[jillesvangurp]

> You're just a consumer now. And if you're a creative person, your wares are content to be algorithmically milked.

That's a choice.

You don't actually have to be an innocent passive bystander; that's a choice. A lot of these nostalgic threads read like old men shouting at clouds at this point "Get off my lawn!". I'm part of the generation that built the internet (though I didn't build any of it). It wasn't taken from us; we just got old. That's actually on us. Nobody ever stopped anyone from blogging, publishing RSS feeds, or whatever it is people did when they and the internet were young. I was there as well. The only thing that changed is that we sunk in a collective mid life crisis when Google Reader pulled the plug. Alternatives never filled the vacuum. Social networks took over and then imploded. And boohoo the evil corporations took our toys. Give me a break!

If you choose to get your news from algorithmic ad factories, that's a choice. Sure, it's convenient. I do this as well. But actually we're empowered to do whatever we want. More so than ever. There are plenty of tools and content creators out there. And with AI it's trivial to build your own tools. Try it, it's fun. The only limitation is your imagination and apathy.

I've been working on a Google reader style reading experience but running locally with codex. It uses locally running LLMs, embeddings, and entity extraction to stay on top of the fire hose of news. Embeddings enable semantic search, clustering, related articles. Entities identify common topics. LLMs allow me to turn this into a personal news agent and editor. Grand vision and I'm a bit geeking out. But completely doable with all the modern toys we have available. Use openclaw/codex/claude cowork/whatever agentic thing you want, make it parse opml and sync and store feeds. Add some skills and you have yourself an AI news agent. Or skip all of that AI nonsense and do it by hand. RSS readers never were rocket science. This stuff no longer is hard.