2024-06-05 11:40:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I've been getting mildly interested in the run up to the EU elections over the past few days. It's not something I've ever paid any real attention to before, but this year, there's so much going on. It feels genuinely a bit exciting. Like the entire region is approaching some sort of important crossroad.
It's also an opportunity to do some arm chair tourism. Learn about some of the different cultural subtleties that exist across the continent. A time when it's possible to suss out genuine differences in the flavours of society, but also the things that hold us together, and maybe even more importantly, a way to envision how we could be better in ourselves and better integrated together in the future. Respecting and even appreciating our differences, and genuinely looking forward to building a great future that we can feel part of and valued.
For me the western EU differences are quite well understood. I've spent time in many places in those countries. It's still interesting to catchup and remember how things were, how they might have changed in recent years. But I'm also really interested in the central and eastern countries. Those I have much less first hand experience with. Mostly just through watching alternative small budget films and talking to immigrants back home. There's a certain romanticism to it, they seem somewhat exotic, but in a cold sort of way.
It's one of the reasons I like listening to the Crypto Voices Podcast. Matthew Mezinskis is a US expat in the region, living I think in Poland. His crypto coverage is the main attraction, he is somewhat famously good at numerical and scientific analysis of the monetary base system, and he's really excellent at explaining things. But he often drifts into a bit of local central european politics at the end of the episodes. It's a boots on the ground view of what's happening in the region. And that's tended to be quite a lot recently, given the war in Ukraine.
Most of what I'm reading newswise is from the Guardian and BBC news websites. It's great writing but I'm always wondering what their biases are. I really wish I could read similar articles but from the different countries local media. Unfortunately because of language differences, but also because of shear volume, that's pretty difficult.
It occurred to me so, that wouldn't it be great, in this age of LLMs and ChatGPT, to have an AI bot that on the daily, consumed all the election news, in all the various languages, creating not only a summary in your native language, because translation is so good these days, but also did some genuine analysis to discover biases, discrepencies, conflicts of interest, in short produced some high level pieces that gave you a way to check the pulse across the entire region.
You could also imagine that, if the AI bot knew your interests and background, it could unearth things that might be of particular interest to you.
Would love to know if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't, why not?