It's an extension of a longer-running project (https://www.forth.news) where it exposes and organizes 100s of newsworthy primary sources -- statements, press releases, press pool reports, emergency alerts, etc, whether from press email lists, X/Twitter, Bluesky, RSS, etc. The web UI is similar to TweetDeck - and it sends notifications.
Latest update now allows some panels to be based on an LLM prompt (i.e. "everything about the Iran War and its effects in the U.S.") which searches the entire catalog of sources as they are posted.
It's my project -- pulling in primary news sources (think pool reports, statements, alerts, press releases, etc) and mixing it with some trusted reporter info. It's all automated, which means its very fast to get breaking news out.
(There is also https://pro.forth.news which is more granular, includes searchable archives, etc)
If there are sources or areas we're not including that you'd like to see, please let me know - jared at forth dot news.
Sounds interesting, but 8/10 stories at the top are about local hazardous weather conditions. Maybe those could be filtered out somehow, but I feel like the default should be better...
The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.
But it also destroys the business model behind the site.
Sure, you could technically redesign to handle the bot traffic, but if the bot traffic is just taking the data and reducing any need for humans to visit the site, why is he putting in the effort to maintain the site?
Because... ? If I'm operating a site, and I want $X to allow a bot to scrape my site, why shouldn't the bot be allowed to make the purchasing decision to scrape the site? Obviously the bot owner would have their own set of guardrails, but if it allows sites like The numbers to stay up because bots aren't going to look at ads so the old model of displaying ads isn't going to work, I have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing.
According to the post inquiries for purchasing the data increased as a result though so they might not make the decision, but they do make the suggestion.
Well, why is he? If it's for ad revenue, this problem is surely global to the web. If it's because he likes to do it, it shouldn't matter if one AI or a trillion scrape the site. I feel like we badly need a rethink of the web architecture after DoubleClick anyway. Maybe the name of the game should be to cut down a site's assets very hard and use static hosting for them. This interferes with crummy sites that show a mess of inlined ads every refresh, but now that there are a billion 'poor users' this is no longer feasible.
Maybe more an inherent problem with these chatbots.
LLMs are great, but they aren't producing new information. You still need people for that. But if you cut down any incentive for the people to do that, the LLMs will starve.
Isn't this the NRA's argument? The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Or at least somewhere between that and full on protection racket.
LLMs come on the scene, hammer the site until it goes offline or racks up bills that threaten bankruptcy, and the solution then is to pay for an LLM to fix it and monitor it.
That's a real nice site ya got there, it would be a shame if massive datacenters going up around the world were to start hammering it from tens of thousands of IP addresses....
Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
I know some journalists say that we're living in the post-truth era and perhaps they're right in the sense that it's what the market needs?
We don't value right or wrong outside of the financial markets so much because there's not much profit to be made there. A politician doesn't need to know if their ally is ethical, only need to act according to the narratives. A piece about a company easily swayed by sponsorships and donations, or needless alarmism that keeps public mind away from real problems.
The current system we live in doesn't value the accuracy of the information and I think that's a tell on how badly the world is running.
Don't know what it's like where you are, but most people nowadays are not so interested in reading a 'newspaper'. It's all online/tv/radio/podcast
Even the local freely distributed papers are hardly read (unless placed near to a train station or similar so someone about to have 30 mins on a train may pick it up).
Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.
Fox wasn’t! That’s what made the Times worth reading! It was center-left people being objective to the best of their ability. So you could use it as a neutral-ish default, the check out Fox for any stories or angles the Times had overlooked.
This is sort of what I mean in one of the other comments regarding biases. This is an entirely subjective take, not to mention vague. Who redefined it? Whose journalism were they redefining? Everyone's, or specific people/outlet?
There's news for entertainment, and news for making informed decisions. I suppose in a healthy democracy, it would be in the people's best interest to have unbiased and thoroughly investigated the news available so voters can make the best decision for themselves and the country. It wouldn't be profitable so it would have to be publicly funded like PBS News, BBC, CBC. And, well, it was good while it lasted but politicians seem hell bent on demonizing anything for the public good.
