I’ve been saying for ages that podcasts are the last mainstream bastion of what the Internet is supposed to be. Imagine if it was the same for film and tv?
Somehow I think Podcasts will survive enshittification. The basis is just RSS and file hosting, so at its core, it’s possible to create and distribute podcasts without huge capital investment. There’s always gonna be some people trying to get their voices out and Podcasts still seems to be the easiest way to do that so until some better method comes out, podcasts will live on.
If you’re talking about Podcast networks, streaming services, ad networks, then yeah, those might face some kind of enshittification and destruction, but no matter what, I’m pretty confident some good podcasts, and some good ways to listen to them, will stick around.
Truth. I was genuinely angry seeing how Spotify kept trying to buy up everything podcast related. Felt like I was screaming into the void about how platform exclusive podcasts are antithetical to the free and open nature of podcasts. I hope their billions of dollars invested into podcasts continue to bite them in the butts.
Thankfully Spotify’s podcast platform still supplies RSS for most podcasts. The only exclusive podcast I listen to got so much backlash they had to make it non exclusive again
So good. I love British panel shows and I’m a parent of young kids. It’s one of my most-listened-to podcasts in the last 4 years.
Didn’t realize it ever went Spotify exclusive. That must have been between my binge sessions; I’ve only listened (on Podcast Addict) to a small fraction of what my wife listens to (on Spotify).
Spotify is actively and aggressively trying to be the ones to break podcasts by having their spotify exclusives.
Even things like Patreon bonus episodes aren't a problem -- they still are sent out via RSS. Still use the interoperable standard. You can even share the URL with people you know, if you feel like it.
The bad actors creating true app-exclusive content need to be called out, shamed, and stopped. Even if it is NPR.
I’m more just talking about how the COOOL NEW THING attracts a lot of attention. Then an ungodly amount of investor money. And then dies. I don’t like podcasts and I don’t know a whole lot about their distribution, but the fact that they get funded like super bowl ads definitely means another shoe is about to drop.
For those interested, AntennaPod is a pretty sweet free and open source podcast app for Android that’s very polished. A great alternative to Spotify, etc.
I’d love to switch to AntennaPod, but I haven’t figured out how to sync across platforms. I’ve heard of Gpodder, but I guess I’d need to host my own instance? Gpodder.net just gives me errors when I try to sign up, and from a quick web search it seems like this has been normal for quite a while now.
I wish I could just save all my metadata to a standard file format, sync those files any way I want, and have all my clients use that. But I don’t think that’s possible with any existing podcast clients. :/
Even when it was up, I never managed to get reliable read state from gpodder, possibly because I have paid podcast that cannot be downloaded easily. If you figure out a good way to sync the podcast list and read state between antennapod and other apps, please share it here!
My workaround so far is to only use antennapod which is actually fine, I can use bluetooth or a jack to use my phone as the podcast device in all situations where I actually want podcasts… but it’d be nice to just not use my phone at all when I’m home. ;-)
Anything we’ve had before now wasn’t AI. It was advanced switch statements. This is the first time to my knowledge that we have a working mesh based AI available to the public. This is not a hype bubble, it is revolutionary and will impact 80% of all jobs on the planet over the next 10 years.
This claim doesn’t work simply due to the fact AI is a very vague term which nobody agrees on. The broadest and most literal (and possibly oldest) definition is simply any inorganic emulation of intelligence. This includes if statements and even purely mechanical devices. The narrowest definition is a computer with human-like intelligence, which is why some people claim LLMs are not AI.
Saying LLMs work differently from older AI approaches is fair, saying older approaches are not AI but the latest one is is questionable.
Yeah, I have to disagree. Reason-able-ness is extremely important. It allows us to compose various pieces of logic, which is why I do think, it will always be more important than the non-reason-able 95% accurate solutions.
But that fundamental flaw does not mean, the non-reason-able parts may not exist at all. They simply have to exist at the boundaries of your logic.
