freijon

u/freijon@lemmings.world
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I'm testing Kagi News (using it along with other news) and I can cautiously recommend it by now. First of all, do read their About page. If this doesn't speak to you, then I guess you can stop reading now. But for me, it hits the nail on the head.

It's basically an AI driven news aggregator. It's one of the rare cases where I think it's AI done right. Kagi News works with a community curated list of news sources (RSS Feeds) and summarizes them into max. 12 topics per day per category. Most of it is open source and you can contribute to the sources with PRs if you want. I created a separate category for my country for instance.

What I like about it: They try to be as neutral as possible. For example they have a section "Perspectives" where you will find the perspective of all involved stakeholders. It's no-nonsense, fact driven news that doesn't waste my time.

You mentioned you want an "European news service". Kagi is located in the US, but most of the news sources they use for the "Europe" category are European. But if you're missing any you can always add them with a PR :)

It's quite a new service (still in Beta) and since it uses an AI summarizer, you should always stay critical and double check the sources. I'm using it since a few months now and I always checked with other sources to see if it gets the things right. It's doing a pretty good job and made a lot of progress.

I basically use it when commuting to see whats new in the world. The once-a-day approach keeps it at a healthy amount. When a specific topic really interests me, I dive deeper and also look for other sources.

You could try the app "Slop detective". It's an iOS / Android app developed for kids to learn to detect AI slop. Alternatively, you can simply open slopdetective.kagi.com if you don't want to install anything. It's created by kagi.com, the company behind the search engine. They have several initiatives to fight AI slop, this educational app being one of them.

This reminds me of the Danish movie Speak No Evil (2022) (not the US remake). I'd describe it as a social horror film, it was so uncomfortable to watch. It's about the danger of doing nothing in the face of evil, in the name of 'not causing offence'. One quote in paticular stuck with me: "Why are you doing this to us?" - "Because you let me".

A few years ago I had to port a tool from HTBasic (a proprietary BASIC dialect) to Python. The original source only runs in their proprietary IDE. Of course, no comments whatsoever and a lot of GOTO magic and matrice calculations some of which have no other purpose as to confuse the reader. The variables had only cryptic and meaningless three digit letters. My theory is that they intentionally wrote it in a way that it would be a nightmare to reverse engineer. And they succeeded.