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 32 real feedback
clicks in the v0.2 database.

## How this is used

Every `description` and `probe` below is embedded (bge-small-en-v1.5, CPU) into a vector.
Item relevance is the **max** cosine similarity across probes, never the mean — averaging
"Middle East geopolitics" with "grid-scale energy storage" produces a vector near neither.
Feedback then moves these vectors over time (Rocchio); the written text is the cold-start
seed so the system is useful on day one instead of after 200 clicks.

Vetoes work the same way, as *regions* rather than strings. This is the whole point: the old
system could not express "sports" as a concept, only as the literal characters `s-p-o-r-t-s`,
which is why 18 of 32 feedback clicks were Connor hand-rejecting AP baseball recaps that a
`blocklist = ["sports"]` never matched.

## Interests

Ordered roughly by strength. Weights are multipliers on the similarity score.

1. **Geopolitics and conflict** (1.0) — the strongest and most consistent signal. Middle East
   above all, plus great-power dynamics: China's expanding global reach, US foreign policy,
   war and escalation, sanctions, the UN.
2. **Tech and science policy** (0.9) — AI regulation, platform governance, surveillance and
   privacy law, research funding. Policy *about* technology.
3. **Labor, inequality and social policy** (0.9) — the "democratic socialism" of the old
   config, read properly: unions, strikes, wages, housing, healthcare, education, welfare
   states.
4. **Software and systems, deep** (0.9) — Connor runs a self-hosted inference stack and a
   substantial homelab. Rust and WASM, systems programming, self-hosting, local model
   inference, and release notes for things he actually runs. **Eligible for push**, not
   digest-only — this was an explicit choice.
5. **Urbanism and city planning** (0.8) — transit, zoning, housing density, street design,
   public space. New in this profile; entirely absent from v0.2.
6. **Energy, climate and infrastructure** (0.6) — grid buildout, storage, renewables, climate
   policy. Real but explicitly weaker than the others.
7. **Global South** (0.6) — Africa, South Asia, Latin America. Not selected in the interview,
   but three of the fourteen starred items were Uber exiting Nigeria and Uganda, India's grid
   and storage crunch, and explosions at a Bolivian military base. Carried at a modest weight
   on that evidence. **Flagged for review** — drop it if it turns out to be noise.

### Geography

- **Cincinnati** — where he lives. Local politics and city stories, at a much lower
  importance bar than world news.
- **Louisville / Kentucky** — where he is from. Still wanted, weaker than Cincinnati.
- **Ohio** — state politics.
- **US national politics** — federal policy, courts, elections, legislation.
- **Italy** and **Mexico** — specific standing country interests.

## Vetoes

- **US big-three sports** — professional and college basketball, American football, baseball,
  and hockey. Game recaps, scores, trades, drafts, salary-cap news, betting lines.
- **Royal and celebrity gossip** — the British royal family, red carpets, box office,
  influencer drama.
- **Horoscopes, listicles, product-roundup content.**

### Explicitly NOT vetoed

Connor is not anti-sport; he is anti *US-big-three-wire-recap*. These stay:

- **Rock climbing, chess, the Olympics, oddball sports** — actively wanted.
- **Soccer** — he is trying to get into it. Match previews and live threads are noise, but
  the sport is not blocked as a concept. This is the first thing to loosen if soccer feels
  under-covered.
- **Sports governance and politics** — FIFA/UEFA corruption, Olympic host-city displacement,
  Qatar migrant labour. These read as politics, not sport, and the old blocklist's
  collisions with them were a bug.

## The importance lane

Independent of interest. This is the "I need to know this even though it isn't my topic"
channel, and it is half the reason the project exists. Its own small daily budget.

- War and escalation — new military action between states, major escalation in an ongoing
  conflict, nuclear or WMD events.
- Mass-casualty events and disasters — earthquakes, major attacks, industrial and transport
  catastrophes.
- US federal shocks — constitutional crises, major Supreme Court rulings, shutdowns, sudden
  sweeping policy moves.
- Economic breaks — market crashes, bank failures, currency crises, central bank surprises.
- Major US political events — significant election results, 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. That must not recur.

## Delivery

- 2–5 pushes per day total, across both lanes. High bar.
- The daily digest is a **web page**, not a push payload. v0.2 sent a long markdown blob that
  ntfy turned into a `.md` attachment, which is miserable to read on a phone. The push is
  three lines and a link.
- ntfy feedback buttons **must work**. They never have — `NEWS_API_BASE_URL` was unset, so
  they were silently dropped at boot. That is the entire training signal for everything above.

## Open questions

- Digest hour, and the exact quiet-hours window.
- Whether the importance lane may ever override quiet hours, and at what score.
- Whether "Global South" is a real standing interest or an artifact of a small sample.