4 ms·

My version of "shields up" is that I only get news from Wikipedia's current events portal and HN. I only stay in touch with my friends via group chats and perso

by yosito 4y ago

My version of "shields up" is that I only get news from Wikipedia's current events portal and HN. I only stay in touch with my friends via group chats and personal blogs/newsletters of which I publish my own on Ghost. Honestly, it works pretty great. I find mainstream social media to be a cesspool of irrelevant junk, so I don't use them. Technically, I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but I rarely browse anything on either of those apps.

airstrike 4y ago
Same. I do that + the Bloomberg Roku app in the evening for "top news" and WSJ alerts on my phone (which I probably only click on 5% of the time)
- webscout 4y ago
  [dead]
physicles 4y ago
Same. HN and BBC World News, usually just the headlines. Podcasts for slow/nuanced takes on things. No facebook or instagram or anything. The Wikipedia current events portal looks like a fantastic replacement for BBC World News though: slightly more in-depth content than just headlines. I'll give it a try.
thehours 4y ago
Similar. 95% HN and text.npr.org. uBlock origin keeps things pretty quiet for any adventures outside those spaces (following links and other things people send me.)
- q-base 4y ago
  Thanks a lot for the "text-only" news site. Do you know any others like that?
vinc 4y ago
Same! I made myself years ago a little web app to fetch Wikipedia Current Events, the top n articles of the day (or the week) on HN, and a few subreddits and that's it. I also progressively stopped using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Things are quieter now. When it's not enough I switch to text browsing via rss and gopher/gemini. Wikipedia Current Events is very important to make sure that I'm not cutting myself completely off from the world, and after years of using it it's good enough when complemented with the local news from the people around me.
- yosito 4y ago
  I wonder if you could pipe that content into GPT and have it give you back a summary. I was playing around with this in the OpenAI playground today. I think with a little prompt engineering, this could be very useful.
  - vinc 4y ago
    I've played with the readability lib by Mozilla before to extract articles from web pages and then feed that to the summarizers we had years ago but the result wasn't great. This is indeed different now, interesting! Another thing that would be great is to use that to identify the news that really matter and mute the rest. I could imagine a prompt containing something like "As a person that likes A, B, C, D, and F, does the following has a potential to be interesting to me: ..."
kerrsclyde 4y ago
Ditto. However I came off Facebook about 6 years ago but I found that I was missing out on certain things (real life meetings between likeminded friends). I now keep a very carefully currated list of bookmarks to certain Facebook groups which I check occasionally. I only ever browse FB via bookmarks. The evil in Facebook seems to come via the feed on the landing page.
- yosito 4y ago
  Every Sunday afternoon, I check out Facebook events in groups that I care about and click "interested". I'm ingesting events that I'm interested in into my calendar, so they automatically show up without me having to check the Facebook app apart from once a week on my laptop.

by yosito 4y ago

airstrike 4y ago

Same. I do that + the Bloomberg Roku app in the evening for "top news" and WSJ alerts on my phone (which I probably only click on 5% of the time)

webscout 4y ago
[dead]

physicles 4y ago

Same. HN and BBC World News, usually just the headlines. Podcasts for slow/nuanced takes on things. No facebook or instagram or anything. The Wikipedia current events portal looks like a fantastic replacement for BBC World News though: slightly more in-depth content than just headlines. I'll give it a try.

thehours 4y ago

Similar. 95% HN and text.npr.org. uBlock origin keeps things pretty quiet for any adventures outside those spaces (following links and other things people send me.)

q-base 4y ago
Thanks a lot for the "text-only" news site. Do you know any others like that?

vinc 4y ago

Same! I made myself years ago a little web app to fetch Wikipedia Current Events, the top n articles of the day (or the week) on HN, and a few subreddits and that's it. I also progressively stopped using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Things are quieter now. When it's not enough I switch to text browsing via rss and gopher/gemini. Wikipedia Current Events is very important to make sure that I'm not cutting myself completely off from the world, and after years of using it it's good enough when complemented with the local news from the people around me.

yosito 4y ago
I wonder if you could pipe that content into GPT and have it give you back a summary. I was playing around with this in the OpenAI playground today. I think with a little prompt engineering, this could be very useful.
- vinc 4y ago
  I've played with the readability lib by Mozilla before to extract articles from web pages and then feed that to the summarizers we had years ago but the result wasn't great. This is indeed different now, interesting! Another thing that would be great is to use that to identify the news that really matter and mute the rest. I could imagine a prompt containing something like "As a person that likes A, B, C, D, and F, does the following has a potential to be interesting to me: ..."

kerrsclyde 4y ago

Ditto. However I came off Facebook about 6 years ago but I found that I was missing out on certain things (real life meetings between likeminded friends). I now keep a very carefully currated list of bookmarks to certain Facebook groups which I check occasionally. I only ever browse FB via bookmarks. The evil in Facebook seems to come via the feed on the landing page.

yosito 4y ago
Every Sunday afternoon, I check out Facebook events in groups that I care about and click "interested". I'm ingesting events that I'm interested in into my calendar, so they automatically show up without me having to check the Facebook app apart from once a week on my laptop.