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Profile v2: split conflict from statecraft, add space, expand vetoes

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Second elicitation round. The significant correction is Connor's own framing:
"my actual war interest is low, but unfortunately all wars are important." The
click history looked war-heavy only because world-news feeds are war-heavy, so
geopolitics-at-weight-1.0 was reading the corpus, not the reader. Statecraft is
now its own block and armed conflict is five weighted bands (anti-imperial,
US-involved, Mideast/Israel, undercovered, general) routed mainly by importance.

New: space-aerospace at 0.95, the highest-weighted block -- Connor is an
aerospace engineer. Plus science-discovery, environment-ecology,
ohio-state-politics, left-movements, anticolonial-sovereignty, far-right-watch,
political-theory. Linux/ricing/neovim folded into software-systems.

Introduces `demote` blocks, distinct from hard vetoes, for categories adjacent to
real interests: crypto/AI hype sits next to AI regulation, culture-war outrage
next to far-right-watch, true crime next to criminal-justice policy. Hard-vetoing
those would take real stories with them -- the lesson from the Europa League
story that both a substring blocklist and a cosine threshold wrongly killed.

Sources 39 -> 56, all fetched and verified: space (SpaceNews, Spaceflight Now,
NASASpaceflight, NASA, ESA, Phys.org), Linux (Phoronix, LWN, It's FOSS,
r/unixporn), left/anticolonial (Intercept, Drop Site, Tribune, African
Arguments). Rejected on inspection: nature.rss is journal metadata ("Author
Correction: ...") and sciencedaily is a press-release mill.

Embedding stays English-only, measured rather than assumed: the same story in
Spanish and English scored 0.758 and 0.600 cosine against a random-pair p99 of
0.634, so one pair was indistinguishable from an unrelated article. Italy and
Mexico are covered by English-language sources instead.

Also fixes clustering performance: centroids are held in memory across a batch
instead of one SELECT plus a numpy rebuild per item, which had taken ~15 minutes
for 1,258 items.
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connor committed 2026-09-08 15:25:56 -04:00
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profile/profile.toml
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@@ -3,24 +3,127 @@
# never the mean. Probes are written as prose resembling article text, because
# that is what they are compared against.
#
# Weights multiply the similarity. Feedback moves these vectors over time; the
# text here is the cold-start seed.
# Blocks are compared by z-score WITHIN block, then multiplied by `weight`.
# See profile/CALIBRATION.md -- raw cosine is not comparable across blocks.
schema_version = 1
schema_version = 2
# ---------------------------------------------------------------- interests --
# =========================================================== interests =======
# --- foreign affairs, split from armed conflict ------------------------------
# Connor: "my actual war interest is low, but unfortunately all wars are
# important." The click history looked war-heavy only because world-news feeds
# are war-heavy. Statecraft is the standing interest; combat reporting is
# routed by importance instead. Keeping them in one block conflated the two.
[[interest]]
id = "geopolitics"
weight = 1.0
id = "diplomacy-foreign-policy"
weight = 0.9
probes = [
"Escalation in the Middle East as strikes continue and diplomatic efforts stall.",
"China expands its influence abroad through investment, diplomacy and security agreements.",
"US foreign policy shifts as the administration reconsiders its posture toward an ally.",
"The United Nations Security Council debates sanctions and an arms embargo.",
"Ceasefire negotiations falter amid disputes over withdrawal and prisoner exchange.",
"Two governments sign a treaty realigning trade and security ties in the region.",
"A diplomatic crisis erupts as one country expels another's ambassador.",
]
