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Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news (boringreport.org)
1166 points by aquaVitae on May 11, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 332 comments
In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the facts and relevant information. By utilizing OpenAI's language models, Boring Report processes sensationalist news articles, transforms them into the content you see, and helps readers focus on the essential details. We recently updated our iOS app experience, so any and all feedback would be appreciated.

App Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boring-report-news-by-ai/id644...




JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on September 22, 2022. Dimon mentioned that as the U.S. nears a potential default on its sovereign debt, markets could experience panic. ...[1]

He said that today, but in an interview with Bloomberg. The source article[2] just illustrates it with an archive photo from 2022, when he testified in a Senate hearing. Similarly, the Disney article[3] starts non-sensically The Disney+ logo was displayed on a TV screen in Paris on December 26, 2019. Disney shares decreased by 9%[...] (I don't think displaying the logo 4 years ago is to blame).

I suppose you should just stop parsing image subtitles. The two articles I checked were otherwise accurate.

[1] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645cfc85bab323b21e6195e... I had to use the developer tools to copy paste the text, obnoxious. You also can't right- or middle-click the source link (to copy it or open it in a background tab). Don't hijack basic browser functionality.

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/jpms-jamie-dimon-warns-of-ma...

[3] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d0cebbaef7c040f89ca4...


Hey, other dev on this project. This is a good catch, and we're aware of this issue. What it's doing is actually using a photo caption as part of the article, and we're working on removing the use of that in the summarization process.


Their are news APIs

Start with those and then figure out how to scrape a site as your input and spit out the existing API format and you'll come in through a clever side route, essentially having a two phase assembly line.

Also this will allow users to customize their "feed" as a free side effect of the architecture and furthermore you'll be able to isolate your scraping -> API transform on a per site basis, also as a free consequence and lastly, you can parallelize the work much cleaner and even have the public add their own "transformer" for their favorite news site


Parsing pdfs or web semantically is really not an easy job, as I found in my own foray into LLM sumamrization.


Maybe image search and if the image is not novel, ignore it?


Good point (it seems to me), and if it's AI generated, (try to) ignore it too I guess


Why? If it is an AI generated image, it was generated from a text prompt, by the author of the article. Author had reviewed the image. The image is novel.

As long as this is novel content, it should be parsed, I think.


Maybe it depends. Let's say some thought have gone into writing the prompt, and the image (and image text?) then explains how something works or helps one understand the article better.

Or if the prompt to generate the image, doesn't include anything interesting that isn't in the article already. (F.ex. "generate a nature photo related to this article"?)


I've come around to there being legitimate usecases for this type of generative AI, but I don't think producing anything that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one. I think the only useful usecases is for when you want to generate fiction.


If you tell GPT-4 specifically to respond with proper jargon for the domain like that found in a textbook or journal it provides much much more useful replies. Silly that prompt engineering is what's required but at least for my purposes wherein I fact check it's output it's right nearly all the time and I've learned a great deal.


Even then there's literally nothing stopping it from making shit up.


Sure yeah, for now. Just saying I literally use it to mine out things to confirm (/ not believe until I do) and so far it has very rarely led me astray and even then it's been small nuance. It's striking.


What do you mean "for now"? Yes, right now, at the most impressive it's ever been, it has this fundamental flaw.


Assuming you're serious and not just knee jerk reacting to the flippant way I replied, this is pretty much exactly what I meant. The full text of this short story I can't find a good link (old ones I've read are broken links now) but this reading on YouTube will suffice.

Asimov, The Last Question https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0


Which is hilarious considering humans make shit up, lie and parrot falsehoods _constantly_. Even without intending to.


It doesn't mean it's less biased. All of these styles are exploited as a form of rhetoric. Many people simply take information written in a textbook style as authoritative.


And that's why I ignore the people that laugh at the whole prompt engineering thing, because it's a genuine skill.

At the moment GPTs are trained on so much data across so many domains that you have to treat it like a person who has similar knowledge.

If I just walk up to you and start sputtering jargon about a very specific complex topic, when you were just chatting to another friend about all sorts of everyday topics, you're not going to be able to reply to me immediately.

With these GPTs it helps to get it "in the mood" for your topic by preloading keywords and shifting the topic over and deeper so your desired topic is clearer to the attention mechanism.


I've come around to there being legitimate use cases for journalism, but I don't think producing anything that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one.


I’m to the point where I’d probably put more trust in an AI generated news summary than many of the sites that purport to give me accurate and truth worthy news.


For a lower-tech approach, The Flip Side is pretty good at doing one story each day from 2 different sides. I was a bit annoyed when an excited friend signed up my email address without asking me, but I have never unsubscribed because I find it refreshing in a typical world of frenzied news.

https://www.theflipside.io


Screwing it up isn't a crime. Papers can retract and re-visit a line of thinking. While nobody loves doing that, I think it'd help.

In addition I think it'd help if papers hammered the party line of Dems and Republicans far harder. My running joke / dare is: send sportscasters to DC for a year. At some point they'll call BS on everything and everyone, and start questioning with both barrels. BS is less tolerated in sports.

Take taxes. Trickle down is BS. But it's also true the top 5% or so pay 40%-60% of taxes while the US Congress continues to spend in debt. How we'd get here? Who's primarily to blame (Congress). And what is Congress gonna do to fix it?

Show votes by Congress members year by year against deficit, debt, and ratio paid by corps, rich, middle, and poorer Americans. I wanna see both aisles running for cover.

Biden's budget envoy was in Congress about 6-8 weeks ago. She mentioned biden's plan was raising taxes on corporations and individuals with $400k or more in earnings. But when the republicans pointed out the fact above (5% paying more than half) she had nothing.

What's the republican code here to de-construct? Well lack of fairness, and an implied destruction of jobs and income for workers if taxes are higher. Ok, how do you defeat that? Dems are empty. And tax payers will ultimately have to bear up under both parties stupidity if this continues.

I didn't grouse too much about how the government (mis)spends money so long as debt to GDP isn't stupid and there's some attempts to get real. But in the last 10 years, I've changed. Who wants to send cash to DC? DC has got serious trust problems.


I agree, having AI sportscasters would be kinda cool.


The calm, serene assurance and objectivity of the GPT outputs have been a breath of fresh air amidst the stupidity of the average social media discourse. If this style somehow prevails it will be a net positive for the internet. I for one welcome our new LLM overlords!


Writing summaries of documents and correspondence is one of the major use cases of those models. Desensitionalization and debullshittification are very similar to summarization, so it stands to reason LLMs should handle these tasks just as well.


Summarized bullshit is still bullshit akin to a polished turd.

Given that the choice of which articles to write is incredibly biased to begin with this approach does not seem effective.

What could theoretically work is an “AI news agency” that “summarizes” many different sources to generate unbiased articles.


> Given that the choice of which articles to write is incredibly biased to begin with this approach does not seem effective.

Selection bias is a given. You always have to keep that in mind. But when you actually want to read a specific article, summarizers are useful. For news and general population content, debullshitifiers could come in handy too.

Point being, the texts are not random. There's some nugget of valuable content in it, but it's usually wrapped by enormous layer of SEO, ad hooks, word count padding, and/or general nonsense. Reducing signal-to-noise ratio here - stripping all those layers of bullshit - is strictly useful.


I’m not arguing summarization is not useful, or stripping the various sources of noise you listed.

“Debullshitification” reads as de-biasing which is not what you just itemized.

My point is rather that Fox News+LLM (as an example) is still biased but would appear/may be incorrectly presented as unbiased to a reader not acutely aware of selection bias which is probably not something an average reader is well informed about.


No, you’re applying a specific meaning to an inherently nebulous term, debullshitification.

And honestly, I immediately knew what that meant when I read it. My preferred news source, which isn’t horrendously partisan, still has…exactly what I’d call bullshit. If that’s removed, I’ll get more bang for my buck in reading it, and that both provides immense value, and something that I’d call “debullshitification”, whilst working purely from the articles provided.


