Improving Daily Links by Culling Spam, Chaff, and LLM Slop
Because the Web is rapidly getting worse and finding real news is getting harder (what "Trump says" isn't news, it's just lyrical churn)
TODAY and tomorrow we continue to celebrate the outcome at the court* (last week these celebrations already began) and after the local party (we leave in about an hour) we'll be working on a new project, then tune in to Dr. Stallman's talk in France, which can be watched in real time as it'll be streamed live at https://live0.emacsconf.org/rms-20jan25.webm (way to distract oneself from a Convicted Felon being treated like a King).
Daily Links (sometimes known as News Roundup; we've done them for over 17 years already!) need more work as the challenge associated with them grows. Despite being better at the workflow, the inputs (i.e. the Web) get worse, which means extracting meaningful news becomes a bigger task. Some former news sites became LLM slop, some turned into propaganda sites of some political/nefarious cause, many are inactive or offline, and some rarely go further than basing a whole story on some "tweet" or "viral" TikTok something.
The project will hopefully help us better curate links and identify important news more quickly, assessing accuracy by bringing together several sources covering the same topic. We have been working on these sorts of things for years, but there's always some room for improvement. Since we started this work the "news industry" has been getting a lot worse every year and exclusive/investigative journalism is becoming rare and scarce. We're meant to think that "the news" is "slop (LLM) summaries" or what supposedly "important people" wrote in some social control media network, possibly while taking a dump in their airplane's toilet seat. That's not what news is. Society cannot function properly when gossip is conflated with knowledge and understanding. Elections (and thus democracy) are reduced to the lowest common denominator, such as scapegoating, paranoia, fake outrage, brand identity, and mindless tribalism. █
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* As we said last year, this was worth every penny. In case it's not obvious yet, Microsoft is not a "software company". Microsoft is a lot more like a crime syndicate that likes to operate through "useful idiots" (it can offload blame or liability this way). Just look who runs that company on behalf of its "real masters". As Microsoft corrupts and bribes a lot of the media, more and more so these days, nobody in the media has the "guts" (permission) to say so. Saying what this media won't say is very much worthwhile, but it also makes a "target" - or an attack vector - of oneself. We get attacked for saying what many other people want to say but are afraid or reluctant to say. Media infiltration and occupation can be a lot more affordable than institutional/organisational one, especially when the media becomes very small and desperate for cash.