# The A-E ordering Connor gave, encoded as weights. Even the lowest band still
# reaches him -- but through importance, on major developments only.
[[interest]]
id = "conflict-anti-imperial" # (A) top of his ordering
weight = 0.9
probes = [
"An armed liberation movement fights a colonial or occupying power for self-determination.",
"A socialist or revolutionary force gains ground against a US-backed government.",
"Anti-imperialist resistance movements coordinate against foreign military presence.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "conflict-us-involved" # (B)
weight = 0.85
probes = [
"US forces carry out strikes and the administration defends the legal basis for the war.",
"American troops, weapons or funding are central to an ongoing foreign conflict.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "conflict-mideast-israel" # (C)
weight = 0.8
probes = [
"Israeli forces strike targets in Gaza, Lebanon or Syria amid continuing escalation.",
"Ceasefire negotiations falter amid disputes over withdrawal and prisoner exchange.",
"Palestinians face displacement, demolition and occupation in the West Bank.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "conflict-undercovered" # (D)
weight = 0.75
probes = [
"Fighting intensifies in Sudan as famine spreads and aid convoys are blocked.",
"Armed groups clash in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, displacing thousands.",
"Conflict in Myanmar, the Sahel or Yemen continues with little international attention.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "conflict-general" # (E) -- low interest, still important
weight = 0.45
probes = [
"Front-line fighting continues as both sides exchange drone and artillery strikes.",
"A long-running interstate war grinds on with incremental territorial changes.",
]
# --- space and aerospace -----------------------------------------------------
# Connor is an aerospace engineer. He asked for launches/missions/spacecraft,
# deep technical, and astronomy/planetary science -- deliberately NOT the
# industry-and-contracts beat, which his policy blocks would catch anyway.
[[interest]]
id = "space-aerospace"
weight = 0.95
probes = [
"The rocket lifted off carrying the spacecraft to orbit; the booster landed and the mission reached its next milestone.",
"Engineers trace a launch failure to a propulsion anomaly and publish the post-mortem.",
"Propulsion, materials and orbital mechanics choices shape the vehicle's design trade-offs.",
"A planetary probe returns data from its flyby, reshaping models of the body's formation.",
"Astronomers report observations of exoplanets, galaxies or a transient event from a space telescope.",
"A crewed mission's schedule slips as the spacecraft completes qualification testing.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "science-discovery"
weight = 0.8
probes = [
"Researchers report a finding that overturns the prevailing explanation in the field.",
"A study in physics, biology or archaeology reveals something previously unknown.",
"New evidence changes scientists' understanding of a long-standing question.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "environment-ecology"
weight = 0.75
probes = [
"Protections for an endangered species are rolled back, alarming conservation biologists.",
"An ecosystem shifts as habitat loss and invasive species reshape which animals survive.",
"Public land and wildlife management rules are rewritten.",
]
# --- software and systems (push-eligible) ------------------------------------
[[interest]]
id = "software-systems"
weight = 0.9
push_eligible = true
probes = [
"Running large language models locally: quantization, throughput, context length and memory bandwidth on consumer hardware.",
"A new open-weights model is released with benchmarks and quantized builds available.",
"A new release of the systems programming language changes the compiler, borrow checker or toolchain.",
"WebAssembly gains new capabilities for running compiled code in the browser.",
"Self-hosting a service stack with containers, reverse proxies and automated deployment.",
"A widely used open source project announces a breaking change, a license change, or a governance dispute.",
# Connor's words: "Linux news in general. The ricing world/neovim configs/etc"
"A Linux desktop release brings changes to the compositor, window manager and display stack.",
"Customizing a desktop setup: window manager configuration, terminal theming, dotfiles and Neovim plugins.",
]
# --- policy and political economy --------------------------------------------
[[interest]]
id = "tech-science-policy"
weight = 0.9
@@ -34,7 +137,7 @@ probes = [
[[interest]]
id = "labor-inequality"
weight = 0.9
weight = 0.85
probes = [
"Workers vote to unionize after a long organizing campaign; the employer contests the result.",
"A strike over wages and staffing shuts down operations across the sector.",
@@ -44,67 +147,39 @@ probes = [
]
[[interest]]
id = "software-systems"
weight = 0.9
push_eligible = true
id = "left-movements"
weight = 0.85
probes = [
"A new release of the systems programming language brings major changes to the compiler and toolchain.",
"Running large language models locally on consumer hardware: quantization, throughput and memory bandwidth.",
"Self-hosting a service stack with containers, reverse proxies and automated deployment.",
"A widely used open source project announces a breaking change, a license change, or a governance dispute.",
"WebAssembly gains new capabilities for running compiled code in the browser.",
"A serious vulnerability is disclosed in widely deployed infrastructure software.",
"A socialist party wins a decisive election, shifting the governing coalition leftward.",
"A mass movement mobilizes in the streets demanding redistribution and public ownership.",
"Cooperatives, mutual aid networks and tenant unions expand their organizing base.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "urbanism"
id = "anticolonial-sovereignty"
weight = 0.8
probes = [
"The city council votes to reform zoning rules and allow denser housing near transit.",
"A new bus rapid transit and light rail line reshapes how residents move through the city.",
"Planners redesign streets to reduce traffic deaths and reclaim space from cars.",
"A downtown redevelopment project raises questions about displacement and public space.",
"Indigenous communities win recognition of land rights against extractive industry.",
"A former colony renegotiates resource contracts and asserts control over its minerals.",
"IMF and World Bank conditionality drives austerity, prompting debt-relief demands.",
]