Since you mentioned nebulous, this is the Oxford definition:

> verb: bullshit; 3rd person present: bullshits; past tense: bullshitted; past participle: bullshitted; gerund or present participle: bullshitting

> talk nonsense to (someone), typically to be misleading or deceptive.

It’s reasonable to interpret debullshitification as removing bias (i.e. what is misleading or deceptive in the news article) in this context rather than the “fluff” listed.

As I stated in the comment you replied to, GP has a different definition and I agreed removing fluff definitely has value.


It's reasonable to interpret debullshitification as "removing bullshit." Specifically, "the reverse process of bullshitification."

Speaking nonsense, misleading, and deceiving aren't the same as "adding bias." They're just techniques that can be used to do so.


>What could theoretically work is an “AI news agency” that “summarizes” many different sources to generate unbiased articles.

NewsMinimalist does this, it’s quite interesting. I’ve been using it since its introduction, and its been a fun way to get lots of summarized, de-sensationalized headlines. Specifically I enjoy setting it to 6.0 and reading the headlines that have impact that didn’t quite reach the 6.5+ threshold.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388


Another great idea though also very US centric like the app in this post. Hopefully this comes to more places


It's like trying to make Chinese food using McDonald's Happy Meals for ingredients.


They have McDonald's in China (at least in Shenzhen) - if you were to take ingredients from there, this may actually work.


I would not and do not trust them to do this in cases where I care about the accuracy of the output.


If you care about the accuracy of the output, don’t read news in the first place? I think you’re trumping up the impotence of this use case.


In fairness to the AI, I have often been confused by stock images or old images on news articles that are not from the event in question.


Photo attribution is a bit of a problem. For a tornado in Kansas they may use an image from another year’s tornado in Mississippi. For the war in Azerbaijan they might use an image from Chechnya, etc.


That is precisely the type of editorial affordance I would expect the AI to strip. This is just another way for media organizations to distort the news. I look forward to those enhancements


False metadata for rich media is a damned tough problem to target.

Putting aside any actually truthful captions, how do I know that "image of X" is actually an image of X?

Reading some of the Bellingcat investigations, and time spent, doesn't bode well.

I guess you could TinEye and index/hash the entire web's worth of rich media, then spot discrepancies (listed as X here, but Y there), but that seems horrendous in compute/bandwidth/storage terms.


>>seems horrendous in compute/bandwidth/storage terms

Yes, but the usefulness of being able to automate that identification in near-real-time to debunk the firehose of falsehoods we get from everywhere would be astronomical

Anyone reading would have a huge edge in both being more accurately grounded in reality and being able to identify the biggest/hottest disinformation streams


Honestly given the quality of Stable Diffusion and similar, you don't even need to reuse the same image posted somewhere else, you can just make it up. So... making such a huge effort...for what? People will adapt to use new tech.


That's a different problem. An important problem to be sure; but different. It's the kind Reality Defender are trying to solve to the extent it's possible and I am afraid it's just a matter of time before we see the effects of this in some crisis point when we can least afford the time to make sense of the firehose of falsehoods (nice phrase btw).

https://realitydefender.com/


> This is just another way for media organizations to distort the news

No, it's not. This is done because stories with images perform better, and obtaining images (& licenses) for photos of every event is not always possible.


Yes, it does distort the news.

If I read a story about a riot and the included picture is from a different but similar urban disaster scene that shows buildings on fire and windows broken I come away from the article with an internal expectation of the disaster scene including fire damage and broken glass -- but that isn't necessarily the case.

This happened constantly with the reporting around the BLM social unrest.

Articles sell better with additional sensationalism, but when the narrative being espoused doesn't conform to reality then it is a distortion, regardless of the motivating factor.


The fact something makes the article perform better doesn't mean it's not deceptive.

Indeed, a major incentive towards inaccuracy in journalism is the pursuit of impact.


'Perform better' is frequently ..not synonymous, but amounting to the same as 'distort[ing] the news'..


AI can just fabricate a new photo for any event.


It sort of becomes obvious when everyone in the photo has seven fingers and two thumbs on each hand.


True, I have a photograph taken in Kenya that has been variously described as in California, Guatemala, Colombia, Australia and South Africa.


I base all my stock picks on the logos used.


I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.

I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol

Thank you though, this is awesome!


I think the issue here is that we've been fed a high-sensationalism diet, so our brains are acclimated to in-your-face headlines. Perhaps if we detoxed our brains a bit (by using this app exclusively for a week or two), we would be able to recalibrate our expectations for what seems "interesting".

This is sort of like how you recalibrate your tongue to a low-salt diet if you stop eating salty food for a few weeks.


The problem with the news isn't that it's sensationalized, which of course it is, but that an ever increasing amount of it is completely made up.


Hm, maybe from some news outlets. I think the main issue for big news outlets isn't outright falsehoods, it's the coverage bias. You really can't get a full sense of what's going on if you don't make an effort to get news from divergent sources because each outlet covers the news that fits its preferred narrative.


Amen to that

If we got a full-scale media blitz with pictures every time someone died in a car crash, people would take unnecessary car-related deaths much more seriously. 100 people a day are dying in the USA right now

There's so much fucked up stuff like that going on in the world, and people have no idea about it since it never hits the news


I’m not sure basic transportation is unnecessary. Avoiding cars because they can crash is not realistic.


Driving with a dangerous combination of speed and distractedness/aggression/lack of skill is unnecessary. People all think they're driving safely even when they're not, because their dumb monkey brains get lulled into a false sense of security by years of coincidentally not crashing.

IMO the status quo is not remotely acceptable, and it's completely insane that we get so disproportionately pissed off whenever an immigrant or a police officer kills someone and completely ignore all the times car drivers kill people.


What are "divergent sources" anyway?

On anything that matters, all sources just copy AP or each other, and maybe splice in some random tweets. Once you're looking at a topic where the news source is providing some kind of opinion, it's a clear sign you're dealing with some thoroughly irrelevant bullshit non-issue, and closing the tab is the best thing you could do now.


I'm referring to sources whose target audiences differ greatly. For example, if you read NYT and NPR, those are not divergent sources. NPR and Fox News, or Reason and either NPR or Fox News are divergent. I don't personally read Fox News myself, but use them as an example here because they are well known for their coverage bias.

For more recommendations, check out the Read Across the Aisle app, [1] which I created to help battle groupthink and the resulting misunderstandings and incivility.

1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/read-across-the-aisle/id118985...


Ah, the sweet aroma of coverage bias, isn't it just the spice of the journalistic world? The quest to avoid blatant falsehoods is relatively straightforward, much like a game of whack-a-mole. Identify the blabbermouths, the rumor-mongers, the peddlers of deceit, and voila! You've successfully exiled them from your daily news diet. A glorious accomplishment, indeed!

However, when it comes to bias, things get somewhat...messy. It's like trying to play chess on a board that keeps shifting under your fingers. An insidious infiltrator, bias sneakily weaves itself into the fabric of reporting, subtly influencing what gets attention and what doesn't. We're all detectives in this narrative, sifting through data, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

News, like science, isn't a perfect process. What's chosen for investigation often matters as much as the ensuing results. News sources, then, become our guides in this complex labyrinth, and their credibility can make or break our understanding of the world. The elusive "objective narrative" might be a mirage, but some news oases are certainly closer to the wellspring of reality than others.

Now, consider the ill-advised adventurer who thinks they're diversifying their media intake by adding a dash of conspiracy theory and a sprinkle of sensationalism. Suddenly, they're questioning whether 5G is responsible for a global pandemic. A fascinating thought, no doubt, but one that's more suited for a science fiction novel, perhaps?

Practicality is key. If you're a trans individual or a parent of a trans child in Florida, news headlines like "Florida's Draconian Measures Against Trans Kids" are crucial for your well-being. If, however, you're more interested in the intricate dance of global finances, a business-centric outlet would be your go-to.

