connor
9cba8db7bb
The NYT is unreadable without a subscription, but dropping it would throw away real signal -- knowing the NYT covered a story is corroboration, and it feeds importance. So sources carry a `paywalled` flag: they still cluster and corroborate, but are never chosen as the link for a notification or a headline when a readable report of the same story exists, and are marked in the UI. Deliberately NOT doing paywall circumvention. The fix is to prefer a source you can actually read, and to add outlets that do not have the problem. Five free New York outlets added, all verified live: The City, Gothamist, New York Focus, Documented NY and amNY -- independent and largely nonprofit, covering the NYC politics the NYT was being relied on for. Hell Gate was probed too and has no discoverable feed at any of the usual paths. Includes an additive migration for the new column, since CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS will not add a column to a table that already exists.
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.
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.