Decided to get back into podcasts recently, but baked-in ads and sponsor reads make standard listening unbearable.

I spent the weekend spinning up MinusPod, an open-source tool that detects ad reads and strips them using ffmpeg. It uses Whisper for local transcription, then feeds the transcript to an LLM to identify exact timestamps for sponsor segments and commercial breaks before slicing them out. I routed the text processing through Gemini Flash, which runs about $0.07 per episode. Clean, ad-free audio feeds with zero manual editing.

I did the opposite this past weekend and migrated from Obsidian to Joplin. Obsidian is a fantastic tool, but with my AuDHD, it’s an absolute productivity trap.

I spent 90% of my time tweaking community plugins, designing complex custom templates, and configuring graph views, and maybe 10% actually writing notes. Joplin lacks the infinite customization rabbit holes, which turns out to be a feature: it forces you to use the tool for documentation instead of endless system design.

There’s a difference between propaganda and selectively presented facts.

The first graphic is misleading because it compares US war spending with Chinese infrastructure spending while ignoring American infrastructure investment and Chinese military spending. It’s a false comparison.

The second graph is from the legitimate Democracy Perception Index 2024. The numbers aren’t fabricated, but they measure how democratic people think their country is, not how democratic it actually is.