hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4256.txt

Episode: 4256
Title: HPR4256: Birds of a Feather Talk at OLF 2024
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4256/hpr4256.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:07:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4256 from Monday the 25th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Birds of a Feather Talk at O-LF 2024.
It is the 20th show of Facerre and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Lyle and Fispeak some nonsense to make other people make shows.
So, uh, hi, welcome.
We're, uh, here to talk about Hacker Public Radio and encourage you all to start listening
and start contributing, because we need shows.
We always need shows.
So, what is Hacker Public Radio?
It is a podcast powered by an international community producing shows every weekday, Monday
through Friday.
Every episode is recorded by a member of the community, uh, sharing their passion and expertise
on a truly staggering number of topics.
Who are we?
Lyle, I'm an IT professional with, uh, 15 plus years of experience, doing all kinds
of stuff, different verticals, different size companies, all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, and so I'm Taj.
I work in the education sector in higher ed, um, but I'm in a past life.
I was an audio engineer, so we decided a recovering audio professional was the way to state
that.
Uh, we've been contributing to HPR and other community podcasts for over 10 years, but
we're also just folks.
We want to see the community grow and help out.
So, how do you get involved?
First of all, you can start listening to Hacker Public Radio.
It's usually pretty cool.
And the best part is, if you come up to an episode you don't like, there's a great button
on your pod catcher.
It's called Next.
Yeah.
You can join the community discussions on Matrix and on the mailing list.
Can we decide to have a master on what we forgot to put on here?
There is a master.
There is the master on.
We forgot to put it on.
No, I know we didn't.
Um, but really record a show.
Yo, kind of show.
Special if you know what that means.
If you know, if you don't.
All right.
We've now set aside time for objections and excuses.
So, Mark, what do you have?
Excuse, please.
Am I even good enough to have been past the center of this point?
So, no, and there's still such thing.
There are shows that are five minutes long, there are shows.
I mean, and then there's a New Year's Eve show.
The New Year's Eve show, which is four or five hours.
But, cutting to four or five hour chunks, it's a 24 hour show
that they cut up and release after the New Year.
So, and I mean, there have been something that have been,
I think, as short as like 40 seconds.
Yeah.
So, however long it takes you to say what you want to say.
So, a common, common reasons people say that they can't do a show
is they think they don't have anything interesting to say.
They're wrong.
They don't have something interesting to say.
Mark, put your head out.
You just did a whole presentation on interesting things to say.
Who really thinks that they don't have something interesting
that you talk about for five minutes,
that nobody else would want to hear about?
Good.
Oh, good, I don't have to argue with you.
That's the best place.
Just me.
Right.
We came prepared for that outcome.
So, the next one is, you think your audio quality is bad.
We're here to help, but also it's fine.
Yeah, so the meme with HPR is that I'm the guy that cares
about everybody's audio quality.
So, if it's something that you're really worried about,
there's actually a series of episodes
that I did about how to fix your bad audio quality
and just basic audio engineering principles.
One of the things that a lot of people are like,
well, what do I record on?
What device do I use?
You can use a phone.
We were talking about one of our friends.
He has one of the Sans Eclipse, the old MP3 players.
He literally clips it on the brim of his hat
and records a podcast.
And it doesn't sound terrible.
No, I mean, he does zero post-processing
because that would be work and he doesn't do that.
I'm just hoping he listens to that, so that's a big frame.
But...
Are you recording one right now because it would be great?
Yes, this is the meta of this whole thing
is that we are making an episode right now.
This is being recorded and when we get to the second half
of this, we are actually going to edit and upload it.
So, you can see right here.
Specifically, because I'm going to tell you, it's easy.
But then we're going to show you that it's maybe not so hard.
So, uploading a show is hard.
Yeah, we're here to help.
We're going to show you how.
You have other questions?
You know who to ask?
Well, it's us.
That's what we're here for.
Yeah, and you'll get contact information for us
at the end of this.
I think right there, actually.
Hey!
There we go.
So, any questions besides the ones that we run up
that people want to ask real quick?
Content moderation?
Ah, this is a no, right?
Yeah, this is a wonderful thing.
There is intentionally no content moderation.
Now, that has led to...
I think they've pulled maybe one or two shows
in the history of Ever because something was said that was...
Because it is international, we have to be...
Very considerate of all the laws,
and somebody said something that would be considered illegal
and a certain jurisdiction, so that episode had to be pulled.
I think they pulled one or maybe failed to post something
because of copyright, and the janitor's stance is...
I know you think it's fair use.
Fair use is an active defense.
My name's the one on the domain registrar.
I'm not doing it.
That's not me.
That's the janitor's position.