They can be used to gather input, which will then be passed into your reason-able logic. If the 95% accurate solution fucks up, that means the whole system is 95% accurate, but otherwise, it doesn’t affect your ability to reason about the rest.
Well, and they can be used to format your output. Whether that’s human-readable text or an image or something else. Again, if they’re 95% accurate, your whole system is 95% accurate, but you can still reason about the reason-able parts.
It’s not exactly different from just traditional input & output, especially if a human is involved in those.
The article makes several claims and insinuations without backing them up so I find it hard to follow any of the reasoning.
I don’t think it’s desirable that it’s easier to reason about an AI than about a human. If it is, then we haven’t achieved human-level intelligence. I posit that human intelligence can be reasoned about given enough understanding but we’re not there yet, and until we are we shouldn’t expect to be able to reason about AI either. If we could, it’s just a sign that the AI is not advanced enough to fulfill its purpose.
Postel’s law IMHO is a big mistake - it’s what gave us Internet Explorer and arbitrary unpredictable interpretation of HTML, leading to decades of browser incompatibility problems. But the law is not even applicable here. Unlike the Internet, we want the AI to appear to think for itself rather than being predictable.
“Today’s highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design.” Uh no? They’re designed with the goal to generate useful content. The bullshit is just an unfortunate side effect because today’s AI algorithms have not evolved very far yet.
If I had to summarize this article in one word, that would be it: bullshit.
The article makes several claims and insinuations without backing them up so I find it hard to follow any of the reasoning.
“Article”. I’m going to call it what it is: a blog post that should have moderated away. If people here are going to post “tech news”, make sure it has actual journalism.
Postel’s law IMHO is a big mistake - it’s what gave us Internet Explorer and arbitrary unpredictable interpretation of HTML, leading to decades of browser incompatibility problems. But the law is not even applicable here. Unlike the Internet, we want the AI to appear to think for itself rather than being predictable.
It’s almost like Isaac Asimov wrote a famous book about robotic laws and a bunch of different short stories on how easy it was to circumvent them.
OpenAI’s algorithm like all LLM’s is designed to give you the next most likely word in a sentence based on what most frequently came next in its training data. Their main strategy has actually been to use a older and simpler transformer algorithm, and to just vastly increase the scrapped text content and recently bias with each new release.
I would argue that any system that works by stringing sudorandom words together based on how often they appear in its input sources is not going to be able to do anything but generate bullshit, albeit bullshit that may happen to be correct by pure accident when it’s near directly quoting said input sources.
I agree that the author didn’t do a great job explaining, but they are right about a few things.
Primarily, LLMs are not truth machines. That just flatly and plainly not what they are. No researcher, not even OpenAI makes such a claim.
The problem is the public perception that they are. Or that they almost are. Because a lot of time, they’re right. They might even be right more frequently than some people’s dumber friends. And even when they’re wrong, they sound right. Even when it’s wrong, it still sounds smarter than most peoples smartest friends.
So, I think that the point is that there is a perception gap between what LLMs are, and what people THINK that they are.
As long as the perception is more optimistic than the reality, a bubble of some kind will exist. But just because there is a “reckoning” somewhere in the future doesn’t imply it will crash to nothing. It just means the investment will align more closely to realistic expectations as the clarity of what realistic expectations even are become more clear.
LLMs are going to revolutionize and also destroy many industries. It will absolutely fundamentally change the way we interact with technology. No doubt…but for applications which strictly demand correctness, they are not appropriate tools. And investors don’t really understand that yet.
tell me how… they are dumb as fuck and follow a stupid algo… the data make them somewhat smart, that’s it. They don’t learn anything by themselves… I could do that with a few queries and a database.
This isn’t an argument in the way you think it is. Something being “dumb” doesn’t exclude it from possessing intelligence. My most metrics toddlers are “dumb” but no one would ever suggest in seriousness that any person lacks intelligence in the literal sense. And having low intelligence is not the same as lacking it.
