A personal wikipedia of everything I’ve watched, read, or bookmarked, distilled into structured pages. I send my agent a link on Telegram and it writes the entry.
This is the “consumed and distilled” companion to my main site zaakir.io and my writing at blog.zaakir.io: where those are what I build and write, interests.zaakir.io is the running record of what I take in - videos, articles, and books - turned into structured notes.
Why I curate my own news
I have a long list of books, talks, and threads I want to get through and nowhere near enough hours, so this site is an experiment in a different way of consuming them: find the crux, keep it, move on.
Two facts make that feel less like cheating. Prose is mostly filler by volume - the hundred most common English words (the, of, and, to…) already account for about half of everything written, and information theory puts printed English at roughly 75% redundancy, so the actual signal in a book is spread thin across tens of thousands of words. And we forget nearly all of it anyway: without deliberate review, most of what you read is gone within a week, which means a full read you never revisit and a summary you never revisit are both lossy. The main difference is the hours spent.
I am not pretending a summary equals the book. Skimming measurably costs comprehension, and the nuance, the counter-arguments, and the odd tangent that changes your mind tend to live in exactly the parts a summary throws away. So the point isn’t to skip reading, it’s to force the one thing that actually makes an idea stick: active extraction. Each entry is me restating an argument in my own structure, and that restatement is the difference between passively skimming and genuinely keeping something.
And it’s mine. Instead of a feed prescribed by whoever is optimising for my attention, this is one I curate myself: books, the people worth learning from, and my own interests, distilled into things I will actually reread. That is what “news” should be - not whatever happened to be loud today, but the ideas I decided were worth keeping.
Browse
Use the topics in the sidebar, the search (top left), or the tag pages:
- AI & ML - how modern AI systems actually work.
- Design - product, UX, interaction, and how everyday things work.
- Engineering - building software, dev workflows, systems.
- InfoSec - bug bounty, AI red-teaming, and hacking real systems.
- Astronomy - the universe, the Sun, and stargazing.
- Business - startups, marketing, and building companies.
- Economics - incentives and how the world really works.
- Self-Development - communication, focus, and living well.
- Creativity - creative practice and craft.
- Chinese - learning Mandarin: HSK1 fundamentals and the patterns behind the language.
- Russian - learning Russian grammar, starting with the case system.
How entries get here
I send a link to my agent (/interests <url>). It pulls the transcript or article text, identifies the overarching concepts, writes a structured page with a sources section and links to related entries, and the site rebuilds automatically.