# Tracked as a threat, not out of sympathy. Connor's AfD and Tate clicks fit here.
[[interest]]
id = "energy-climate"
weight = 0.6
id = "far-right-watch"
weight = 0.75
probes = [
"Grid operators struggle to connect new renewable generation as storage capacity lags demand.",
"A national climate policy sets emissions targets and restructures energy subsidies.",
"Conservation rules protecting endangered species and public land are rolled back.",
"A far-right party surges in a regional election, unsettling the political mainstream.",
"An authoritarian government consolidates power over courts, press and elections.",
"Extremist organizing and street violence grow as mainstream parties adopt their rhetoric.",
]
# Confirmed by Connor 2026-09-08: wanted, at a level that keeps him up to date
# rather than saturating the feed. Also supported by three of eighteen starred
# items (Uber exiting Nigeria and Uganda, India's grid crunch, the Bolivian base
# explosions).
[[interest]]
id = "global-south"
id = "political-theory"
weight = 0.7
probes = [
"An international company withdraws from several African markets amid regulatory pressure.",
"Elections and political upheaval reshape governments across Latin America.",
"Infrastructure and economic development across South Asia strains under rapid growth.",
]
# ---------------------------------------------------------------- geography --
[[interest]]
id = "cincinnati"
weight = 0.9
local = true
probes = [
"Cincinnati city council debates a development, budget or policing decision affecting neighborhoods.",
"Local news from Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "kentucky-louisville"
weight = 0.6
local = true
probes = [
"Louisville and Kentucky state politics, legislation and local government decisions.",
"An essay argues about socialism, imperialism and political economy, drawing on history rather than reporting a news event.",
"A critical analysis of capitalism's structure and its alternatives.",
]
[[interest]]
@@ -116,19 +191,93 @@ probes = [
"Federal agencies are restructured by executive order, prompting legal challenges.",
]
# --- place -------------------------------------------------------------------
[[interest]]
id = "urbanism"
weight = 0.8
probes = [
"The city council votes to reform zoning rules and allow denser housing near transit.",
"A new bus rapid transit and light rail line reshapes how residents move through the city.",
"Planners redesign streets to reduce traffic deaths and reclaim space from cars.",
"A downtown redevelopment project raises questions about displacement and public space.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "cincinnati"
weight = 0.9
local = true
probes = [
"Cincinnati city council votes on a budget, a zoning change or a development project downtown.",
"A regional transit plan or street redesign changes how people move around Cincinnati.",
"Rent, eviction and homelessness policy in Hamilton County; a local union drive or strike.",
"Neighborhood institutions, local arts, food and community life in Cincinnati.",
"Local news from Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "kentucky-louisville"
weight = 0.6
local = true
probes = [
"Louisville and Kentucky state politics, legislation and local government decisions.",
]
# The level above city hall: Connor asked for Ohio and Kentucky statehouse
# coverage alongside Cincinnati city government.
[[interest]]
id = "ohio-state-politics"
weight = 0.75
local = true
probes = [
"The Ohio statehouse passes legislation over the governor's objection.",
"Redistricting, election law and statewide ballot measures in Ohio.",
]