Can you even define intelligence? I would honestly hazard a guess that by “intelligence” you really mean sapience. The discussion of what is intelligence, sapience, or sentience is far more complex and nuanced than you’d expect.
And where’s the intelligence in people without the data we learn?
They don’t learn anything by themselves
I don’t know what you even mean by this. Everything learns with external input.
I could do that with a few queries and a database.
The hell you could! This statement demonstrates you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. LLMs learn and process information in a method extremely close to how biological neurons function. We’re just using digital computation instead of analogue (the way all biology works).
LLMs have regularly demonstrated genuine creativity and even some emergent properties. They are able to learn certain “concepts” (I put concepts in quotes, because that’s not the right word here) that we as humans intrinsically know. Things like “a knight in armour” are likely to refer to a man, because historically it was entirely men that became knights, outside of a few recorded instances.
It can also learn general distances between cities/locations based on the text itself. Like New York city and Houston being closer to each other than Paris.
No, you 100% absolutely in no way ever could do the same thing with a database and a few queries.
Today’s AI is way worst then when ChatGPT was first released… it is way to censored.
You might need to reconsider that position. There are plenty of uncensored models available, that you can run on your local machine, that match or beat GPT-3 and beat the everliving shit out of GPT-2 and other older models. Just running them locally would have been unthinkable when GPT-3 released, let alone on CPU at reasonable speed. The fact that open source models do so well on such meager resources is pretty astounding.
I agree that it’s not AGI though. There might be some “sparks” of AGI in there (as some researchers probably put it), but I don’t think there’s much evidence of self-awareness yet.
which one is your favorite one? I might buy some hardware to be able to run them soon (I only have a laptop right now that is not the greatest, but I am willing to upgrade)
You might not even need to upgrade. I personally use GPT4All and like it for the simplicity. What is your laptop spec like? There are models than can run on a Raspberry Pi (slowly, of course 😅) so you should be able to find something that’ll work with what you’ve got.
I haven’t used that myself because I can run OpenOrca and Mistral 7B models pretty comfortably on my GPU, but it seems like a fine place to start! Nothing stopping you from downloading other models as well, to compare performance. TheBloke on Huggingface is a great resource for finding new models. The Reddit guide will help you figure out which models are most likely to work on your hardware, but if you’re not sure of something just ask 😊 Can’t guarantee a quick response though, took me five years to respond to a YouTube comment once…
It’s ok if you don’t have a discrete GPU, as long as you have at least 4GB of RAM you should be able to run some models.
I can’t comment on your other activities, but I guess you could maybe find some efficiencies if you buy the blow in bulk to get wholesale discounts and then pay the hookers in blow. Let’s spreadsheet that later.
It depresses me that we have to find new silly acronyms to mean something we already had acronyms for in the first place, just because we are simply too stupid to use our vocabulary appropriately.
AI is what “AGI” means. Just fucking AI. It has been for more than half a century, it is sensical, and it is logical.
However, in spite of its name, the current technology is not really capable of generating information, so it isn’t capable of actual “intelligence”. It is pseudo-generation, which it achieves by sequencing and combining input (AKA training) data. So it does not generate new information, but rather new variations of existing information. Due to this fact, I would prefer the name of “Artificial Adaptability” (or “AA”, or " A2") to be used in lieu of “AI”, or “Artificial Intelligence” (on the grounds that it means something else entirely).
Edit: to the people it may concern: stop answering this about “Artifishual GeNeRaL intelligence”. I know what AGI means. It takes all of 3 seconds to do an internet search, and it isn’t even necessary: everyone has known for months. I did not bother to explicit it, because I did not imagine that anyone would be simple enough to take literally the first word starting with “g” from my comment and roll with that in a self-important diatribe on what they imagined I was wrong about. So if you feel the need to project what you imagine I meant, and then correct that, please don’t. I’m sad enough already that humanity is failing, I do not need more evidence.
