connor
6dc3694260
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's news profile
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The thing the previous system never had. `news_triage` v0.2's entire model of taste
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was three keywords and two blocked substrings; everything else was ranking
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machinery with nothing meaningful to rank. This file is the replacement, and
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`profile.toml` is its machine-readable form.
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Written 2026-09-08 from a structured interview plus evidence from 40 real feedback
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clicks in the v0.2 database. Schema v2.
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## How this is used
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Every `description` and `probe` is embedded (bge-small-en-v1.5, CPU) into a vector.
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An item's score for a block is the **max** cosine across that block's probes, never
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the mean — averaging "Middle East geopolitics" with "grid-scale energy storage"
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gives a vector near neither. Blocks are then compared by **z-score within block**,
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because raw cosine is not comparable across blocks; see `CALIBRATION.md`.
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Feedback moves these vectors over time. The written text is the cold-start seed, so
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the system is useful on day one rather than after 200 clicks.
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## Interests
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**Foreign affairs is split in two.** Connor's own framing: *"my actual war interest
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is low, but unfortunately all wars are important."* The click history looked
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war-heavy only because world-news feeds are war-heavy. So statecraft —
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`diplomacy-foreign-policy`, weight 0.9 — is the standing interest, while armed
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conflict is weighted lower and routed mainly through importance.
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Within conflict, his stated ordering became five weighted blocks:
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| block | weight | |
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|---|---|---|
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| `conflict-anti-imperial` | 0.90 | anti-colonial and socialist-revolutionary wars |
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| `conflict-us-involved` | 0.85 | wars the US is actively engaged in |
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| `conflict-mideast-israel` | 0.80 | Middle East, especially engagements with Israel |
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| `conflict-undercovered` | 0.75 | Sudan, DRC, Myanmar, the Sahel, Yemen |
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| `conflict-general` | 0.45 | everything else — low interest, still important |
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**Space and aerospace** (0.95) is the single highest-weighted block: Connor is an
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aerospace engineer. He asked for launches and missions, deep technical coverage
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(propulsion, materials, orbital mechanics, failure post-mortems), and
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astronomy/planetary science — deliberately *not* the industry-and-contracts beat,
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which his policy blocks already catch.
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**Software and systems** (0.9, push-eligible) covers local model inference, Rust and
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WebAssembly, self-hosting and infrastructure, and — in his words — *"Linux news in
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general. The ricing world/neovim configs/etc."* Notably he did **not** pick security
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and vulnerabilities, so that is absent rather than assumed.
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**Political economy** spans `labor-inequality` (0.85), `left-movements` (0.85),
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`anticolonial-sovereignty` (0.8), `far-right-watch` (0.75, tracked as a threat
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rather than out of sympathy), and `political-theory` (0.7).
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**Place**: `cincinnati` (0.9 — where he lives, so a lower bar), `ohio-state-politics`
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(0.75), `kentucky-louisville` (0.6 — where he's from), `us-national` (0.8), and
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`italy-mexico` (0.75).
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Italy and Mexico are a special case. He follows both for politics but also because
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he is learning the languages and expects to travel there, so **culture and popular
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culture count as signal in this block, not noise** — the one place where lifestyle
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content is wanted. The `consumer-lifestyle` veto must not swallow it.
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Also carried: `science-discovery` (0.8), `environment-ecology` (0.75),
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`tech-science-policy` (0.9), `urbanism` (0.8), `global-south` (0.7),
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`energy-climate` (0.6).
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## Vetoes, and why some things are demotes instead
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Hard vetoes are reserved for categories that never overlap a real interest: US
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big-three sports recaps, royal and celebrity gossip, consumer/lifestyle filler.
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Anything that *might* overlap is a **demote** — a penalty on the score rather than
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exclusion. This distinction exists because a hard veto on a sports-adjacent region
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killed *"Belgian mayor blocks club from hosting Israeli opponent in Europa League"*,
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which is Middle East politics. Overlap is the norm, not the exception:
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- `crypto-ai-hype` sits next to AI regulation and local-inference news
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- `culture-war-outrage` sits next to `far-right-watch`
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- `true-crime-blotter` sits next to criminal-justice policy
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### Explicitly not vetoed
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Connor is not anti-sport; he is anti *US-big-three-wire-recap*. **Rock climbing,
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chess, the Olympics and oddball sports are actively wanted.** Soccer is not blocked
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as a concept — he is trying to get into it — though match previews and live threads
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are noise. Sports *governance* (FIFA/UEFA corruption, Olympic host-city displacement,
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Qatar migrant labour) reads as politics and stays.
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## The importance lane
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Independent of interest, and half the reason the project exists: war and escalation,
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mass-casualty events, US federal shocks, economic breaks, and major US political
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events (decisive elections, deaths of political figures).
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**Vetoes still apply on this lane.** In v0.2 the bypass lane ignored relevance
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entirely (`gate.rs:302`), so a blocklisted item could still fire at priority 5.
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## Delivery
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- Digest at **08:45**, quiet hours **22:00–07:00**. The importance lane **may** wake
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him; the interest lane never may.
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- 2–5 pushes/day across both lanes.
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- Conflict outside categories A–D notifies only on a major development — a new
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offensive, a ceasefire, mass casualties, a state entering. Routine front-line
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reporting goes to the digest.
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- HN items are ignored below **150 points**: the crowd does the first filtering pass.
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- The digest is a **complete record** of the day, including already-notified items,
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and the weekend edition runs longer and leans longform.
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- **Three serendipity slots** in every digest for items that scored well on quality
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and importance but poorly on the profile, labelled "outside your usual". A system
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that only shows you what you already like tightens its own bubble as it learns.
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- No format filter: he reads analysis, wire copy, investigations *and* opinion, which
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also confirms the old config's `notify_opinions = true` was deliberate.
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- Feedback stays **binary**. The old system's failure was collecting 32 labels, not
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collecting shallow ones.
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## Source trust
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`weight` in `sources.toml` is editorial trust, carried over from the old config where
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Connor had deliberately set Al Jazeera highest (1.2) and NYT lowest (0.8), and
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extended to weight independent outlets (The Intercept, Drop Site, Tribune, African
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Arguments, Middle East Eye, +972) at 1.1. It affects importance and tie-breaking,
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never whether an item is visible.
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## Language
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Embedding is English-only. Measured: the same story in Spanish and English scored
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0.758 and 0.600 cosine against a random-pair p99 of 0.634 — one of two translation
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pairs was indistinguishable from an unrelated article. Native-language feeds would
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rank erratically, so Italy and Mexico are covered by English-language sources.
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Revisit with a multilingual model only if that becomes worth re-calibrating every
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threshold for.
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## Open questions
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- Whether `global-south` is a genuine standing interest or an artifact of a small
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sample. Confirmed wanted by Connor, but worth re-checking against real feedback.
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- Exact score at which the importance lane may override quiet hours.
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