Media mammoths like The Washington Post and The New York Times attempt to cater to this myriad of needs, breaking down their content into neatly packaged sections like sports, economy, politics, culture, and so on. Yet, their own peculiar biases can sometimes stain the narrative (ahem, New York Times and your unfortunate penchant for trans panic stories).

In short, my dear friend, finding balance in news consumption is less like a serene ballet and more like a lively tango. You're constantly adjusting, recalibrating, and challenging your understanding of the world. Bias will always be there, lingering in the shadows. The trick is not to eliminate it, but to dance with it.


> I think the main issue for big news outlets isn't outright falsehoods

I'm not entirly sure:

- Fox outright lied about voting machines (and much more)

- NBC lied about Russiagate (and much more)

- CNN lied about Ivermectin and painted Joe Rogan yellow (and much more)

Outright falsehoods are definitely a thing.


Just read a non-sensationalised news outlet ? It’s pretty easy to find.


> This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news

Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.


100% agree, doing this wholesale would probably help my (and likely others) mental states as a whole! Imagine desensationalizing product sites and ads and the like, we might actually be able to bring down that threshold so it can stop ever increasing. The irony here is I feel like what I wrote here is sensationalized lol I do truly think it could be helpful I just think a lot of us are "broken" as far as that's concerned from the exhausting nature of everything these days always vying for our attention.


Sensationalism typically involves the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy, in order to provoke public interest or excitement. Your text, while expressing strong feelings about the topic, doesn't exaggerate or misrepresent the facts for dramatic effect. You're discussing your thoughts and feelings about the potential positive impact of desensationalizing advertisements, which is a subjective opinion rather than a sensationalized claim.


> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc

That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.


I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]:

---

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Thomas Jefferson, 1807

---

The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now? It sounds completely reasonable. Like so many things in history show, the era we're entering into is not some wild uncharted domain, as it sometimes feels. Rather the era we all lived and grew up in was the weird one. Now we're simply returning to 'normalcy.'

[1] - https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...


> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable.

Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US) was more uniform 10 years ago, and even moreso 30 years ago, so if you ran into lies (including lies of story selection and detail omission, as well as the more direct falsehoods), they’d be more likely to be the same lies from every source, leaving no reason to question them.


Can you offer any examples? In modern times I'd appeal to something like the lies surrounding the death of Officer Sicknick [1] as an example of exactly what you are describing. The entire story that he was murdered, let alone in the precise and brutal fashion described, could have been trivially falsified by any journalist doing the most basic things every journalist does: speak to the family, call the coroner, look at police records, and so on endlessly. Seemingly none did, which rather blunts Hanlon's razor.

That razor goes from blunted to decimated once one also looks to the media response once those lies were definitively revealed. Instead of seeking explanation, and reckoning, over a death being exploited and politicized with the most cynical of lies, the media simply moved onto a new lie about the story (that he was killed by pepper spray) before ultimately just burying it. I'd contrast this against something like Iraq in that one could, at least plausibly, claim ignorance on part of the media. I'd also note that there was some serious push-back from the media once the lies were revealed, and also much less homogeny even in the interim.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick


Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's you want to de-sensationalize.


I love that idea!


> Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized

Half? It's higher than that.

The other issue is - and your quoted "news" hints at it - a significant amount of what we're fed isn't news at all. Yes, it's something that happened. That doesn't make it news.

So while this app might remove the hyperbole what about the things and details that are being ignored? How do we fill the gaps so we're getting a more complete context?


I’m not sure that’s a flaw


> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.

I tried doing the same thing as OP with chatgpt and came to the same realization so I stopped.


Maybe it could also use the LLM to rank the articles by essential importance or impact.


Maybe we need a recommendation on top of the boringfied version to find the truly interesting stuff for you.


This is why I am just as skeptical of criticism of the media.

Everyone wants to consume their work, but they need people to pay for it so that they can keep working, but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.


> but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.

I think this is only true because we allow unlimited sensationalism. It's just like any other junk intake (candy, social media, gamification, etc) - it's easy, it has an immediate reward, and it's not valuable. But out bodies and brains were conditioned by evolution to only care about the first 2, so junk news is just hacking our brains (or exploiting our vulnerabilities).

To be blunt, we've turned something that should serve us into a parasite. We need to have awareness of this and put create standards and/or regulations. When the playing field is level and (almost) nobody is writing clickbait, our brains will return to normal.


I'm generally excited about something I'm calling "English to English translation" - and this is a good example.

Previously translation has focused on going between languages.

I think there's just as much benefit to translating within a given language.

* Translate corporate speak to plain English.

* Translate passive aggressive to calm and peaceful.

* Translate sensationalist to neutral (like the OP).

* Translate implicit and heavy with subtext to direct and assertive.


I am looking forward to a tool to summarize a 10 page long Terms of Service into a list of points about what I really need to beware of. Same for legal contracts.


Still generated by humans afaik, but in the neighbourhood:

https://tosdr.org/


There's already countless tools you can find online that will summarize text for you, but here's a more recent one:

https://www.chatpdf.com/


See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256007


TI have been thinking on similar lines. I have access to my own freelancers. However, do you have any pointers to algos/libraries I should be using? My NLP skills are not great!


My favorite is pasting something into the chat with "ELI5"


What you described is known as "sequence-to-sequence learning", or seq2seq. Google it or ask ChatGPT. It's a very common NLP technique that can do almost everything you mentioned.

Of course the utility will depend on the training data you collect. For example to go from corporate speak -> english you would need thousands of pairs of "translated" sentences. Or you could use an LLM to translate for you, paying as you go


The same concept applies to so many things

One time, local-dialect subtitles completely changed a movie experience for me

It was an American movie. Where I was, they usually watch movies with english audio and neutral Spanish subtitles

This time, instead of neutral Spanish, they used local Spanish with slang… wow, what a difference in the way the movie felt

Having local language and slang can convey meaning and emotions so much more effectively


Proper translation is an art form... if you have the budget.

Otherwise, it's someone typing as fast as the movie goes on the first viewing.


Another use case in the arts: interpreting literature and finding connections within and between books


I love this.


you are missing "rewrite email i don't want to read in the style of <author i like> influenced by <other thing i like>"


The title from Boring Report:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance on Switch

Article's title:

> Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle

I find the Boring Report summary to be much more informative that the article, it's like they trimmed away all the fat.

The fact that the game runs at 20-30 FPS doesn't seem like a "minor miracle", by 2023 standards that's barely acceptable. And I understand the limitations of the Switch hardware, I'm not trying to insult Nintendo or the Zelda games, but I have hard time using the word "miracle" to describe the performance of a game that runs at 20-30 FPS.


Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas the shortened title makes it sound like a plain benchmark.


It's not that you're explicitly wrong, it's that you and the article are putting a very positive spin on what is objectively mediocre performance. I could just as easily put a negative spin on it, and suggest there's something wrong with the fact that the Switch can barely run modern games.

For the record, I own a Switch and I'm thinking about buying the new Zelda game... I just like facts more than spin.


I care more about the loss of information than the spin in the title. The new title objectively gives you less information about what the article will actually contain even if it is less biased. The natural extreme of this would be a program that strips the titles of articles out entirely: It would be guaranteed to remove all bias from titles every time, at the cost of obfuscating what the actual contents of the article will be.


But it's still sensationalized. It could instead be something like:

"[Zelda] Performance on the Switch is Passable and Impressive under the Limitations of Hardware"


This is up to personal interpretation. Some would certainly argue that calling it "impressive" is still sensationalizing it. There is no clear line that should not be crossed when it comes to this sort of thing.

To be honest I think that the burden of this sort of issue lies with the reader. If you read "small miracle" in the original title and are able to correctly interpret the meaning of that ("The game runs despite hardware limitations"), there isn't really any problem with that. If you read it to mean "The switch is literally a miracle, Nintendo programmers have done something previously thought impossible," it's on you for failing to understand the intent of the author. The author should not have to police their language just because someone somewhere does not understand hyperbole or metaphor.