Edit 2: “your opinion only matters if you have published papers”. No. Also it is a really stupid argument from authority. Besides, anyone with enough time on their hands can get papers published. It is not a guarantee of quality, but merely a proof that you LARPed in academy. The hard part isn’t writing, it is thinking. And as I wrote before, I already know this, I need no more proof, thank you.
The fact that you think “AGI” is a new term, or the fact that you think the “G” stands for “Generative” shows how much you know about the field, so maybe you should go read up on literally any of it before you come at me with this attitude and your “due to this fact” pseudo-intellectual bullshit.
The “G” stands for “General”, friend. It delineates between an Artificial Intelligence that is narrow in the scope of its knowledge, from intelligences like us that can adapt to new tasks and improve themselves. We do not have Artificial General Intelligence yet, but the ones we have getting there and faster than you could possibly imagine.
Tell me, oh Doctor Of Neuropsychology and Computer Science: how do people learn? How do people generate new information?
Actually no fuck that, I have a better question: define “intelligence”. Let’s hear it, I’ve wanted to act the Picard in a Data trial since I was a kid. Since around the time that the term Artificial General Intelligence was coined in fact: nineteen ninety fucking seven.
If you haven’t published a few papers then your preference in acronyms is irrelevant.
AI comprises everything from pattern recognition like OCR and speech recognition to the complex transformers we know now. All of these are specialized in that they can only accomplish a single task. Such as recognizing graffiti or generating graffiti. AGI, artificial general intelligence, would be flexible enough to do all the things and is currently considered the holy grail of ai.
Y’all y’all check it, I just found the new revolutionary radical technology! They’re called jpegs! No one company can control them, they’re too powerful! /s
My favorite thing about podcasts is how, at least in the ones I listen to, the ads are generally relevant because they’re added when you download each episode. I HATE the modern YouTube thing of “this video was sponsored by” segments. “The first 100 people to…” on a video from even just 1 or 2 years ago is completely useless, and I hate that they’re forever burned into the videos :(
Pocket Casts did some update I didn’t like so I switched to Podcast Republic and haven’t looked back. I do have Spotify Premium aswell but that is and always will be for music only.
Just an illustration of what the article is talking about; I can switch to another app and still get the same podcasts. Not the case with Netflix, Spotify, HBO and so on.
Probably putting Apple Watch and file features behind a sub. That happened ages ago but they really haven’t change the UI since I’ve been using it for a decade (or so).
i stopped using pocket casts when they started adding pay for features into the main UI but disabled. i’d bought pocket casts but up until that point i was glad it was made free as it was the best podcast app for android, now i use antennapod, and it’s fine.
There are still platform exclusive podcasts, like on Spotify, but they don’t seem too prevalent. Podcasters seem to make most of their dough either through advertising sections, or having supporter exclusive feeds.
In fact, exclusive podcasts have been performing really badly recently. That’s why there have been a ton of layoffs in media - it turns out people won’t voluntarily trap themselves in walled gardens.
Universe Today, a space news podcast and website, gets almost all their funding through patreon, and without many “exclusive” feeds. Mostly it’s personal Q&As and an ad free feed.
It’s a bit of a rare beast, but their goal is to completely end advertising, and go all listener funding, and they claim they’re close.
The same goes for a lot of YouTube channels.
In fact, I opened a Patreon account just to show a little monthly support for an excellent, criminally underrated creator of videos on astronomy and its’ history, ParallaxNick.
Among other topics, the guy recently finished a four-part series on Galileo, a two-parter on Kepler before that, a single on Copernicus before that. By my calculations, I’m guessing a six-part masterpiece on Newton is right around the corner.
YouTube is an entirely different beast. Even if they personally don’t have ads, the platform itself runs ads and provides money to the creators based on those ads (or YouTube Premium subscription fees).
Podcasts don’t usually have a “platform” that supports them, many of them are self-hosted, and the podcast app is just an aggregator with no middleman inserting ads or passing the listener data on to anyone else.
Heck, the fact that RSS feeds in general still exist is amazing and a wonderful way to get an unfiltered source of news, information, and entertainment.
