News Minimalist – Only significant news
newsminimalist.com
newsminimalist.com
Happy to answer any questions.
(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)
The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.
But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.
I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.
So I built a web app that I think solves this.
It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.
The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.
You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
Adding filter for news sources should be pretty easy, I'll consider it for "advanced view".
Now that would be worth something...
Say, you want more than 6 filters they costs 50 cents/filter/month with a minimum of 5.
I think one would gradually make more and more of them?
* Make it easier to browse back in time. My biggest annoyance with news sites I've subscribed to is that they have no way to find articles after they have moved off the front page so I feel compelled to visit every day, and when I don't I feel like I'm wasting money, so I unsubscribe. I did eventually find that you have previous days available in the newsletter section, but a more discoverable interface like "previous/next day" link on the bottom of the page would be great.
* Add some less frequent newsletters, such as weekly and monthly which dedupe any stories that come up multiple times in that period, and include the top N stories, rather than everything over a threshold.
* Sections would be great for advanced users. My ideal would be to let the user set a different threshold for each section, but then still display them all together on the front page.
I actually created a site - https://detoxed.news - with a very similar philosophy a while back, though with a much simpler implementation. It periodically scrapes Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and presents that information in a nicer format.
I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you keep well-informed about current events and happenings in the world, without wasting your time on the 24 hours new cycle.
1) Flood in Rwanda kills 109 people 2) Sudan War 3) Australia evacuation from Sudan 4) Seizing of an oil tanker
None of these headlines keep me particularly informed and are actually a more potent version of the 24 hours new cycle
Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles more significant and where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases?
I haven't. I can share ChatGPT's evaluation of sources credibility, maybe that will give people some insights. For example, Reuters got 9.5 (out of 10), Lifehacker 7, Oprah Mag 3.
> where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
I'd say today is just US and economy-heavy day. There were many days when other categories and geographies made the top (I especially enjoy these). One example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
FWIW, when I read news I often cross check on different outlets to get a sense of the span, range and sometimes media blackouts, including the ones with extreme bias (like RT reporting on Ukraine). This can give a good reading of the meta-temperature of a developing or controversial situation with a lot of propaganda and bias. In some cases, less trustworthy outlets will cover stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to more reputable publications, and sometimes, those can be really important.
For a service like this, I’d much prefer something analogous to “here’s what different outlets are saying”, rather than trying to make its own judgment about bias.
Subscribed to newsletter.newsminimalist.
Any chance of updating the RSS feed item "summary" to something more useful than "significant news" and title to something more than the date? Or maybe an RSS feed of the newsletter format?
(I do see some of the older items have titles that include some info on what's included)
Basically, I think the ideal RSS feeds would be _two_: 1. RSS feed of every item that hits the 6/10 threshold (title and link to original, summary not too important, either same as title or paragraph summary of what the article is about) 2. RSS feed of the newsletter (title: "May 4 2023 - significant news", link: newsletter page, summary: list of article titles)
I suppose versions of #1 with diff thresholds could be nice, but I'd probably only use the default threshold.
Background: I run a bot that sends RSS feeds into discord channels (easily followable to any discord server) and this particular feed seems potentially quite handy for good news info. Probably overlaps with https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ but that automation probably means it can catch breaking news faster than a manually-curated site like that.
"RSS" that I have currently is generated by the email platform that I use for daily emails. It's not a proper RSS from website.
Making a proper RSS for website items is on my list, but I need to finish some other features first.
Agree about subtitles in older items, I guess I just got lazy writing them :) your message was just what I needed to get back to older better format.
Heads up that your plaintext emails in the newsletter have some html formatting and template artifacts in there.
Personally, I want an even higher signal to noise ratio and even fewer articles. Perhaps significance > 7, and articles from the last week.
I've subscribed to the RSS feed. I thought the feed would provide links the significant news articles directly, but it appears to provide a link to the newsminimalist.com summary. That's totally fine, but I'd think it'd be a bit nicer if there was an option to access the articles directly.