Ideally it would put the conclusions in the title:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance: 20 to 30 FPS on Nintendo Switch

That would generally make it unnecessary to read the article.


In an ideal world we’d have a network of trusted people that feed trusted event highlights and leave it to ai to fill in the gaps or detect bias. At the moment news is just a collection of episodes and arcs aimed at maintaining a constant state of fear and anger - emotions familiar to all of us. We are designed to pay attention to danger and the media knows this. We should detoxify it. It’s done enough harm.

Edit: after reading some of the content i really like it!


In the old days, I am told, BBC newsreaders read the news, and on days when not enough had happened, proceeded to play music for the remainder of their timeslot.


As it should be. Why constantly bombard us with nonsense? Every now and then i chill and listen to old radio broadcasts. There were plenty of bad things happening at the time but somehow the way they were presented was calming and reassuring. Modern news make it sound like civil wars are imminent and we are constantly ready to jump at each other’s throats. A bit like “Give me the photos, I will give you the war”. If there is no reason to panic they’ll manufacture one.


News now behaves a lot more like gossip than journalism. Small things are made sensational, and big things are spun to make the best story for the teller and the receiver.


I think this is the real problem. News is "made" to fit a budget. My ideal news would only be published when it is actually worth reading.


That's like saying, in an ideal world we don't need encryption because no one lies, everyone is responsible with the data they are entrusted with, and no one has any motives to look at data that doesn't belong to them. Ok, but we don't live in that world. So we have encryption, and people have to take what they hear with a grain of salt.


In an ideal world we wouldn’t worry about any of this because we’d be spherical cows floating in a vacuum. Sounds nice actually.


We should do the same with fiction novels. For example:

In 1922, a man named Nick Carraway moved to West Egg, Long Island, a region populated by newly rich individuals who have established social connections. Nick has taken residence in a small house next door to a mansion owned by a man named Jay Gatsby.


I've also been thinking about processing news with LMs, but from a different angle.

One big complaint I have for reading news through RSS, is that there's no natural hierarchy/priority to the news. There's no front page, no headline, no size in RSS feeds. Given the way news agencies generates those feeds, there are _tons_ of repetition, tiny updates, some insignificant one-liner interview about some significant events. Not to mention the "no update at this point" updates. Entries that are not informative look exactly the same as---but often outnumbers---the entries that are informative.

An ideal news feed processor to me, would be one that reads through last weeks RSS feeds, and merges the all those tiny updates into coherent articles, ranked by the significance of the event. Sort of turning newspaper into a journal.

The merging and reflow should be well-within an LM's capability. However, I'm not sure if OpenAI's API can swallow an entire week's worth of RSS, or produce multiple full-sized articles, but this is something that I'd like to try when I get some free weekends.


A related idea that I’ve had is to present a time-lagged newsfeed and use AI to link to any follow up stories.

“hey, remember how everyone was panicking about the price of eggs a few months ago? Well, prices are normal now but only one person wrote about it so you probably didn’t hear that”


People get the impression that mostly bad things are happening because “this just got much worse” is newsworthy but “this isn’t as bad as it was 5 years ago” isn’t, and improvements tend to happen slowly whereas disasters can happen quickly


I had nearly the same idea as you around surfacing what is "important" vs just a large list of RSS articles.

The main differences compared to what you are thinking are two things. One for the `Significance of the event` I've used the number of publishers talking about that event. So more publishers == more important. Two, I've done this in a daily fashion instead of a weekly report.

I can also confirm that the LM has the capability to do at least a days worth (2500+) of articles. I would doubt its capability to produce an entire article but it does a great job at a small summary.

Here is the link if you wanted to check it out. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131


Are you curating the list of publishers somehow? I would imagine the AP/AFP newswire repost circuit/echo chamber would result in overestimating importance of a lot of crapola and underestimate the importance of investigative pieces for example.


This was an issue when I first started. With minimal sources a lot of time the top collections were low quality SEO articles.

After adding a sufficient amount of sources I've noticed a decent reduction in the echo chamber. Although by ranking importance by the most talked about topic, it is going to have some sort of echo chamber.

Adding left and right leaning publishers for instance has helped. Although one might say something is good and something is bad, the embeddings pick it up as the same topic.

In a way it also cuts through bias.


I just downloaded it, looks pretty useful especially for news sections I don’t follow particularly closely.

Will check this out over a few days.

Out of curiosity have you looked at deep you can go while still getting quality results (i.e. beyond top 2-3 in each heading)?


Here's an idea, maybe the reason why news is angering and emotional is that there is a lot of bad shit going on in the world that we have just kind of let happen for a long time, and a lot of injustice that shouldn't be ignored, and a lot of people justice ignores that it shouldn't.

Maybe the solution isn't to pretend things are just fine. People keep trying to paint this as some sort of "sensationalism" and "I want just the facts" but the facts are that thousands of people die every day from cheaply and easily preventable illnesses and issues while people who can literally self fund rocketry get to accumulate even more wealth and power.

There's a difference between "remember the maine" and "hey women right now are literally dying because they can't get abortions to remove dead tissue inside their body because of some completely different person believes their religion says doing so is a crime"

Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be angry.


>Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be angry.

Why?

What are you going to do?

Just get high off the dopamine drip fed by social media rage cycles? Angry rants on Twitter? Maybe start a Youtube channel and make a buck or two with banal political essays?

Recognize that the news is designed to make you angry because that anger prevents you from taking any form of effective action, it misdirects your energy and consumes your focus. It is a means of control, leading you to confuse catharsis with praxis.

By all means, be concerned about the world, injustice, social inequality, etc. There is a lot to be concerned about. But anger - much less the indignant virtue signaling anger you're displaying here, is a waste of time.


This, unless you are physically protesting (in a way that’s legitimately disruptive and not symbolic), campaigning, or otherwise actually doing something beyond voting, how angry you are (or more generally how passionately you feel about an issue) doesn’t affect the outcome much if at all.

This was a key step towards improving my own mental health by unplugging from news. I do care about things like abortion and crime, and I vote accordingly, but the amount I am outraged does not affect the outcome. So consuming media that merely outrages me and tries to grab my attention, but not in a way that galvanizes me to actually do something about it beyond voting and word of mouth, just worsens my mental state to no benefit.


> This, unless you are physically protesting (in a way that’s legitimately disruptive and not symbolic)

To be fair, protesting (even the legitimately disruptive kind) doesn't really do anything either. We had people from all sides of the political spectrum protesting everything during the last three years, and the world is pretty much exactly like it was in 2019.

Protesting is just "being angry, but outside".


I think it's important to do something practical. Even if you're a full time warrior for justice, screaming all the time will burn you out. You have to do practical stuff. Volunteer to clean up, volunteer to be a mentor to at-risk youth, volunteer to help people look for jobs, volunteer to help build houses, volunteer to teach people English, volunteer to help people sign up for social services, volunteer to make food and distribute food, etc, etc, etc. Pick something practical and do it.

...and it'll also help you advocate for systemic change in multiple ways. It gives you far better insight into the true nature of social problems, so you can advocate more effectively about them. It also signals to people that you actually care about the issue and aren't just yelling about it because someone on the Internet stirred you up. It gives you legitimacy and authority on the topic.

Doing ONLY practical stuff can also leave you drained as you feel overwhelmed by the scale of systemic issues. So having a balance of both sides, both practical change and pushing for systemic change can be very powerful.

And keep in mind that social media is largely an echo chamber. You're not really raising awareness by retweeting stuff on twitter to your like-minded followers. You need to get out there and talk to friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and local leaders like at city hall, etc. If you've done a lot of practical stuff, you may be able to talk to local journalists and write op-eds with some level of authority on the topic.


That is particularly the kind I meant to exclude, I agree with your sentiment


[flagged]


There are counter protestors in Russia, but they are quashed pretty quickly by Putin's government.