YouTube is an entirely different beast. Even if they personally don’t have ads, the platform itself runs ads and provides money to the creators based on those ads (or YouTube Premium subscription fees).
This could be fixed if everyone hopped onto Peertube, but that’s unfortunately not happening anytume soon
I mean, the only podcasts I’ve ever supported through patreon were small operations, most of them already didn’t have ads, and their paid feeds were mostly just them bullshitting on microphone.
Yes you can pretty easily selfhost sync for AntennaPod and Kasts with github.com/bohwaz/micro-gpodder-server (there are more official options that are heaver)
Thanks, good to know. At the moment I’m just plugging my phone into my computer and passing .opml files around which feels fine for the moment… and very secure.
I just launched a podcast a couple days ago. On a website, on a tiny server that lives on my dresser. Then I added it to Apple and Spotify and all the usual suspects. Such a wonderful system. Feels like I’m living in the past, in a good way.
I don’t get podcasts. Like, I’ve tried, several times over the years, but I’d really rather read something in five minutes than hear it dragged out for an hour.
So “where” I get my podcasts is already question-begging. I was pointed to one last week where the intro was all about things “everyone” experiences … getting the kids to school, what fast-food place to go to, arguing with the spouse about decor, usw. None of these applies to me, so I saw no reason to listen to the meat of the thing.
Don’t assume your audience is like you. Sure, some people may get warm fuzzies that others have experienced the hell of deciding to pop out a kid, but distilling the human experience to having kids and all that comes with that is going to turn off a lot of people. We know it’s hell. That’s why some of us noped the fuck out.
@Powderhorn I didn't get podcasts either at first. But they're basically just an equivalent to radio shows, only that you're listening to them recorded already and you can pick which one(s) to hear and in what order.
I’m with you … I’ve struggled to find one that’s really interesting to me. I think some people build a relationship of sorts with the people hosting the podcast… And I’ve never been able to feel that way about a one-way dialogue.
The closest I ever came was www.jupiterbroadcasting.com haven’t listened to them in a long time though now (long before podcasts were the big resurgent craze they have been the past few years).
Linux TechTips WAN show … I can sometimes enjoy but it is a very long format thing which also turns me away.
You good? The type of pods you listen to should revolve around your likes. I drive for a living so music/podcasts are in my ear 5 days a week for 9-10 hours. I definitely don’t see a reason for them if you don’t have that type of time. I have a few music related ones but the majority are from my favorite standup comedians. There’s so many I don’t understand how you couldn’t find one you liked. It’s not all random people talking about their personal lives. You’re conflating podcasts and vlogs.
I only really listen to them while driving 3+ hours.
My mind needs some engagement or I’ll fall asleep.
I listen to Dark Net Diaries because I’m interested in Cyber security, this American life because of the varied stories, wait wait don’t tell me because it’s light hearted, and car talk because of the nostalgia. I’m planning on grabbing a prairie home companion because my father listened to it, makes me think of him.
That being said. Dark Net is becoming a little more dramatic than I’d like, but it’s still good content.
oddly specific objection aside, where podcasting really shines is fiction. it’s the modern version of the radio drama. fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and Find Us Alive have narratives that are tailor-made for episodic audio and would not work in any other medium. a good fiction podcast is truly wonderful to listen to
I find the opposite to be true for me, but I’m the type that will sit down and read a textbook for entertainment as well. Purely informative podcasts, not entertainment etc. I’ve learned a lot of philosophy and ancient history via Spotify actually, it’s a very useful medium for information access, for those so inclined.
I have ADHD and almost always have an audiobook (TTS, technically) or podcast on while driving or doing chores.
What I like about TTS is that I can speed it up enough (~6× speed) that my mind doesn’t wander, to match my adHd. Podcasts I usually max out at 2.0× speed because human voices are harder to understand at higher speeds. Any slower and they can’t keep my attention. 1.0× speed is painful, and I don’t take anything in.
