Signal Sources — August 2026

This is the first run of Signal Sources, so all 20 sources below are new — the reading list starts here.

🔬 Research & Labs

BAIR Blog

Berkeley's AI lab publishes its own papers straight from the people who wrote them, no press office in between. A recent post traces a kernel-porting project called K-Search from CUDA to Apple Silicon, the kind of write-up that never makes it into a conference recap. Cadence: weekly to biweekly. Feed: https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/feed.xml

SAIL Blog

Stanford's AI lab runs the same format — grad students and faculty writing up their own results — with a recurring "Papers and Talks at [conference]" roundup that works as a cheat sheet for what actually mattered at ICML or CVPR that year. Cadence: weekly to biweekly, with spikes around conferences. Feed: https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/feed.xml

🛠️ Engineering Blogs

Fly.io Blog

Fly.io's own engineers narrate the mess of running a public cloud in first person: GPU fleet rollouts, a Rust gossip protocol called Corrosion, the sandboxing work behind their agent product. It reads like someone explaining a system to a colleague, not a polished case study. Cadence: biweekly to monthly. Feed: https://fly.io/blog/feed.xml

Tailscale Blog

Alongside the product updates, Tailscale runs genuine postmortems. A recent one walks through hunting down a SQLite corruption bug that had apparently been sitting in the wild for sixteen years — that's the kind of debugging story worth the subscription on its own. Cadence: roughly weekly. Feed: https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml

Turso Blog

Glauber Costa's team is rebuilding SQLite in Rust, and they write about the internals as they go: MVCC, async I/O, giving every customer their own database at scale. Primary-source database engineering, updated almost weekly. Cadence: weekly. Feed: https://turso.tech/blog/feed.xml

📮 Newsletters

ChinAI Newsletter

Jeff Ding translates Chinese-language writing on AI policy and industry that most English-language coverage never touches, including reactions inside China to its own AI companion regulations. No other newsletter is doing this specific job. Cadence: weekly. Feed: https://chinai.substack.com/feed

Interconnects

Nathan Lambert works on post-training at Ai2, and it shows. His posts on frontier training methods and the open-model ecosystem read like notes from someone who runs the experiments, not someone summarizing a paper abstract. Cadence: one to three times a week. Feed: https://www.interconnects.ai/feed

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, the pair behind the "AI Snake Oil" project, bring the same skepticism here, testing what AI agents can and can't actually do instead of assuming it. A useful counterweight if your feed already leans toward hype. Cadence: roughly monthly. Feed: https://www.normaltech.ai/feed

📦 Changelogs & Release Feeds

vLLM Releases

The changelog for the inference engine most self-hosted LLM deployments run on. New model support and quantization tricks show up here, sometimes several times a week, before anyone gets around to writing a blog post about them. Cadence: multiple releases per week. Feed: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/releases.atom

Ollama Releases

Ollama ships constantly, and the release notes are where new backend support (MLX, for one) and CLI changes land first, often as release candidates before they hit the stable channel. Cadence: multiple releases per week. Feed: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases.atom

✍️ Practitioners & Independents

Eugene Yan

Eugene builds evals and recommendation systems for a living, currently at Anthropic and previously at Amazon and Alibaba. His posts read like internal engineering notes someone decided to publish: heavy on what actually shipped, light on speculation. Cadence: roughly monthly. Feed: https://eugeneyan.com/rss/

Vicki Boykis

A founding ML engineer with a long resume in embeddings and information retrieval, writing with a craft-first, occasionally contrarian streak. Her recent post on running local models well is more useful than most vendor comparison posts. Cadence: roughly monthly. Feed: https://vickiboykis.com/index.xml

antirez

Salvatore Sanfilippo built Redis and has spent two decades as a working systems programmer. Now he's turning that same skepticism on AI coding tools and lab governance, posting every few days to weekly with no patience for hype or doom. Cadence: every few days to weekly. Feed: https://antirez.com/rss

🎙️ Video & Podcasts

The TWIML AI Podcast

Sam Charrington has been interviewing ML researchers about specific papers and systems since 2016, which makes this one of the longest-running technical interview shows still going. Each episode picks one piece of work and stays with it instead of skimming five. Cadence: weekly. Feed: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/MLN2155636147

The Cognitive Revolution

Nathan Labenz talks to AI builders and researchers multiple times a week, and occasionally sits down alone to walk through a paper — a recent episode dissects Anthropic's interpretability work on "global workspace" in more depth than the paper's own abstract. Cadence: multiple times per week. Feed: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/RINTP3108857801

📊 Benchmarks & Leaderboards

LiveBench

Most benchmarks get gamed within a few months of release. LiveBench refreshes its question sets on a rolling basis specifically to stay ahead of that, and scores against verifiable ground truth rather than another model's judgment. Cadence: continuous, new model configs added multiple times a month. Feed: none

SWE-bench Verified (Vals AI)

Vals AI runs every model through the same minimal bash-tool harness against the 500-task SWE-bench Verified set, which strips out the scaffolding tricks that can make some agent demos look better than the underlying model actually is. Cadence: rolling, roughly every one to two weeks. Feed: none

Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub

Epoch pulls FrontierMath, GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, and a dozen other evals into one place, plus its own composite Capabilities Index. Useful when you want the whole picture instead of checking five separate leaderboards. Cadence: continuous, multiple updates a month. Feed: https://epochai.substack.com/feed

🏛️ Communities & Policy

AI Alignment Forum

A researcher-run discussion board for technical alignment work, where the comment threads are often as substantive as the posts — people like Paul Christiano showing up to argue about failure modes in reward hacking and debate training. Cadence: several posts a week. Feed: https://www.alignmentforum.org/feed.xml

Tech Policy Press

A nonprofit newsroom covering the actual mechanics of AI regulation and platform accountability, plus a standalone tracker for pending legislation and litigation. Closer to a beat reporter's notebook than a think-tank press release. Cadence: multiple articles daily. Feed: https://techpolicy.press/rss/feed.xml

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20 sources added this month · 20 on the list. The full archive imports as bookmarks or as an OPML feed bundle. Found a dead feed? Reply to the email.