Never trust a helpful little wizard.
Never trust a helpful little wizard
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Unofficial fan archive · Podcasting 2.0 · Episodes 1–274
The Pod Sage
An unofficial notebook of what Dave Jones has said on Podcasting 2.0, the show he co-hosts with Adam Curry. Wisdom, books, and recommendations are below. Every quote is his, copied from the transcript, and the transcripts can be wrong.
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Wisdom
It is if you aren't in the directories, you just don't exist, right?
If you aren't in the directories, you don't exist
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I just want to make sure that when I do listen, that money is being sent, because I don't want to, I don't want to take without giving.
Don't take without giving
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Yeah. And we're, you know, so a good example of that is like deprecating tags out of the namespace. I've never I've never wanted to do this. I've always been opposed to this.
Don't deprecate a tag just because nobody's using it yet
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can never accurately reflect what they actually you know, what the value that they're getting from the product, because the VAT, the value of media is ever changing on a on a daily basis,
Subscriptions can't track media's changing value; pay at the moment of value
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But But what if that's, that's fine. But rhetoric rhetoric aside, it was a fair criticism. I mean, like I, I, I get angry and I just in a change something and I should have I should have talked it out first
Take fair criticism and talk it out before changing shared things
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when you curate it and care for it in a way that lets other people run it on their system. Yeah, that's, that's you're signing up for support long term for a lot of work, a lot of work and a lot of bug fixes and things like that.
Making software self-hostable means signing up for years of support
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if you had a show where they had comments attached to each episode, then those comments sort of live forever on that episode.
Chat and comments are different things
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in full legal terminology that you, as a, if you publish a podcast publicly on the internet, that it's just like a webpage and you, there are no rights that are exchanged in this
A public podcast is like a webpage: no rights change hands
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I think that the closed platforms are also fighting the exact same battle. I don't think they can make that guarantee. They could say it, but they couldn't live up to it.
Closed platforms can't promise to keep out slop either
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to me live is one of the most important things about podcasting 2.0 Even if not a whole lot of people use it right now. Because it it shows that RSS can be the can be just as powerful the distribution mechanism as YouTube or anything else.
Live shows prove RSS can match the platforms
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If you keep knocking long enough. He will get up and give you whatever you need because of your shameless persistence.
Shameless persistence pays off
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If they had never told me the price and said, give me what you want, just like as a monthly subscription, I would have given them, I don't know, 15, 20 bucks
Without a set price, fans might pay more
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if it's just pure idealism, well, then your ideal is known as on his merit may not be any better than anybody else's ideal. And you're just arguing about, you know, you're just arguing about your vision.
Interop with money settles arguments between visions
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it's really helpful to hear the non technical podcasters point of view, when it comes to how to handle all this stuff.
Bring in non-technical podcasters' perspective
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These things are not just sort of optional things that some apps can do and some apps can't. It's on every these things are on every apps radar and a Every apps roadmap, it's just a matter of where they are in the priority list.
Once it's on every roadmap, timing doesn't matter
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we try first and foremost to make the tag except future proof. So they accept any protocol. Yeah. The problem with namespaces in the past with with with podcasting is they, they they tied themselves to a specific protocol
Make specs protocol-agnostic
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it's really hard to do from a UI perspective is to get All the features into the UI, in a way that doesn't look like this kitchen sink of garbage everywhere.
Fit every feature without a kitchen-sink UI
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if you go into something with a slow, sort of methodical, built, you know, approach to building it, you don't you don't have to fall victim to a lot of that stuff.
Build slow and methodical, not 'fix it in the first patch'
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it's sort of like a guaranteed thing on the on the Netflix Amazon prompts versus you taking a risk, and give you know, and doing it yourself and make it potentially making more money but potentially not making any money.
The devil's bargain: a guaranteed buyout or keeping ownership
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What we've essentially built is a left hemisphere. That stands on its own without the guardianship of the right hemisphere of the right hemisphere.
LLMs are a left hemisphere with no right hemisphere to check them
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if it's free, and it's just doing a couple of things to jump downloading an app or something like that, I don't, I don't know that that's the he. It's just not that big of a barrier.
Asking listeners to switch to a free app isn't a big barrier
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if you can spend resources on a better money, better money is one of those things that's worth spending energy on
Some things are worth the world's energy, including better money
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That's the benefit of the closed system is that it all goes through one entity. And so you always have one link. It's always a link to Twitter, a link to YouTube, a link to Spotify.
Closed platforms win on sharing because there's one link
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Books
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes
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The Technological Society
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The Myth of a Guilty Nation
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Orthodoxy
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Inferno (The Divine Comedy)
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Why We Drive (also: Shop Class as Soulcraft)
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View Why We Drive on Amazon (opens in a new tab)View Shop Class as Soulcraft on Amazon (opens in a new tab)
The C Programming Language
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Heretics
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The Master and His Emissary
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A Secular Age
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The Devil in the White City
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The Caves of Steel
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Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra; The Antichrist
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View Thus Spoke Zarathustra on Amazon (opens in a new tab)View Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ on Amazon (opens in a new tab)
Life Is a Miracle
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City of Sedition
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Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory
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A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press During World War II
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Bartleby, the Scrivener
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Listen, Liberal
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The Law
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Against the Machine
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Recommendations & Tips
Ancestral diet
I have this theory that if you look at your heritage, and you say, Okay, what did my ancestors eat? That's probably what you should mostly be eating.
