WesleyLivesay

Same here. Everything joint except for a credit card on both sides that are individual but are really old accounts so they help our credit scores.

Absolutely correct. I wonder what the % of monetized channels (which only starts at 500 subs) make a sizeable amount of money, say more than $1k a month.

It seems natural that in a world in which you need money to survive people who like to do a thing would like to be able to do that thing for money so that they don't have to do something else to survive.

The article definitely assumes you know that 'Obsidian' is a reference to the text editor found at https://obsidian.md/

Yeah, Preview has always worked great for me. Maybe I am just not using fancy-enough PDFs to notice that it doesn't support some things.

It does feel a bit odd. A better title might be "Work Faster, Not Longer".

Probably also ties into the fact that this person's job seems very deliverable based. Maybe content creation? That is just a completely different set of requirements than most people's "keep butt in seat for 40 hours" jobs.

Logitech MX Ergo.

I have bad news about every keyboard I have ever used....

Before I swapped to a split keyboard I liked the numpad-less/fractional keyboards because it allowed my mouse to be in a better spot on my desk as it required me to keep the keyboard centered without having to reach so far to the right to use the mouse.

I had exactly the same experience.

After using the Ergodox since around 2020 it is hard to see going back to a non-split keyboard. It helps that I also swapped to a trackball at the same time and I find the ergo of having a trackball between a split keyboard to be excellent.

Also, having the backspace key as the "home" key for my left thumb has greatly increased my typing speed....I make a lot of mistakes.

I would be curious to know what a workflow looks like where the Cut command justifies such first-class real estate.

I have the four big thumb keys as Backspace - Tab - Enter - Space in that order from left to right specifically because my thumbs sit on Backspace and Space and those are my most used keys on the keyboard.

Agreed. Although the saying I have always heard is that you can't outrun a bad diet.

I feel like there is one more level of detail that is needed in many categories of "firepower" and that is the relative age of the platforms. The groupings are just a bit too high level with something like "tanks" or "fighter aircraft" not really being sufficient for any kind of understanding of capabilities. Even if the deeper numbers were even more estimations for some nations, it would still make this more useful.

I think this ties into the negative connotation I mentioned: propaganda does not have to be false, it just has to be biased.

One thing I noticed in the article was that all of the rumors being discussed were negative rumors. The goal was to take rumors that might bring down morale and "set them right". I wonder if positive rumors were treated the same way.

Absolutely still happening, I used past tense to refer to the exact events discussed in the article (newspapers printing anti-rumor columns)

An interesting article for sure. There were all kinds of things done by the various nations during the war to control the information available to the populous and to try and influence their beliefs.

I do think it is interesting that this article never uses the word "propaganda" to describe what was being done by the newspapers here. It undoubtedly was propaganda, but in the modern world that word carries a very negative connotation so it is only described as counter- or anti-propaganda.

Shouldn't you then compare it to a 2 year old Air? They seem to be in the $600-$700 range on eBay.

The challenge with that is that unlike those things that sponsorblock is skipping, most podcast ads these days are dynamically inserted at time of stream/download. This means that some listeners get them and some listeners don't.

They are also dynamic based on geographic location from which you download, which results in drastically different ad loads based on where you live. This is probably one of the reasons that a sponsorblock-for-podcasts has not yet happened.

Generally you only need to submit them to three platforms:

* Youtube Music (replacement for Google Podcasts) * Spotify * Apple

Every other podcast platform uses Apple APIs to get your podcast info, and it will be available on, for example Pocketcasts, as soon as it shows up on Apple Podcasts.

There might be a few other smaller players that you still have to specifically submit to, some of them have died off. The ones above will get you to the vast majority of listeners.

Interesting...in a bad way.

I guess I am not shocked that they would do something like that. I'm sure they claim that they do it for user experience or some such nonsense.

Having been involved in podcasting for almost a decade now, I take a generally pessimistic view of the future the RSS based distribution system of podcasts. It largely only exists because of decisions made by Apple many many years ago that they have not gone back on. They set their APIs to public which allows a podcaster to submit to Apple and then all of the various podcast distribution platforms can pull in that data to allow you to subscribe to the RSS on their platform. Apple's introduction of Podcast Subscriptions was their first move away from this model (with Apple hosting the audio) and I wouldn't be surprised if they moved to get more control in the future.

When Spotify entered the market they paid a lot of money for exclusive content, but for the 99% of podcasters their interaction with the space was the same as Apple, submit your RSS and it serves it from your hosting. However, Spotify also bought two podcast hosting platforms: Anchor and Megaphone which ends up blurring that line a bit. As far as I know the Anchor/Megaphone hosted podcasts are not treated differently by Spotify, but that could change at any time.

The recent change from Google with the retiring of Google Podcasts in favor of Youtube Music is a tremendous step in the opposite direction. Youtube Music does NOT use the RSS based distribution method, with podcasters uploading their files directly to Youtube. Google even offers an RSS import.

From all of the metrics I have seen the above three platforms make up 80%+ or so of the podcast user base. So if they made changes to make things less open podcast creators would be forced to follow. Making it feel like the openness of podcasts is, at least in 2023, more of an illusion or an act of charity than anything else.

I would be far more concerned with the proliferation of Ring doorbells and cloud connected security cameras and systems.

I actually wonder if some kind of post processing could be used to remove people from videos/pictures but that would require some kind of registry which causes its own problems

My reading is almost entirely history as well, for somewhat similar reasons to the article.

Another thing I like about reading historical non-fiction is that in the modern world it is almost alway possible to dig in deeper on anything you read. There are different more detailed books/articles on the subject, often internet accessible primary documents, etc. and this ability dig deeper and deeper on a subject just cannot exist for fictional worlds.

I'm not necessarily super surprised, the uptake on Google Podcasts always seemed very low.

An interesting article. I think one of the major challenges in deep dives like this that rely heavily on HoME is that there is so much material that was clearly discarded, reconsidered, or reworked later in Tolkien's life. The steel ships/rockets/etc. of some of the earlier versions of Ar-Pharazon's fleet is a great example of this, which I don't think has a proper disclaimer in the article.

It is one of the downsides of using HoME as a source, it is a collection of rough drafts over the course of Tolkien's entire life and the textual history, and evolution, is a critical part of discussing anything you find within especially the earlier volumes.

At this point there are enough note taking app options out there that are really just a fancy interface on top of text/markdown files that I have a really hard time ever considering any ecosystem that locks my notes into their own data system. I do see an export function here, but it is unclear whether or not that export to text files or just to the PDFs.

I use Obsidian, and I would love for it to be Open Source, but I take comfort in the fact that at any moment I can just delete the app and start editing my notes in any application that can interpret text files.

As a person who was looking to buy some of this new set, so glad this has been found so the street prices of the collector boosters will drop.

I feel like you are overestmating the impact of Apple Podcast subscriptions. It doesn't seem like a very well supported feature outside of a few large media brands.

Sucks being dependable.

I'm not sure there is anything in podcasting 2.0 about removing ads. I don't think the distribution protocol can do anything about ads that are baked into the mp3s on the hosting side.