> I’m likely further hamstrung by the fact my content is high-brow & long-form, which comes at a disadvantage in the contemporary media landscape.
I think it comes at an advantage for building a loyal fan base in audio drama podcasts though. The kind of fan base that may want to support you financially.
> Genuine question: what's harming your experience in current podcasting apps?
Oh, where do I begin beyond just saying they are trash. I've used all the big names and each one seems like it was created with a the same basic idea in mind: show the latest episodes of a podcast, and have some form of pagination. Which is fine if that's all your podcast does and isn't meant to be listened to from the beginning.
But the moment your pod cast might have different shows or parts or otherwise intend to start at the beginning, it's suddenly hit or miss. Basically, it makes an assumption about how podcasts should work and ignores the reality of popular podcasts out there.
Not to mention some are just obtuse to use. I forget which one but I was trying to add a feed to a popular one and there was NO where to add my own feed. Spent five minutes looking and there was no way to add a URL feed. Like, that's core 101 functionality.
Like I said, I tried the popular ones and they all were annoying to use. I realize this comment doesn't help much, mostly because it was earlier this year that I tried them out and became frustrated so it's mostly me thinking through how much they sucked and not much on the specifics.
I think the best way I can think of it is they all did the bare minimum and stopped.
I use Apple's Podcast app because it's free, it syncs, and it while it sucks, I don't want to pay for something that isn't better than free.
I'm a Pocket Casts user, and see that it was one you tried.
Pocket Casts lets you select the episode order (as well as do things like group by season). I think it's pretty common to be able to add RSS feeds by putting them in the directory search field, and PC does this as well.
I've had absolutely zero problems using Pocket Casts to add custom Patreon feeds, and to listen to episodes in the other they came out.
Thanks for sharing! I've found your perspective interesting. I mostly listen to audio dramas, which are linear so I indeed didn't think about non-linear listening.
I agree that adding by URL is a must. I find other features like ability to download an episode or "Mark as played" as super useful too.
I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.
I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.
Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.
The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.
> adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks
Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.
Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.
I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S. state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved, the company made everyone redundant.
The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:
"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.
I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.
Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.
In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.
The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.
Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).
Everything was subtle:
Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).
In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.
CalyxOS is the alternative to Graphene mentioned above. CalyxOS has a bit different goals - it cares about privacy more than security and complete removes Google services instead of sandboxing them (they get replaced with MicroG which is a shim of Google services so that majority of apps continue to work). I successfully used it for a few years on my Pixel 4a. Most apps just worked including banking, but some didn't. Notably dating apps didn't work well and Uber's map didn't look right.
Graphene completely removes Google services in the default install. There is an option to install a sandboxed version of the Google play store, with enhanced privacy and security, but you don't need to install this or any other Google services if you don't want to, and I have opted to keep my Graphene installation Google-free.
There is a disagreement between the Graphene and CalyxOS community about which is more secure/private: Graphene's sandboxed Google play store, or CalyxOS's MicroG. I've read posts advocating for both sides, but I don't have the expertise to have an opinion, and I decided that I don't want either software on my phone, since I don't want to run google code or play store apps.
Although I'm not expert enough to validate the following claims, here's what I've read.
Graphene people claim that MicroG needs elevated privileges to run, privileges that Graphene doesn't grant to any app. MicroG also loads and runs Google code (in a context where that Google code would presumably have access to those elevated privileges). Graphene's version of the play store emulates some APIs without using Google code (for privacy), and sandboxes the Google code that it does run, running it with reduced privileges. This is a security first posture, keeping in mind that if you don't have security then you can lose privacy via exploits of your security holes.
CalyxOS's MicroG emulates a larger fraction of the google play APIs, making it less reliant on google code to operate, and this is the source of the claim that MicroG offers more privacy.
It's really not feasible to run most apps without Google Play APIs/MicroG. The most problematic issue is the notification API.
MicroG runs with elevated permissions to avoid being killed, and so that it can continue listening to socket events. Once an event arrives, it decodes it into a notification, packages into an RPC request, and awakes/runs the target application activity. Then it, crucially, uses the elevated privileges to override the default policy to also allow the target application to run without interruptions for 20 seconds (to process the notification).
I get my apps from F-Droid, which guarantees that the apps are open source, free of most "unwanted features" (ie, not malware), and don't depend on google play APIs. Apps written to the F-Droid standard don't use Google Play APIs for notifications. I acknowledge that most people want to run closed source apps from the google play store, but I consider those apps untrustworthy, and what I do won't work for most people.
