news

A personal news aggregator: many sources in, two to five well-chosen push notifications and one readable daily digest out.

This is a ground-up rewrite of news_triage, which is still running. The rewrite exists because the old system had no representation of what its user actually likes — its whole preference model was three keywords fed to BM25 plus a two-term substring blocklist, and everything else was ranking machinery with nothing meaningful to rank.

Full pipeline reference, and why each decision is what it is: ALGORITHM.md. Read it before changing a scoring constant — several obvious-looking improvements have already been tried, measured, and found worse, and it records which.

The core idea

Taste is a set of vectors, not a bag of keywords.

Every interest, veto and importance category in profile/profile.toml is written as prose and embedded with a small CPU model (bge-small-en-v1.5, ~130 MB, ONNX, no torch, no GPU — so it never contends with the llama-swap stack). An item's score is the max cosine similarity across a block's probes, never the mean: averaging "Middle East geopolitics" with "grid-scale energy storage" gives a vector near neither.

This is what lets a topic be expressed as a region rather than a string. The old system could not represent "sports" as a concept, only as the literal characters s-p-o-r-t-s, which is why 18 of its 32 feedback clicks were its user hand-rejecting baseball recaps that blocklist = ["sports"] never matched.

A generative LLM is used only for prose — the daily digest write-up and cluster headlines — at roughly 1–30 calls/day through LiteLLM, never for per-item scoring.

Two routing lanes

Notifications are decided on two independent axes, because "something I might like" and "something I need to know about" are different questions:

• interest — high similarity to the profile's interest vectors.
• importance — burst velocity, independent-source-bucket count, editorial prominence, and aggregator-native scores. Deliberately not raw corroboration count, which just measures how many wire-reprinting outlets you subscribed to.

Vetoes are absolute on both lanes. In the old system the bypass lane ignored relevance entirely, so a blocklisted item could still fire at priority 5.

Layout

news/        the pipeline: sources, store, embed, cluster, score, route, deliver
profile/     all configuration (see below)
tests/
deploy/

Configuration

Nothing about the reader is compiled in. news/*.py contains no interest, no place name, no feed URL and no personal identifier; all of it is data in three TOML files under profile/ (override the directory with NEWS_CONFIG_DIR):

file	what it is	who edits it
profile.toml	who you are: interests, vetoes, demotes, importance, delivery	you, often
sources.toml	what to read, with independence buckets and trust weights	you, occasionally
config.toml	machinery: HTTP, embedding model, clustering and scoring constants	rarely

To use this as someone else: replace profile.toml and sources.toml, and change user_agent in config.toml to your own contact. That is the whole job.

tests/test_config.py exists to keep this true — it builds a configuration for a different, invented reader and asserts that no part of the author's identity or preferences reaches the running code.

Two constants deserve a warning. [clustering].threshold (0.82) and [scoring].veto_absolute (0.60) were calibrated against a specific 3,885-item corpus with a specific embedding model. Changing [embedding].model invalidates both, because a different model puts cosine similarity on a different scale. Re-run the calibration in profile/CALIBRATION.md before trusting them.

Commands

news poll        one fetch -> embed -> cluster cycle
news sources     sources and item counts
news clusters    inspect clusters and their corroboration
news score       score clusters on both axes
news simulate    what would these thresholds actually have sent?

simulate is the tuning surface. The old system's replay harness hardcoded its parameters and so could never sweep the thresholds it existed to tune.

Web

/         triage feed -- ranked, keyboard-driven (j/k move, i/n label, o open)
/tune     move the thresholds and budgets, see what would have been sent
/config   what each block matches, plus a box to try a new filter and save it
/digest   the day's briefing, mobile-first
/healthz

Everything except /api/feedback/* sits behind the identity gateway. That one path is exempt because ntfy runs notification buttons from the phone and a native app cannot complete an interactive login; it is HMAC-signed instead.

Status

Running in production. Ingest, clustering, two-axis scoring, routing, ntfy delivery with working feedback buttons, the digest page and the triage UI are all live.