Why I built The Chonkerton
I made this because I wanted a way to catch up on AI news, and the news in general, while out walking my dog.
I stare at screens all day, and the endless doom-scroll of a news feed is something I'd rather avoid. Podcasts are great, but sometimes I don't have three hours to listen, and for news, if it was recorded at 5am and it's 8pm now, it just feels dated. Either way it's a time and attention commitment. I wanted something more hit-and-run, something I could listen to on short walks throughout the day.
So I built it for myself first, and found myself genuinely enjoying it.
The summaries and the voices are AI-generated. I know "AI" is a boogieman term right now, and much of that is earned. So, plainly: the voices are generated on an old 3090 in my spare room, which, courtesy of the solar panels on my roof, I can just about call renewable with a straight face. The summaries still run on rented models in someone else's data center, on a cheap plan. The goal is 100% local, 100% sun. The audio half is there; the summary half isn't yet. Here's exactly what the thing does. It reads stories from sources that allow syndication or gave me permission. Nothing is scraped from behind a paywall or from anyone who didn't consent. It summarizes them, reads them to you, and stops.
It doesn't mine your peccadilloes and it doesn't optimize for your attention, because there's nothing here to scroll. Norm Macdonald used to say that when he was a kid the news was half an hour, and he figured they got that right; even then there wasn't enough news to fill it, and the broadcast would wind down with a story about a caribou. That's the spirit of the thing. Could you binge it? I suppose, but the supply is the actual news; once you're caught up, there's nothing left to feed you, caribou included. When it's done, it's done.
The Chonkerton is built and run by one person, me, under Conch Labs LLC. I'm not raising a round or chasing a billion users; I'm building a small, honest product I'd actually want to use, and hoping enough people want the same thing to keep it alive. If that's you, the best way to support it is simply to listen.