The specific privilege that MicroG wants and that GrapheneOS doesn't allow is the ability to spoof the signatures of other apps. GrapheneOS runs the Google Play APIs in a sandbox, and this sandbox allows push notifications to work, so that's not the problem with MicroG from a GrapheneOS perspective.
I just really wish they would just allow microG, sandboxed in the same way as Google services (like DivestOS does), behind as many security warnings as they see fit.
The DivestOS project put stronger emphasis on device longevity and on libre ("free as in speech"), so their microG implementation was just a better fit for their case.
I can explain. The first link actually contains multiple comments -- the complete discussion is linked.
For a specific example within it, it does explicitly state "17.1 and higher have an unprivileged microG feature now: https://divestos.org/pages/faq#appCompatibility" in 2023. The comment was by the DivestOS project author.
The second link, also from 2023, starts with "Latest release of my DivestOS can now run microG in an unprivileged manner:" -- also by the DivestOS author.
I think that covers it for your reading of the links, no?
Anyway, the DivestOS project did have an implementation of microG, and it was sandboxed. As for my comment about projects goals, I also selected those two links because both include such commentary about DivestOS' implementation in relation to project goals and to the GrapheneOS implementation.
Thanks for clearing that up. I should've read your post more closely. To be honest I never checked the second link because I follow the Android privacy/security scene pretty closely and I was already pretty confident that if DivestOS added support for that I'd have already heard about it. My bad!
The way I see it, is that being able to demonstrate specialist-level skills in something is a good signal no matter the problem you need to solve. It means you can learn. As a specialist you have already shown ability to master a skill, so if a project needs another skill, you will be able to pick it up.
And quite often that's how you solve client problems as a contractor. You figure out what the actual problem is (in business terms), the cost/benefits of various solutions and then learn whatever you need to solve the problem. Only then you get to write code.
The funny thing is that you may be a ninja Rust developer, but sometimes all the client needs is a cron job to move data from a spreadsheet to a server. Or even worse, you may need to modify VBA scripts in an ancient Excel file!
Moka pot is such a wonderful little invention! If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend giving it a shot (pun intended).
It produces great tasting espresso (the flavor is just a little different that from an espresso machine) and it's quick to clean. It's much cheaper and practical for home use and I can't comprehend why an "average" coffee drinker would need anything else (except perhaps AeroPress, which is equally great). Espresso machines have their place, but I see them as a good solution coffee aficionados or when you brew a lot of coffee.
It's closer to cezve/ibrik than to espresso in a sense that it cooks coffee at 100 degrees whereas the standard temperature for espresso is around 93, which results in more finer flavours in the coffee comparing to the basically burnt one.
To be devil's advocate (despite being a long vim user): Lapce has a GUI, so they are not in the exact same category. Having lightening fast GUI is still a novelty, because the most popular IDEs like VSCode or JetBrains IDEs have slow downs from time to time.
It's not the GUI itself. A console application in a window is still a gui rendering console text. It's the fact that Vscode and jetbrains use a high level language/engine that makes it slow.
For jetbrains it's java and for vscode it's an html rendering engine. An IDE built from vulkan or some other low level graphics API can likely be even faster then vim depending on the console it's running within.
Asynchronous code doesn’t make something fast. It just prevents the application hanging when waiting for a function to return. But if that function is user facing (eg values for a context menu) and is slow, then your application is still going to feel slow in spite of those functions be asynchronous.
Coincidentally this is actually a problem I faced when writing my alternative shell.
I was just saying that you can make the text editor as lightning fast as you want but the moment you need to do anything useful with an IDE you become dependent on the performance of your plugins.
This is why I’m a little jaded when people talk about IDE performance. Unless that IDE is using its own bespoke plugins, and the trend these days is (thankfully) moving away from that, it’s really not a good benchmark any longer.
Column staggered and even more so ortholinear are easier for my brain to work with: the layout can be made almost symmetrical and fingers always go up.
One thing to watch for is that many have same size modifier keys as letter keys, which I find not ideal.
- Futu.re by Dmitry Glukhovsky (author of Metro 2033 series). Interesting take of how life would look like if humans became immortal.
- Blackout by Marc Elsberg. A semi-realistic depiction of a 2-week long blackout in Europe caused by a terrorist attack.
- Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larson. Murder mystery in Sweden. Really enjoyed the setting.