Episode 275: "Off The Rails"

ShowNotes

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

01 - ️ THE ROBOT GOES ON PNWR — "I DON'T SEE THE NECESSITY FOR PODCAST APPS" (summary, no clips)

Podnews Weekly Review, 16 Oct — "Adam Curry's AI Podcast Future" (1h29m; Adam, 4:00–53:45)

Sam's setup: on our last show Adam "changed Dave Jones' mind… from a skeptic to a believer". Adam: "I went back and listened… the first thing that Dave went to was advertising. It seems like anything with podcasting always evolves around advertising, even though… we don't have advertising on our podcast."

On Muse and the "spying" story: "Muse is collecting all this data, it's making files of every single one of your friends… That is a feature, not a bug." — and the five machines at home running local models.

Sam: Reddit removed RSS and charged for its API ($43M from selling data); Lightning/L402 "worked for a while, but then… legislation and technical challenges." Will clients pay x402 to reach the Index through the MCP? Adam: "I don't see the necessity for YouTube apps, podcast apps, email apps… all clients that access all data will be some version of an agent working on the user's behalf." And: "Amazon did the stupidest thing ever by blocking Muse."

On the newsletter: "40% of all value for value revenue always comes after we send the newsletter."

On RSS: "RSS stays. It's a perfect format… no different from HTTP or SMTP." Podcast Index Robot "goes into this structured RSS feed, which is very low overhead."

On podcast apps: "Podcast apps has been probably the crappiest part of the entire podcasting business. It's truly a labor of love… Do you want to be an interim step in between the data and the user? Maybe, but I don't know." And on Godcaster: "We're in the app business too… same issues apply."

The clean-feed line: Adam had his Omarchy box build a Cleanfeed-equivalent into his playout — "I'm gonna probably cancel my subscription, which is only $36."

Sam's close: TrueFans is building "Kevin and Kelly" as experimental agents on the Index fire hose. Afterward, to James: "Adam Curry is very smart and he can use it" — but normal people won't. James: "I don't think normal people will be doing that, will they?"

And the follow-up on Mastodon. Sam posted a Fintech Times piece on agentic payments "after all the chat with Adam and Dave about micropayments 2.0 using X.402"; Adam: "The power will shift to consumer power with agentic negotiation between vendors of goods and services."

Fintech Times: the real barrier to agentic payments is not the AI

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

02 - WILL APPLE LET THE ROBOT SKIP THE ADS?

aegrumet, under Adam's 274 post: "I still think you're underestimating the pressure that will fall on platforms to create and enforce TOS that forbids this stuff… the tech is ahead of the policy, and… the latter will eventually catch up."

Dave: "You're saying you think Apple will change their terms to prohibit local on device models from assisting in ad skipping?" … "Ad blockers are already allowed on the AppStore and PlayStore… a popular Reddit ad/nag blocker and things like 1Blocker for Safari… Neither Apple, nor Google serve podcast ads."

aegrumet's last word: Google and Apple "are fundamentally different with respect to ads. Hence Chrome is much more aggressive with respect to blocking the blockers. I don't see the current moment as a policy so much as a lack of one."

Sam on PNWR: "This week Apple blocked Muse, and so did Amazon" — agents doing price checks and arbitrage. TrueFans built a web application firewall off JS's bot list because AI bots were running up its MongoDB bill.

Dave on Spotify, boosted: "Spotify harnessing hundreds of dev hours and the power of 3 supercomputers to change what the like button does again."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

03 - ️ NAMESPACE — A FEED FOR PEOPLE, AND VIDEO IN THE ALTERNATE ENCLOSURE

podcast:person for fictional characters (discussion #498). Dave: "Makes great sense."

Nathan Gathright: propose a personGUID attribute pointing at a medium=person feed — so "Tap on a person, open up a list of their podcast appearances" works for every podcast:person tag. alecksgates: "the problem is no source of truth." Mitch: maybe a publisher or playlist feed referenced with a guid. Sam: TrueFans tried this two years ago and is "reliant on the hosts first implementing support for the person tag."

Adam replied: "SOPML!!" Mitch asked the robot what Adam meant — "Adam Curry almost certainly meant SOPML = Social OPML" — and: "thanks to transcripts and BoK, you can now communicate in mere grunts." Dave: "lol!"

Podnews ships video through the alternate enclosure (Liquid Studios pilot): Spotify, LinkedIn, TrueFans, Pocket Casts, YouTube — "Not on Apple Podcasts, sadly." Podcast Guru: works, but now needs a switch-to-video toggle "since it's not HLS." Dave: "Assuming you chose mp4 since Apple Podcasts doesn't play HLS out of the alternate enclosure yet?" James: "mp4 because that's all I can produce… I don't really want to serve HLS, given it's massively more expensive to serve." Podcast Guru: "honestly you're the first podcaster we've seen doing it. "

partytime3: Nathan's agent listed the partytime parser bugs it hit; Dave: "I'll post the partytime3 code shortly and see what is still outstanding."

#794 closed: JS fixed the podcast:guid example XML with a valid UUID.

 For Dave: is partytime3 out?