Maybe I’ll try that. I listened to audiobooks/podcasts at 1.4x, because otherwise, seems similar to you, it’s painfully slow to be able to focus. But doing something during listening is still either focusing on the podcast and doing the task wrong, or doing the task right but missing half of the contents, sometimes even forgetting that someone is speaking in my ears right now. Maybe speeding up is an option, thanks for suggestion!
The worst thing I really want to be able to listen, and feel like I’m missing out on a great experience otherwise, and this annoys me. :(
That is the correct answer. You don’t read a book while doing the chores. I also don’t whip out a Terry Pratchett novel while commuting when I know I have to change trains in 10 minutes. A podcast will do and you can keep listening while waiting on the platform. In the car I often listen to music instead, but sometimes I get bored and I’m more in the mood for an interesting podcast. Especially if I’m stuck in the car for a bit longer.
When deliberately doing one thing only, I like to read. I can read the paragraphs as fast or as slow as I like or just skim them.
The “secret” is: You have to find the podcasts you like. Some are just chat and drivel, some are more condensed. You might also like Audiobooks with stories instead of factual information. I don’t think you can make an absolute statement. Well, unless your brain isn’t wired for audio content. I’d get that nothing appeases you if that were the case.
Nowadays everyone and their grandma has a podcast. Quality varies greatly and most of them are more talk and not anything of substance. it’s not easy to find the good ones in all of the noise. But they exist.
and here I am listening to hardcore history at slow speed for what was uploaded as an 4 hour episode but then again I do the same thing for audio books
So all Podcasts are bad because this one particular example was stupid? Why did you feel the need to bring that up? What you described you can find plenty in books, magazines or everywhere else.
There are all kinds of podcasts for all kinds of interests. And the best thing is that people like you and me can make and publish them. I dislike many podcasts because they are superficial, loud, hectic or whatever but there are many others that just work for me.
I usually listen to them while on a run, in the car or to fall asleep to.
Unfortunately I don’t have recommendations for you because most of my subscribed podcasts are German* and the others are in the „fall asleep to“ category of men talking about tech. But if you’re interested in the latter, start at atp.fm or something on the relay.fm network.
*if you are German speaking, I’ll gladly give recommendations
I think they just gave an example for how podcasts often feel to them. And I can relate, most podcasts feel like the podcaster assumes a certain norm and presenting topics as absolute truths. Someone here mentioned darknet diaries for example and I tried listening to this podcast but was deterred by his assumptions of how everyone wants to accumulate money and how he is obviously very oblivious of his political bias (i.e. trying to be apolitical but thus supporting a government’s military and political decisions). I guess this problem of thinking one is apolitical while actually talking about highly political stuff is more prevalent in cis male dominated spaces like tech (imo because of the combination of less empathy, a more self-centered viewpoint and a confidence in one’s own correctness). But as given per example by the other commenter, societal norms at large give people the feeling that they are correct in their views and that things just are a certain way (e.g. sex differences, certain experiences etc). Well, just wanted to give my mustard to it ;)
My problem is I don’t see how that relates to podcasts. It’s just a medium. Everything you describe can happen everywhere else.
Edit: Maybe what you’re missing are journalistic standards. Most podcasts are for entertainment and you might need to dig a little deeper to find professional journalism.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.
You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).
The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There's nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There's also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform's discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It's totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your "podcast discovery platform" could well be your local bookclub's email list -- and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform's app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don't support this, they're behaving in a deviant way).
There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don't get their way.
I read it as a celebration that anyone can distribute podcasts. Distribution is via RSS so as long as you have the feed URL you can use whatever podcast player you want to subscribe to whatever podcasts you want.
Not just that but the feeds are indexed in many directories (if the hosts decide to, but most do) so you can just find it in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or „wherever you get your podcasts from“ and instantly start listening. If you would need to go to a website, copy the feed URL and paste it into your client, that would already be fine for nerds but not very convenient. Which is why regular website RSS feeds are not as popular (and also because they are often shitty, on purpose).
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