4 ms·

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 t

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 8mo ago
LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
- shevy-java 8mo ago
  That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
mmsc 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
  [deleted]

pipeline_peak 8mo ago

LLMs use up tons of energy and water.

shevy-java 8mo ago
That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?

mmsc 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
[deleted]