I'm also using ChatGPT to scrape online info and reduce it. Were there any particularly interesting problems that you had to solve? For me, it was figuring out ways to reduce the number of tokens so I don't hemorrhage money!
Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032
Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)
Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.
Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D
Question: are you using ChatGPT to summarize the article and making that the title of each post?
Relatedly, it would be neat if you had a slider or +/- buttons for each article summary, so someone could choose their depth based on how interesting the title sounds.
I just ask chatgpt to "summarize the article very concisely" and hope that it won't lose any important points. But chatgpt is really good at summarizing, so I don't worry much.
Having +/- buttons is a good idea, will add it to todo list as well.
If you were so inclined, it would probably be pretty trivial to also offer leveled versions as well, which would be very useful for schools/teachers to use with students. There are a handful of companies that have bespoke leveled reading articles created from standard news articles. ChatGPT would make the workflow for creating news articles much easier, though manual QC would still be necessary to ensure that the article summaries are accurate and appropriate for students.
The idea of filtering news sourced mentioned elsewhere is nice, but will necessitate considerable input from users, kind of negating the purpose of the site
I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.
Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Eg default (no topic sections like what you have today), and optional advanced (with sections)
( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )
Thank you kind stranger!
Have you considered/thought about this aspect of news?
But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
I don't know ChatGPT's logic, but it might be it's giving higher scores to news about US economic difficulties because they tend to cause ripples all over the world. But I've never seen articles about US internal politics getting score over 6.5 (or maybe there were none in the last month).
Also, the second to last least significant article seems to be incorrectly categorized: "Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby"
Which is actually a serious look back at the advancements over the last quarter century, hardly deserving the second to last position.
It seems like ChatGPT is ranking them not based on actual content significance but presumed significance of the headline. (Which would also make sense technically as ~1200 headlines is about the max context length of GPT-4).
I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid.
Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun the credibility evaluation.
So it's exceedingly unlikely the actual content, beyond the headline, is processed if your using the ChatGPT version.
In 99% cases a single news article fits within the context.
I drop those that don't fit, since several examples I saw were announcement of lottery numbers (too many tokens) and articles with broken html.
And the context length limit prevents that relation from extending to more then a few articles, if that's your method.
i.e. Your method doesn't actually produce a meaningful score that can be ranked in some linear order with the 1200 other articles.
At most it would make sense to rank a discrete score in relation to the few other articles it remembers.
Anything beyond that should be placed in 'score ranges' from 5 to 7 for example, not given a discrete score.
Sometimes I'm very frustrated about the news that get to the top. When I try to debug it, it gives me a completely different score.
I considered using ranges over discrete score, but dropped the idea, as it makes it too hard to find 1-5 articles that should make it to newsletter (there are 71 articles in this range right now) and it's hard to clearly display that idea in UI.
I guess my position right now is — it's not perfect, there are obvious errors (like the one you found above), and improvements are definitely possible.
But I hope that some people would find it "good enough" even with these inconsistencies. I also hope that ChatGPT or another LLM will make a big progress soon that would solve this problem automatically.
I just realized, for that particular news article about Regenerative medicine it was my mistake all along. I asked ChatGPT to give unknown sources a score of 1 and completely forgot about. I think that's what it did.
For now it marked only 8 sources as unknown out of 1700.
(Yes I know .us exists but it’s not as common as .com)
If it was newsminimalist.co.uk I don’t think anyone would really complain that it’s UK-specific news, right?
Your American bias is just shining through, where of course you're not surprised.
Those both mean the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
$ whois com.
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
DNS was originally a DARPA project, and was implicitly US focused from the very beginning of the internet, because it was a US project. ".com" carries that legacy because it predates the concept of country-specific TLD's.
A similar idea exists in reddit: /r/news is very US-focused, even though it's not called "US news". Since Reddit is an American site with an (at least initially) predominantly American audience, it's not surprising at all that things are American-biased by default unless explicitly named accordingly.
