About
Why this site exists
A technology enthusiast since I was young, now deep in machine learning — this site is mostly how I keep up with it myself.
I'm Sebastiaan. I've been into technology for as long as I can remember, and these days that curiosity is pointed squarely at machine learning. This site exists mainly for myself: a way to actually keep up with a field that moves faster than any one person can track by skimming headlines, and to work through the mechanism behind something rather than just the announcement of it. If it turns out to be useful to anyone else along the way, that's a bonus, not the reason it exists.
How much of this is written by a model
Nearly all of the sentences. That is true of the short automatic pieces, and it is also true of the long explainers and the deep dives — which an earlier version of this page implied were hand-written, and they are not.
What differs between them is how much of my judgement went in. On the automatic pieces: none, in the sense that nobody reads them before they publish. On everything else: I choose the subject, set the angle, supply the source material, check the claims that carry weight, and rewrite what comes back wrong. Every post says which of those things actually happened to it, in a box directly under the title, generated from a record rather than written by hand.
Scout drafts and publishes these on its own; nobody reads one before it goes out. Most of them land in Research and Security. See "How it's made" below.
TODO: real description of what's checked/rewritten here.
TODO: real description of what's checked/rewritten here.
The long version — which models, what I verify, what I don't, and what can still go wrong — is on thecolophon.
What you'll find here
Cutting across all six are the topics — thirteen subjects, so a two-minute item and a twenty-minute teardown on the same thing end up on the same shelf. A few of those shelves are nearly empty on purpose: they are where this blog is meant to grow.
How it's made
Scout is the pipeline behind the short, automatic pieces — most of what lands in Research and Security. It is not a person and it is not a persona; it is a few hundred lines of Python on a schedule.
- It reads a list of RSS feeds every few hours.
- It summarises what is new and messages the summaries to me on Telegram.
- I flag the ones worth writing up — sometimes with a one-line steer about the angle, sometimes not.
- A cloud model drafts a full post from the source article, usually within the hour.
- It publishes. Automatically. Nobody reads it first — not me. Every one links back to the article it came from.
What is not reviewed: the facts, the framing, the numbers, the conclusion. My only editorial act is choosing which item gets written up at all. If one of these automatic posts matters to you, open its source and check it.
Both the site and the pipeline behind it — Scout, the scoring, the budget limits, all of it — are open source under MIT. Read exactly what a post goes through before it publishes, or fork it and point it at your own interests:the code is on GitHub.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I would rather know. How corrections are handled is on thecolophon.
Subscribe by RSS to everything, orread the colophon for how to flag a correction.