I think this episode highlights a very real problem--generative "AI" tools are already depriving people of their "livelihood" (literally "means of staying alive"). I've been thinking a lot lately about the exploitation of workers and what kind of economic systems could provide everyone with a dignified standard of living (as a layperson, my very loose understanding is that Universal Basic Income is a frontrunner in that space). Thanks so much for giving examples of other writings on this topic. I'd love to hear more.

I do think there is a second problem with generative "AI" that, while less urgent than the first, still matters--burying good work in a flood of bad harms both artists and audiences. At least for some artists, the hope that the work finds an audience is an important motivator. For audiences, encountering a work you love and knowing it was made by a person with a perspective affords the opportunity to find more works from that person and better appreciate that perspective. The ability to create low quality works coupled with systems that prioritize clicks (search engines, engagement-based social media algorithms, etc.) are a recipe for dramatically increasing the difficulty of finding good art.

As a small aside, I discovered one of my favorite visual artists only because they were commissioned to create a logo--something that might never have happened if generative "AI" had been pervasive ten years ago.

I've been experimenting with methods to include a mastodon thread as comments in a static html page.

I'm thinking we can include replies to the hpr bot, https://botsin.space/@hpr as an additional way to comment on a show.

I'll do a show about a few different ways to include mastodon comments.

One method I've been looking at is using the mastodon API to pull the mastodon replies , therefor allowing an opportunity to gate what comments appear on the web page.

I think this show is exactly right. Ther objective of all economic policy should be minimizing the amount of toil people do. 100% unemployment for the win!

Hey Ken.

I've been thinking about some "low hanging fruit" we can pick to get some extra traction.

1: Realtime community interaction : Set up a Discord server for HPR community members and listeners (with a janitors closet channel for operational managerial stuff).

2: Social Media presence: I don't think we should be on "every" social media channel, just the ones where our community and target audience is. So keeping in the spirit of "freedom" we might want to focus on Mastodon (and if possible a link with Threads). I think we already have an automated RSS feed that posts links to all the new shows on Twitter and Facebook, but getting "tracktion" on your Social Media presence is easier if you choose a "primary" channel for your engagement.

3: Promotion of these channels in the bumper/trailers of the shows to pull in listeners into engaging with the community. This way we can encourage them to record their own show

4: TALK about HPR in non HPR podcasts: Do we ever have hosts that are guests on other podcasts ? Talking about a podcast "anyone can join" is a great showtopic for other podcasts too.

5: Record a Youtube tutorial on HOW to record and upload a show. Stick it somewhere that is immediately obvious or behind a url www.hackerpublickradio.org/howtorecord

As for redesign of the website, i think we should take a look at the way the pages are built and organised to make it easier to attract new listeners and make it more obvious they can contribute too.

Intro music and voiceover: You know how I feel about it. It's long winded, slow and well... it's built to help people dose off. It should be carefully laid to rest, covered with soil and flowers and replaced by something shorter and snappier. (i'm more then happy to help if you need a new voiceover).

To put my money where my mouth is : Here is the HPR Discord: https://discord.gg/4WwngKE8

Are these some steps in the right direction ?

This one is going to need a second listen. :) Lots of good points made highlighting the massive grey zones about how and where we apply new technology to solve existing "problems", or develop new ways of doing things.

Maybe we can find a way for people to leverage some tools to help them make more HPRs! (or at least give themselves more time to do so)

This was super well timed, I was just starting to poke around for tools to deal with a backlog of old music I recovered from an "ancient" hard drive in my parents' basement. This should do the job nicely, particularly since it has the built-in MusicBrainz integration. Thanks!

Hi hobs and KnightWise,

I think you both say to have meaning full conversations with the community, but each have your own preferred way to do this.

This is fine.

What I am missing is clear statements of actions that HPR can do to increase the number of shows and the number of hosts.

If you say the website needs improving, then at a minimum provide examples to what needs improving. Better point us to stylesheets we can use to fix your points.

When you talk about the comment system needing work, tell us what work is needed, so that we can see if it's intended to be like that (anti spam, or avoiding flame wars), of if it can be improved.

And don't forget that the Janitors just do what they are told, and the owners are the community members. So some things have already been agreed on the mail list. To change it you (not the Janitors) will need to argue your point and convince them to do so.

