Do not host your Podcasts on Apple Podcasts

The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts basta.substack.com

What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host. That's right: if you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app. This feels like an absolutely wild choice from a product perspective; it's the mindset of a company who still thinks that they have dominance over the podcasting world. It's ludicrous to assume that it's a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast.

Medium is the message. About "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari.

https://hanki.dev/medium-is-the-message/

Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realized that the times in my own life when I've been most successful on Twitter — in terms of followers and retweets — are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I've been attention - deprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site — but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade.

Another Android

DHH wrote:

Now, I'm no fan of Google in general. And I still prefer the fit and finish of iOS over Android, but there's something deeply appealing about having a phone where at least it's actually possible to install Forbidden Software, like Fortnite, without wild interventions like jailbreaking. The fidelity gap is real, but the freedom gap is bigger.

Full text here: 

Another Android world.hey.com

 

And that made me think: new EU legislation will force Apple and all other OS developers to open up their products to competing App Stores. What added value will Android have over iOS when iOS (and iPadOS) are also allowing to install "competing" AppStore's? I guess zero? 

You can always go faster (if you know where to risk it)

You can always go faster (if you know where to risk it) world.hey.com

Maybe that's why there's a specific charm about young entrepreneurs. Free of scars from past losses, they can push in a way that grizzled veterans might not. This often gets turned into a caricature for derision, like Tech Bros. But the world needs a mix. We need youngsters blessed with the bliss of ignorance to push the envelope where the stakes are lower. And then some old-timers weathered by wisdom to pull the envelope when the stakes tip large.

Why TV Lost - Paul Graham

In 2006, my parents who never watched much more than the evening news and maybe the Tour d'France, decided to stop watching TV altogether.  Well, actually, our local government decided to switch from analoge broadcasting to DVB-T.  Where we live, we couldn't get decent reception in this 'superior' format, so we still had a TV box in the prominent spot of our living room, but it was just a big black box now, that when turned on, showed the background noise of the Big Bang (or just snow, anyways). 

Around the same time we got our first "high speed internet", in the form of an ADSL connection that gave us a whopping 4mbps download. I was now able to watch the news again by downloading it first and then placing my laptop on the table for all of us to watch. This never caught on. We just didn't watch TV anymore. 

http://www.paulgraham.com/convergence.html

About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers.What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to.One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.

I still love watching movies and series, but nowadays I will watch them with friends on my beamer, or just on my iPad if I feel bored one evening. The helicon days of live TV broadcasting are indeed far behind us. 

Friends with kids inform me that kids these days don't really watch TV anymore either. Their attention span and time are robbed by smaller screens nowadays.

Happy Times 😊 

Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks

explore federated networks fediverse.party

Rant: Year of Linux on the Desktop

Rant: year of Linux on the desktop blog.liw.fi

• 2000: Linux and free software are a cancer on the IT industry.
• 2001: The dotcom bubble burst, so Linux will now die, since nobody can afford to continue to develop it, as there's no profit in free software.
• 2003: Uh, okay, Linux didn't die. But it's too hard to install.
• 2005: Ubuntu is just a toy.
• 2006: So Linux is used a lot, but only on servers. It will never work on phones or embedded devices.

(skipping ahead so I don't drag up too many bad memories)

• 2022: Linux runs all top 500 super computers, billions of personal devices, most servers on the Internet, on all continents, on all oceans, in the air, in orbit, and on Mars. Oh, and in the air on Mars. All big corporations use open source in some form.
• Also 2022: Linux will always be a hobbyist toy, unless solves all these new problems we've just thought about.

Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)

Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' science.org

Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption—perhaps in North America, the team suggested—stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl's team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold.