Kirk here. The “follows” (likes + follows, actually) of the page recently passed the 6,000 mark. Thanks to everyone (editors and readers) for participating.
I went for quite a long time without posting much. The reasons were that I had become rather disappointed in the Facebook platform (i.e. what Cory Doctorow has termed en***tification) and also found that I was spending too much time on the page and not able to do other things. Recently, I’ve been feeding news to the page in a way that I think will be more sustainable. What follows is for nerds like me. If you don’t have any particular interest in how the sausage is made, so to speak, please feel free to stop reading here.
I have two RSS feeds for Google news alerts: “Kumamoto” and “熊本 + 外国人”. I use RSS for other things and so I check my feeds on my app (Vienna on my Mac) every day. A problem I have is that I get a lot of false positives. “Kumamoto” might snag flight reports, for example, and “熊本” + “外国人” often includes articles about Kumamoto where “gaikokujin” only appears in a side bar so the article isn’t really about 外国人 in 熊本. Wading through all of these false positives took a lot of time and wasn’t really sustainable in the long run.
Fortunately, I’ve found a solution that I’m quite happy with. I’ve made a little app for myself that uses Python scripting and AI (via API) to sort through everything for me. I’m not able to program in Python but Claude helps me – so-called “vibe coding.” Now, I just double click on a little app and the script is invoked. It checks the unread items in my RSS app, uses Python to mechanically sort items into “include” and “exclude” categories, then uses AI (Claude API) to check stuff that can’t be sorted mechanically. The result is data presented to me in the form of a web page with a small number of “included” items at the top and a much longer list of excluded items below it.
It works remarkably well. I can now check in less than a minute what used to take me much longer to sort through. So, I should be able to keep feeding news to the page and also get other work done. ;)