Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites (cut-the-crab.streamlit.app)
I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles that promise a lot but never give me what I’m looking for. They’re full of clickbait titles, scary claims, and pointless filler. It’s frustrating, and it’s a waste of my time.
So I made a tool. You give it a URL, and it tries to cut through all that noise. It gives you a shorter version of the content without all the nonsense. I built this because I’m tired of falling for the same tricks. I just want the facts, not a bunch of filler.
What do you think? I’m also thinking of making a Chrome extension that does something similar—like a reader mode, but one that actually removes the crap that gets in the way of real information. Feedback welcome.
206 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadmaybe add something about keeping pronouns consistent? otherwise pretty cool!
How about the ability parametrize with the target URL? Something like https://cut-the-crab.streamlit.app/[TARGET_URL] ?
A pre-click quality signal is more interesting and fair I imagine. Though I don't know how one can build a solution that is not game-able.
An information theory centric angle that is interesting to think about.
That would leave us with another set of new creators that would emerge, those people who would be driven just by the desire of sharing a tiny piece of their lives or knowledge, purely for the fun of it, without needing more incentive than the joy of doing it.
you know... like the internet was in the begining.
I'd like seeing that :)
Absolutely. The Internet has way too many "content creators" and not enough "artists, writers, and musicians."
When I go online, I'm not looking to "discover and consume content." What a bland way to describe the output of creativity.
Before ~2006, we all had blogs, and posted regularly with no financial incentive; imagine a web where people posted to share their expertise, and that's what the early internet was. Money ruined this.
Also, early youtube (and google videos) had plenty of stuff to watch. Would youtube be full of "professional" "content" with no ads? Probably not, but there is a world in which youtube subscriptions actually gated videos that required a budget to make.
When I was young and naive, I learned guitar so I could make tunes, not realizing I'd failed to search engine optimize narratives about my journey for ad placement to fund my spotify pay for play to get myself concert gigs to sell hats and t-shirts until I could land sponsors.
I'm sad to think in my naïveté I might have encouraged future children to create music for themselves and put it out there to see if it resonates with others, instead of enroll the kids into creator influencer classes teaching how to content mill for the idiocracy.
I'm ashamed I thought personal joy and fulfillment was a valid incentive, taking away their drive to generate and grow rich.
But a plugin is nice too.
We had SEO filler rubbish before we had AI.
Is it actually looking for AI at all or was this just included as the current buzzword.
I interpret a click bait title as having nothing to offer at all. On the off chance that there is something there, it will almost certainly be repeated elsewhere with less cruft.
Also if you use Https instead of https in the url field it gives an error…
We love novel ways of wasting fossil fuels!!
Nothing directed at OP here, I actually love this idea and I’ll totally use this for recipes
However, relying on AI as a solution has its own pitfalls: Even state-of-the-art models frequently generate inaccuracies and hallucinations, which raises questions about whether AI truly adds value if the extracted "information nugget" truly is what the original's essence is about or just another layer of BS.
Is the idea that your site works with sites that are blocking ChatGPT, or is the goal to be a more native browsing experience (via chrome extension)?
If I give ChatGPT your comment (slightly edited):
” I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles that promise a lot but never give me what I’m looking for. They’re full of clickbait titles, scary claims, and pointless filler. It’s frustrating, and it’s a waste of my time. gives you a shorter version of the content without all the nonsense. I’m tired of falling for the same tricks. I just want the facts, not a bunch of filler.
Here’s the URL: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/1...
I get this:
” President-elect Donald Trump attended the reopening of Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, marking his first international trip since the election. French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Trump at the Élysée Palace, where they were joined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for discussions on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The reopening ceremony, attended by over 50 world leaders, celebrated the cathedral’s restoration following the 2019 fire. First Lady Jill Biden represented the current U.S. administration at the event.”
Cut-The-Crap gives me this, which is also good, but not necessarily a benefit over what I already have:
” French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to the Elysée Palace in Paris ahead of the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, which has been closed since a devastating fire in 2019. This marks Trump's first trip abroad since his election.
Macron is set to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Trump, and the three leaders will meet together. Approximately 50 world leaders are expected to attend the cathedral's reopening, although President Joe Biden will be represented by First Lady Jill Biden.
Trump and Zelenskyy last met in September during the UN General Assembly. Despite speculation of a meeting during this visit, a Trump transition official stated no such meeting was planned.
Macron has positioned himself as a mediator in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, which began in February 2022. The U.S., France, and allies have imposed sanctions on Russia to support Ukraine's territorial integrity. Zelenskyy has urged the Biden administration for more support, including lifting restrictions on Ukraine's military actions against Russia.”
So add more fluff, move the actual thing people are looking for to the bottom, etc. Oh and add controversy, "The only authentic". Then add sex - a suggestive photo.
