Today's threads (a thread)

[t3cht@mastodon.social]

@pluralistic
You can roll your own reader!

This weekend I built my own locally hosted rss+ reader. Yes, used Claude.
Why? I want features, my features & cuz I can now, thx Claude. No worries about sunset, lives on NAS.

My Features? Crawler enhanced, Jina API allows me to scrape pages without rss or decent html feeds. Jina also does tagging and categorization, creates summary cards for every story. The next layer creates briefs of any feed with LLM. Great read aloud too.

[t3cht@mastodon.social]

@pluralistic
As this matures I'd be happy to share code with others if there is interest. It's a dockerized project. Next it needs a feed manager so I don't have to choose between editing json and burning tokens to adjust feeds.
I run it in a webpage on DDG behind a pihole, so clicking through to web pages for reading remains semi private and relatively low ad. I also pair it to tailscale so my locally hosted page is always available to me and family with the same experience.

[t3cht@mastodon.social]

@pluralistic
Also interested in any adjacent projects who might want to share code or ideas for improvement.

[ildiavolorosso@sfba.social]

@pluralistic 'Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric.'

We're living this in the Salesforce ecosystem right now. They recently replaced all their well-functioning support forms with agents powered by their bet-the-company AI bots. And the outcome is predictable: it's twice as hard for partners and customers to get the specific help they need, and which they knew how to easily get from the support forms. Many of these forms kicked off automated processes that are essential to partner business. Now you have to argue with a bot that gets things wrong, requires more effort to interact with, and acts as a case deflection tool. All because someone had a number-go-up metric to meet.