-do apps. I'm really drawn to cultivating more of these 'bridges' with stuff that's already around.
Help them learn faster and skip unnecessary steps.
One person unable to explain, another unable to understand.
"I touched the phone for some specific reason an hour ago and didn't do that yet."
Public sofas… Why not?
No computing after lunch. Shower thoughts for the whole afternoon and evening.
Focus, reps, optimistic vortex, strong signal, ripple effects.
From 'trapped in my notes' to 'public data' that anyone can use.
The layout of this book makes me cringe but it's got tons of great ideas for making products more approachable.
[Anticipate the faces they're likely to make and compensate for their inability to show you.]
[They need to believe they'll improve, then actually improve, and also realize they've improved.]
[If they're worried about breaking something, they'll hesitate to touch anything. Make recovery easy. Help them feel free to just try things. Consider it a "Wild Experimentation Mode."]
["This product is awesome" really means "I'm awesome".]
So much in here that speaks to the tension between creating for myself versus for others. I'd like to get better at this.
[Building new things for your customers (instead of finding new customers for your things) implies investing in their lifetime value.]
[A supermarket might expect the lifetime value of their regulars to be thousands of dollars, so they would do well to 1. sponsor events for new residents in the area and 2. do right when a local complains about the fruit not being ripe.]
If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like "as stated" and "our policy," then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you're doing and watch it all fall apart.
[A brand is not your logo: it's the promise they think they're making.]
"I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"
[Specific is kind of brave as it's accountable: it either worked, matched, spread, or it didn't. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?]
[Find a corner of the market that can't wait for your attention, where you are the perfect answer.]
[When you show up with a flotation device to help someone drowning, they don't need ads to understand or be persuaded.]
[In a natural city, play happens in a thousand places within the cracks of adult life. Children become full of their surroundings through play, unless they're in a fenced-off cage.]
[Putting a concert hall beside an opera house is almost never practical to either audience, and only a consequence of that simple-minded part of us which puts things with the same name in the same basket.]
[Your price represents not just the product but also the documentation, support, and future roadmap.]
[Sage accounting software sucks, but you buy reliability in knowing it will update for new tax laws, your bookkeeper's likely familiarity with the product, and the support of staff who respond to forty thousand callers a day.]
[Black and Decker introduced their DeWALT drill series by giving away pulled pork sandwiches and holding drill-off competitions at construction sites, and being present at rodeos and NASCAR races where their end users hang out.]
with correct deep breathing, the ribs gently massage the spine and internal organs.
A sub 2.15 marathon runner is not "fit" to dead lift 600 pounds of iron, and a world-class power lifter is not "fit" to run a sub-28-minute 10,000 meters.
['I will if you will' becomes credible through monitoring that makes deviations visible.]
[If you woke up one day and everyone acted as if you didn't exist, you'd probably try to shake someone out of it. Beliefs will act the same way if purposefully ignored and force their presence to be acknowledged.]
Thinking outside of the boundaries of our beliefs is commonly referred to as creative thinking.
Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.
Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).
Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.
Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet.
Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.
Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.
Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.
Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.
Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.
When advertising comes to AI assistants, they will slowly become oriented around convincing us of something (to buy something, to join something, to identify with something), but they will be armed with total knowledge of your context, your concerns, your hesitations. It will be as if a third party pays your therapist to convince you of something.
A Fun Product Business for People Who Love Their Community
[Create a pocket-sized 'community passport' that's valid for one year with offers from at least 20 participating local businesses in a specific niche (like coffee, ice cream, beer, books, music) and price it at $1 per business; promote to local community groups and media or influencers in that niche.]
How we grade presentation night
[We can grade them as "learned something new", "knew this but enjoyed it", or "unknown"; "unknown" is not bad and not a property of your talk: it has to do with the relationship between your talk and the receiver."]
In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.
A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus
Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.
Observations on 6 years of journaling
["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]
my journal is my rubber duck.
[The owner of eyeglass e-commerce store DecorMyEyes found that online complaints put his site at the top of Google searches. He then responded to bad reviews with insults, threats, and other harassment to continue ranking high.]
LLMs are coherence engines, not truth engines
[LLMs generate coherence more than truth, with] no access to the world, no sensory grounding, no lived experience, and no intrinsic way to check correspondence between its outputs and reality.
[The same is true of humans, as we] construct narratives, causal explanations, identities, and moral frameworks that hang together, rather than ones that are objectively correct. [We tend towards] narrative consistency, social acceptability and reinforce biases based on beliefs.
To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.
[In business models squeezing both customers and employees, senior management plays them against each other as enemies.]
if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.
Visual diary of what kids eat in different parts of the world.
Enter 2 or more words to see their relative distances to the concepts of "good" and "evil".
Open-source alternative to Beeper which makes much code available but not their main client.
[supports] Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zendesk
RSS feeds for arbitrary websites, using CSS selectors.