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Pit Boss pellet smoker
pit boss, I almost spent like the pit boss is the best bang for the buck because there's many more expensive smokers like the,
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Podping (instead of polling/API)
if that's all your need, then the API for you don't need the API, just use piping. And everybody sees the feed.
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Beef tallow fries
Yet we went to we went over to their house the other night he made beef tallow fries with grass fed beef.
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PowerPress / Blubrry / RSS.com / Buzzsprout
Dave's standard advice: if you're on WordPress, use PowerPress. If you focus on value-for-value and don't want to self-host, Blubrry or RSS.com have it built in. Otherwise Buzzsprout.
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Custodial Lightning wallet for small balances
there's nothing wrong with having a custodial wallet that just holds 100 bucks or less.
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Little House on the Prairie
There's an epic, there's a single episode of Little House on the Prairie. That taught me what being a man really is more than any other thing.
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Rules for Standards-Makers (Dave Winer)
It is the Bible that we live by within podcasting 2.0 and the namespace development and all the open standard development that we do here at this project.
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A decent microphone and audio interface
People who represent podcast advertising agencies often sound like they're in a can. Microphones aren't expensive; anyone in that job should get a decent mic and audio interface on day one.
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SSH hardening baseline (keys only, no root, UFW allowlist, Tailscale)
After Adam's server was compromised, Dave lays out his standard protocol for anyone running Linux servers: disable root login, password login and keyboard-interactive login; move SSH off port 22; allow only public-key authentication; and go further by restricting the SSH port with UFW to specific IPs. With Tailscale and his home CIDR block, the restriction is less of a pain on the road.
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Beef protein milkshake (Equip Foods beef protein + whey isolate + milk; later creatine)
Dave's signature drink, made in a blender: three ice cubes, a cup of milk, a scoop of whey protein isolate and a scoop of Equip Foods grass-fed hydrolyzed beef protein (chocolate; 'a little pricey, but high quality'). Later versions add creatine and high-protein, low-sugar milk. He says chocolate works and vanilla doesn't.
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Balance of Satoshis (bos)
Dave recommends Balance of Satoshis, a JavaScript command-line tool for Lightning node management. Its accounting function pulls your node's transactions for a time period and can resolve them to fiat, producing a CSV for bookkeeping.
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Break the reflexive phone grab
I snapped out of it. After about about five or six seconds. I was like, hey, you know what, idiot you can just go make coffee.
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"The Subprime AI Crisis" (article)
Dave recommends searching for and reading 'The Subprime AI Crisis', which notes that fewer than 1% of Microsoft's paying Office 365 customers subscribed to Copilot because it's so expensive. It's useful context on how fragile AI business models are.
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NVIDIA RTX 3050 (3000-series GPU)
Get a 3050 It's not a powerful card, but you don't need much you'll all you need is is eight, you need a 3000 series card. And you need which 3050 is like $200
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tracking.podcastindex.org/current
For apps that keep their own feed database: besides watching Podping, watch the Podcast Index tracking endpoint at tracking.podcastindex.org/current, which also covers feeds that don't use Podping. Fetch current, then follow the 'previous' links back until you reach the last one you checked, and you'll have seen everything the Index has seen. It's a static file in object storage, cached at Cloudflare.
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Seven-day rule for colds
So I go to the I go to the end. User, here's my typical. Here's my typical strategy. So I'll give it a week. And then if I'm not getting better by day seven,
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NixOS
Every everything, like literally everything in the system is controlled with this one configuration file.
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Stay out of flame-war threads
As a personal policy, Dave stays out of heated social-media 'hell threads' (like the one on paywalls on podcastindex.social). Adding to them doesn't help, so he reads and lets them play out, then shares his thoughts in a calmer setting such as the show.
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America This Week (podcast, Matt Taibbi & Walter Kirn)
I subscribe to this podcast America this week with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kern and it's one of my favorite shows. He every week they discuss a short story.
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Copper foil tape
wanting to always go back and rest on top of the XLR jack. So I just put some copper foil there. I feel like we're in good shape. I know I don't hear any hizzy
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'No egress fee' object storage (e.g. Wasabi)
Storage providers advertising no egress fees (Wasabi came up) still have limits: go over a certain amount of egress per month and you get a phone call telling you they don't want you anymore. The Index instead runs Cloudflare in front of Linode.
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Smoking meat at home (ribs, Boston butts; Meat Church seasoning)
Dave has a smoker (a friend's hand-me-down) and smokes baby back ribs and Boston butts. He name-checked Meat Church, the BBQ seasoning brand.
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Avoid MySQL early row lookups
Fixing a Podcast Index API bug where requests returned too few episodes, Dave explains MySQL 'early row lookups'. A poorly thought-out GROUP BY or ORDER BY can make MySQL fetch full rows from disk (say 100,000) before filtering down to the 5,000 you deliver. Keep the work in the in-memory index and fetch the actual row data at the last minute, finagling the query if needed.
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