Scour - September Update
Hi friends,
In September, Scour scoured 1.2 million articles (up from ~880,000 in August) from 28,568 feeds. Also, welcome to the 116 new users who signed up since my last product update email!
Here's what's new in the product:
š Library and Article Tabs
You can now find all of your saved, loved, and liked posts, as well as your full reading history, in the Library section.
Also, if you click Read on Scour for any article, that page now has tabs for the article's content, other posts that it cites and that cite it, and the feeds it was found in. Here's an example for a widely cited post.
š Expertise Level
Scour now tries to determine the level of expertise each post assumes and infers the level of expertise you have per topic (based on the wording of your interest is and the types of articles you click on or like). At least for me, this means I'm seeing far fewer beginner Rust questions from Reddit showing up in my feed. (For those in tech, this is powered by Jev.)
š Search for Feeds and People
Scour's Search will now show you results for feeds and authors, in addition to posts that match your query.
Relatedly, you can now follow individual authors as sources and Scour will try to show you their posts from any website they publish on.
šļø Detecting More Junk
Scour now detects and hides more junk, ranging from sales pages and SEO garbage to uninformative link roundups and low-value discussion threads. You should see more high-quality content in your feeds. By my current count, about 1 in 10 posts being shown before was some kind of junk that Scour now hides.
ā” Faster Feed
I continue to obsess over making Scour feel super fast and snappy. In September the slowest feed loads got about 7x faster (p99 went from 2.1 seconds to 282 milliseconds) and the median feed load time got 2x faster (p50 went from 90 ms to 40 ms). This is also while ranking about 1.4x as much content as the month before.
šŖ¦ RIP Reddit Feeds
Unfortunately Reddit announced their plan to turn off RSS feeds on November 13th. This is how Scour checks which discussions are happening on Reddit and finds articles posted on different subreddits. After November 13th you'll no longer see links to the Reddit discussions from Scour š¢.
š Some of My Favorite Posts
Here are some of my favorite articles I found on Scour in September:
- The biggest news in the tech / AI world was the release of TypeSafe's Jev model. These were some of the related articles that I found interesting:
- The Latent Space interview with TypeSafe's CEO, Jev: System One models for Prod, not God ā with Diogo Almeida, CEO, TypeSafe AI.
- Fingerprints of Jev and Jev's Architecture Unmasked were interesting black box investigations into Jev's base model using the tokenizer and other externally visible properties.
- Sixteen Models Walk Into a Storefront gives a very nice breakdown of techniques that can be used to manipulate LLMs' assessments of which products to buy and how much to pay for products.
- Logo Design Trends in 2027 Favor Marks Someone Can Prove They Made. In the age of AI-generated glossy slop, this is no surprise, but it's a nice write-up.
- The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Quite random but an interesting read.
- I Judged My Mum for Overusing AI, Until I Caught Myself Doing Worse. I continue to appreciate Sid's commentary on the age of AI. This is very relatable.
Happy Scouring! - Evan