The thing is that AI can now generate these sites for you so no need to do anything yourself.
Finally pay Google to feature your ad - I mean recipe - and do other stuff to ensure that real recipes do not steal your traffic. :-)
I’ve just been asking chatgpt for recipes lately and it’s doing a great job. The other night I made béchamel sauce for the first time (cooking for 6 dinner guests!). ChatGPT nailed it.
I’m 2% sad for all the recipe websites it’s ripping content from. But then I remember what utter Adsense cancer they all are. “My mum made this recipe! You’ll never guess step 6!” While being plastered with 8 auto playing videos on the edges of the screen. I hope those websites suffer a firey death.
But on the other hand you could have just purchased any cookbook that covers the basics, instead of taking all this web-scaped content without attribution or compensation. I mean, look, I totally get it and I'm certainly guilty of this too - but let's not pretend that we're not basically stealing other people's content here. Much of the time those people running those recipe websites are just trying to cover their hosting costs and make a squeak of money on the side.
A friend of mine tried to set up a website that would host open-source recipes for people - he called it The Open Sauce - but in the end there just wasn't enough input from recipe creators.
Also, and by the way, the top google hit for bechemal is this : https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/139987/basic-bechamel-sauc.... Few ads, and the recipe is at the top of the page. No life story in sight.
I feel a little sorry for the good quality cooking websites out there. I’m just so burned by the bad ones that I’d rather skip the Google search. ChatGPT is also a straight out better resource because I can ask followup questions to chatgpt - “How much should I make for 6 people?” / “What is rue, anyway?” “It’s been a few minutes and my milk isn't thinkening. Am I doing anything wrong?” - etc. It’s an incredible cooking aide at my level of skill.
In the first case its a trillion dollar business based on scraping the entire internet and sharing out a lossy, compressed version of the content with no attribution or financial contributions to the original creator. In the second case its a shady, technically illegal practice of scraping DVDs or online video streams and sharing a lossy, compressed version without attribution or financial contributions to the creator.
Maybe Napster just needed VC backing to make it seem legit.
This is an interesting idea, but I don't think it makes much sense to apply that logic to classic kitchen recipes. Who, exactly, is the original creator here?
The common recipes I'm asking chatgpt about - crepes, homemade pasta or bechamel sauce - are hundreds of years old. We could extend your metaphor to say that the bechamel sauce recipe has been "pirated" by generations of cookbooks for hundreds of years. Chatgpt is just continuing the well established tradition of recipe piracy, in order to bring these amazing recipes to the next generation of chefs.
After all, allrecipes.com didn't invent bechamel sauce either. Do they make financial contributions to the original creator of the recipe? I think not.
Edit: for a better example - Brothers Grimm stories aren't protected, but if someone makes a movie based on those stories the movie absolutely protected.
If ChatGPT is reproducing content verbatim from its training set, then I think the claim its violating copyright holds a lot of water. (And I think there was a NYT lawsuit claiming such - and I wish them well).
But if chatgpt learns from 100 recipes for bechamel sauce, and synthesizes them into its own, totally original description, then I don't see how what its doing is any different from what the authors of those recipe books & websites are doing. If anything, its probably synthesizing a lot more sources than any recipe author. If the only common factor between chatgpt's output and any specific source is the (public domain) recipe itself then that seems ethically in the clear to me.
I can't see a justification to criminalise what chatgpt is doing with recipes, without casting so wide a net as to open recipe authors up for persecution in the same way.
Scraping a website isn't illegal. When humans do it, we call it browsing the web.
It feels wrong to me but that says nothing of the laws we currently have or how a judge would rule on it. Personally if I were on a jury I'd be inclined to side with the NY Times in their case against OpenAI, with the huge caveat that I only know the basic of their case and am not bound to only what's officially evidence.
But so long as chatgpt doesn't reproduce any of its sources word for word, I don't think its a problem. Especially since cookbooks have been doing the same thing for centuries.
At least, I think that's where I would draw the line. But I agree - we're in very new territory. Who knows what a judge will think.
That's more or less what took Uber from criminal enterprise to mainstream.
https://www.justtherecipe.com/
which was mentioned here a while back:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160959
If we assume a generous 2 tokens per word on average (OpenAI suggests it's actually 3 tokens per 4 words), that's still 5 full 50k word novels worth of text every month for the price of a single DigitalOcean droplet.
This chain is also kinda funny: "Cut the BS!" > Streamlit App > Streamlit bought by Snowflake to push their pretty low value (IMO) but very expensive AI play. You should figure out how to run this against the output of Snowflake AI; you'd probably end up with an SQL query result set :)
We were given this advice way back in 1985 with "the only winning move is not to play. how about a nice game of chess?"