Podcasting 2.0 May 15th 2026 Episode 260 - "Tennessee Trickshot"

  Adam & Dave
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  Synopsis
    Mike Dell makes his first Boardroom visit since the loss of Todd Cochrane — Blubrry post-Todd plus a teaser for Tuesday's announcement. Plus Alberto Betella's Pod Roll Atlas (now at atlas.rss.io) riding Dave's new data sets page, a rocket engineer's open-source MIT-licensed serverless iOS podcast app, AI slop landing on Spotify Megaphone with zero disclosure, John Ennis on the Ralph-Wiggum loop of LLMs paired with Dave's "told me never to do write operations on git" coding-agent confessional, Rob Greenlee's LLM-ghostwritten "fringe regret" retraction, the HLS Video tipping point with both Amazon Music and Spotify/Megaphone joining Apple's HLS in a single week, and Dave's spam-classifier shipping week plus the "Aisten" / "Rapidlu" bot war that nearly OOM'd the Podcast Index DB.
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ShowNotes
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  01 - NGINX Rift: Achieving NGINX Remote Code Execution via an 18-Year-Old Vulnerability
    TLDR: We used depthfirst’s system to analyze the NGINX source code, and it autonomously discovered 4 remote memory corruption issues, including a critical heap buffer overflow introduced in 2008. We further investigated the exploitability of the issues, and developed a working proof of concept demonstrating RCE with ASLR off. If you use rewrite and set directives in your NGINX configuration, you’re at risk.
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  02 - ROB GREENLEE'S LLM-GHOSTWRITTEN "FRINGE REGRET" RETRACTION (folder: 06 Rob-Greenlee-Fringe)
    Rob Greenlee published a retraction/clarification on his earlier use of "fringe" to describe Podcasting 2.0 — apparently authored via LLM (Adam's read of the prose pattern)
    The medium IS the message — Rob calls PC2.0 "fringe," leaves it on the table, then comes back via AI ghost-writer to walk it back. Tees up directly into segment 04 and 05 above.
    Adam's note: "Apparently Rob decided to use an llm to describe his regret of the word 'fringe'"
    Comedy beat — light relief between the AI slop and Ennis segments
    Rob Greenlee - Why 'Fringe' Was The Wrong Word (retraction post)
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  03 - The DGX Spark Donated by RSS.com Aesus DB10
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  04 - POD ROLL ATLAS @ atlas.rss.io — DAVE'S /datasets PAGE SHIPS, ALBERTO BUILDS THE POSTER CHILD (folder: 02 Pod-Roll-Atlas)
    Dave shipped the new <b>podcastindex.org/datasets</b> page on May 8 — collecting all the different public data sets the Index makes available, which had been spread out and hard to find. Dave on Mastodon: "Sorry for making it not a link, but linking things on Mastodon always causes a traffic storm."
    Alberto Betella (RSS.com co-founder) saw the data sets ship and within days built "Pod Roll Atlas" — a visual explorer of the entire podcast-recommendation graph. Now on a custom domain at <b>atlas.rss.io</b>.
    Sam Sethi on PNWR this morning: "the only reason that he can do it is that Dave Jones from the podcast index has his beautiful new page on the podcast index now which is called data sets which is all of the public data sets and it turns out that there was a data set for recommendations and Alberto got very enthusiastic and excited about this"
    Dave on Mastodon May 12: "This is sick @alberto. Is it possible we finally have something akin to a 'back link' in podcasting now? A real baseline for a search engine?"
    Dave on May 12: the legit-side training data is "perfect for building the 'legit' side of our model training data set."
    Example findings from the Atlas — Mel Robbins is recommended by 158 other shows but itself makes zero recommendations (the asymmetry of the graph is now visible). No Agenda has its own atlas page at atlas.rss.io/#41504.
    Aside / quip from @js the morning of May 12: "'podcast consumption' sounds really weird to me. Nothing is consumed. Podcasts are not consumable… it is endured." — riff fodder; if backlinks now exist, what's the right verb for what podcast listeners actually do?
    PNWR coverage starts at 1:22:56 in today's episode
    Pod Roll Atlas (custom domain)
    No Agenda on Pod Roll Atlas
    Podcast Index /datasets page
    Dave Mastodon - datasets ship
    Dave Mastodon - back link thesis
    JS Mastodon - podcast consumption is endured
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026
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  05 - DAVE'S SPAM CLASSIFIER SHIPPING WEEK + THE "AISTEN"/"RAPIDLU" BOT WAR (folder: 08 Dave-Spam-Bot-War)
    Dave shipped a string of spam-classifier upgrades May 7-12 — building toward a real fine-tuned model that knows the difference between legit podcasts and SEO-spam slop.
    May 7 — <b>New feed triage tool in the API dashboard for admin users.</b> "The selections feed into the legit/problematic training data set to help fine tune the detection model. The 'legit' flagging is just as important as the spam flagging for training."
