!How I read news
---
agk's diary
5 July 2023 @ 17:01 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1
while first daughter reads a book on the potty
---
There's an internet conversation about how people
get their news, or at least how we get our scrolls
on. I guess reddit's afire with moderator turmoil
and new fees for api calls. Twitter disabled people
viewing tweets who aren't logged in, then dos'd
itself. Youtube's locking down its api too I think.
Bot scraping of everything for plagiarism by over-
hyped predictive text might be the cause or just
the excuse. What do I know.
On gopher people logged plans for sdf's reddit-like
lemmy instance, how to categorize their interests
in usenet's hierarchy, relaunching their media bias
website, quitting 4chan/hackernews, finding Yandex
slurped up gopher content probably to help another
LLM transform lots of electricity into a speculat-
ive bubble. Someone mentioned rss.
The parallel conversation's about news. Where to
keep up with it, is it a waste of time, is it mani-
pulative propaganda, what news is worth attention.
Seems reddit, twitter, and youtube are how lots of
people get news. They curate to filter what they
want from distractions.
One of my hobbies is a project to get my country's
national passenger rail company to serve my state
with a corridor through my town. Another's watching
slow-motion catastrophes unfold. So I read news.
For the train project, I found rss feeds for local
sections of newspapers and TV news along 400 km of
the proposed route and fed them to vore.website.
One way to find rss feeds is "view source" and
ctrl-f for "rss" or "atom." The result turned out
to be a blast to read. Suddenly I'm up to date on
triumphs and scandals of city governments, parks
departments, county government, local courts, local
history, and library events.
Sometimes at work, where powershell's openssh and
sdf's gateone ssh portal are blocked, I look at my
news aggregator in a graphical browser. Thank you
reader mode for finding the text on news websites!
At home I use a shell alias called news. Uh...let
me find it, I'll show you....
$ which news
/sdf/bin/arpa/af/a/agk/.local/bin/news
$ cat .local/bin/news
#!/bin/ksh
lynx
http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=
https://vore.we
# Purpose: call frogfind and look at newsfeed.
# Use: news
I truncated the link to my aggregated news, sorry.
You can see I let frogfind preprocess it for a more
pleasant view of the aggregator and news sites.
Local news is the weirdest and most wonderful news
as well as the most useful. We live in local worlds
after all. The problem's there's so little of it,
only a few stories per locale per week, mostly of
the "Local Man Killed" variety. I fixed that.
For catastrophe news, I read blogs, mostly Naked
Capitalism and Moon Of Alabama. Sometimes less than
weekly, sometimes almost daily, depending on free
time, fatigue, frustration, whether I'm following
any stories.
I like news. I don't like getting stuck scrolling,
numbly reacting, forgetting everything I stuporous-
ly read. Thank God for books and my area's hyper-
local radio stations. They do less for scroll-happy
dopamine loops; more for fulfilment, long-term
integrative learning, ability to think, feel.
