133arc585

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there's nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.

Colloquial use of that word is not related to its technical use to describe a female dog in dog breeding. Colloquial use of the word is precisely driven by misogyny. Don't try to play that game, it's dishonest. Do you think the homophobic f-slur is acceptable because, after all, it is a technical term relating to bound wood fuel? If not, why is that not acceptable, but the one you're using is? Historical linguistic justification for a word whose colloquial use has not been related to its historical meaning for a very long time is dishonest.

By "otherwise discriminatory" I meant discriminatory in ways other than the two (sexism, ableism) that I explicitly mentioned; can you not think of other ways to discriminate? "Otherwise discriminatory" can include words that are specificaly xenophobic or racist, or homophobic. I didn't bother doing a full inventory when I was illustrating a point.

I find casual use of opaque blocklists without any second thought to their impact disturbing.

It's not opaque. The entire block list regex is publicly visible for every single instance. In fact, it's in the page source of every single page you load. You're simply uninformed. Moreover, if you think there was no second thought to it's impact, you're yet again uninformed. There was (and has been) discussion about it amongst developers and (early) users, and discussion continues; in fact, there was a post about it with large engagement maybe three days ago.

I am not sure how I feel about enforcing a block list (and I said that in my previous comment), but one thing it does do, repeatedly, is illuminate how little people think about offensive things they say. Interestingly, more often than not, people would rather defend their use of misogynist language than consider using literally any other word in English or another language.

It's in the blocked word list because it's misogynist. The fact that it's used so commonly with no second thought is disturbing.

I don't know if I agree with the blocked word list being enforced, but I definitely have a problem with rampant misogynist, ableist, and otherwise discriminatory language used with no thought.

Mullvad does not allow port forwarding.

They announced on May 29th that they would not allow new port forwarding. On July 1st, all existing port forwarding was disabled. Since then, Mullvad no longer allows port forwarding.

You can thank Meta for that. They sued the registrar managing several ccTLDs, including .ml, .ga, .gq, .cf, and .tk. Meta even goes so far to fabricate a conspiracy theory about the registrar being part of a cybercriminal ring; they feign concern and wreak havoc.

In hindsight, yes. But there was no indiciation ahead of time that this situation would happen or was likely to happen. In fact, there was no more reason to believe a free ccTLD was any more likely than a paid ccTLD to cause a problem. The problem arises because a ccTLD's host country can choose to remove any domain it wants, paid or not. One could argue that using a ccTLD at all was a mistake, but you'd have to look at precedent for ccTLD's country's doing this and see if it happens often or not.

Silence trimming is something you need to be careful of. If you listen to any comedy podcasts or storytelling, silence (pauses) have meaning and value. If you just listen to news or talk podcasts, its pretty nice to have. I have it turned on or off for selected podcasts, and it tells me it's trimmed over 1 full day of silence from my listening.

They're lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn't control what ads the network uses, but they've literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

I've set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).

Oh that's interesting. That makes sense. Like I said I'm using the Kindle 4 from 2011 and it has a slightly different form factor and no way to use a magnetic case.

Huh. Yeah that must be a thing with newer models. Mine doesn't have any magnets, and its not in a shape a case would even make sense. I do press a button to dismiss the "screensaver" (the thing that keeps you from accidentaly turning pages with side buttons when not in use), but I don't see an ad on that screensaver. It's pencils laying on a book, and has been for about a decade now.

Dynamic ad length wouldn't be an issue for chapter markers, or "tone delimited" podcasts (the first two categories). It would only be a problem for the third category, which is already the more difficult of the three.

There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like "Ad: X". In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who's name begins with "Ad: ", though I don't know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn't be very useful.

Another method that could work on some podcasts that don't use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like "time for ads", and the ads will insert. Sometimes it's always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase "the money zone" on MBMBAM), but that's not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

In summary, I don't know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.