# Connor follows both for politics, but also because he is learning the
# languages and expects to travel there -- so culture and popular culture count
# as signal here, not noise. He said: "pop culture stuff from Mexico/Italy is
# even ok. Learning the culture helps me learn the language and travel there
# better." That makes this the one block where lifestyle content is wanted, so
# the consumer-lifestyle veto must not swallow it.
[[interest]]
id = "italy-mexico"
weight = 0.7
weight = 0.75
probes = [
"Italian politics, government coalitions and social policy in Italy.",
"Mexican politics, security policy and the relationship with the United States.",
"Regional life, cost of living and transport across Italy; what is changing in its cities.",
"Mexican and Italian music, film, television and food culture; what people are talking about.",
]
# ------------------------------------------------------------------- vetoes --
# Confirmed by Connor 2026-09-08: wanted, at a level that keeps him up to date
# rather than saturating the feed.
[[interest]]
id = "global-south"
weight = 0.7
probes = [
"An international company withdraws from several African markets amid regulatory pressure.",
"Elections and political upheaval reshape governments across Latin America.",
"Infrastructure and economic development across South Asia strains under rapid growth.",
]
[[interest]]
id = "energy-climate"
weight = 0.6
probes = [
"Grid operators struggle to connect new renewable generation as storage capacity lags demand.",
"A national climate policy sets emissions targets and restructures energy subsidies.",
]
# =========================================================== vetoes ==========
# Hard vetoes only for categories that never overlap a real interest. Anything
# that *might* overlap is a demote instead -- see below. This split exists
# because a hard veto on a sports-adjacent region killed "Belgian mayor blocks
# club from hosting Israeli opponent in Europa League", which is Middle East
# politics. Overlap is the norm, not the exception.
[[veto]]
id = "us-big-three-sports"
threshold = 0.55
threshold = 0.60
probes = [
"The team beat their rivals in a game recap with final scores, statistics and player performances.",
"A player is traded, drafted or signs a contract; the league fines a franchise over salary cap rules.",
@@ -139,20 +288,57 @@ probes = [
[[veto]]
id = "royal-celebrity-gossip"
threshold = 0.55
threshold = 0.60
probes = [
"The royal family attends an event; speculation continues about the couple's status and future.",
"Celebrity red carpet appearances, box office returns and influencer controversy.",
]
[[veto]]
id = "listicle-filler"
id = "consumer-lifestyle"
threshold = 0.60
probes = [
"Horoscopes, quizzes, and a roundup of the best products to buy this week.",
"The best products to buy this week, ranked, with deals and discount codes.",
"Horoscopes, quizzes, recipes and a travel guide to the perfect weekend away.",
"Personal finance tips: how to budget, save and pick a credit card.",
]
# ------------------------------------------------------- the importance lane --
# =========================================================== demotes =========
# Penalty applied to the interest score, not a hard exclusion. These categories
# each sit adjacent to something Connor genuinely wants, so removing them
# outright would take real stories with them.
# Adjacent to: tech-science-policy (AI regulation) and software-systems (local
# inference). A hard veto here would be actively harmful.
[[demote]]
id = "crypto-ai-hype"
penalty = 1.0
probes = [
"The token surged after the exchange listing as investors piled into the crypto rally.",
"The startup raised a funding round at a multibillion-dollar valuation to build AI agents.",
"A company announces its new AI-powered product will transform the industry.",
]
# Adjacent to: far-right-watch. "X said Y and Z reacted" is noise; a far-right
# party winning a state is not.
[[demote]]
id = "culture-war-outrage"
penalty = 1.0
probes = [
"A politician's remark sparked backlash online and critics demanded an apology.",
"A manufactured controversy over a advertisement or a celebrity's comment dominates social media for a day.",
]
# Adjacent to: policing and criminal-justice policy, which Connor does want.
[[demote]]
id = "true-crime-blotter"
penalty = 0.8
probes = [
"Police arrested a suspect in the killing; the trial opens with jury selection this week.",
"A missing person case takes a turn as investigators search a rural property.",
]
