This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone.

I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety.

My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end.

40 years creates a mirror between the Reagan Era and today. The parallels include celebrity populism, Cold War tensions (Soviets vs. Russia), and inflation economics.

The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition:

OCR & Ingestion: Converts raw pixels to text.

Scoring: Grades events on metrics like Dramatic Irony and Name Recognition to surface stories that are interesting with hindsight. For example, a dry business blurb about Steve Jobs leaving Apple scores highly because the future context creates a narrative arc.

Objective Fact Extraction: Extracts a list of discrete, verifiable facts from the raw text.

Generation: Uses those extracted facts as the ground truth to write new headlines and story summaries.

I expected a zen experience. Instead, I got an entertaining docudrama. Historical events are surprisingly compelling when serialized over weeks.

For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.

It hits the dopamine receptors of the news cycle, but with the comfort of a known outcome.

Stack: React, Node.js (Caskada for the LLM pipeline orchestration), Gemini for OCR/Scoring.

Link: https://forty.news (No signup required, it's only if you want the stories emailed to you daily/weekly)

Source or country of origin would be nice.

“Opposition leader Aquino” in article without any other context could be confusing

> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed Health and Human Services

Secretary Margaret M. Heckler on Wednesday refused to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Mrs. Heckler denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had sought to shorten the process by asking the secretary to declare an 'imminent hazard' to public health. Declaring an 'imminent hazard' would invoke emergency powers and allow an immediate ban. The NRDC contended that routine, low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed is allowing drug-resistant bacteria to enter the human food chain, weakening the ability of drugs to fight human disease. The NRDC sought a ban on the use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline. Mrs. Heckler's decision does not end the matter permanently, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still can ban antibiotics in animal feed through administrative regulations. The issue of antibiotics in animal feed has already been under review at the FDA for more than eight years

Antibiotic resistance predicted all that time back

> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition

This is neat! But I wonder about longevity of the project if it relies on scanning newspapers.

Do you have an endless suply? Perhaps there is some digital archive you could use?