I just set up TinyTinyRSS (https://tt-rss.org/) at home and I'm looking into interesting things to read as well as people/website publishing interesting stuff.
This, among the other things, to reduce the daily (doom)scrolling and avoid the recommendation algorithms by social media.
So: who or what do you follow via RSS feed, and why?
Lots of webcomics
NPR,BBC,CBC
Local news
...and THIS site!
Via RSS?
I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?
I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.
The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TNs2ohrc6hnRQ5Sn2w">
- Julia Evans - Daniel Stenberg - Geohot - Cloudflare and Netflix’s respective tech blogs - TorrentFreak - LWN.net - and some others in spanish -
Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.
P.S. Even HN is something you should personally control. It's very useful whenever moderators flag a submission you might've liked.
- Anton Zhiyanov
- Register Spill by Thorsten Ball
- Phil Eaton
- Mitchell Hashimoto
- Gunnar Morling
- Jack Vanlightly
- Charity Majors
- Bryan Cantrill
- Marc Brooker
- NULL BITMAP By Justin Jaffray
Another tip is you can subscribe to YouTube Channels and Podcasts via RSS as well. I wrote a little bit about my setup to help reduce doom scrolling: https://tylerhillery.com/blog/how-i-consume-the-internet/
(It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)
As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.
Matt Lakeman
Global China Pulse
Sinocism
Bartosz Ciechanowski
brr
Construction Physics
Jonathan Nolan's substack
On the Seams
Quanta Magazine
Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist
Aeon | a world of ideas
Classic Film and TV Café
Experimental History
The Marginalian
The Prism - Gurvinder
The Technium
Westenberg.
Chameth.com
Activity in the release-notes tag
All Things Distributed
An Untitled Blog
Charles Hugh Smith's Substack
Chips and Cheese
computers are bad
Dwarkesh Podcast
Francis Stokes :: Githublog
iRi
Rest of World - Latest Stories
Shtetl-Optimized
Signal Blog
マリウス
I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.
A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :
Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/
Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world
Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/
Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.
Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.
All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.
I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.
https://www.writesoftwarewell.com/ - very good software posts, mostly around Ruby on Rails.
https://crankysec.com/ - Cybersecurity rants mostly, fun to read.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ - Ed Zitron's writings. Good counterpoints to all the AI hype these days.
These come up often on HN but I'll call them out anyway:
https://jvns.ca/ - Julia Evans, good technical content all around.
https://xeiaso.net/ - Xe Iaso, good technical content all around once again
I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.
I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir that rips out a bunch of unneeded complexity (config files, databases, fetching, looping, etc.)
Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...
Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/feed/
https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?
https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.
https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)
https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.
Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D
A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).
https://techtalksweekly.io/ - new software dev conference talks and podcasts
https://ciechanow.ski/ - interactive articles about science and engineering
https://jvns.ca/ - great technical content overall
This is a great thread btw.
- Apricitas Economics
- Avery Pennarun
- Civic Texts
- Citation Needed
- Derek Sivers
- Die, Workwear!
- Electrospaces.net
- Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
- Lukasz Olejnik: Tech Letters
- Matt Kiser: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
- Molly White: Citation Needed
- Paged Out!
- Patrick McKenzie: Bits about Money
- Peter Steinberger
- Peter Welch: Still Drinking
- Sam Rose
- Simon Willison
- Squishy Computer
- Sylvain Kerkour
- Zeynep Tufekci: NYT
I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.
Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...
Mixtape•1w ago
These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.