Reader
The questions readers send us most often, answered in the publication's voice. Send a question we haven't answered to editors at blackboxnotes dot com.
Q01
The publication is operated by Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd, a Singapore-registered media-holding company and a portfolio entity of Web4Guru. Editorial decisions are made by the named bylines: senior critic Annika Vogel, staff analyst Tomás Esquivel, and the standing Editorial Team. The operating disclosure appears verbatim in the footer of every page.
Q02
The publication is funded by its publisher, Lumenwhite Media Holdings. We do not run display advertising. We do not run sponsored posts. We do not accept "thought leadership" placements. We do not host conferences. We do not co-brand with vendors. The publisher subsidises the publication's operating costs as a long-horizon editorial property; the publication, in turn, agrees to nothing in exchange for that subsidy except editorial independence as described on the About page.
Q03
The named bylines retain editorial control. Web4Guru does not approve, review, or commission specific articles. We disclose the parent-entity relationship on every page footer and again at the head of any piece that touches a Web4Guru product (Web4Guru, Web4OS, the ROGA recording project). We will publish any request by the publisher to soften coverage; to date, no such request has been made.
Q04
Because we read what we cite, talk to people we name, and run pieces through a three-stage fact-check before they ship. That work does not scale by writing faster.
Q05
Yes. Pitches go to editors at blackboxnotes dot com. A useful pitch is two paragraphs: what the piece will argue, what the contributor has specific access to, and why now. We respond to viable pitches within ten business days.
Q06
The newsletter signup form is in the page footer and at the end of every article. The newsletter is a short monthly dispatch: the cornerstone essay, the regulation-watch roundup, and the corrections column. We also publish RSS and JSON feeds; see /rss.xml and /feed.json.
Q07
Because the publication's beat is opacity and auditability, not model performance. A new model is interesting to us if its release changes the auditability landscape — for example, by introducing or removing a meaningful interpretability mechanism, or by triggering a regulatory response. New benchmarks alone are not the publication's beat.
Q08
Most often because we have not yet found a way to write about it that meets the publication's editorial standards: we have not seen the underlying technical document, the system has not been audited in a way we can describe, or the framing the subject offers is the framing we would need to argue against. Send the document to editors at blackboxnotes dot com and we will read it.
Q09
Short excerpts up to 300 words may be quoted with attribution and a link to the original. Longer republications require correspondence. We have a standing republication clause for any piece we mark "Open republication" in its footer; to date, no piece carries that mark.
Q10
Yes. Errors of fact go to corrections at blackboxnotes dot com. We respond within five business days. If we ran an error, we run a correction in public: the original text stays in place with a [CORRECTED →] marker, the correction follows, and the Corrections log records the original text, the correction text, and the reason. Errors of framing are not corrections — they are letters to the editor, and we publish those too when they are substantive.
Q11
Because the publication is small on purpose. A two-person editorial masthead plus the standing Editorial Team is what the publisher funds. The publication does not aspire to scale; it aspires to be reliably useful to a small number of working readers.
Q12
Tips go to tips at blackboxnotes dot com. We do not promise confidentiality without first reading what you have, but we read everything that comes in. For sensitive material, write a one-paragraph note describing what you have, and we will respond with a secure channel for the underlying documents.
Q13
No. The publication is a text publication. The medium is part of the editorial position: we want the reader's attention on the argument, not on a host's charisma.
Q14
No. The publication's pieces are written and edited by the named bylines. We use the same tooling working journalists use — spellcheck, link verification, citation management — but we do not generate prose with model output and run it as ours. Tooling used to research a piece is disclosed in the piece when it materially shaped the analysis.
Q15
Write to editors at blackboxnotes dot com. We publish substantive letters under the Letters to the Editor column at the end of an issue. We do not publish letters that argue with the publication's framing without engaging the publication's arguments.
A question we haven't answered? Write to editors at blackboxnotes dot com. We revise this page when readers ask the same question more than twice.
Searches the full archive. Empty state: try auditability, EU AI Act, or interpretability.