So, and just for people who don't know,
the way that HPR works is sort of the admins
we don't call them admins, we call them janitors,
just because it's fun.
And so, they're the people who make sure
that the shows go up, and because of some of the laws
and certain jurisdictions, if they have heard a thing
and then publish it, they're held legally liable,
but if they publish it without hearing it, they're not.
So, that's one of the reasons
there's not any content moderation.
There have been some issues when people post things
that are sort of not cool to a lot of people,
and then we're basically a self-policing community.
There have been some people that are no longer part
of our community because they were sort of ostracized
for their opinions that they were sharing.
But also, the janitors are called janitors
because they're not in charge.
They do not set policy.
They implement policy decided on by the community.
They are very, very clear about that.
They do not make decisions, except for a few things
that would impact them personally.
They implement the decisions of the community.
That's why they've chosen the name janitors,
not administrators.
And all of the policy is decided by the community
on the mailing list.
So, anything that changes in policy is put up
and then people make comments on it.
And if somebody says no, then there's a discussion
about it, and that's happened, where we kind of modify things
back and forth until we get something
that everybody agrees on.
And I was going to say something else,
and I've already forgotten what I was going to say.
But that's, oh, there's multiple levels.
So, like the janitors are kind of at the top
and anytime something that is, I don't want to say,
something where they want to know
if they made the right call.
There's another level called auditors.
So, like I'm an auditor.
So, if Ken, who we made the joke about,
you owe Ken a show, Ken is one of the janitors.
If he needs to have an interaction with somebody
that is about policy, that email goes to all the auditors
and the person that is going to.
And then I think there's been a couple times
where it's been sent before it's been sent.
So, everybody has to approve it before it goes out.
So, that's sort of how we police our own people.
Yeah.
So, listener figures, any idea?
Kind of.
We know it's in the thousands, like per day.
I've heard much higher numbers.
It's always a game of like, I know that like my device
is like downloaded three times a day, right?
So, how many, especially because it's hackers,
how many people are doing that on the regular?
Like, how inflated is the number we don't really know?
But then it's also potentially deflated
because it's syndicated on other services
kind of with or without people's permission.
Yeah.
Everything has to be by essay.
I was gonna say, that is the thing we did forget is
that unless you specify otherwise everything is,
I believe by essay, there's creative comments,
attribution share alike.
By essay four now.
Yeah, we've made the change to four.
Occasionally, I've heard people specifically
designate their episodes as less restrictive,
never more restrictive.
Yeah.
And that, again, that's a legal thing.
But I know there have been places where
HBR has been aired on the actual radio
because it's something that can be put on the radio
as long as that person vets that it, you know,
here it would be the FCC or wherever it is
that it meets those qualifications.
But anybody can do whatever they want with it.
The other thing I remember reading on the site,
as I was preparing for this, that I think is worth mentioning,
because of the way that a lot of the larger feed,
RSS feed infrastructure is set up.
HBR is tagged as explicit on the feeds.
And then I believe you can specify whether or not
it's explicit in the tag for your show.
But that is more of a community tag where
the headers will tell listeners whether it's explicit
or not per show.
But in the feeds, it is marked as explicit
because there's no moderation,
because people will choose to represent themselves
however they see fit.
And sometimes we've had the conversation
that what is explicit in one place
is maybe not explicit in another,
or like certain words might be really taboo to say
in America that are fine somewhere else, right?
And so a lot of times it defaults to explicit
and then you can say it's not explicit.
But I think pretty much everybody
makes their stuff explicit at this point, just to be safe.
I would say not because the content is always explicit
but simply because it is safer to leave it on by default.
Yeah.
Other questions, comments, concerns?
What is an essay?
Creative Commons attributions share a like,
which I believe means it is you have to attribute
where you receive the audio, work from,
and distribute it under the same license.
So if I made an episode about, I don't know, camels,
just for a random, and trust me, there have been episodes
that is not the most random.
We always talk about the things that, you know,
people think hacker and public radio,
they think it's all like very technical stuff.
It's really not.
Probably this is the example that everybody kind of goes
back to in the HBR community,
is that we have one of our members, Clotu,
who did a whole series on urban camping,
like how to camp in your office
or how to camp in your car and stuff.
And it was fascinating and everybody loved it.
We had another episode where one of the contributors
was like literally inside of his well,
trying to like fix something in the well
while talking about like beers.
And he published it and everybody was like,
okay, I guess it's of interest to hackers
because that's kind of the, as long as it gets
by that very low threshold, then you can publish it.
So that's sort of, and where it is.
As a member of the community for me,
the of interest to hackers is, are you excited about it?
Somebody's probably going to be interested
in hearing about it, even if they're only interested
in hearing about it because you're excited about it.
