Scour - October Update
Hi friends,
In October, Scour scoured 1.5 million articles from 34,703 feeds. 164 new users signed up since the last product update email, so welcome to you all!
Here's what's changed in the product:
š§ Smarter Topic Matching
I rebuilt the way Scour determines which content is relevant from the ground up so you'll see more relevant posts and fewer off-topic ones in your feed.
During the rebuild, I also replaced the embedding model Scour uses, meaning I am no longer using the sponsored model from MixedBread. Thank you so much to MixedBread for sponsoring 2 years of Scour's embeddings š. I'll continue to be a big fan of their work and eager reader of their blog, which you can subscribe to via Scour here. Going forward, Scour will be using the Voyage 4 family of models, which I'm pleased to say I actually heard about initially on Scour.
š£ļø Smoother Screen Reader Experience
For people who use screen readers to navigate Scour, the website experience should be quite a bit better now. Headings are easier to navigate and keyboard shortcuts are easier to find and can be turned off so they don't interfere with screen readers. Thanks to Elliott P for letting me know that certain parts of Scour were hard to find and use!
šļø Filter Feed to New Sources
For those of you who subscribe to specific feeds, Scour previously had the options to see content either from "All sources" or "Feeds you follow". Now, you can also see only content from "Beyond your feeds" if you want to use Scour to discover exclusively new content you're not seeing through your feed subscriptions.
š Some of My Favorite Posts
Here are some of my favorite articles I found on Scour in October:
- I really appreciated this provocative take from Sean Goedecke that Software Engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI. As he wrote, "Software engineering has always automated industries".
- Alex Kesling wrote about how engineers are moving up The Stack of Caring, "the layer cake of abstraction and technology between a person and some thing they want to do in the world".
- Zvi Mowshowitz wrote a good (and long) summary of many of the hacks and vulnerability disclosures that led to October being referred to as Black October, The Hackening. One former OpenAI employee quoted in the article said "Feels like March 1, 2020 for Cyber".
- Ben Congdon wrote about Agentic Monitoring, which has been on my mind since I recently moved away from Fly.io's built-in Grafana and an open source product analytics stack to a home-rolled system that does both observability and analytics. Similar to Ben, I found this line from an Anthropic post quite interesting: "We call these Claude 'superfans.'...They...act like an experienced engineer who has nothing better to do than to refresh charts and look for anything strange."
Happy Scouring!
- Evan