Not necessarily. A lot of podcasts are hosted by places that detect your ip and splice in location-targeted ads for each individual download. Hence OP’s struggle with timestamps.

Even off of Spotify etc, the source is poisoned.

I AM READY TO BE KILLED BY A HORRIBLE LAVA WORM

DHH with a pants-on-head stupid argument just because he hates the big players in tech? Must be a day ending in Y again.

You assumed I was saying a thing because I was a racist. I explained why I wasn’t. And you just refuse to believe me. That says so much more about you than it does about me, and I’m pretty tired of explaining it to you. Consider the conversation over.

LLAP 🖖

I don't suppose you can elaborate on what makes a main character bad without using the word woke?

Your words. Maybe you didn’t explicitly accuse me of racism. But you did the Joe Rogan “just asking the question” thing of proposing a question and already implying the answer you presupposed.

It is equally baffling to me that because you don’t understand why I have an opinion, it must be because I’m a racist.

I’m kinda done trying to explain to you why I have an opinion. It’s not that I haven’t explained it well enough. It’s that you refuse to believe me.

My dude, I am literally praising the writing they did on DS9 and LD with Sisko and Freeman. Two people of color who are in charge.

I am not criticizing Disco or the writers for the existence of the characters. I think it is very cool that there’s a woman of color running the ship. And that the mushroom engineer has a loving marriage with his doctor husband. And that they picked up a cool enby person with a ghost boyfriend who plays the cello.

I am not criticizing the existence of these characters. I am criticizing the execution.

I am saying that the writing was bad, the plots made no sense, and the characters’ motivations were all over the place. And yeah, the main character thing was bothersome. Not very Star Trek. The show about an ensemble cast doing space stuff.

If one person says hey we should do this thing, and everyone else says no we shouldn’t based on the information we have, and it turns out that the one person was right because of things nobody knew at the time, that’s a boring plot device. When it happened multiple times, and then kinda all the time, I stopped watching.

Kirk and Sisko sometimes disagreed with their crews. Sometimes they were wrong. Burnham was always right. And it got old.

No no no no no.

I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.

Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.

Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.

PLEASE do not do this.

Worse: your sleeper ship arrives at what should be a pristine planet. But FTL capable ships beat you there. And they ruined the planet over a few thousand years. And now they’re sending out refugee ships of their own.

Alternate take: this is the same sort of mark self-sorting that scam artists use.

A reasonable person isn’t gonna reply to a typo-ridden email from a Nigerian prince. But those few who do are going to be easy to get everything from.

Imagine you’re an executive at the company your dad founded. You’re an idiot. Everyone knows you’re an idiot. But you think you’re smart. This guy is willing to consult with you about how your company will use AI (for a modest fee, of course). You don’t understand AI, but you think you do, and you just need someone to help with the details. And everyone has to nod their heads and agree to pay him because they’re afraid of getting fired.

You don’t have to fool everyone.

No, don’t you see, in an impossible hypothetical situation, they assume you’d do something against your stated values. You’ve been pwned by a person of logic and intellect, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but you agree with them now.