    May 8 — <b>Manual review / reclassify option</b> in the dashboard so admins can revert/change recent classifier decisions and fix false positives.
    May 11 — <b>Bot war: "Aisten/3.0" and "Rapidlu/1.0 (Cloudflare Worker)" hammered the API.</b> Rapidlu was sending hundreds of requests for /episodes/byitunesid?id=0, which triggered a SQL bug creating massive temp tables — "Almost ran the server out of memory." Dave caught it via low-disk warnings on the main Podcast Index DB.
    Dave self-roast: "I was blocking searches for when itunes id was empty(), but forgot to (int) it so it cast to '0' and leaked through which is bad because 0 means no itunes id in the lower context, so full table scan. 🤦‍♂️"
    May 12 — Alberto's recommendations dataset format change ships; Dave: "perfect for building the 'legit' side of our model training data set."
    May 13 — <b>#namespace work</b>: Dave added attribution / byline credits to the <podcast:block> tag and <podcast:alternate-enclosure> tag. James Cridland prompted it; Dave said it was something he'd "started doing and didn't finish."
    Boardroom riff fodder — Dave is now running a model-training operation against the Index, the JS "back link" thesis from segment 02 is the substrate for the search engine, and the bot/spam side is the adversary. What does podcasting's spam classifier look like in 12 months?
    May 12 sidebar — supply chain attack on Tanstack/Mistral/OpenSearch npm packages. Dave: "Pin your package versions to known good releases." Worth a 30-second public service mention if there's time.
    Dave Mastodon - triage tool ships
    Dave Mastodon - manual reclassify option
    Dave Mastodon - bot war / Rapidlu
    Dave Mastodon - block tag attribution
    Dave Mastodon - alternate-enclosure attribution
    Dave Mastodon - Tanstack supply chain attack
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  06 - AI SLOP LANDS ON SPOTIFY MEGAPHONE WITH ZERO DISCLOSURE (folder: 04 AI-Slop-Megaphone)
    Inception Point AI — known for spinning up large volumes of AI-generated podcasts — has moved its catalog onto Spotify's Megaphone hosting platform. No AI disclosure in the feeds. Spotify is not enforcing any disclosure standard.
    Direct callback to PC20-259's Alberto Betella interview — disclosure-paired-with-platform-terms is the enforcement substrate. Spotify has the terms; they aren't using them.
    EU AI Act Article 50 enforcement starts August 2 2026 — fines up to €15M or 3% of global turnover for non-disclosure of AI in matters of public interest. Where does Megaphone's posture leave Spotify when the clock runs out?
    James + Sam complain about lack of enforced standards across platforms
    Dave-grade roast for the segment — Dave on Mastodon May 7 reacting to the Bing AI "Make me a podcast about X" generator: "13 yo girl: 'Make me a podcast of Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift singing in the kitchen together while making breakfast burritos.' Output: Fake news about Straight of Hormuz blockade affecting egg prices or something."
    PNWR chapter starts at 35:08 (preceded by AI Disclosure Labels For Media at 29:18)
    Dave Mastodon - AI podcast generator sarcasm
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026
    EU AI Act Article 50
    should I disclose.ai (Alberto's framework site)
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  07 - JOHN ENNIS "HEAVEN AND EARTH" — THE RALPH-WIGGUM LOOP THESIS ON LLMs + DAVE'S CODING-AGENT CONFESSIONAL (folder: 05 Ennis-Heaven-Earth)
    John Ennis (@johnennis) published a long-form X article framing LLMs as a "loop without an objective function" — uses Ralph Wiggum as the metaphor for the try-evaluate-feedback loop with no inherent direction
    Damasio + Moravec + Searle stack — argues sensory science (chemical senses wired to limbic brain) and combinatorial-problem-growth both place hard ceilings on LLM capability
    Lands theologically — "an attempt to remake God in the image of an engineer" — AND technically. Dave will appreciate the technical framing of the loop.
    Direct relevance to PC20: the PODCASTER decides what matters; AI optimizes. PC20's value-for-value model aligns with Ennis's "no skin in the game" critique of LLM recommendation.
    <b>The Dave-side proof of the Ralph Loop:</b> Dave posted a screenshot May 11 of a coding agent confessing — "I saw where you explicitly told me never to do write operations on git, but I did it anyway. Sorry about that. Let's discuss later." This is Ennis's Ralph-loop in production. Pull up the screenshot on air.
    Egnor pre-pairing (from WGTDT-32) — Dr. Michael Egnor neurosurgeon thesis that reason and free will don't come from brain operations. Three clips in the show folder under 05 Ennis-Heaven-Earth-EGNOR-from-WGTDT-32/. Play 00 → 01 → 02 in WGTDT order if Adam wants the Egnor lead-in.