"it would be in the people's best interest" -- the problem is that as we're seeing, people do not seem to agree, at least not when voting with their wallets.
And who determines what is "unbiased?" If I don't match your biases, am I biased?
Seeking out experts, eye witnesses, and sources of information and reporting on them as plainly and dryly without altering the facts and given statements whether you, your sponsors, the government or audience likes or agrees with them is about as unbiased as one can hope for, no?
Even the basic act of deciding which stories to cover can be seen as bias.
Which experts are we seeking out? What are their agendas?
Altering facts and statements is not bias, it is incorrect reporting. Anything reported as factual that is not is wrong, period, full stop.
But framing? You can frame a story any way you see fit.
And as I was trying to get to in the earlier comment, "bias" is in the eye of the beholder. What might be straight down the middle for one reader could be wildly biased to another.
What is your a priori estimate for the percentage of news that is consumed as entertainment? As in, it does not result in a change of behavior in the consumer beyond engendering neuroticism. I'd put that number at or above 95%. News is gossip wearing a suit.
That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.
Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.
The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.
You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.
Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.
The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)
Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.
If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.
All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.
The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.
The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.
Look, I agree with some of this. Full disclaimer, I am building that service that pulls in primary sources and aggregates/synthesizes (https://www.forth.news)
But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.
"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.
I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.
Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.
AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.
My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.
That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.
Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense.
Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.
That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.
I pulled some numbers and I get $239 for the average car and average use based on [1], [2], [3]. Using the same numbers the Federal part would be an additional $79. Do you have different numbers for Washington state? Like, do people drive less than 10,952 / year or have more efficient gas vehicles?
The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below.
Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225
Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.
I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.
Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight.
Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.
That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.
Sounds like it's a fairer system that would be harder to corrupt. You're right, it'll never be implemented because we're totally infested by regulatory capture.
It seems like the point isn't that it's intended to tax EVs, it's intended to shift the cost of road maintenance onto the vehicles that cause most of the road maintenance needs. Basically, it's aligning incentives so that firms bear the true cost of their actions.
If that results in taxing semi and heavy duty trucks, that may be a good thing. A lot of the wear & tear on highways comes from trucking; if it shifts a lot of that truck traffic to rail, it likely would significantly reduce the total cost to society.
It's not flawed logic though. If, say, a mile of highway costs $1 million and it needs some expensive repaving/reconstruction every 20 years, who should bear the cost?
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
Done that way, personal vehicles are barely going to be a blip on maintenance, but keep in mind this also pays for new construction as well as other non-pavement traffic infrastructure.
Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?
I think future proofing taxation now rather than waiting until enough people have EVs to try to resist it isn't a bad call, and can easily live in parallel with wanting to subsidize broader adoption.
I own an EV in Massachusetts and I’m not aware of any extra EV fees of any sort here. The only EV-specific thing the DMV even offers is an EV-only license plate, and the bi-annual registration fee for that plate is the same as a standard passenger vehicle plate ($60).
The EV tax was only implemented because it's easy to implement both politically and practically, not because it's the best solution.
A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.
Yeah because today tires are free for anyone with a tread depth of less 3mm, of course.
Realistically tires and brakes are already subject to sales taxes and are not subject to review at annual vehicle inspections. We probably should enforce that cars on the roads have working brakes and tires but that’s seemingly beside the point of how we pay for the maintenance of the roads.
We're discussing a country that bases "Safety ratings" by how well they protect the driver, and ignore every other person outside the vehicle - meaning the people least likely to be hurt here are the ones trying to cheat the tax
It's an extension of a longer-running project (https://www.forth.news) where it exposes and organizes 100s of newsworthy primary sources -- statements, press releases, press pool reports, emergency alerts, etc, whether from press email lists, X/Twitter, Bluesky, RSS, etc. The web UI is similar to TweetDeck - and it sends notifications.
Latest update now allows some panels to be based on an LLM prompt (i.e. "everything about the Iran War and its effects in the U.S.") which searches the entire catalog of sources as they are posted.
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