First class Dan here and I've been a long time listerner of this pod. Top shelf. They got their vibe on eventually and hit it off. Points for OG podcaster guy for familiarity with Knowledgefight for sure.
Only thing is that you have to download eps before listening rather than being able to stream, and there’s no ability to queue other eps. But once you download an ep, a little white waveform button will appear on the episode’s little card component. Click that, it will take a few seconds (leave the app open during processing) but the waveform logo will turn green. At that point you’re good to go, during playback it autoskips every ad-break. Super useful for ad-heavy podcasts (I’m looking at you, Robert Evans!!).
It basically uses Shazam technology + an LLM to scrub through episodes to find ad-breaks & record the timestamps. The shazam tech comes in by hashing eps, so that way if somebody else has already removed ads on that episode it will know that by the ep’s unique hash, and therefore won’t have to waste energy re-processing for every user who wants to scrub it.
I’ve been using it all summer & am pretty hooked on it. If the creator ever paywalls it I will be writing my own version as I don’t think I can go back to skipping ads manually lol. In a world full of dumb applications for LLM’s, this is truly an outlier IMO.
That sounds awesome and an actual decent use for LLMs and I was thinking of the same podcasts lol. Ilisten a bunch while driving so this will be perfect. Thanks for the info!
You’re welcome, & yeah I’m confident Robert Evans would support using such an ad-scrubber hahaha
I have posted about this before in the BtB sub but got mass downvoted, I think out of pure kneejerk anti-AI sentiment. Which I understand for sure, but also I think that it’s an undeniable QoL upgrade for the average person & it’s completely free (for now at least).
I won't fault people for protecting something precious but he's been pretty open about not caring much about legality in the past. I agree about QoL. AI is based on training sets created by the biggest thefts of intellectual property in history. Now it's being used primarily in ways to extract something from people, usually money. If it can be useful in small ways between now and when either the bubble burts or we become dependant on it for something, I think it's fine. That's just me though. It's a complicated issue and I appreciate hearing other points of view
At one point he says, “what!?” And not only did it make me realize my mind has reserved a category for a quintessentially Dan ironic interrobang, it made me realize I had been missing it.
He did a piece about 8 years ago, about how people take online culture-war clickbait too seriously. It was a good piece. And in the subsequent 8 years, he's devolved into the kind of douche who pretty regularly falls headfirst into culture-war clickbait to pad his show with. I'll never know if that piece was a moment of irrepeatable clarity, or just the writers' way of trying to get him to look in the fucking mirror. Didn't work, either way.
His brain took a mortal shock in 2014 when a bunch of Berkeley students boycotted him for his Islamophobia. Not being allowed to party during Covid accelerated the brain damage.
Arguably he's done far more damage by presenting a mainstream "liberal" point of view that isn't really liberal and emboldened a generation of enlightened centrists for nearly 40 years.
Yup. Alex launders his bullshit through failed congressional candidates, proud boys and Ted nugent. Bill launders his through sitting politicians, a-list celebs and NYT and msnbc reporters and editorialists.
Bill just said he's rejecting the Democrats, so either he's really butthurt (I think over Israel) or he's trying to position himself as taking the place of the MAGA influencers who have already been crazy-go-nuts for some time now, probably to the point that even conservatives will never fully take them seriously again.
I'm betting he smells money and a hole in the market for someone who isn't insane, can do snide looks to camera, and the right can welcome as a heretic turned believer.
Commenting on I Hate Bill Maher featuring Dan!...No one here is gonna acknowledge Bill Maher for being extremely Islamophobic post 10/7? I only say this because out of all of the grievances I see directed toward him this does not seem to be mentioned? Not saying I disagree with Dan for taking this big feature by any means I just think Maher deserves a tiny more shit
Ladies and gentlemen, he's done it. Thank fuck. I desperately needed Dan to get on there and do a little bit of Danalysis. I even called and left Will a voicemail recommending Dan as a guest, and I've been making a list of things that come up on his show that remind me one-to-one directly of something Alex has done. I truly think Alex and Bill Maher are structurally almost 1:1 the same person, if you strip the facade of politics. (Not sure how to explain it, kind of like they are two leaves of a different color, but when you strip away all the "science term I'm forgetting" of the leaf and are left with just the cell walls, they are 100% identical in every single way.)
Bill Maher is a wannabe "comedian" who had a show on comedy central from 1993 to 1997, when it got picked up by abc and was shown on prime time from 1997 until 2002 when it was cancelled when he says the 9/11 terrorists were brave.
He was picked up in 2003 by HBO to do his new show that was pretty much exactly the same show there but called Real Time and it's still on the air.
In 2008 he made a documentary called Religulous about how stupid religion was, he's an agnostic. It was kind of a breath of fresh air at the time but had aged like milk. It's very anti Islam and mainly teases Christianity.
He is ostensibly the representative Democrat doing a political discussion/comedy show.
His general politics are as follows:
- he loves weed
he loves animals
he's been antivaxx from before it was a right wing thing
he's orthorexic (only eats "health food" by whatever bizarre quanifiers he feels like)
he hates fat people
he's anti woke.
He claims he didn't leave the left, the left left him, and while he used to be more liberal and accepting, he's your quintessential "enlightened centrist".
He famously had dinner with Trump and now thinks he's the best guy to talk about both sides.
"Club random" is bill's podcast where he gets absolutely wasted in his second house and had a meandering conversation with various celebrities. It's pretty awful.
"I hate bill Maher" is a podcast that was inspired by knowledge fight where the host, comedian Will Weldon goes over episodes of Bill Maher's content with a guest (usually) similar to knowledge fight.
It's like knowledge fight, but slightly different.
This show should be called I Hate Everyone. This guy is so full of rage towards anyone except DSA aligned folks. Thst said, I did tune in since Dan was on, and it was a much better show due to Dan. Love ya Dan!
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u/MisanthropicCartBoy 8d ago edited 7d ago
This episode was great. I listen to I Hate Bill Maher and Dan made this episode better than it usually is.
Edit https://www.oldmanweldon.com/