AIndigestion

You know what’s an “easily AI-automate-able task” that felt utterly boring? News digests.

Back before the Slop Era, newsletters were how I curated my own personal knowledge base. There were a few publications that I treasured for their selection (personal favorites, The Educator’s Notebook and Offbeat) and I trusted them to keep me sharp and informed on my professional and personal interests.

It’s actually what inspired this newsletter. I was just starting my entrepreneurial journey 6+ years ago and I wanted to preserve a Friday morning every other week to click through my link salads and read the things I didn’t have time to consume during the workweek. That’s why this is called the TL;DR- I would read and craft short summaries of articles I liked so you didn’t have to.

But now, content is cheap. Good writing and reporting is harder to find in the slop-o-sphere.

And digests are cheaper. Many newsletters now have some set of links they share (and often, are paid to promote).

So when all these breathless AI enablement people were hawking “Make an AI News Digest,” I was initially bored. Why have an AI summarize what I’m already reading? But after a bit of self-reflection, I realized my ick was something more perverse. I think AI digests rubbed me wrong because I was being encouraged to mortgage diversity of taste for precision of interest.

Stew on that for a second: diversity of taste. “Taste” is currently the Silicon Valley holy grail in the year of our lord 2026 that my Zoomer niece calls aura. It’s personality, plus discernment, plus opinion, and when taken as a whole, represents an attractive and intriguing perspective.

Whose opinions do you adopt? Taste.

Whose opinions do you thrash? Taste.

What’s beautiful, ugly, familiar, and foreign all at once? Taste.

Peter and Lavinia who curate the newsletters I loved? They had taste that I liked and I would use their link digests to shape my own taste. I became more tasty because they surprised me with their perspectives on what they thought was good.

AI does not have taste; it is a tabula rasa. Actually, it's worse: it's the average of all content and that includes your uncle's conspiracy theory site and your weird cousin's Jeff Bezos erotica. An AI-curated news digest is really just a mirror for my own taste, especially in Slopsville where someone has already published an AI-generated content nothingburger specifically crafted to suck an AI curator into a sales funnel. Yes, this is happening now.​

If you build a news digest that simply grabs the headlines on your chosen topic, you will be handed exactly what you already care about, girding the walls of your homogenous echo chamber harder every week. Precisely what you asked for, right? A perfect bubble of recycled ideas sourced from content marketers slinging AI-powered snake oil.

But did I create an AI news digest? You bet your tokens I did. However, it’s not really a news digest like you are probably imagining, but what I have dubbed a Curiosity Machine.

And yes, you can steal my Curiosity Machine. Great artists steal.

I call it a Curiosity Machine because I was wary of falling into a hall of mirrors. Instead, I programmed for anti-promotion, cross-domain exposure, emerging vs emerged developments, and the crème-de-la-crème: an ever-cycling list of trusted curators. Lemme TL;DR a few things that I did to intentionally curate surprise over slop:

1. Ignore the mainstream

I specifically told the agent to assume I’ve already read whatever is already on the headlines because headlines are unmissable and I ain’t gonna read that stuff twice. Instead, I wanted to find content that hadn't quite broken into mainstream discourse.

Example:

• ​Two-week test — if Dan reads NYT/Hard Fork in two weeks, would this feel like he saw it coming? If no, cut it.​

2. >50% Cross-Domain Sourcing

Silicon Valley and many AI-hypesters are myopically focused on the tech industry. An improv troupe using ChatGPT is far more interesting than another lead gen strategy.

Example:

• ​Of the 3–4 specific seeds in any briefing, at least two must come from outside the AI/coding ecosystem proper.​

3. Does it Smell Promotional?

Content marketing is just ads in prose. I don’t want to read a blog post that expertly positions a software solution as the next best thing. It never is. I also want to know if a Reddit post is suspiciously the exact same content across lots of channels, which AI is quite good at sniffing out.

Example:

• ​Identical phrasing appears across multiple "independent" accounts within the same week.​

4. Practitioner Hunger Games

Channeling my appreciation for human-curated content and sourcing new ideas, I gave my Curiosity Machine a bit of dice-rolling chaos to cycle in fresh creators and perspectives. This is what breaks the precision-of-interest loop.

Example:

• ​Roughly once a month, propose one new human curator for the practitioner list (someone whose recent judgment earned it — cite the post that convinced you) and nominate one to retire or demote.​

Do I love my Curiosity Machine? Heck yes. I’ve found myself referencing things I’ve read in my curio digest much more often than content I’ve read in other newsletters. I’ve learned about a vibe coded rave MMO, middle schoolers teaching their teachers about AI, and AI-assisted storytelling to help caregivers for dementia patients.

Wanna learn how to set up your Curiosity Machine? Grab some time with me and I’d love to help you stand up your curator of delightful surprise.

A TL;DR from the CRO

Stick your snoot into new perspectives and you'll be surprised how it stretches you.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

PS. Listen to me read this aloud!​

SMSCWAI Cool Person Announcement

Congratulations to Simon Bergeron for being the inaugural Cool Person of Show Me Something Cool With AI. In our last meetup, he showed us his cool digital employee, Lemon, including a live voice mode that puts Siri to shame.

It's also high time to shout out Simon who I met on LinkedIn as just another guy on the internet but who has become my go-to AI enthusiast who understands how to make complicated tech easy for normies. A man after my own heart.

You can be a Cool Person just like Simon (and you might even meet him!) at the next SMSCWAI on July 31st.

MUSHROOM UPDATE

Oh my lawdy, thanks to my MushMan, I finally propagated mushrooms.

I have been trying to grow mushrooms for YEARS. Only once did I manage to get something substantial out of my mycological efforts, but this is WAY better than anything I've done before. This bag of mushroom substrate and spores came from a true MushMan at a neighborhood festival.

We're on a texting basis.

These guys hopefully will grow into some edible yummies, assuming they survive the next few weeks. Ain't gonna count my mush until they've...bloomed? Sprouted? Shroomified.

MushMan also told me that my outdoor mushroom attempts may still bear results, but it could take years. I was elated last summer in my last mushroom update when I saw some mycelium starting to appear, but then the winter came and by this spring I thought I had failed again. I say I love failure, but come on- it's mushrooms. They grow on dead things. Failing to intentionally decompose was an ego bruiser...

...but I trust my MushMan. He got my indoor experiment working; I should keep faith that the outdoor experiment just needs time.

We all will shroomify when given enough time,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. If watching mushrooms grow doesn't do it for you, how about watching this while on mushrooms?​