Weekly Update (May 24, 2025): Podcast summaries, private feeds, in-person meetup!

Alright, welcome to the weekly-ish edition of the Metacast Weekly Update. I'm your host, Ilya, Bestlife. And I'm Arnab, sitting or standing right next to Ilya. Yeah, it's... First time in two years we are doing an in-person episode and that's the first ever weekly edition recorded in person. And regardless of what we are doing next to each other, we should get to business and give our updates. So Arna, what have you been doing in the last two weeks?

so i've been working on the app on the next release that should be coming up by next early next week i would say um so summaries are now in the app You can see chapters in the details, screens of episodes and all that and you can tap right from there so you don't have to go to the player and start it from there anymore. There's a new update available banner. From now on, when we launch a new version of the app, you'll start seeing like there's a new update.

available and you can like click that and immediately update it yeah there's also a link to the change logs you can also see what are the new features that are in this release that will also link to the blog post so yeah you can always keep up to date on what's new in the app yeah and if you're annoyed by it for whatever reason you should not be it's very small but if you are you can dismiss it and don't upgrade yeah totally

And then we have started using our own assets domain for images. That's very technical. What does that mean for the users? You tell us because you built the thing. So images in the app are now loading faster. Yeah. Well, I mean, in Android, it's noticeably way, way faster. Or maybe not on Pixel and high-end Android devices, but like my puny old Android device.

like way way better yeah so basically for the we talked about that a couple of episodes ago for the web app we've created our own image optimization and we start using the same thing in the mobile app which just makes everything faster because the image is enough smaller yeah And then a couple more things that I've worked on is one of the things we've struggled with is getting enough ratings and reviews.

so now we started adding some cues in the app when you do some specific things we start showing you like hey would you like to rate us yeah so now if you start the subscription we will ask you to give us a five star review yeah So, yeah. And the final thing is, because we're starting to show chapters and summaries and they're not available on older episodes, they're automatically generated whenever we create the transcript for new episodes that we fetch, but they're not available on older ones.

so there's a way for you to request it that will basically it will make you post on reddit or send us an email but we ilya and me have a special thingy in the app to like generate it immediately Yeah, so it's a backdoor in the premium features. And maybe sometime we'll just open it up for everybody. but that feature uses like Generative AI LLMs and

It can be expensive. That's why we've kept it only for us like admins for now. So previously we'd have to go to the backend and like do some stuff there in database to trigger those actions if you have to rerun them. Now we can do them straight from the app, because we are admins. Okay, so on to you, Ilya.

i've been slacking all of last week or this week i lost track of time so i was in philadelphia for a reunion for my master's program there in upenn and uh yeah I had an amazing time, meeting lots of people I know from 10 years ago, alcohol, all of that stuff, the goodness. Also, I spent a couple of days in New York.

roaming manhattan and new jersey i've never been to jersey before i had a really bad incident with the bus driver because she was asking me where in new york i'm going and i was saying i'm going to new york And she just couldn't grasp the difference between New York and New York in my pronunciation. Anyways, I got yelled at.

so and then finally i'm here in vancouver where yeah we've been um also doing a lot of cool stuff we've been talking about the private podcasts we've uh created a high level plan sort of sort of a list of things that we need to do to support private podcasts We're really excited about that. We've also been doing a lot of chats and walks and we cooked dinner together. Actually I think it's

I mostly cook that dinner, but you help me. I prepared stuff, yeah. I did the manual labor and you did the... We did the 8th morning. So, yeah, that was a lot of fun. You know, it's always fun to meet each other. We have not met, I think, for a year since you visited me in Florida last year. During that time, I was able to squeeze in some work. I've created a features page on the web app that talks about all of the awesome features that we have. We will ship this on Monday.

And I've also done some changes in the Cloudflare caching stuff. You know, it's a never-ending thing that we're doing. Yeah, I was going to say like when are we not working on caching? Has there been a day since the day the LLMs attacked like in mid-February we haven't worked on caching? Last month we set up We set up caching basically like what we needed, right? We set everything up and then we purged all of the cache. So the entire cache had to be regenerated. It was what, like 100 bucks?

100 bucks. So basically every time we make a big change in the web app and we have to purchase cash, it's 100 bucks. And I think it will grow linearly with the growth of the number of podcasts that we have. that is a big deal because like over time when we have 10x more podcasts it will be like a thousand bucks a month or a thousand bucks multiple times a month if we like have to purchase multiple times a month so you have to do the caching thing like really well

but if we didn't do the caching it would be like maybe two three hundred every month regardless and now most months we wouldn't have to do the full cash purge and in those months the bill would be very small But yeah, unless we do like big changes Cool. So now I'm going to be here for another week.

And we'll be working together, so Arnab, what are we gonna be working on together? so to release the private feeds we realized that we need to do some things in the app before so that's uh in v1.20 which is coming up like early next week All of the things that I talked about, summaries, chapters, available banner, and this preparation for private feeds, all of that will land in 1.20. and then we'll start working on private feeds which should come out in v.1.21 Cool.

Yeah, on my end, for the V120, I'll release a blog post. We have summaries, summaries is big. So that's going to be a really cool blog post because it has the big feature but also some smaller ones that I think we should talk about because they are the unsung heroes of of our app. We also release the feature pages after the caching sets in. It's so weird that we have to plan our releases for caching and billing cycles.

And then for the V1.21, I'll be working with Arnab on some of the backend and web app related changes for the private feeds. We are really excited about the private feeds. And I think the way we are planning to do it... Almost no other app I think has some of the things that we're planning to do for private feeds so that's really exciting. Yeah, our app will be like the best private feed app.

All right, so we still have one and a half minute left before we have the timer. Let's use the timer very wisely and within 30 seconds. Yeah, so I guess for people who are listening for this for the first time. We are doing the podcast recommendations at the end of each episode and we set the timer for 30 seconds. So Arnav, what is your podcast recommendation?

I don't have a podcast recommendation. So instead, I love Asterix and Obelix comics from like way back from my childhood. There's a new Netflix show, five-part series. So good. Asterix and Obelix, they had a movie also the last couple of years back that was not good with Zlatan in it, by the way. And the new series is so good. Watch it. That's my recommendation in 25 seconds. Okay. And Ilya. You got 30 seconds starts now.

so i've been following your recommendations and i started binging on everything everywhere daily podcast which is almost like TikTok, but for interesting topics. So it's like under 10, 12 minutes, you get a breakdown of a really cool topic. So I've been binging on the World War II episodes. They inspired me to pick up the Stalin's biography. So basically I listened to the whole Stalin biography audiobook while I was traveling last week. Nice, that's a good one.

Yeah, one second remaining. Wow, well done. No, no, no. You'll be like waiting to hit the pause. Three seconds remaining. That was three seconds remaining, okay, cool. Okay, anyway, we've been able to do this in under 10 minutes, and I think part of that is because there's just so much chemistry going on in person. It just helps.

Cool. Yeah, a bit faster. Alright, so we'll record like a full episode next week, I think. Yeah. Before you leave, yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Alright, see you next week. Bye-bye.