If we were all using Minitel instead of The Internet, we would have similar bias where services would be biased towards France unless shown otherwise, because Minitel was a French technology.
The point is, it's not explicitly a problem that somebody puts up a website and it's US-centric. Nobody owes the world an international version of whatever project they want to make, and you don't need to get upset that they only bother to cater to a US audience.
I'd say, .com is just the default. If you go location/topic specific, you go with another TLD.
To the 130 million (domainnamestat.com) domains, registered in the US, there are like 500 million domains, registered somewhere else. I couldn't find any numbers for how many of those are .com and how many aren't, but you cannot just ignore those. Just because most domains registered in the US are .com domains, doesn't make .com a US domain. That's a really egocentric point of view.
That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact.
Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world use .tv addresses for other reasons that have nothing to do with Tuvalu, doesn't change the fact that it's a Tuvaluan TLD.
If you want more information on this, the intro in the Wikipedia article on .com is quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com ... particularly:
> The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.[2][3][4] Additionally, as the Internet was invented in the United States, most American businesses and enterprises have used the .com domain instead of a more U.S.-specific .us.
.tv addresses are different, because ccTLDs are explicitly tied to countries (hence "ccTLD"). generic TLDs (gTLDs) like .com are not.
.com registrations are ultimately under US jurisdiction. It's what happens when you have a name system that was originally intended for one country's project (The Internet) and said project ended up becoming internationally used. The original TLD's are grandfathered in even after we got country-specific ones.
Nobody complains that .mil is US-centric either. .mil isn't a ccTLD but of course it means US military.
.com is a very popular TLD used all over the world. It doesn't make it non-American. Just as .tv is also very popular outside of Tuvalu, it doesn't make it non-Tuvaluan.
That means the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
- when a user changes the score slider, encode that in the URL with a hash tag, so they can bookmark the page with their preferred settings
- a left button allowing me to step back to yesterday's news
- to simplify newsletter signups, just accept an e-mail address right on that page
- your **advanced** options:
- have GPT score each news story across common labels: science, politics, entertainment, news, etc. Then allow these as a filter. If I want to see the top science stories of the day, that should be easy.
- have GPT write a 2 sentence summary of each story as a lead-in after the headline title
- a user/saved whitelist/blacklist of news sites
- any advanced setting should be shareable. For example, if someone puts the effort in to make a page with just Australian news sources, focused on sports, with a minimum score of 5.0, they could save that with a title that can be shared for anyone.
All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)
It's a nice idea and looks like it's implemented well. My problem is probably that different things are significant to different people. Following that thread leads to filter bubbles, of course.
For big international (usually bad!) news I tend to go to Wikipedia Current Events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Could News Minimalist have an option to only show good news with some significance? I think that might be popular and quite useful for the mental health of lots of people.
Good things do happen but they're under-reported because death, destruction and conflict draw more clicks & views. A way to surface the less depressing news would be welcome.
>“Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.”
Is an excellent hook.
I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example:
>“Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8
>“White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top.
To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times.
Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I think ideally I could do some sort of deduplication, but I don't know how to implement it yet.
Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
The problem with deduping is that some news get posted and reposted by different sources for several days (sometimes even weeks) in a row. That's a huge context I'd have to put in AI.
1000 news titles * 3 days * 70 symbols per title = 210,000 symbols = 40000 words = 53000 tokens. My current context window is 8000 tokens and I think 32000 tokens is max that GPT-4 allows.
---
Add: now that I think about it should be possible to do in several runs. Will keep thinking about it, thanks for the suggestion.
Every time ChatGPT saw the words "World is ending" (not real example) it gave those articles very high score.
Estimating source credibility was the only solution I came up with.
100,000 dead Russians, is very likely the propaganda number. Maybes it’s right; maybe it’s not, IDK, but I know that there has been zero negative Ukraine news since the conflict started (ghost of Kiev anyone?), and the media machine definitely only works one way on this topic.