The media, which we're discussing right now, was leveraged to turn the Russian people in favor of the invasion of Ukraine, and against any "traitor" that protested against it.

Emotions aren't inherently bad, but I don't trust any emotional reaction the news media is trying to invoke. The news media is a firm institution of the status quo. I don't think anger from news stories will do much more than create controlled opposition. Notice how as soon as your anger puts you on the street in protests, they immediately turn on you and call you a rioter? Or if you egg a virulent transphobe, suddenly you're some kind of almost assassin?


> Fuck off with your assumptions, you don't know me. You don't know the actions I have taken.

And I couldn't care less. Here, you're just posturing for karma like everyone else.

>Anger doesn't prevent people from taking action or coordinating, that's the purpose of pushing people into basically wage slavery. Bad political actors WANT you to stop having a reaction to the things they do. They WANT you to feel hopeless and helpless. A politically apathetic population is the goal.

The opposite of anger isn't apathy, or feeling hopeless or helpless. Those are more often than not the results of anger. The opposite of anger is reason. Coordination and action only happen once you move past the narratives of anger. You can't do anything about most of what you see on the news, so there's no point in getting angry about it.

Yes, anger doesn't prevent people from taking action, but being angry from the news isn't necessary for that, only caring enough about the issue enough to take action. More often than not anger leads to apathy, hopelessness and helplessness.

>Look at Russia right now. Nobody to rise up and stop literal genocide.

People are losing their lives fighting Russia every day. What the fuck are you talking about?

>A problem is people thinking that lots of anger inducing headlines is not an accurate reflection of reality, but some sort of "bias" or "misleading".

It isn't an accurate reflection of reality. It's not entirely inaccurate but it is always biased and misleading. And the narratives on social media even more so.

But hey, you go ahead and get as angry as you like. I'm sure you'll let us all know when it leads you anywhere.


I agree that having an emotional response can help trigger societal change but it’s important to distinguish emotion that comes from within you after seeing information and you being fed content that is intentionally emotionally triggering. I agree that injustice shouldn’t be ignored but letting people think and feel it for themselves can be more powerful and impactful long term than being force-fed what to feel, which can result in people not fully realizing what they’re supporting and also moving on to the next thing that comes up.


I never said to be driven by the emotional reaction, but rather that the emotional reaction to current world events is the expected outcome. Still plenty of room to attempt to fix things rationally and through careful consideration


People getting angry at news is a major reason for a lot of the news that is worth getting angry at.


That sounds nice, but the problem is that 99.99% of people get angry and then .. do little. At best they complain to their friends and raise awareness. Mostly they just feel stressed. The point is that the bottleneck is not awareness or even justifiable rage, it's intelligent action, and a more staid view of current events sounds attractive.


The headline style reminds me of Matt Winkler's "Bloomberg Way" which specified headlines that summarized the article into a single line, see: https://wildtech.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/20... or https://www.optionsbro.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bloomb...

I'm not sure if they always achieved that, but it was at least a goal for readers to be able to skim feeds to understand what was going as quickly as possible. Such a policy was feasible because the readers were paying customers as opposed to web news which are often funded by advertisers or worse.


I've played with a variation of this called "Unbiased News".

The prompt asks to rewrite the article in an unbiased way and to also expose biases in the article. It feels 'good' to use.

Demo here: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1647042056139968512

Code and prompt here: https://github.com/OrionBrowser/ProgrammableButtons


"Unbias" doesn't exist.


I will settle for news that isn’t clumsily trying to provoke an emotional response.


> In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the actual facts and relevant information.

A reasonable premise! But easier said than done. I wonder how this app counteracts the hallucination and lying behavior of LLMs.* Would be pretty bad to trade off easier-to-decipher human bias and sensationalism for distorted truths and lies from an obfuscated sequence of dot products!

* I assume they are using LLMs because they state:

> By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable of generating human-like text,


Usually it hallucinates when you're asking for information, in this case it's rewriting existing text, so it should be a little safer. When in doubt check another source, as with everything.


People should doubt everything an LLM outputs, ergo, why use it in the first place if the desired output is objective fact? LLMs hallucinate, that's what they do. When it's wrong, you likely won't notice that it's wrong, but over time, your world view is going to become more and more distorted.


> why use it in the first place if the desired output is objective fact

rewriting facts is like 90% of all writing jobs


I think there will be an art to these "information summarization" products. You want just enough summarization to accomplish the reader's goal, while also minimizing your hallucination surface area. Summarize too short, and your user won't get what they came for. Summarize too long, and watch user trust crater as the hallucinations pile up.

I don't think there's a generalized solution to this problem for all information domains, so when search engine companies implement it it'll be low quality. What remains to be seen is if the money is in being a curator/aggregator within a niche, as Boring Report aims to be; or if it will be in selling the specialized summarization tech to the content creators directly - for use by them when they publish. I think the latter leans B2B and will have higher quality since the content creator signs off on it. But we'll see. Either way, the right mental model for LLMs may be to treat them as memetic compression algorithms.


Ah, I've had this idea for 5+ years now and just haven't had time to try to build a MVP. Before this year it would have been harder to do well - involve human writers and sentiment analysis. But lately I have been thinking about trying to do it with GPT.

I genuinely think there is a huge underserved market for a "world's most boring news and weather site". Almost everybody I talk to on all sides of the aisle recognizes that clickbait news is one root cause of lots of problems and want an alternative. In fact, in some ways, Hacker News is that site for me.

That said, I don't get why an app not a mobile-responsive website.


Agree strongly with the "why is this an app?" stance. The front page makes it unclear that there's a web interface at all because your options are big buttons for ios and for "desktop/android". No, I definitely don't want a "desktop" app. I want a web page. So I didn't click it and I closed the window.

When considering installing any app, your first question should be "is there any benefit to the user of making this an app instead of a web page?" The answer is very frequently no, which means effort spent building the app and getting me to install it must be for a purpose that's not in my interests, such as tracking.


It does have a mobile web version:

https://www.boringreport.org/app


I love the idea of a news summary, but this is also something of a reductio ad absurdum of "just the facts" reporting. Informative reporting would tell me what happened, who is affected, why it might matter to me, etc. Having a point of view (or a bias, if you like) is unavoidable when providing context, but providing context is essential to being informative.

It's a hard problem! But I'd guess that not many people will stick with this as their news source, because it won't hold their interest, because it doesn't include all that information about why they might want to care.


I love the idea! I was thinking about doing sth similar to my medieval content farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about) but as a personalised feed, where I can apply different “soft” filters to different types of content, eg. remove garbage tech-bro language, provide outlines/shorter versions of sensationalised content, reference related articles from different sources. Essentially, I was thinking about replacing my poet/editorial team personas with different user personas.


Dude, I love your Medieval Content Farm!!!


What I find most ironic about this is that rather than bringing users closer to the source of information it potentially pushes them farther away by adding an additional step to verification. I imagine you've considered this? How easy does your app make it to access the source article and author information, for example?


We readily make available the source article on both iOS app and website. We want to serve as the stepping stone for information about an event that would encourage people to seek out more.


Looks like the original URL is at the top of every story.


I need an alternative YouTube homepage that generate video suggestions without clickbait titles and thumbnails.


For thumbnails, ask and ye shall receive -- Clickbait Remover for Youtube:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

Further discussion on HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...


Thanks a lot. This is great. Any tricks for Youtube mobile app as well? Maybe any unofficial app you recommend?


I use Procrastination Free YouTube. It has settings to customize YouTube so that you don't see any suggestions at all. If i need to watch a video, I have to search for it. In order to not miss Videos from people i want to follow, I use NewPipe on my phone.


https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-videos-sum...


But how will you know what to click on without a goofy face with a shocked expression?


is anything of value lost by suppressing youtube videos with thumbnails containing faces showing happiness > 0.9? i suspect not.

this probably functions decently well as a "europe vs america" discriminator.


