I'm done with podcasts. They've become so thoroughly enshittified with ads. Who wants to listen to content where you have to fast forward through commercials every few minutes? It totally breaks the flow. For other multimedia content, like movies, TV, books, and music, the solution is simple. BitTorrent, high-capacity storage device (NAS), solid VPN, and everything is smooth. No ads. No costs. Easy delivery. Podcasts are a strange beast though. They're freely downloadable via RSS feeds so there's no need for traditional "piracy" per se. But there's no ad removal mechanism either. I played around with a server-side app called Podly a couple weeks back. It small, and runs in a docker container. It claims to: - download your desired podcasts - convert the audio content to a text stream using AI model of your choice - based on that text stream, use another AI model of your choice to detect where the ad breaks are, strip them out, and then reassemble the .mp3 file for you. It's simple in theory but it's pretty much useless in practice. It doesn't catch most of the ads. In one case, it stripped out all of the actual podcast content and created a resultant file with nothing but ads! It's so strange to me that despite all of the fantastic things AI can do in terms of solving century old math puzzles, writing code, finding security bugs, etc., the ability to detect and remove advertisements from podcasts is completely out of reach. Apparently that's one of the few remaining things humans can easily do that AI can't. Do you know of any ad-block tech for podcasts that actually works? #asknostr #podcasts #adblock

I'm experimenting with self-hosting a Nostr relay (strfry). And a bunker/signer. And a Lightning node (core + lnd). And soon, the web client (jumble). I have no idea if any of this stuff is working successfully, either in isolation or in concert. Any attempt to send me a reply, reaction, DM (kind 14), or 1 sat zap would be appreciated. If you get an error message, I'd love to know what it is. Not sure if I'm smart enough for this self-hosting stuff but let's give it a shot. Thanks guys. #askNostr #mildlyRetardedRequests #seniorCitizensOfNostr