🗞️ Extra extra! This is Finite News: the mindful, AI-assisted newspaper.

🤔 Motivation

I happily pay for subscriptions to quality news sources and support essential journalism! But increasingly news websites and newsletters are filled with clickbait, pop-ups, and attention vampires.

I made Finite News to deliver a lean, personalized daily news email. Its goal is to reduce distractions and focus on what's happening in the world.

👀 Features

Finite News can...

• Give you the day's headlines from your trusted APIs, feeds, and websites.
  • Enforcing strict limits on the volume of news, and leaves out ads and links.
  • Applies multiple large language model (LLMs) and rules to consolidate headlines that are about the same topic, remove opinions and clickbait, and only show news you haven't seen before.
• Forecast your local weather.
• Get you the latest XKCD comic.
• Alert you if your favorite NBA or NHL team plays tonight.
• List upcoming events of interest to you.
• Tell you if a new electric car is eligible for the $7500 tax rebate in the US.
• Tell a joke.

📰 Make your own newspaper

How it works

Finite News is set up to run as a scheduled job in AWS Sagemaker.

Concepts to know

• Publication: The general processes that are shared by every issue and subscription.
• Subscription: The customizations that personalize Finite News for a single person (subscriber).
• Issue: One email delivered to one subscriber.

Installing

1. First, you need to create data files that configure everything about Finite News. See "Designing your newspaper" below.
2. Create an AWS account and a Sagemaker domain.
3. Clone this repo as a directory in your Sagemaker environment.
4. Make a new AWS S3 bucket.
5. Add to S3 the files you created in "Designing your newspaper"
6. Set up AWS Secrets Manager. Create a "secret" (really it's a collection of secrets) called fn_secrets.
   • Add a new item to fn_secrets called BUCKET_PATH with the value of the URL to your S3 bucket.
   • 💡 If you don't name your secret "fn_secrets", or your region isn't "us-east-1", you'll want to edit the notebook to pass your values to the function get_fn_secret()
7. Create an account on sendgrid.com. This lets you send emails in the notebook (via an API).
   • Add your api key to your AWS Secrets Manager under fn_secrets as SENDGRID_API_KEY
8. (Optional) Create an API account on openai.com, to use GPT to filter headlines
   • Add your api key to your AWS Secrets Manager under fn_secrets as OPENAI_API_KEY
9. Test the notebook finite_news.ipynb in Sagemaker.
   • Select a Data Science 2.0 image with Python 3.8 on a ml.m5.large instance. Other settings may work too! But the "Data Science" (1.0) image may not, and getting it to run on other instances may require changing the code such as finding different package versions that are happy together in that environment.
   • In the Parameters cell, set DEV_MODE = True etc so no email is sent. It will write the day's issues to a file in the notebook directory instead.
   • Inspect the file.
10. Run the notebook as a scheduled job. This is easy!
    • Set Parameters at the top of the notebook to production mode, which at minimum requires DEV_MODE = False
    • Click the Create a notebook job icon in the menu bar.
    • Set the schedule for how often it should run. If you want to publish daily issues, select Day and a time in GMT.
    • 💡 Make sure it uses the same image (Data Science 2.0 etc) that worked in your test.

Designing your newspaper

🚨🚨 Comply with the Terms of Service of your sources and APIs.

Create the following files. See the samples_files folder for examples. Later, your files will go in your AWS S3 Bucket.

• publication_config.yml: General choices for how to run Finite News
  • This includes setting up individual news sources. See the sample publication_config.yml for instructions.
  • If you need an API key to access a particular news source, add api_key_name: {NAME OF YOUR API KEY} under that source in publication_config.yml. Then add a new secret in your AWS Secrets Manager, under your fn_secrets, that is called {NAME OF YOUR API KEY}, like in publication_config.yml, and set the secret value to your api key.
  • To disable GPT, delete the gpt section in publication_config.yml.
• config_*.yml: Configuration for each subscription (each daily email).
  • To add a new subscriber, create a new config_their_name.yml file and upload to the S3 bucket.
  • Finite News creates the list of subscribers by looking for all YML files in the bucket that begin with config_.
• template.htm: The layout for the email. The parts in [[ ]] are populated by the code at runtime.
• substance_rules.yml: Policies for identifying "low substance" headlines to always drop. You can add rules to remove headlines on topics you don't want to hear about or recurring noise.
• thoughts_of_the_day.yml: (optional) Shared list of jokes and quotes sampled for Thought of the Day. To enable, in config_*.yml file(s) set add_shared_thoughts=True.

❤️ Bugs, questions, and contributions

You're awesome, thank you! The best way is to create a new Issue or Pull Request.