I mean, Russia isn’t the good guy here, but I don’t excuse propaganda just because it tells a story I want to hear.
In this case, I don’t care what the US or Ukraine says the number is. That isn’t news. It’s narrative, true or not.
So, I feel like the score should take into account if how likely an article is to be narrative vs purely an event.
The number is news because Russia is waging a large-scale invasion of another country using cannon fodder tactics. Reporting on that invasion is not simply propaganda.
Since December
News is something that either has happened or is going to happen. If it might not happen, then it's speculation, that isn't news (imo).
e.g.
- "US Braces for potential recession" -- no, the REAL story is the interest rate is going up
- "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news
- "WEF predicts jobs disrupted" -- speculation, not news
And also I echo the other comments about it being overly US-centric, but that's par for the course.
Edit: I should also say, good job! It's a nice website
It seems like this will happen unless something significant changes. It also seems likely something significant will change, such as GOP and Dems agreeing. But until that happens, Federal Government seems to be on track to default.
"Significant" has a very personal context. Things that affects significance to me are things like: proximity to my home/work, my hobbies, my age, my financial situation, etc.
For example, if my neighbourhood's crime rate had gone up by 100%, I'd want to see that amongst the top news of the day.
I don't like the word "top" because even on the most uneventful day there's going to be something that qualifies as top (because of the lack of competition).
So proper term would probably be "globally significant news" or "news significant to humanity as a whole".
This project is very cool, but the top results are only significant for people concerned with politics and economics. It would be amazing to generate a custom score for the articles based on topics that impact me and my community the most.
Q: Could you please add RSS? I’d use this every day if I could get it in Feedly. (NM found it in a comment https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml)
Q: Why’d you choose 6.5 as the default? Sorry if you answered that already.
I will definitely sub to News Minimalist if the same is possible.
Will try to improve it.
Added "good RSS" to the TODOs.
Secondly, it's more of a local thing, most of this is US news as people have pointed out, significant varies again based on location.
Being able to manage information is not a battle I feel is being won right now, because content publishers have the complete opposite goals and curation tools aren't adequate enough.
Quick suggestion: parse the URL to determine which media organization published the content, and then allow for users and/or the LLM to leverage info from Media Bias/Fact Check[1] to determine if a source is valid. I'd like to see how it arrived at the conclusion of why the article got it's given score.
I would 100% pay something like $2 month for a daily feed of ranked headlines with links.
I (somewhat ashamedly) get most of my knowledge of current events through reddit, because it's more convenient than aggregating that knowledge myself. However, I also completely agree with the idea that a collective of Internet users is not the best tool for aggregating news, as many popular news/current event subreddits have devolved into echo chambers and astroturfing.
The point of saying this is that I know my approach to collecting knowledge about current events is flawed so I'm okay with replacing it with something else that isn't perfect: it just has to be better and more reliable than my current method.
It would be best if the feed can also update one-by-one rather than the daily batch, but not a deal breaker.
From the footer:
> simply visit newsminimalist.com when you feel like it.
That's exactly what RSS feeds are for, so you can subscribe to a website and get the updates without the need to visit it again or even think about it again.
I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly.
It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back
Those were the days.
- people are harping on bias, but I think they miss the point. Use the tool, get the tool result, and let god sort them out.
- Multilingual sources are core to the value proposition. Make it a community list with tags, e.g: a user from india add their favourite local UP political news source with tags [india] [politics]. then you can taylor the reports by interests (yes, like all news aggregation websites before. they do it because it's needed I think)
- likewise,store the summaries, then enable users to ask for a rewighing with their interests in the prompt, e.g: "I am a well educated, religious Emirati interested mainly in news about the wars and tensions in the middlke east, as well as car racing"
- get news by actual news, not by news source. E.g: get the embeddings of the news, cluster, get summarization of "best" sources of cluster with added info like likely primary source, histograms of reputation vs sentiment vs political leaning
- todays news give you also access to the comments, both on the site and e.g: on reddit and twitter. add maybe a comment summarization / sentiment analysis (e.g: 90% of comments on this new york post article were racist one-liners. Dicscusion on this Korean article revolve around effects on workforce mental health, etc)
- you mention cost: make accounts able to add their ChatGPT API keys, with an estimation of how much you'll use, ang keep these accounts free. For the others, warn that in time you'll add a small charge maybe?
