Still No Olympics
OVER a week ago I explained how (and why) I had set up a special filter to block "Olympics" (or "Olympic") coverage from my feeds. I am no opponent of sports. It's just that the "Olympics"® are no longer about sports.
We use several computer programs (that we developed ourselves; it's in Git, AGPLv3) to survey the news all day long, then curate sensibly. And no, it's done manually (by humans), the automation just spares us laborious collection tasks (pulling together material to study individually after sorting).
So far it seems like we've missed nothing important. Hearing my wife playing some clips in the other room, it seems like the Olympics attracted more controversy than I can recall (IOC used to receive scorn for its copyright stance and amid COVID-19 in Japan nobody heard of the IOC much).
I have lots of bad things to say about the Olympics. But many of them aren't of a technical or societal nature; it's more to do with economics and politics.
Earlier today I spoke with a friend who also said he had lost any interest in the Olympics. Those games are run and governed by complete idiots.
If your news-reading software supports filters, add something that culls "Olympics" and "Olympic" (case-insensitive, sometimes the latter covers the former, sans word-wise tokenisation) to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. There's not that much news left after the cull, but better to have less and more relevant than a bunch of nonsense that's more about politics (or nationalism) than about athleticism. Sport has been 'co-opted' and turned into an "industry" willing to be sponsored by - and advertise - junk foods. Screw that, I'm out! █