[Workers have been convinced to put their savings in pension funds that invest in the stock market, which in turn puts more pressure on workers to perform better; this also shifts responsibility for a social system into the private realm.]
[Businesses are fundamentally political communities, no different from any other pooling of resources to achieve a collective goal.]
Joshua Maponga: How to Decolonize Africa’s Systems
[Before school, identify problems in your community. Study them in school and find solutions. Develop a proposal and business plan. After graduating, return to your community and solve those problems.]
[We plant coffee, which we can't eat, then export it to earn money that we can use to buy food, rather than simply planting food we can eat.]
What does it mean to be seen, all the time, by everyone?
[We are not individuals or ever alone: just the current contact point into a community.]
[Act in ways that would fill the healthiest people you know with pride.]
[Just as you find your footing, they start to change. I swear she grows with each blink.]
Let's talk about a Christmas Carol and its lessons....
[The systems and experiences that shape people can explain them without excusing them.]
If you refuse to examine how you became who you are, you'll mistake your coping mechanisms for virtues.
Why Nobody Can Afford Canada Anymore
[Canada wasn't hit as hard during the 2008 financial crisis but printed money and lowered interest rates anyway. This funneled too much investment into real estate and enabled housing prices to continue inflating for another decade or two.]
Puppy Wisdom, if we can hear it.
[When a baby dog bites, it can be painful but also totally normal. Why can knowing this give me so much patience towards an animal, yet I take it so personally when my partner does something which hurts? Getting hurt and processing it together can also be a normal part of relationships, and you can't have one without the other.]
It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now
[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]
[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]
pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going
Move your FOSS project to an org!
[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.
Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.
Look at any modern software application: buttons are verbs, boxes with drop-shadows are nouns, API requests are grammatical structures. We’re not “using” interfaces so much as speaking them. When you pick up a new piece of software you can usually operate it but you lack fluency, you’re still learning the dialect.
[Inventing your own module instead of using a pre-existing one increases your maintenance work down the line as well as the learning curve for new contributors who need to get acquainted with non-standard tooling.]
Fallacies of distributed computing
- The network is reliable;
- Latency is zero;
- Bandwidth is infinite;
- The network is secure;
- Topology doesn't change;
- There is one administrator;
- Transport cost is zero;
- The network is homogeneous;
projects solve the creator's need.
products are the intersection of the creator's capacity to build a solution, solving other people's needs, and their means to compensate the work. no intersection, no product.
[I appreciate that they shared this in a public space and not via direct message or email because it enables others who might find the information useful to discover it.]
[Direct messages can contribute too, but the risk is higher that no one will see it.]
learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin, so caring or not caring about one implies the same about the other
Choosing to 'skip over parts' is reading because reflects a choice about what's being processed.
If I've absorbed something through my own lived experience or heard of it in another context, I'm still "reading" the idea as I recognize it well enough to skip over.
Cultural or self-inflicted frowning upon 'screens causing us to skim rather than read' creates pressure to do things 'properly', but comparisons are not relevant: set your own objectives and make your own meaning.
Skipping is about feeling when you're not connected so that you can move to yes.
The average entrepreneur faces mild shame and maybe bankruptcy proceedings if their venture doesn’t work out, but even then they tend to maintain strong networks, saved money and cultural clout.
A person who takes really hardcore risk might face starvation, destitution or deportation if their gamble doesn’t work.
technical or nerdy ones mind might enjoy "reading the docs/spec/manual" while everyone else looks for "show me how to be amazing"
[All communities need a mind programmer they trust. Today we call it "memetic engineer", "influencer", or "political leader", whereas before it was "priest" or "shaman".]
"who can benefit while this is incomplete?"
a bridge goes both ways
The Left looks for traitors, the Right looks for converts.
nobody can take away your files
Listen as a distraction-free playlist, without accounts or sign up.
Filó Machado: FÉ CEGA / FACA AMOLADA
pure musicianship with mostly guitar, beatboxing, and vocal rhythmics leading to some very happy music; complex harmonies remind me of Toninho Horta and Jacob Collier (especially the changing shirts).
Mestre Gato Preto: The art of the berimbau
mostly berimbau without singing, solo and with the drum section, great swing
tight drumming, nice contrast between sections
would love to know the genre that is named for this chord progression.
Maribel La Canija: Mediterráneo
many 'typical/cliche' progressions but nice surprise resolutions, crunches, and resolutions. timefeel includes triplets. bass solo has this "suspended in the air" feeling i tend to seek out.
KNOWER: It's All Nothing Until It's Everything
deadly intricate rhythmic precision juxtaposed with smooth flowing head-banging melody.
I love receiving music by the way; be welcome to send me recommendations anytime, anywhere!
That's all for now.
Feel free to reply and share your reflections, or just say hello.
Thanks for reading, and see you next time 👋🏼.