Or perhaps they are more significant than they feel because their trickle-down effect is slow and hard to trace.
I would love a simple mobile app, it's just easy to tap your news app on a phone, ideally with a way to customize the notification timing. I have certain moments each day when I want to consume this type of content (breakfast, lunch break)
A small community driven comment section with Karma system would also be nice. I like to discuss news and it enables knowledgeable people to add some additional insights. See the dutch tech news site for inspiration. they explain their karma system here: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
Alternatively (or complementary), I would recommend https://ground.news/ which looks like a classic news outlet, but they pick only the relevant info and more importantly explains where the news fits in the political spectrum.
Personally, I highly recommend you to rely on more than one source of news, ideally with different country and political biases (for instance, I enjoy reading in The Guardian about Germany, and watching Al Jazeera to learn about what's new in the UK).
> For each article ChatGPT estimates:
> Magnitude: how big was the effect;
> Scale: how many people the event affected;
> Potential: how likely is it that the event will cause bigger events;
> Credibility: how credible is the source.
Then I do `Credibility * cbrt(Magnitude * Scale * Potential)`
cbrt = cubic root
Maybe the formula could be improved but I was satisfied with the result, so kept it that way.
[1] I tried it with gpt4:
> Pick a card.
>> As an AI language model, I am unable to physically pick a card for you. However, if you're referring to a card from a standard 52-card deck, I can randomly select one for you.
>> Your randomly selected card is the 7 of Hearts.
> Again.
>> Alright, let's randomly select another card for you.
>> Your new randomly selected card is the Jack of Diamonds.
These two biases are probably indicative of a host of other, less obvious biases. To be clear: all media is biased, because it is created by biased humans and it has been well demonstrated that algorithms replicate the biases of their creators.
A good newspaper/website knows their audience and delivers reporting relevant to it in a language they appreciate and cognizant of its societal impact.
This should indeed be easy, and given how good it is at translation, very interesting - taking too news sources and national broadcast services; rate as you do now - filter the top, summarize in English, store and dedup on similarity vector - it would be great. For example i don't read any Chinese or African news sources - but it would be great to have them in the mix.
Might even index on similarity first then ask for a summary on all different reports on the same story?
Would be cool to publish multiple feeds corresponding to each integer significance threshold. Like 6+, 7+ etc
Update: turns out the RSS feed doesn’t work like I expected. I wanted it to publish each news item to the feed, but it’s actually just a feed of the newsletter.
For example this piece of news gets less than 5:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-aft...
Yet it’s certainly important, affecting a large number of people, and matching other criteria.
As someone who works in media I agree with the premise this comes from, but the implementation is a typical examples of the complexities and nuances that LLMs do not get. Also you’re just under the illusion to escape an agenda, but you’re just swapping human agendas for a technobabble view of journalism that is arid as it can possibly get.
If I want to know what's happening from an authoritative source I go straight to Reuters and that's it.
However, there is also objectively less interesting news out there that I might want to click and read, and reducing the score to 3,4,5... (?) will give me a ton of crappy news which I don't want to read, and then I am back to square 1: google news or similar.
You need to provide a better way to select or filter out, otherwise you'll only get proxies of Reuters and similar, which we probably already go to during the day.
It reminds me of The Economist's daily The World in Brief, which I currently subscribe to and is quite expensive...
Would easily pay 10$ a month for this in its current state.
(Great product/PoC btw, this seems like an awesome application of LLMs!)
New effective Alzheimer drug is even lower
Kudos!
Very nice concept - thanks for sharing!
For example, you've missed my definition for the same reason many mainstream outlets do: I don't care about the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. That alone is 4 out of 14 of your front page stories.
