Following on from my post about doom scrolling through the news and feeling the way I do right after eating that second or third piece of cake M told me I shouldn’t have, I finally focused on trying to actually fix my news problem instead of just avoiding it. I asked ChatGPT the other day whether it could build me a rule structure for news that would, in essence, censor things I read. Things I don’t want, things I do want. Turns out it could.
I consume most of my news through RSS feeds in an app called Reeder. My first attempt was simple. I exported my OPML file, the list of everything I subscribe to, handed it to ChatGPT, told it exactly what I wanted and didn’t want to see, and let it build the logic. I ran it once or twice. It took ten to fifteen minutes to process each time, was very compute intensive, and just wasn’t doing what I wanted.
So I had a different thought. I already had this RSS feed file. Could I get AI to build me an actual tool to do the heavy lifting, with the AI only handling a smaller slice of the logic on top? I’ve had good luck with that pattern before, where the AI builds a local tool for the grunt work and only steps in for the parts that actually need it. Turns out yes, it could, and of course once I proposed it the AI agreed it was a much better approach than my first idea. Which, seriously, if it was that much better, why didn’t it just suggest that in the first place and save me the time? That’s a separate emotional issue I need to unpack in its own therapy session about AI use.
It suggested FreshRSS, an open source RSS reader I’d actually used before, back on an earlier version of my VPS. I’d stopped using it at the time because Reeder already syncs everything to my devices through iCloud, so self hosting the same feeds felt redundant. But I’m generally in favor of hosting my own stuff when I can, so we brought FreshRSS back with all my existing feeds, added another container alongside it to do the preprocessing and staging, and then a third layer that’s the actual AI step, pulling the processed data and turning it into a summary rather than a raw doom scrolling feed.
The first couple of summaries it gave me were pretty thin, partly because my source list was thin. For months I’d been whittling down my RSS feeds because Claude or ChatGPT kept telling me two sources were basically duplicating each other, so I’d drop one. Now that AI is doing the curation instead, it’s going the other direction. It’s telling me to add more sources so it can build a fuller, more complete picture on the topics I actually care about.
One example. I’m an American living in the UK, and I also work in financial services, so I want to track the FX rate between the US and UK. Instead of just pulling from general news sites, it started going straight to the Bank of England and the US Fed for specific announcements. Something I would never bother doing manually, but a computer doesn’t mind, and then it digests it down for me.
It’s been running for about a week now, and it’s genuinely doing what I asked. I find it pretty funny that if a news provider censored my news like this without asking, I’d be outraged. But since I’m the one asking for it, I couldn’t be happier. There are hints here and there of touchy topics, since some hinting is unavoidable given what I’m tracking, but nothing that pulls me in to go dig further. Which, again, is exactly the point.
I’ve since added a bunch of topics I’d forgotten about in the first round, and it’s giving me good paragraph length blurbs with source links if I actually want to go read more. It’s a real step change from doom scrolling and bookmarking articles for later that I never get back to. I’m not trying to be comprehensive here. I want a picture of what’s going on, fifteen to thirty minutes of reading, and then I stop and I’m not depressed about the state of the world. I know I’m building myself a bit of a bubble, but I’m trying to stay reasonably well rounded by excluding specific things rather than whole topics.
One thing it set up that I haven’t tested yet is a weekly digest of blogs and general interest reading, more of a how-to and hobby mix. Sort of a Sunday paper edition, which I thought was a nice touch, even though I’m not sure I actually want that on a Sunday. So that’ll need some tweaking. For now the plan is it generates once a week but I can also just run it on demand. Still early beta stage since I don’t have a few weeks of usage on it yet.
Behind the scenes, this is all running on a public VPS I keep separate from the one hosting my blog, set up specifically for stuff like this. It’s pretty locked down, but the AI agents can hit the API to pull the processed data out of the app when needed. Next up is probably tuning the sources further, and I’d like to get it to a point where it publishes the results to a private webpage or file I can load in a browser and use Safari’s read aloud option on, instead of me manually asking Siri to read sections. That’s not solved yet.
The other thing I didn’t fully appreciate until I started this project is how much of a time sink visiting news sites had become, the same way social media is. It truly is an addictive habit you don’t realize you have until you’re trying to stop it. I catch myself now with a free second reaching to check the BBC or CNN, and stopping myself, and I hadn’t really noticed how often I was doing that until I started noticing myself not doing it. My to do list has gotten better as a result, since I’m spending that time on things I’ve actually said I want to do instead. More on that another time.