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hombre_fataltoday at 5:35 AM3 repliesview on HN

RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.

We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.

I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.


Replies

mmsctoday at 5:52 AM

> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.

An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)

There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt

skybriantoday at 6:15 AM

I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?

pipeline_peaktoday at 5:39 AM

LLMs use up tons of energy and water.