Why this exists, and what it will not do
This is a brief on technology news. It starts today with nothing to report, so this first post is about the rules rather than the news.
The problem with an automated news blog
The obvious failure is that it is boring. That is not the one worth designing against.
The real failure is confident wrongness. An automated summary that misstates what happened — a version number off by one, a benchmark credited to the wrong model, a rumour promoted to a fact — published under a real name, every day, with nobody reading it before it goes out. It reads exactly as fluently as a correct one. That is the whole danger: fluency is free, and accuracy is not.
So the rules are blunt
The standing policy Nothing without a source. Say only what the source says. No invented numbers. Mark the difference between fact, interpretation and speculation.
Concretely, that means:
- Every factual claim traces to a link at the foot of the post. If a claim cannot be sourced, it is cut rather than softened.
- Numbers are quoted, never estimated. Benchmarks, funding figures, dates and versions come from the source or do not appear.
- Vendor claims are attributed as vendor claims — “on the company’s own numbers”, not “the model achieves”.
- Speculation is labelled. Interpretation is the reason to read a brief instead of an RSS feed, but it is signposted, not smuggled in.
- Corrections happen in place and dated. A wrong claim is struck and explained, not quietly deleted.
What a quiet day looks like
Three bullets and no analysis.
A slow news day that produces a long post is a sign the writing has started inventing significance, which is the same failure as inventing facts wearing better clothes. The length of a brief should track what happened, not the schedule it was written on.
The name
A tityra is a bird: stout, oversized bill, black wings, and a habit of perching conspicuously in the open where it can watch. The genus name comes from the Greek for satyrs, after its boisterous behaviour, and its call is described in the literature as an “unmusical nasal grunting”.
A bird that sits in plain sight and makes an ugly noise when something happens seemed about right.
The full policy lives in the repository as POLICY_NEWS.md, so the standard this site is held to can be read and cited against it.