Use BlockTube to block any channel that uses clickbait thumbnails. That's what I do. I don't care if "but their content is calm and good", if they use clickbait thumbnails they lose all views from me forever. There's no shortage of channels on youtube that don't do that, so there's no reason to tolerate the ones who do.


If anyone is looking for non-sensationalist news edited by humans, I'd like to offer a shoutout to the newsletter put out by https://join1440.com/. I've been reading it now for a couple of months and, after comparing their choice of stories to cover and the ones covered in the national news (US and Germany), I'm feeling ready to leave the mainstream and let 1440 curate for me. So far they have not missed offering me an interesting and un-opinionated summary of what the mainstream outlets I've been watching consider the most important story of the day. It's a 5 minute read and is published every day except Sunday.


I agree. I downloaded the Boring app yesterday. Launched it for the first time today and it appears to be tackling the wrong problem. The problem isn’t the headlines, it’s deciding what to cover in the first place.

PBS News Hour also does a great job of this. Just a few global and national stories a day, but a stark contrast from the emotional triggers from other news outlets.

Unfortunately have to delete the app for now. Will check back later to see if they’ve figured it out.


Sounds interesting. Just out of curiosity, how would they cover something like the recent "town hall" that CNN hosted for DJT?


You can read today's briefing here: https://join1440.com/newsletter/title-42-ends-george-santos-...


It was not a top story but listed under Politics and National Affairs with this text:

"Former President Donald Trump appears on CNN town hall forum in what is considered the first major television event of the 2024 presidential campaign (More) | See all 2024 presidential candidates so far (More)"

(More) is a link to further information.

Top story for that day (today) was Title 42 Ends and second was Santos Charges Unsealed


Yeah, "desensationalizing" doesn't really work when the peril should be the lede, does it.


I'm not sure how one would desensationalize Donald Trump. For my needs, 1440 handled it just fine. Title 42 affects an international audience, Santos charges are newer news than the old news spouted so emphatically at the Town Hall and the third story, about inflation easing is also non-repetitive. The loudest and most outrageous voices manage to be heard even without amplification.


This is a great concept! Thanks for sharing. I do have to wonder, though, if this is a Band-Aid over the problem of sensationalist reporting. Assuming there is a market for “boring” news (I think there is; I’d like to read it!), wouldn’t it be cheaper to pay journalists to write less exaggerative pieces in the first place?


In an ideal world yes, but the incentives are not there. For example, many governments benefit from media being sensationalist, within and outside borders. They don't want less sensationalism. I think this "attention to negativity" is something inherent to humans, and now that we have opened the door, I doubt it's gonna close by everyone paying more to journalists.


I would posit the minority of people are drawn to more "boringly" presented news, and as such, it wouldn't make much sense to have it be the primary artifact. (for better or worse)


I think counteracting the market forces that drive exaggerated journalism would be far more expensive and difficult than simply developing some software to filter the exaggerations locally. Also, we can work on the first more effectively with the second in hand.


Try ft.com. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions, not ads, so they are not striving to generate clickbait like most papers.


There are boring news orgs, but how many are you subscribed to? How likely are others to find them?


If there is a x million dollar market for boring news, there's an x+a million dollar market for the same news that's less boring


You can't just reword things and get a better result. If there actually is an alien invasion and the earth is actually doomed, that's actually the correct headline.

Media literacy is about way more than about the wording of headlines. It's also about understanding why a headline was selected, who benefits from a story, whether the story is internally logically consistent, and why were the people quoted selected, context of the story that you wouldn't know just from reading it, etc.

I say this as someone that wrote a browser plugin to do something similar in like 2011 by screening words that indicated the headline was pointless.


I agree. Although one side effect of the Boring Report's approach that I quite like is that it also seems to make the headlines more informative.


So basically https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick autogenerated by AI


Love the idea, the name, and the app logo. I tried it with a CNN article and found that the output was a bit too summarized. It would be nice if users could specify if they want no summarization (just desensationalize) or if they want summarization included (and possibly to what degree).


I built something that summarizes hacker news discussion pages for me, and I have been very pleasantly surprised how much nicer it is to read "angryuser1 and angryuser2 got into a heated discussion" than to actually read the discussion. Forcing everything into the neutral gpt voice has greatly reduced the emotional valence of my HN consumption


Do you generate the headline from the original headline, or do you desensationalize the body of the article and then ask OpenAI to generate a headline based off of the new article body?

It seems like the latter might be better, since it ensures the headline actually matches the article below, as opposed to relying on a likely-clickbaity title that would no longer match the desensationalized article body.

Probably worth testing both ways to see what the results look like!


Also, in a couple of cases the desensationalising has removed (useful) information. E.g. in https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7... the headline is "Supreme Court Decisions in Two Cases" missing any of the stuff about corruption in the original headline "Supreme Court sides with ex-Cuomo aide and Buffalo developer in disputes over corruption convictions".

(also, that click jacking to prevent copy/paste is a PITA)


I wrote a small utility to send the AP news feed to GPT and ask it to judge which stories are important based on how many people they affect and how time-sensitive they are. ie. Will this story still be important tomorrow?

Only the passing ones are then delivered to me.

I'm not releasing this as a product, it's too simple, but it works surprisingly well, and it's trivial to add criteria for what you deem to be important, or not.


I actually liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I would say I’m pretty averse to clicking on sensational titles, but that definitely leads me to not click on articles that may have contained useful information. This actually makes me comfortable reading about politics and issues that are otherwise overdramaticized and gives me the opportunity to objectively filter what I want to read.


Also check out News Minimalist! https://www.newsminimalist.com


Looks really good! Please apologize for plugging in the comments, we are doing something very similar with https://markets.sh/. The news are not only summarized and clustered by stories but we are also building a relationship of the clusters and connecting it to e.g stocks and economic data. We are also plotting news coverage over time (looking to add sentiment and metadata soon.). We made this all indexed/queriable in realtime via a chat feature So that you can follow up on questions (need to be signed up tho). API is also available for automatic retreival.

Here are some examples:

Musk Legal Issues: https://markets.sh/stories/elon-musk-s-legal-issues-2023-05-...

TikTok Ban: https://markets.sh/stories/tiktok-ban-2023-05-11-01-16-03

Bard: https://markets.sh/stories/google-bard-ai-chatbot-2023-05-11...


I'm sceptical about how good you can make low-quality source material. If you've managed to train an AI to find the little nuggets of truth that the headline is based on, that's cool. But if the topic is relevant, there will be an article from a reputable source about it.

With the current advancements, is there finally a browser extension that just hides clickbait titles/thumbnails?


There's also: https://www.newsminimalist.com/


I would love to see a combination of the two: stories ranked by importance with boring headlines


It already is rewriting the headline and summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797241

Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388


This is the type of news app that I’ve always wanted. Kudos. I hate the sensationalism in news these days. One thing I’d like to see is a feature for grouping articles about the same piece of news. I keep seeing repeating articles covered by different outlets. It may not be easy to implement, but it’d make it much more useful for skimming the daily news.


Can’t say I‘m a regular user of Artifact, but I‘ve played around for a bit with their AI summarize feature and found it really satisfying. Very reliably tells you what‘s hiding behind clickbaity headlines and best of all, it works without having to confirm/close cookie dialogs or any other popovers first.

Edit: To give an example: Coming across the headline "Popular action series is cancelled after just one season", the summary really provides everything I want to know (or at least: to let me decide if I want to spend time actually reading the article):

> Cancelled after one season: CBS has axed action series True Lies, based on the 1994 film, after struggling to find its own identity.

> Mixed reviews and lack of audience: The show failed to gain a large enough audience despite starring actors like Steve Howey and Beverly D'Angelo.


I really like the concept and experience even though I almost missed out! I thought it was _only_ available as an app when I loaded the page on my phone. I rarely (basically never) install apps so I closed it immediately. It wasn't until I read on HN that I realized there's a web version.