# ============================================= the importance lane ===========
# Independent of interest. Vetoes still apply here -- v0.2's bypass lane ignored
# relevance entirely (gate.rs:302), which let blocklisted items fire at priority 5.
@@ -162,6 +348,7 @@ weight = 1.0
probes = [
"One state launches military strikes on another, marking a major escalation of the conflict.",
"Nuclear facilities are targeted or a state signals willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.",
"A major new offensive opens a front, or a ceasefire is signed and takes effect.",
]
[[importance]]
@@ -198,34 +385,59 @@ probes = [
"A prominent political figure dies or resigns unexpectedly.",
]
# ------------------------------------------------------- calibrated scoring --
# These constants are not guesses. They were fitted on 2026-09-08 against all
# 3,885 items in the v0.2 database and Connor's 40 real feedback labels.
# See profile/CALIBRATION.md for the measurements.
# =========================================================== delivery ========
[delivery]
# Settled with Connor 2026-09-08.
digest_hour = "08:45"
quiet_hours = { start = "22:00", end = "07:00" }
# The importance lane MAY override quiet hours. The interest lane never may.
importance_may_wake = true
# No format filter: Connor reads analysis, wire copy, investigations AND opinion,
# so writing style is deliberately not a scoring axis. This also confirms the old
# config's notify_opinions = true was intentional.
format_filter = false
# Filter-bubble counterweight. The digest always reserves slots for items that
# scored well on quality and importance but POORLY on the interest profile,
# labelled "outside your usual". Notifications stay strictly on-profile; this is
# a reading surface, not an interruption.
serendipity_slots = 3
# The digest is a complete record of the day, including items that already
# fired a notification -- not just the leftovers.
digest_includes_notified = true
# Saturday and Sunday editions run longer and lean toward longform, analysis and
# the serendipity slots.
weekend_digest_multiplier = 2.0
# Aggregator maturation. An HN post at 3 points is noise; the same post at 300
# is news. Items below this score are ingested and clustered but never scored
# for routing, so the system waits for the crowd instead of firing on arrival.
hn_min_score = 150
# Feedback stays binary: interested / not interested. Low friction matters more
# than richness here -- the model wants many labels, and the old system's
# failure was collecting 32 of them, not collecting shallow ones.
feedback_actions = ["interested", "not_interested"]
# Embedding stays English-only (bge-small-en-v1.5). Measured 2026-09-08: the
# same story in Spanish and English scored 0.758 and 0.600 cosine, against a
# random-pair p99 of 0.634 -- so one of two translation pairs was
# indistinguishable from an unrelated article. Native-language Italian and
# Spanish feeds would rank erratically, so Italy and Mexico are covered by
# English-language sources (ANSA English, Mexico News Daily) instead. Revisit
# with multilingual-e5-small only if native sources become worth re-calibrating
# every threshold for.
embedding_language = "en"
# Conflict outside categories A-D notifies only on a major development -- a new
# offensive, a ceasefire, mass casualties, a state entering. Routine front-line
# reporting goes to the digest.
conflict_general_requires_importance = true
# =========================================================== scoring =========
# Fitted 2026-09-08 against 3,885 items and 40 real feedback labels.
# See profile/CALIBRATION.md.
[scoring]
# Compare blocks by z-score WITHIN each block, never by raw cosine. Raw cosine
# is not comparable across blocks -- "geopolitics" averages 0.501 similarity to
# world-news text while "kentucky-louisville" averages 0.441 -- so a plain max
# let geopolitics win 78% of all items. Per-block z-scoring drops that to 19%
# and moves the median rank of a known-liked item from 1246 to 293 of 3885.
normalize = "zscore-per-block"
# Veto is deliberately NOT a plain similarity threshold. A story can be
# genuinely sports-adjacent and still be wanted: "Belgian mayor blocks club from
# hosting Israeli opponent in Europa League" is Middle East politics, and both a
# substring blocklist AND a 0.55 cosine threshold falsely killed it.
#
# So: veto on unambiguous similarity, OR when the veto signal beats the best
# interest signal by a margin. Measured at these values: 17/22 of Connor's real
# rejections caught, 0/18 of his likes lost, ~21% of the corpus vetoed, and all
# four sports-adjacent news canaries survive.
veto_absolute = 0.60
veto_margin_over_interest = 0.3