I was gonna pull up and see like what the topics
for this week work is that would be an interesting.
Dead air, we're not allowed to have a talk while
truncate silence is the thing.
Oh, yes, it is.
So somebody did a show about playing Civilization 4,
which has been a whole series where he's gone
through every Civilization game telling you
like everything about it, which is hilarious.
How to stream audio streams on the command line,
which I think was CVLC was what he was using.
Somebody interviewing somebody from Aug Camp
that just happened, somebody installing Geeks,
which that's of interest to hackers.
And then somebody just talking about podcasts and TV shows
that they listen to, which is kind of one
of the common things that people do.
When you first start, kind of the suggestions
are like an introduction episode, like,
hey, this is me, this is how I got into whatever.
You'll probably find out through listening to it
that it's very heavily like Linux open source based.
There are people who aren't that come on
and do Windows stuff, but most of us are kind
of more into the open source world.
So a lot of people do their like first episode is,
hey, this is me, this is how I got into Linux
or this is how I started playing with computers.
How I got into Linux, what's in my bag?
What's in my bag?
Podcast recommendations.
Those are a lot of the, get to know you type episodes
that a lot of new contributors do.
Yeah, people do like random movie reviews
that's happened before.
We used to do a thing where we, and us too specifically
with some other people, would do an audio book club
where we would find a freely available, like,
Creative Commons audio book, and we would all listen to it
and just get together and have a session club.
And there were times where we could get the author
to come on with us, which was, that was cool.
I was trying to remember how many times that happened
at least twice.
At least twice, yeah.
Does that two count lost in Bronx?
Oh, three.
Nevermind.
I was gonna say, I don't remember that's two
and lost in Bronx or two counting lost in Bronx.
Yeah.
He's the guy that doesn't like work, by the way.
Yeah.
That's a dig.
Shocking.
Shocking.
I'm sure in six months, when he listens to this,
get a record, get a record and score in spots.
Anything else?
Yeah.
I'm late, so I missed your presentation.
Okay, we'll start over.
Go back to slide one.
This is online.
This is an actual radio with radio signal.
Correct.
Yeah.
The hacker public radio is a community podcast
published Monday through Friday with episodes
from the community members.
I was like, are you gonna do the whole opening
should be out?
Like, do you know it by heart?
Cause it sounds like you do.
Yes, I do, no, I'm not.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
You have an RSS?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's spoilers.
If it doesn't have an RSS feed, it's not a podcast.
Why?
I will die on that hill.
I will, too.
We don't need to talk about that.
You don't see an Android, listen to podcasts and go ads.
It's great.
Yeah.
There are no ads on this ever.
I've got to say, you can always listen to HVR,
but no ads.
There are no ads.
Although sometimes when somebody's talking about a thing,
it basically isn't ad, cause we're like,
this is so cool.
You've got to do this.
The bigging for shows could probably technically
be something of an ad.
Yeah.
It's not for your labor, which are for shows.
And that's one of the things with it,
is because it is volunteer driven,
and it is five days a week, trying to get people
to contribute enough to keep it going.
I think I forget exactly how long it's been going on
in this form, it's mutated from different shows
to this one, but I want to say,
it's like at least 15 years, if not more,
that it's...
Some guys, the people were the techie, the seeded it.
Right, and then Ben Rev was before that, so, yeah.
I mean, having a community that can pull that off,
but then we always run into, like,
during the summer, or usually during the holidays,
everybody's busy, and so there's like this thing
where we're all getting on the mic,
we're like, please, please, please, please,
please, please, please, please, please, please, please,
and then, you know, we scratch together
enough to make it happen.
But that's sort of why trying to do some outreach
and try to get people involved, at least to listen to it,
and then maybe decide, hey, I wouldn't mind doing one of these.
Yep.
Because what we see a lot of, and we are always trying
to help out with, is we have five, six people
in the community who make a massive number of shows,
and what we don't want is to be, you know,
five days a week with five hosts,
a show by each one of them every week, and burn them out,
and then, there's no way...
No more yelling at anyone.
The decision has been made for years now.
If the queue is empty, and the reserve queue is empty,
and there's a day goes by without a show,
that's the end of HB.
We're rolling up the sidewalks.
So, so far, we managed to avoid that.
But, we've gotten very close.
So close, like, everybody's like,
I've got to make an episode, like, in the next 20 minutes,
or, this is not gonna fall apart.
You got 40.
Oh, what was it?
You got, no, no, right now, you've got 40.
Oh, yeah, we're good.
We're good.
We'll get it up there.
Going once, going twice.
All right, let's edit a show.
Let's do it.
If anybody wants to see this,
we'll put it back up later,
but Taj is going to switch over to his setup.
And...
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at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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