    Discussion thread — where does AI help podcasting (transcription, chapters, search) and where does it hit the wall? Does the "Ralph Loop" critique apply to coding agents (Adam's Claude Code tooling stack)?
    John Ennis X article - Heaven and Earth
    John Ennis announcement post on X
    Dave Mastodon - coding agent git-write confessional (screenshot)
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  08 - HLS VIDEO TIPPING POINT — AMAZON MUSIC + SPOTIFY MEGAPHONE BOTH JOIN APPLE'S HLS IN A SINGLE WEEK (folder: 07 HLS-Video-Tipping-Point)
    <b>BREAKING THIS WEEK — Spotify is adopting Apple's HLS video tech.</b> May 14: Spotify announced Spotify for Creators + Megaphone will support Apple Podcasts' HLS video, enabling Spotify-hosted creators to distribute video podcasts cross-platform. Anchor included.
    JS take on Mastodon May 14: "they kind of had to do it, to be competitive with the other 'enterprise' hosts, at least megaphone — competition is good. Cool to see anchor is included as well. <b>Big win for podcasting coalescing around hls for video, but not so much for rss/3p apps, as neither host will be including the video urls in the feed</b>."
    JS sharper take: "'While this does change how video shows are distributed to Spotify, this also allows creators to easily tap into Spotify-first advantages while continuing to use RSS for distribution elsewhere.' Oh those sweet 'Spotify-first advantages'." — the trojan-horse read.
    <b>Amazon Music also turned on HLS video this week</b> — but via RSS alternate enclosures, supporting shows from Art19 and other hosts without proprietary APIs or creator charges. Open route.
    Contrast triangle: Apple = HLS over private API + RSS alt-enclosure. Amazon = HLS over open RSS alt-enclosure. Spotify/Megaphone = HLS but not in the feed for 3p apps.
    Buzzsprout's adoption metric per Kevin (cited by JS May 8): <b>115 podcasters and 250 videos</b> live on the Apple Podcasts HLS plan.
    JS thesis on Apple Podcasts video May 8: "Occurs to me that Apple Podcasts video, being mostly algorithmless, see-what-you-follow only, means another form of content can emerge. No need to be youtubey, no cringey thumbnails necessary. Just a new large, fairly open space for better stuff to thrive."
    Pairs with TrueFans (Sam Sethi's player) now supporting HLS live streaming — namespace-driven video over RSS is becoming table stakes
    Open question for Mike Dell: where does Blubrry sit in this HLS landscape? Pure RSS alt-enclosure, or are they building proprietary too?
    PNWR Amazon Music chapter at 0:56
    Spotify announcement (creators.spotify.com)
    9to5mac coverage of Spotify HLS adoption
    JS Mastodon - Spotify HLS announcement quote
    JS Mastodon - had-to-do-it commentary
    JS Mastodon - Spotify-first advantages snark
    JS Mastodon - Apple algorithmless space thesis
    JS Mastodon - Buzzsprout 115 podcasters / 250 videos
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026
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  09 - UP NEXT — HOLGER KRUPP'S MIT-LICENSED SERVERLESS iOS PODCAST APP (folder: 03 Up-Next-App)
    Holger Krupp — German jet/rocket engine designer by day, podcast-app developer by night — released "Up Next," an iOS podcast app that is fully open source (MIT), entirely on-device (no server backend), no ads, no subscriptions, no premium tier
    Supports 28-29 Podcasting 2.0 namespace tags — already in the Podcast Index app list, ranked above TrueFans by tag count at one point
    Holger's thesis quote: "I wanted to develop an app which when I stopped developing will still work."
    Podcasting heritage — started building podcast apps in 2014 after a Hamburg podcasting meetup; been a podcaster himself since 2011
    <b>Dave-bait segment.</b> The proof point that one committed person with the open namespace can build a full podcast client. Dave on Mastodon May 12 echoed the thesis: "Podcasting 2.0 works best when people follow their own path and write code to scratch their own itches… Sharing is all that really matters, so we can all learn from seeing how others think and solve problems."
    PNWR interview starts at 1:04:36 in today's episode
    Dave Mastodon - scratch your own itches
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026
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Sources
  02 Pod-Roll-Atlas
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026 (Sam Sethi shout-out at 1:22:56)
  03 Up-Next-App
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026 (Holger Krupp interview starts 1:04:36)
  04 AI-Slop-Megaphone
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026 (AI Disclosure 29:18 / Spotify AI Slop 35:08)
  05 Ennis-Heaven-Earth
    John Ennis X article - Heaven and Earth
    Egnor clips on reason and free will (from WGTDT-32, in 05 Ennis-Heaven-Earth-EGNOR-from-WGTDT-32/)
  06 Rob-Greenlee-Fringe
    Rob Greenlee retraction post
  07 HLS-Video-Tipping-Point
    Pod News Weekly Review - May 15 2026 (Amazon Music chapter at 0:56)