Looking forward to more very constructive shows that will focus on these goals.

Ken
Keeper of the broom.

Yes it should lead to more free time and a universal basic income. However what actually happens is that the person is required to do other work involving more toil for less money. To earn the same they need to do multiple of these jobs.

In the show, I recommended to join the support mailing list for digiKam.

A couple of days ago I had a specific use case I could not find out how or even if I could do it, I could not find out by trial nor find anything in the manual.

I submitted a straightforward question to the digiKam user e-mail list. After about two hours one of the developers responded that that what I wanted to do is not currently possible but a bug report for the use case already exist.

Of course, not every question is answered so promptly. But again and again I am amazed of answers given both by the community and developers.

- People can skip episodes they don't enjoy; we don't have to limit the audience to semi-retired geeks
- Many of those who 'flocked' to the small web have kept it as an ancillary add-on to their other more mainstream tools: take it from one such Zombie
- Marketing strategies don't by their nature sully anything, they simply make things easier for a target audience to find; it's up to our community to deploy them sensibly
- Discord works just fine on Linux; I use it daily
- There's a big difference between trying to attract some fresh ears and a splinter group trying to "win the day"

But maybe evolution isn't what the community wants. In which case I'm happy to let it continue on its way and meet whatever fate awaits it.

Thank you for your show. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, but do need to clarify some points.

The first classic mistake is that people confuse marketing and sales. Marketing is about finding the value proposition behind a certain product and finding the right audience who would benefit from it. It’s not about pushing a product or selling adds. It’s about telling the story of ‘free software / the small web / open source … what have you” to people who don’t know about it and would benefit getting to know it.

At no point in time did I say we needed to chase popularity, controversy or propaganda. At no point did i say we need to monetise HPR. I am saying we need to speak about the VALUE of HPR to people who benefit from it and give everyone a simple way to interact to further engage in the value of building a community.

Ps: Your comparison between a marketeer and a drug dealer to me, feels a little naive and quite offensive. Stallman “markets” free software too, remember ?

We do not have the luxury of restricting ourselves based on whether the platform is using proprietary software or not, we go where the potential contributors are. One could be forgiven looking as the software choices we use, and are getting engagement on, that we are bias towards FLOSS platforms but what you are seeing is "Effect" and not the "Cause". Starting out our policy was to use existing platforms as much as possible, we were not afraid to use and pay for proprietary software. However in our nearly 19 years of operation we saw that companies come and go. With proprietary software you are left high and dry while, with FLOSS software you can find someone to host it.

The show focused on our IRC channel, and while it's true we did have a thriving community there for a while, that stopped when Freenode got taken over. We maintain a presence on IRC, but most people have moved to Matrix where the contributions and feedback has been very good.

You suggested (possibly ironically) replacing IRC with a BBS. From 2005 each show was automatically posted for discussion there. Unfortunately that community was abandoned when the corporation producing the software stopped support. It was shut down after it was compromised, and then the site got over run with spam.

Our comment system was a third party application running on cPanel. The corporation producing the commenting software stopped support, and after it was compromised the site got over run with spam. For a time the entire HPR domain was blocked as a spam site. Dave and I were able to salvage the database, and put in very robust checks on code that is now released undo AGPLv3.0. Since then cPanel upped their prices to such an extent that we migrated to a static site also available under the AGPL, but we were able to just move the MailMan operation to a service which we pay for.

In 2011 we jumped on the Google+ bandwagon and did get a lot of contributions, until it was shut down in 2019.

> Thank you for the positive feedback on our show. We are indeed “present” on X, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, but are we “active” there?

We spend easily 90% of our time working on community engagement in some form or another, and I would conservatively say that we have invested thousands of hours into it over the years. Each community requires a tailored approach because it is not realistic to expect the same approach on LinkedIn to work on TikTok. Therefore we actively engage to a level and extent that is appropriate for a given platform, as dictated by the terms and conditions, the behavioral norms and operation rules of the community there, while keeping in mind the return on investment each platform delivers.

