Tuesday, August 15 — Big project update and 1 significant news story

Today is a big day for the project.

Analyzing that many articles with ChatGPT-4 has always been costly. To reduce the bill, I use several optimizations, one of which was to analyze the articles in a bulk: “ChatGPT, please provide scores for these 30 articles”. But that came with a drawback — the scores for any single article were affected by other articles in that group, sometimes dramatically: the 6 could get an 8 and vice versa.

That stopped me from fine-tuning the prompt and introducing new parameters. What’s the point in these improvements if they all are going to be washed out by randomness anyway?

Today I’m removing this optimization. There is now enough premium subscribers on the website to cover the 2x bill increase.

Now each article is scored individually and the scores are more reliable. It also opens the door for further improvements — I’m already working on introducing two new parameters: certainty and actionability.

Back to the news.

Today ChatGPT read 1210 top news stories. After removing previously covered events, there is 1 article with a significance score over 7.5.

[7.7] UN experts accuse Taliban of human rights violations in Afghanistan — UN News

A group of United Nations human rights experts has accused the Taliban of violating human rights in Afghanistan, including the rights to education, work, and freedom of expression. The experts cited reports of summary executions, arbitrary detention, torture, and ill treatment, with women and girls, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals being the hardest hit. The experts called on the Taliban to reverse its treatment of women and girls, end reprisals against former government officials, and uphold the general amnesty. They also highlighted the dire humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, with millions of children not receiving basic food or healthcare.

Want to read more?

See additional news on newsminimalist.com.

Thanks for reading us and see you tomorrow,

Vadim