3 ms·

Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 7mo ago
RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago. We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data. I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
- pipeline_peak 7mo ago
  LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
  - shevy-java 7mo ago
    That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
- mmsc 7mo ago
  > an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc) There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs. The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human. I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites. And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
- skybrian 7mo ago
  I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
shevy-java 7mo ago
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

hombre_fatal 7mo ago

RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago. We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data. I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.

pipeline_peak 7mo ago
LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
mmsc 7mo ago
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc) There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs. The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human. I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites. And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
skybrian 7mo ago
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

shevy-java 7mo ago

I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.