I feel like the kind of person who would use Boring Report is also the kind of person who's brain is already discounting sensationalist titles and doesn't really need an app to do it for them. That being said, I'm all for trying things to make the news more measured and nuanced.


I disagree, as I think this would be useful to people with anxiety disorders who don't want to entirely disconnect from the news. Just because they may be able to logically identify articles and headlines as "sensationalist" doesn't mean their brain won't still kick off some uncomfortable physiological responses.


It's somewhat sad this tool is so desperately needed to make modern 'news' media less annoying and more useful. Frankly, over the past year I've intentionally blocked almost all news media out of my life by aggressively curating all my content. It was weird at first but over time I've found I'm less distracted and happier. I get more done and I'm now able to better focus on the people and things that actually matter to me.

It's ironic that this tool is essentially reverting news reporting back to what journalism is supposed to be - factually reporting notable events that have already happened. It's bizarre how acceptable it now is for 'news' to include 'opinion and speculation'.


I've been reading boringreport for few days now thanks! Here's some constructive feedback:

- The world section is super weird especially where important geopolitics are mixed in with "someone dies in a car crash in the UK".

- The web app is pretty bad for what could be much better off as a static text document. Expanding articles is unnecessary slow. Why do I have to wait 3 seconds to get 1 extra sentence and a link? Why abbreviate 3 sentences into half of a sentence at all? The full article also comes up at the bottom of the screen while locking out the rest of the app - trully weird. Honestly, it's not very usable at the current state.


Thanks for doing this. This is something I've been looking for since ChatGPT was unveiled generally. I wish Feedly or a similar RSS/News-aggregator would add a feature like this ... it would make so much sense.


We plan to implement RSS support as well, so please stay tuned. Thanks for the support.


I'm a paying feedly customer . FWIW I would move into your paid service if you implemented rss. I moved to feedly when greader was killed, but never liked feedly that much.


Ha! Was just scrolling about to see if anyone asked about rss. I think you are onto something, I know i will keep your app installed for a while. Good luck and well done!


I came across this gem on HN recently that targets a similar issue with news:

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Absolute gem, have been using is everyday now


Wikipedia current events portal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events


Generally about a week out of date.


I'd love to see an ongoing set of graphs and data visualisations that show me what's going on.

E.g.

- how much are we borrowing this year and the last 50 years

- what is net migration for the last 50 years

- what is inflation for the last 50 years

- what are the crime rates for the last 50 years

- what are the violent crime rates for the last 50 years

Don't know why I picked 50 every time, but I'd just love some key, well-contextualised data that we could all agree on. At the moment it seems as though people can't even agree on basic facts, and anything that helps with that would be awesome.


Agree that this would be interesting, but your proposed solution would not address people not agreeing on facts, I think. People often (many on this site) say that they don't believe government inflation figures, or that underreporting of crime makes crime rates meaningless.


> underreporting of crime makes crime rates meaningless

Well, if they can present the rate of crime underreporting, and how it has changed over time, they're welcome to add it to the graph :)


Orwell's Newspeak comes to mind. This can be a good app but it can also serve to stifle conversation by narrowing the Overton window if this kind of technique becomes the norm.

Stay vigilant.


Very nice. Although perhaps you could do well to remove some sites from your intake. For example, while the following link is mild compared to its source material, it's hardly devoid of sensationalism:

https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645a8edbcdaefdcdfe3806b...


This is great, but I didn't realize that was a video at the top of the page; I think it needs the 'muted' attribute for it to autoplay.


Hey, dev on this project, thanks for the heads up! Fix should be there soon.


Modern "news" is a lot like sewage padded by corn fructose syrup and wrapped into shiny colorful pills to fool the mind. It's true that the pills have useful elements in trace amounts, but if you start harvesting them from the pills, you'll get poisoned. Your LM just removes the deceptive shell, but the pill's contents remain the same. I think it would be better if your LM identified and highlighted lies and deceptions in news articles. Most of them will be all in red, but that's the goal: give users an idea what they are reading. For example, the prompt for your LM could be: "for every statement in this arricle, mark it in red if it's a lie or an unsubstantiated claim, mark it in purple if it's appeal to emotions, mark it in green if it's appeal to authority" and so on. I doubt journalusts will be able to outmaneuver LLM trained on every book in the internet. (journalusts to distinguish from true journalists, that are exceedingly rare today)


though thats true this product (if widely used) would reduce incentives to make clickbaity headlines like 'You Wont Believe' or 'Watch what happens when'. Also 5000 word essay at the start of every boiled potato recipe. Thats a step forward but to change the actual content of news would require adjustment of journalistic motivations, which are primarily either money or power driven. they dont change easy especially given how much money is in keeping populus close to 50/50 on only 2 options.


You can't copy and paste on desktop. That's thoroughly frustrating, it's understandable, but a more suitable mechanism should be found than strictly disabling it.

From A Random Article[0]:

"In the second case, the court ruled in favor of Louis Ciminelli, a Buffalo developer convicted for taking part in rigging the bid process and property fraud. The justices reversed a lower court ruling based on a theory of law that the government later abandoned."

That might be "boring" to the point of "uninformative." It also gives me strange reminders of the book "Brave New World," and I think most of the authors so edited might feel the same way.

I would presume to _add more_ to the article then to _take away_ from it, in some cases, to the point of blinding the reader from any fact whatsoever.

[0]: https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7...


From the Science section, there is a headline "Metallic Object Falls Through New Jersey Home's Roof", which is the desensationalized version of "Possible meteorite crashes through the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm".

The ambiguity of "metal object" kind of makes it more sensational than "possible meteorite".


This is a pretty cool way to tackle this problem, but I don't think there's any "easy" solution to this problem space, which I visualize as:

News media needs to make money. To do so it needs eyeballs. Eyeballs, despite our best efforts and intensions, can't help but be drawn to sensation (and blood). The news media thus selects for sensation and blood.

The add-on effect of this that makes it all matter: recency bias as well as some other cognitive quirks we all have mean that when the news media selects for sensation and blood, we start to believe the universe is a lot more sensational and bloody than it really is.

This is demonstrable: publish a story about a freak one in a million train accident and people stop riding the train and start taking their cars, despite risk of accident in car being by every way of measuring it drastically higher.

I'm not saying that news media shouldn't talk about train crashes, I'm saying I'm not sure we've figured out yet how to remind people that the world is actually mundane. People watch the news to "be informed," but in actuality their perspection of reality is being warped.

The news would have you believe crime is going up or down based on whether it makes a good story, when (depending on where you live) the relatively minor adjustmens in these statistics really don't affect you, every walk to work statistically speaking will leave you unmolested.

The media would have you believe that there are riots across the country in response to the cops killing an unarmed person, again. When in reality, most protests are really quite boring, just a lot of people walking around and maybe occasionally chanting. If there even is a local protest.

I don't know what it will take to remind people that the world is boring, but right now the news media is motivated against this, because the angrier and more scared we all are, the more we click in.


Hey after I click "Desktop Android" when I am on Android, please don't show a full screen ad for an iOS app


Yeah especially when they can detect I'm not even on iOS in the first place.


This is the kind of app that I imagine would get popular, then it gets bought out, then the new executives would turn to each other and put a negative sign somewhere in the code turning the newly acquired app into a sensationalizer that does the opposite of its original purpose, for more engagement and corporate metrics.


We need a similar app that removes existentially cynical themes from HN comments


Love the idea, it would be nice to have this as a chrome extension.


What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean? Is there any additional detail on what exactly it does?


What exactly does "What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean?" mean?

I think what you're really saying is: "I'm less interested in the work this person did to make something cool; selfishly, I'd like to know if it follows my biases so I can judge it based on politics."

Or you're just curious how it works and haven't spent the effort trying it out, which is valid.


What a weirdly aggressive attack... Either I'm selfish and have a lot of biases or I'm lazy.