The fact of the matter is that some channels do not lend themselves to providing contributions. As an example, FaceBook and LinkedIn have zero engagement. The feedback I get from people I tried to engage with on LinkedIn is that they don't want their employer to know they are associated with a project with the word Hacker in it's title. While several Facebook groups responded to my request with a one line link to some of the more unsavory shows we have hosted. We maintain a presence as an avenue for contact.

We have been on Twitter since August 2008 and have more than 10K post there with 1,019 Followers. To this day we comment and respond to every show, and actively follow up on engagement. To my knowledge we did not get a single new host via Twitter.

Community building takes a lot of time and it can be years before you see the results of your work. So please don't just setup an account on a service if you are not willing to maintain it for the long run. It's one thing to not have a presence on a platform, it's another to have a defunct inactive presence.

By far the best way to engage is talking to people about HPR and asking them to contribute. This applies to online interactions, but is especially true of in person contacts.

A great show, many thanks for sharing.
With what little understanding of soshul meeja I have, I believe what is apparently effective is _active_ engagement with a wider community than what already exists. That means, indeed, going where a potential audience might be, and shouting about HPR.
TikTok, YouTube and SnapChat are where the kidz hang out, as well as Discord as you rightly pointed out.
Given limited resources, perhaps we should drop LinkedIn and Facebook in favour of one or more of those more zippy platforms? Ken already has plans for YouTube, I see.
While anyone with a few minutes could post episodes to those 'channels' (see how down with the lingo I am?!), I think that automating the process would be a good starting point. That's beyond my skill set, but I would bet that there are some listeners who could manage to knock something together?
As a community podcast, it's a community responsibility to get out there and engage, actively, where we can, to bring in new listeners and therfore contributers. Such is the reality of the internet in 2024. Sadly.

I quite enjoyed listening to this episode of HPR. Very well articulated.

Seems to me that the main argument can be summarized as HPR should be chasing popularity. This may very well be the optimal thing to do, however, when I look around at those that have done so (which admittingly is a small sample size and not random, and may also suffer from survivor bias), I see results that are rather unpleasant (well, to me, clearly there are many who must enjoy those high ranking Youtube tech channels, for example).

Success can be measured in many ways. Popularity is indeed one of those measure.

Great episode all the same, but, count me out.

Hey Ken,

Thank you for the positive feedback on our show. We are indeed “present” on X, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, but are we “active” there? Do we engage with the community there? I appreciate all the work that is being done, don’t get me wrong. I’m also more then happy to help to run the Discord server if we can actively promote it in the shows.

The one statement that (as a marketeer) did made me choke on my coffee is that : “As for the intro and outro that should be “soothing for people who want to fall asleep to the show” We cannot in all seriousness state that the content provided by our hosts is to be “packaged up” into some narcoleptic-brown-noise generator. Is this the message we want to send out? “tell us what you are working on, but not too loud, we wanna doze off to your content ?”.

The goal (for me) in contributing a show is to invigorate, inspire and motivate fellow geeks to try out new things, discover new technologies and share experiences, not to record a high tech guided-sleep-meditation.

I think in this regard we are misguidedly catering to a minute part of our community and should reconsider our approach in these matters.

Dirk! It only takes a geeky podcast to find out that we live so close by :) Imagine that! give me a ping via mail or something and we could meet up!

Great show, thanks for looking at this from a business point of view.

You are correct in saying that the website could do with a update, and given our booth kit needs a revamp this would be a great time for a refresh. Anyone with design skills please step forward.

The intro and outro are specifically chosen to be calming to meet the communities requirement that the music should not wake people up who listen to podcasts when going to sleep.
https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2021-October/004294.html

I'm not sure how you fall into the mistaken belief that we only have an IRC channel, that we don't engage with the community, and we avoid corporate technology. On every footer of every page on the site is a list of social media outlets that we are active on. We actively engage on the Mailing list, Mastodon, Matrix, Mumble, IRC #oggcastplanet, X (Formally Twitter), Facebook and Linked-In.

Soon to be added will be our Telegram, and YouTube channels.

The actual answer to "Why don't we have a discord?", is because nobody has volunteered to do it - until now ;-)

If you are willing to set it up and manage it; then feel free to do so, and send us the link and we will happily add it to the site.

