Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

I tried to solve this problem by making AI rank the stories by significance and rewriting the news titles in a boring, factual style.

I think it worked quite well, there's only about 10 headlines a day (out of 15k+) that get a significance rating higher than of 5.5 out of 10.

It also helps avoiding the overfocus on western issues and actually learn what's happening around the world.

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

I love the idea of this tool, but there are serious issues with using LLMs to summarize articles and text. Re: Apple’s Notification Summary Debacle

For example, this headline with a score > 5 is flatly incorrect.

“China launches innovative flying robot to explore Moon's south pole for water resources”

Every article listed in the summary says the launch is planned for 2026.

Thanks! Good point.

I think there will always be some hallucinations until they're solved on a model level, but I'll also try to nudge AI now to be more precise with the headlines.

Neat! Sounds similar to another app I've used: https://www.boringreport.org

That's a pretty cool website! What prompt do you use to determine what is and isn't significant?

Can't share the full prompt, but I share methodology on the about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about

Can I make the significance my choice?

To me a news site curates news that impacts me directly or things I can do something about. This could be in a scale too. 10 is water main is broken on my street, while 0 is a car crash on the other side of the planet.

Thanks for newsminimalist - other than what comes up on HN it's the only news I read these days. It's usually just enough to keep me in touch without any of the outrage.

I did the same too, but by ingesting Wikipedia's current event portal. The result is a decent balance of world events, but without the sensationalism.

https://detoxed.news/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/detoxed.news/

why can't you?