✨ AI slop ✨

unless they eventually don’t need foreign currency anymore because their own country produces everything they could ever need or want

I like when true crime podcasters eventually come to terms that the police is between inept to malicious and often won’t actually solve anything. Sometimes it’s the community that solves the crime, sometimes one good apple who insists on it and works against his own superiors. Sometimes the murderer is a policeman, sometimes the murderer is friends with the police. Often the police as an institution just makes a note, sometimes before the crime happens, and ignores it until it becomes too big to ignore. It’s ridiculous seeing so many true crime episodes come to similar conclusions about the police. And since most true crime is american due to america’s lack of privacy regulations, the way the police treats black people is also insane.

Some people interviewed: “I saw him kill his own dog and turn him into sausages. I reported him to the police but they didn’t care.”

No they can’t really fly, more just run and creep

Podcasts have ads directly in the audio, similar to sponsorship ads in YouTube videos and on other platforms directly in the video the creator uploads. I was wondering when an open source solution to that would come out, similar to sponsorblock for YouTube, but I guess Spotify is first.

Podcasts are still slightly different, as the easy pliability of audio means podcast hosts inject ads based on your location and other factors into the audio stream instead of just going with one single global ad for everyone. But you still only get the audio stream from the regular podcast host, which is why classic ad blockers don’t work. A community-run solution might be "for podcast id 123 skip from audio fragment “sponsor” to “welcome back”. Just purely going by time (skip from 10:00 to 10:30) wouldn’t work, as ads can be longer or shorter. There can also be multiple ads back to back even if they’re a standard length.

A service like Spotify at least partially hosts its own podcasts and probably does the ads for those podcasts itself, so it can just leave them out. If Spotify proxies podcasts from elsewhere, it can detect (via querying the podcast multiple times from different locations) where the dynamic bits of the podcasts are and cut them out. That could also be a community solution, though it would require more computational resources. A centralized service like Spotify makes it easier. Spotify is also AI-happy, and what they’ve actually done might be to just train an AI on ad segments, and let the AI cut those segments out.

By the way, YouTube already skips some creator sponsorships with their premium service.

rules aren’t neutral or grown out of the void. people with biases and maybe even ambitions create them for specific purposes

EDIT: To quote Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

one has a lot more power and uses a lot more space than the other