Hi there
Nice to here about the "Take you a little stroll through the vineyards forest, the vain carnivores, which is a forest located on a hill behind my house" . Living in Alt-Hoeselt, it is in my backyard ;-)
Good points about "The future of HPR". As a geek, a long time listener and fan, for me 'recording a show as a response' is just one step to much or to high as well...
Next time we can go together for a walk at Napoleons 'wijngaardbos'
Thanks for the HPR Episode.
Many greetings from a fellow geek from alt hoeselt
Dirk

Nice to hear your first show Dave! I hope listen to you again.

I'm uncertain if, when or to what extent I will start with home automation. Although it can be fun, I only want it in cases where it is better or add value, else I prefer not connected devices. Anyway, I have been looking into Home Assistant which would be my first go for home automation, so I am looking forward to learn about it here on Hacker Public Radio.

Many of us have struggled with excess weight. I have been using an intermittent fasting eating pattern for quite some time now, with mixed results. When I behave for my remaining meals, and minimize my sugars, then all is well. When I binge and eat half a box of cookies, it doesn't work so well.

Thanks for the inspiration to be more disciplined.

I know there are still smart people saying "AI" will not take our jobs, but have you seen the latest? At the very least, talking heads should be worried. On the other hand, the people who write for talking heads maybe just don't need the talking head part now.

Here's one video with a demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pal-dMJFU6Q&t=843s

Great show, thanks. It got me looking at /etc/services to remind myself about assigned port numbers!

Back in the 1970's when I abandoned my Biology PhD and got a job instead, I ended up working in the computer service department at Lancaster University in the North West of England where we had an ICL 1900 series mainframe. This was a 24-bit machine (using _magnetic core_ memory), running an operating system called GEORGE 3.

When somebody left, I stumbled into working as an assembly language programmer (using the PLAN assembler) because we had source access to the operating system (on MicroFiche) and were enhancing it, with other universities in the region, to implement an early form of networking, the GANNET network.

Burnt into my memory from that day to this is the value of 2**24 - 1 = 8388607
This of course is the largest signed integer that can be stored in 24 bits :-)

Oh, and because I was looking in the HPR database today, I feel that I am in the presence of greatness because not only is the show number 4096, the duration (in seconds) is 1024. ;-)

Dave

One use of powers of 2 is mentioned in Ender's Game. Ender runs through the powers of 2 to calm himself down, a nerdy way of counting to 10. Enjoyable show

One thing I forgot to mention is that previously when tech made something obsolete, there has been a new thing for the people to do or make.

I'm not seeing the new thing in this case.

I can't wait to find out what happens in the sequel, HPR 8192.

I liked this show!

Your review of your softwares included several I use, some I have not heard of but of interest and some I know but have not started to use (and some not in my current need). One of those I have installed and started to look at is Gramps and I was happy to hear your positive comment about it which gives me more confidence to use it.

When you talked about your early Linux days, it was when I used Sun workstation with their Unix as my daily job driver. I believe I started with Sun in the 1990's and had it for probably more than a decade at job. I liked the Unix environment and I remember a colleague talked about Linux when it was very new and I became interested in Linux but it was much later I actually started to use Linux. I could relate to several details in your story to my Unix background.

Finally, you mentioned the freedom to put the operating system and other software I want to on my device. One big device many have is a car, and I believe modern cars lack software freedom. Anyone with knowledge in modern cars softwares, please enlighten us in a pod show!

This was an interesting show, and I am looking at the transcription to see what I am missing. I recently found myself also losing signal, and got it back by cycling in and out of airplane mode to remedy the problem. This did get me thinking that I should also have a backup, as I travel semi-frequently from Kentucky to the Chicago area suburbs, also because of my family situation.
Depending on which location I travel, it is between 350 and 400 miles.

With this last road trip and also some roads that I wanted to avoid, I started using OSMand, which uses OpenStreetMap in the background. I would have to read the transcript to catch all your points, which were very interesting. I will probably be getting at least a handheld CB radio in the near future.

Also, it has been 20 years or so, but I used to print out directions from Mapquest if the destination was somewhat local.

Thanks for your show
- Archer72

You're right Nick. Thanks. What I failed to mention during the podcast is that while it is indeed free for personal use, I'm not able to make the personal use claim anymore because I need to use it at work, and Oracle detects this and sends a nastygram to the organization asking them to pay.