I wonder if this could be a good use-case for an LLM: feed it that fire-hose of an RSS-feed and have it group and spit out a short and sweet summary per group with the original links. It’s something I would want from actual journalists, but while they are busy writing about Trump’s latest tweet, this might be a usable substitute?

Hm, what letter comes before A?

I think the problem is that the media reports everything Musk and Trump says, so having an effective way to filter through everything to get at what keeps me informed is not straightforward. This wouldn’t be an issue if news outlets acted more as a filter and reported only on the more essential developments with proper analysis to go with it. In my country, the main page of our main news outlet will report Justin Bieber having a baby as breaking news on the front page, alongside notices of American “celebrities”’ demise (I put it in quotes, because they need to refer to the character they played in a 90s sitcom because nobody knows their names), and five articles about the same unfolding event.

Thanks for a detailed account of your system!

one things i really wish existed is an extension that detects and blocks any site leading to garbage about the current US president, who i despise and want to ignore, despite ignoring it being to my detriment most likely. that vile man needs to go away.

I think that man (and the team around him) is a perfect example of someone who exploits this barrage of “information” to their advantage, and does that very well. I remember how nice the relative silence some months into Biden’s presidency (after the insurrection stopped being a constant headliner in the news cycle). This is one of the reasons I desperately want to find a way to keep on top of things, because it feels like the overall events matter if I can only cut through the noise and understand the big picture. I live in Europe, and current events leads to a lot of uncertainty for the region that I think is better to understand and be prepared for, rather than ignorant of.

additionally, i have a collection of hundreds of map sites bookmarked, with a folder containing a set i check with about the same regularity as my news sites.

This is an interesting source I have not really explored myself (aside from weather and occasionally a flight map). I need to investigate what kinds of local maps could be beneficial to have bookmarked. The event map is already bookmarked now!

My answer: I’m leaning more towards A), getting increasingly desperate to find a better way. I’ve tried for some time to use RSS-feeds to avoid scrolling the front pages of the newspapers I follow. This makes the situation much better (the constant headlines updating is better), but it is still overwhelming. Ideally I would want to have a mixture of daily and weekly digests of the most important news (with descriptive headlines), made by knowledge and trusted teams, with sensible analyses and links to longer reads if I were so inclined. That way I could spend 5-15 minutes a day catching up, and then diving in deeper if I needed that. I just don’t know where to find these. I would also ideally like to be able to follow important events in other regions than my own, such as Africa and Asia. I’ve tried following AfricaNews for events in Africa, which gives me at least a sense of things going on there that I never hear of in domestic news outlets, but have not found similar for Asia or South-America for instance.

Adding this to my readlist for later this week. I see it starts by outlining batteries as critical to mitigate climate change, but right now, from a European perspective, I think energy independence will be a much more powerful driver than climate change to make sure we have regional production of critical energy infrastructure, including battery manufacturing. Time to realize we can’t be dependent on China and the US for this, and that China in particular will not allow us to successfully establish this industry according to free market principles with them flooding the market with cheap batteries (as they’ve done before in other sectors, and likely will do more as a result of US tarrifs). We can’t compete, so we must subsidize to ensure establishment of regional production capacity.

Not shaming OP here, but there has been clear signs of Musk being an unhinged idiot since around 2017 (or whenever the diver-pedo-incident)

Was it a Model SS?

Good