It's a good idea, but it will be difficult to execute in a way useful to a significant number of people.
I have no control over it, but let me know if there are any problems with it — I'll see what I can do.
That is, for a day with 5 news, post 5 times on the feed, one for each.
I'm using a RSS reader that only shows the title of each day (and not the body of the post), and right now it's showing only
> Tuesday, May 2 — 4 significant news
> Only significant news. All signal, no noise.
But I would like to be able to skim all headlines in the RSS reader itself
(I know I could probably make a custom RSS feed out of this though)
I can't help but wonder that with the rise of tools like this, news agencies might start publishing exploding news to make it seem more important. It'll be interesting to see how the model works with that kind of data and if it's able to figure that out.
You’d get super interesting contrasts, and when western media would be going wild over the latest Trump gaffe, right next to it there’d be news from some island in the middle of pacific saying their antelope conservation efforts were finally paying off.
In hindsight it was super cool, and I’m really sad I didn’t keep up with it.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is credible at all?
for example your minimalist list shows "ibm to layoff thousands to replace them with ai". that's not minimizing the news, because now i I'm less informed. someone with knowledge of ibm know they are dead and would layoff with our without the magic ai excuse. so your site kept the non news part of a headline.
same about US default. everyone know there will be no default. the headline with minimal critical thinking should be "legislative keep pushing executive for concessions to raise the bureaucratic debt limit"
see, thinking is not that hard. but there's zero of it in news and your site minimize it even more.
From my side the only thing I wished to have once I clicked on the first link is if there were links to de-paywalled websites (I guess Pocket works for that, or webarchive).
I did it at first, but quickly realized that it's too expensive. GPT-4 is 15 times more expensive for prompt and 30 times more expensive for completion than GPT-3.5-turbo. But I think GPT-3.5-turbo gives 90% as good summaries as GPT-4.
Even if only English language sources are considered, there are available ones for non-English-speaking countries, example from Spain https://english.elpais.com/
As you said analyzing news in other languages should help with bringing up different perspectives. I'll work on that.
But I'm still not sure what to do about chatgpt's bias. For now I just accept it.
It might not be for much longer though...
It'd be great to filter out keywords
- Mark as read
Dim already read headlines, be able to mark each one as read or "done"
Bug or some fine tuning: Saw news repeated about 4 times today, about the European Central Bank/ECB. Some different wording but it was essentially the same.
The RSS feed combined with the source filtering idea would be great.
0.5/10 might be the sweet spot for best of the worst.
- WWE Draft 2021: Triple H announces draft picks and new brand exclusivity.
- Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson reunite at 2023 Met Gala.
- Vladimir Putin's lover Alina Kabaeva makes rare appearance at gymnastics event in Siberia.
I’d love to see some dials to find even worse news in the future. :)
Where and how are you getting the ~1000 news articles you feed to GPT4? I think it would go a long way for transparency to list that somewhere on the website. Also, are you using international news agencies? Quite a lot of them publish an English feed too.
I would also love to see the difference it would make given a different geographical prompt ("in the context of China/India/Asia/Europe... How would you are this article") and political ideology prompt ("how would you rate this article for a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Socialist...")
Is “news” supposed to be about worrying/negative signals incentivizing doom scrolling? Out of the first 20 headlines only one is truly positive(HPV vaccine). The rest show how broken and dreadful our world is. This does not (exclusively) apply to this particular website. It is a common trait across all media platforms - all about politics, war and economic and social problems.
It is like, yeah, we have many problems but just pointing out those is an imbalanced way to feed the idol of misery. Where are the news about solutions?
One guy even wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life”.
So if I were a subeditor tasked with writing a standfiest for this, my headline would be: "american tech people miss point of journalism"
More seriously, it takes a human's judgement to do this well. Editors will often read all the other daily papers, weeklies, magazines, and other periodicals. They're highly attuned to "relevance". ChatGPT is clearly editorially very naive