CYCLICISM (ˈsɪklɪˌsɪzəm)
The belief that history repeats itself
Last updated at 01-30-2024, 00:23
Sure, the news is sensational.
But don't you feel like you've read it before?
Growing up, I used to love reading the news. Midterm elections, climate change, a kid taming a wild alligator. It was all fascinating. But the news today feels... boring. Sure, it's sensational, but with almost every article out there, doesn't it feel like you've read it before?
I'm here to show you that you have. Or at least, you've read something semantically very similar (in the vector sense).
Enjoy.
About
This website was created by applying a sentence transformer to the headline and abstract of every article published by The New York Times between January 1st, 2001 and December 31st, 2005. Every six hours, the page is refreshed by fetching the currently trending articles and applying the same transformation. Similarity is then approximated using annoy indexes.
Why 2001-2005?
I (the omniscent narrator) was born in 2001, and I wanted to see what the world was like when I was too young to open a newspaper and go, "Huh."
Also, ~20 years is an amount of time where you'd probably agree "That's a long time ago," but not so long ago that you won't recognize people, places, and events.
Want to learn more? Keep scrolling.
OBLIGATORY PERSONAL WEBSITE LINK
But... who are you?
I'm Mark 🖤, a student at Harvard studying math and computer science. I like data structures and algorithms and have a bit too much free time. Oh, and I'm probably going to graduate soon, if you know any cool places to work. ;)