Could it not be that as a person with an interest in AI and general technology I am wondering if there is any detail on what does an "AI" look for to determine a "sensationalist" title and how does it "desensationalize" it?

I have scanned the twitter feed and the app and just wondering if there is anything on how it works. The answer can be no.


I'm not trying to attack you, I was dissecting your intentions, which I'm now noticing came off as super rude and I apologize for that.

But let's be frank... It's clear through your verbiage that you were either thinking about this politically or were actually just curious as I stated in my previous message.

I never said you were lazy, there are many reasons why you might not be able to try out the product right now and it's totally normal to ask questions when you assume others might have answers. It's also possible to do selfish things, or think selfishly at times and not be a selfish person, I was not trying to antagonize.

Sorry for misunderstanding your intentions, for some reason when you asked "What does desensationalize exactly mean?" I read it particularly negatively.


I read the OPs comment seemingly in a completely different way than you.

To me, it's just a comment asking how it may work (technically). Pretty normal to ask that on HN. The persons feelings or intentions aren't reflected in the comment and I think aren't relevant to the question either way.


I think it's the word "Exactly" in his sentence that changes the meaning away from "I'm intellectually curious" for me. I'm just reading between the lines but the op can change their intention as they please and deny so whatever I say at this point is irrelevant and it's likely I was being too cheeky.

Wouldn't someone who was intellectually curious just ask: "That's interesting, I wonder how it works?" and not: "What does desensationalized exactly mean?" which is overly negative. Incidentally, I'm being accused of being negative for pointing that out.


May I polity just say that perhaps defending yourself to this many people is unneeded. You said your two cents, hammering the same nail with a different hammer won't get the nail in any deeper. I've already completely moved on, you should as well. We are in HN, not reddit, let's all get a long as best as we can and discuss the matters at hand. I have no problems with you, I hope you have nothing against me.

My intentions were not negative, if it was interpreted that way I apologize, same as you I type the way I type.


FWIW I also read:

> What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean?

as being snarky rather than curious.


So you can be rude, but I can't be a little cheeky, roger that. I have no problems with you and I hope you have a great day!


They were not rude. You were not a little cheeky.


This is unnecessarily presumptive and negative. They have a simple question - and that doesn't mean they didn't try it out to see how it works from the user side of things.


The way the question was asked was not asked as if by a person who was simply curious, so yes I was negative.


It'd be interesting to see a variant of this app with a slider bar, allowing one to drag a widget to see the exact same stories but with say, far-left, left, center, right or far-right biases applied.


This should be useful for the ever-more-hyperbolic weather reports that dominate network news now.

NBC News, almost every week: "20 million Americans threatened by severe weather this weekend!"

"Bomb cyclone threatens 10 million people"

"Atmospheric river menacing 18 million people"

Translation: A rainy front is moving through several states.


I mean there is a different between 'getting some rain this weekend' and 'life threatening flooding'.

The atmospheric river post would be an example of the second headline and should still maintain the necessary urgency and implied danger.


There is indeed a difference, but you wouldn't know it from listening to these breathless announcements every night.

What I hate about these particular (nearly verbatim) examples is the summing of the entire population of every state that might be touched by a system and barfing it out as if it's a body count.

And why all of a sudden does every weather phenomenon (or variant thereof) have a new sensational name?

And on a California-centric tangent: I also detest meaningless labels, which CA loves. For example, there's a RED FLAG WARNING! WTF is that supposed to mean? Are millions of people threatened by red flags? OH NOES!

And finally there's "sigalert." Insert giant eye-roll emoji.


Would be nice to be able to see a summary of the original article below the ai one, including the sensationalism


The prospect that this type of tech could proliferate is politicians' and political media's worst nightmare lol. Imagine everyone putting a boring filter on CNN, Fox News, and political Twitter. Politicians would have to run on policy platforms again, which has become almost unthinkable.


With the "by omissions" dishonesty that most politicized news orgs go with these days, I think gathering all news, then putting it through the AI, would be ideal. There would be some chance at getting the whole picture.

I'm far more interested in what a sensational news org decided to not include.


Please allow me to pay you so you can focus on this full-time.


Great execution.

Question: How do you intend to make money from/monetize this?

The reason I ask is because I have several "pet" projects like this I've been meaning to develop but with the time cost and financial cost it has to be something I can at least cover the server and maintenance costs.


I would like to pay for a news aggregator like this, especially if it had more topics. $1 a month would be easy to part with and would cover GPT costs quickly with a relatively small number of users.

I would also like to see an RSS reader that does the same to my own feeds, but that could be cost-prohibitive.


"Sensationalism" is not a bug. It's an essential aspect of useful news.

Those of you who think it isn't... let me guess... You didn't major in sociology, anthropology, or psychology?

Those of you who respect sociology/anthropology/psychology and yet still think that "sensationalism" (presented in quotes because that is a socially-constructed, loaded term) is something that distracts you from real news, I'd like to hear some of your nuanced thoughts on this. Because it seems to me that one man's "sensationalizing" is another man's "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." And that's quite important.


Seems to me it’s just a hyperbolic arms race in a pretty naked attempt to generate clicks at all costs. I am quite content to figure out how the news effects me without breathless editorializing in the title.


What would be an example of a headline that you think people would label Sensationalist but that you would describe as "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." ?


I'm not against such kind of experiments but there should be very strict legislation to label any kind of AI-generated or processed content as such. I hope that lawmakers catch up quickly enough to make this happen at least in the EU.


Well done.

There is something like this in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' by Vernor Vinge; his intergalactic societies translate their alien languages - and incompatible methods of expression - using an application similar to this one.

Very cool whenever sci-fi becomes reality!


If you take biased news sources controlled or strongly influenced by corporate/government entities X Y and Z, and de-sensationalize them, you'll still get biased sources controlled or influenced by X Y and Z. Just saying.


It would be great if it could summarize topics of bundled individual news over time. Often a single news really is part of a wider context and doesn’t make sense to be read in isolation without knowing the context before.

I believe Google News does some bundling of topics.

Though I also recognize that topics are hard to define as they could be chosen arbitrarily wide. Everything could be a topic. The ultimate topic would be “The Universe” which contains everything.


This is awesome. I have been hoping for this for a long time. It reminds me of reading a paper newspaper from the 90s. It’s all about information being shared, not clickbait. Thanks for making this!


I'd settle for an app that merely identifies all of the overwrought elements in a story and color codes them, so that we can teach people that these sources are a negative influence on their lives.

Don't rephrase it, just show me all of the sentence fragments that need to be rephrased. Or better still, make it a 'lint' tool that rates articles and websites by the density of manipulative verbiage they use.

These sites will piss you off and teach you nothing in the process.

These sites will piss you off but actually teach you something.

These sites will placate you (I'm looking at you, Ted Talks).


I’m kinda curious how this would make truly sensational news completely blasé


There's already - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

It's shows left, center, and right bias of new articles.

Read the 'From the center' version of articles, and the bias and sensationalism has been removed - https://www.allsides.com/story/media-industry-cnn-staffers-c...


Isn’t coming to a news story from these specific political viewpoints already a whole lot of bias?

I don’t think we can boil down most things into three separate POV. Not everything needs to be looked at through a political party’s perspective


Came to say this. The point seems not to be give an "all sides showing" but specifically to remove language that's designed to trigger our subcortical response systems.


Is that even possible? Take the specific language apart the choice of which stories to report on is already/can be highly biased.

Not sure a sanitized Fox News or NYT is “bias free” and is probably more dangerous than approaching the original articles knowing what their bias is.

With that said the product being demo-ed here is about sensationalism not bias per se as in this discussion.


They actually use a 5-dimension political spectrum. Left-right is not specific to any political party, dates back 200+ years and is extensively used in academic and nonacademic literature.

What other system would you recommend for evaluating political bias in news?


> Left-right is not specific

You could have left it here.


Center bias is as much of a bias as any other.


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