- Below is the latest edition of w3w, my free newsletter about emerging technology, including AI, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more . If you would like to receive it in your inbox every Sunday, please subscribe here.
- I used several AI apps to assist production of this edition of w3w. Final edit 100% by me. For fuller detail, see the newsletter's commit history on GitHub.
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I've written previously about my quest to ditch algorithmic curation of the news I consume. But as it's such an important topic — and rapidly becoming more so due to low-quality "AI slop" proliferating around the web — I want to re-share and update some of my earlier tips for improving news consumption.
Most important, social simply isn’t a primary news source for me anymore, because it’s clearly pretty crappy at that particular job. This is true precisely because social platforms usually lean too heavily on algos that tend to make us angrier and more extreme, not more informed.
Hence I'm generally spending less time on social these days, and I try to reserve it for personal updates, the occasional DM, rants about the Mets, or other ephemera.
For news, the main alternatives I seek out are feeds organized in simple reverse chronological order, often with editing and curation by (gasp!) actual humans.
Tools that fit into these categories for me include:
- Email newsletters. Our inboxes are perhaps the original example of reverse chronology, with everything organized simply by timestamp. Then, within each newsletter (like this one), you’re usually getting one actual person’s curated view of the world. Bingo.
- RSS. Yes, this old standby from the early days of the blogosphere still works. My daily feed reader is Feedly, but there are several others out there you might choose. When you build your own subscription list in one of these things, that itself is a form of human curation.
- Podcasts, downloaded via my desktop podcatcher. The qualifier in that description is really important, as the podcatcher is what cuts out the algos, leaving a simple reverse chronology. As a user of the Ubuntu operating system on my desktop PC, I use the default audio app Rhythmbox for curating my podcasts. (I can also move the downloaded audio files over to my mobile devices if necessary with Rhythmbox.) What you probably don’t want to use, however, is something more platform-y like Spotify or Stitcher. Those are more aggressively (and algorithmically) curated, in my experience.
- News organizations’ bespoke sites and apps. Again, a somewhat old-school option here. But the plus side is that these things usually don’t have much algorithmic curation, except perhaps for the occasional “most read stories” list or something that’s similarly pretty simple. Where the news orgs have generally been more experimental is in story presentation, design, and multimedia experience. But even with those features, you’re still getting the creative vision of human reporters, editors, and designers, not robots trying to target you with ads.
- The Brave web browser. I give this one an honorable mention because its default privacy safeguards protect me well against algorithmically targeted advertising in particular. That’s not exactly pertinent to the matter of prioritizing feeds of news headlines. But it is broadly related to the theme of breaking from the major platforms’ surveillance-driven business models.
Finally, if you want to delve deeper into the underlying threats that bad algos pose to society, I highly recommend the book Weapons of Math Destruction, by data scientist Cathy O’Neil. She does a great job of making the topic accessible to the layman, debunking the misguided idea that algos are inherently free of the ideologies of their creators, and so much more.
Cathy also blogs about these sorts of issues here. And that blog even has an RSS feed! (See what I did there?)
For news consumers, I believe there's a little discussed but urgent need to inoculate ourselves against all the rhetorical poison that circulates online every day. We can't just leave this informational immune response up to news organizations. And we certainly can't leave it to the people running the tech platforms.
We should have learned from repeated experience by now, they're simply not going to do much. Not when there's so much profit to be made from keeping people angry, suspicious, and distracted, regardless of the ill effects on the world around us.
If the rest of us want something different, we're ultimately on our own. Act accordingly.
Five Things: Aug. 10-16, 2025
The week's top headlines about emerging technologies and trends reshaping the web:
- The startup Sentient unveiled a new open-source AI development framework dubbed The GRID as a decentralized alternative to closed AI platforms from the likes of OpenAI. The GRID is designed to help developers build, share, and monetize AI agents. (CoinDesk)
- Crypto markets ran hot and cold. Bitcoin set a new record above $124,000, and ether flirted with its all-time high set in 2021. But then token prices and the stock market retreated Friday after new data showed wholesale-level inflation hit a 3-year high in the U.S. in July. Hopes for a cut in the Federal Reserve's key interest-rate target ebbed, and traders unwound bets on riskier assets.
- The trading platform Bullish, which is also the parent of news site CoinDesk, raised $1.1 billion in an initial public offering at the New York Stock Exchange. Such crypto-related deals have been back in vogue on Wall Street this year. An earlier highlight: the stock-market debut of USDC issuer Circle in June. (CNBC)
- U.S. crypto regulation remains in flux. The Federal Reserve said it will end a program that oversaw American banks' crypto activities. Instead, the group's work will be folded into regular bank oversight... Separately, the American Bankers Association and dozens of state banking groups are urging Congress to close loopholes in the recently enacted Genius Act to prevent a massive flight from traditional cash deposits to stablecoins.
- Indirect exposure to bitcoin in Norway's sovereign wealth fund has nearly tripled over the past 12 months, reaching $863 million as of June 30, according to public disclosures. Norway's central bank controls the country's sovereign fund, which is the largest such entity in the world. Its crypto exposure is driven by investments in companies like Strategy, Block, Coinbase, MARA, and Metaplanet. (The Block)
- North Korean hackers are regularly applying for jobs at Binance, and the exchange's security chief says in a new interview that the company has developed a series of checks to weed them out. Yikes. (Decrypt)
Market Snapshot
A quick look at some major indicators as of Friday's market close on Wall Street:
| Indicator | Close | Weekly | YTD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $117,018.53 | +0.5% | +24.7% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 23,712.07 | +0.4% | +12.8% |
| Gold | $3,382.60/oz | -2.2% | +28.7% |
| USD Index | 97.84 | -0.4% | -9.8% |
| 10-yr U.S. Treasury Yield |
4.3280% | +0.0430 | -0.2450 |
Looking Ahead
- James O'Donnell of the MIT Technology Review has recently covered some harrowing, AI-driven misadventures in law and medicine. The full details O'Donnell has unearthed are definitely worth a look. But the TL;DR version boils down to two rules of thumb about AI that are still worth remembering: 1) AI bots' answers to user queries still need a lot of checking for factual accuracy. Grandiose claims by OpenAI's Sam Altman or other quasi-celebrity tech CEOs aside, the current state of the AI apps that actually exist includes serious limitations. These things aren't yet truly sentient or akin to your favorite clever android from a sci-fi movie. 2) Domain expertise by actual humans is still extremely useful in doing the checking. Full stop.
- Crypto asset-management firm Grayscale has registered new entities with Delaware regulators to offer exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for the Cardano and Hedera tokens. Such state-level filings are likely a precursor to registering more detailed proposals for the ETFs with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (The Block)
Odds & Ends
- Scientists in South Africa have begun injecting rhinos' horns with mildly radioactive isotopes to deter poaching. The injections are safe for the animals but are easily detectable at airports and borders, thus helpful for arresting traffickers. (National Public Radio)
- A University of Georgia geologist has determined that a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a home outside Atlanta in June is 20 million years older than Earth. (CBS News)
That's it for now. Thanks for reading the newsletter today! If you want to know more about w3w's history and (ahem) the author, that info is available here.
If you need to reach me directly, please email peter[at]w3w[dot]media.
Best wishes for a healthy and productive week ahead. 😊