This is great! Would be nice if it didn’t include sites with paywalls as an option.
yeah, thought the same thing... Nothing more dissappointing :(
News Minimalist – Only significant news
151–160 of 232 posts
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#152I'd been waiting/hoping for someone to make something like this. Well done. A few ideas that will not clutter the UI but you might consider:
- 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.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#153I love that there are no news over 7.0 significant. FOMO cured.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#154I think I’d like a more comprehensive via location version also. Might also help to include English summaries of news from other languages or from English sources in other countries. For example, I had to scroll to number 32 to see news about the Sudan, which is very significant news that seems marginalized compared to the news about Europe and the US that shows up on the earlier entries.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#155I am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site. But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
The problem is that .com is a de facto US TLD… as an American it doesn’t strike me as odd that a .com site is implicitly USA centric any more than a US news channel or US newspaper. (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?
No, .com isn't implicitly USA centric, it's just the internet default. You mention .us yourself but then dismiss it because reasons.
Your American bias is just shining through, where of course you're not surprised.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great use case for llms. I'm not expecting you to do this, but I would love to choose my own news sites. I'm a Brit living in Czech Republic. So I'd maybe have the guardian, BBC, and some Czech sources in there. Not so interested in American news, any American news that affects me will reach my local sources. But great work!
Thank you! Adding filter for news sources should be pretty easy, I'll consider it for "advanced view".
A prompt, or more like a list of them seems the most interesting customization. For example: "no crypto currency", "nothing from Keith Rupert Murdoch", "chinese realestate", "ukraine war", "forex" etc
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?
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. I gave a small description of it on about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about > 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…
Yes, I understood the idea of the formula. Rather, my question is - how does chatGPT know how to value those variables? It doesn't have a real understanding AFAIK.
It doesn't. But by the magic of insanely large training corpus, it does anyway. Similar to how it can "roll a die" or "pick a card"[1], the weighted model can do some (to me) mind bending stuff, just by answering "which tokens are likely to come next, in this given context" (which, in some ways, is the same as me trying to guess what you are going to say next; "Thank you for explaining"? (Actually chatgpt is much better at that game than me...).
[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.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#158What about positive news?
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”.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#159What a great way to see the bias play out in real time.
I noticed some bias because I only analyze sources in English. It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages, maybe that will help. Is that what you meant?
> It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages
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?
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#160I am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site. But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
Agree, as a Canadian, I also find that today too many US-centric news made the cut, but often it's not the case. Here's a recent issue covering different topics and not mentioning US at all: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Oddly enough in the 'least significant section', with scores 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).