news/profile/profile.md

Connor's news profile

The thing the previous system never had. news_triage v0.2's entire model of taste was three keywords and two blocked substrings; everything else was ranking machinery with nothing meaningful to rank. This file is the replacement, and profile.toml is its machine-readable form.

Written 2026-09-08 from a structured interview plus evidence from 40 real feedback clicks in the v0.2 database. Schema v2.

How this is used

Every description and probe is embedded (bge-small-en-v1.5, CPU) into a vector. An item's score for a block is the max cosine across that block's probes, never the mean — averaging "Middle East geopolitics" with "grid-scale energy storage" gives a vector near neither. Blocks are then compared by z-score within block, because raw cosine is not comparable across blocks; see CALIBRATION.md.

Feedback moves these vectors over time. The written text is the cold-start seed, so the system is useful on day one rather than after 200 clicks.

Interests

Foreign affairs is split in two. 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 statecraft — diplomacy-foreign-policy, weight 0.9 — is the standing interest, while armed conflict is weighted lower and routed mainly through importance.

Within conflict, his stated ordering became five weighted blocks:

block	weight
conflict-anti-imperial	0.90	anti-colonial and socialist-revolutionary wars
conflict-us-involved	0.85	wars the US is actively engaged in
conflict-mideast-israel	0.80	Middle East, especially engagements with Israel
conflict-undercovered	0.75	Sudan, DRC, Myanmar, the Sahel, Yemen
conflict-general	0.45	everything else — low interest, still important

Space and aerospace (0.95) is the single highest-weighted block: Connor is an aerospace engineer. He asked for launches and missions, deep technical coverage (propulsion, materials, orbital mechanics, failure post-mortems), and astronomy/planetary science — deliberately not the industry-and-contracts beat, which his policy blocks already catch.

Software and systems (0.9, push-eligible) covers local model inference, Rust and WebAssembly, self-hosting and infrastructure, and — in his words — "Linux news in general. The ricing world/neovim configs/etc." Notably he did not pick security and vulnerabilities, so that is absent rather than assumed.

Political economy spans labor-inequality (0.85), left-movements (0.85), anticolonial-sovereignty (0.8), far-right-watch (0.75, tracked as a threat rather than out of sympathy), and political-theory (0.7).

Place: cincinnati (0.9 — where he lives, so a lower bar), ohio-state-politics (0.75), kentucky-louisville (0.6 — where he's from), us-national (0.8), and italy-mexico (0.75).

Italy and Mexico are a special case. He 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 in this block, not noise — the one place where lifestyle content is wanted. The consumer-lifestyle veto must not swallow it.

Also carried: science-discovery (0.8), environment-ecology (0.75), tech-science-policy (0.9), urbanism (0.8), global-south (0.7), energy-climate (0.6).

Vetoes, and why some things are demotes instead

Hard vetoes are reserved for categories that never overlap a real interest: US big-three sports recaps, royal and celebrity gossip, consumer/lifestyle filler.

Anything that might overlap is a demote — a penalty on the score rather than exclusion. This distinction 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:

• crypto-ai-hype sits next to AI regulation and local-inference news
• culture-war-outrage sits next to far-right-watch
• true-crime-blotter sits next to criminal-justice policy

Explicitly not vetoed

Connor is not anti-sport; he is anti US-big-three-wire-recap. Rock climbing, chess, the Olympics and oddball sports are actively wanted. Soccer is not blocked as a concept — he is trying to get into it — though match previews and live threads are noise. Sports governance (FIFA/UEFA corruption, Olympic host-city displacement, Qatar migrant labour) reads as politics and stays.

The importance lane

Independent of interest, and half the reason the project exists: war and escalation, mass-casualty events, US federal shocks, economic breaks, and major US political events (decisive elections, deaths of political figures).

Vetoes still apply on this lane. In v0.2 the bypass lane ignored relevance entirely (gate.rs:302), so a blocklisted item could still fire at priority 5.

Delivery

• Digest at 08:45, quiet hours 22:00–07:00. The importance lane may wake him; the interest lane never may.
• 2–5 pushes/day across both lanes.
• 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.
• HN items are ignored below 150 points: the crowd does the first filtering pass.
• The digest is a complete record of the day, including already-notified items, and the weekend edition runs longer and leans longform.
• Three serendipity slots in every digest for items that scored well on quality and importance but poorly on the profile, labelled "outside your usual". A system that only shows you what you already like tightens its own bubble as it learns.
• No format filter: he reads analysis, wire copy, investigations and opinion, which also confirms the old config's notify_opinions = true was deliberate.
• Feedback stays binary. The old system's failure was collecting 32 labels, not collecting shallow ones.

Source trust

weight in sources.toml is editorial trust, carried over from the old config where Connor had deliberately set Al Jazeera highest (1.2) and NYT lowest (0.8), and extended to weight independent outlets (The Intercept, Drop Site, Tribune, African Arguments, Middle East Eye, +972) at 1.1. It affects importance and tie-breaking, never whether an item is visible.

Language

Embedding is English-only. Measured: the same story in Spanish and English scored 0.758 and 0.600 cosine against a random-pair p99 of 0.634 — one of two translation pairs was indistinguishable from an unrelated article. Native-language feeds would rank erratically, so Italy and Mexico are covered by English-language sources. Revisit with a multilingual model only if that becomes worth re-calibrating every threshold for.

Open questions

• Whether global-south is a genuine standing interest or an artifact of a small sample. Confirmed wanted by Connor, but worth re-checking against real feedback.
• Exact score at which the importance lane may override quiet hours.