What hex37 is
Plain-English explanations of the stories the internet is arguing about.
How stories get here
Each day we scan widely-discussed technology stories and select the ones that can genuinely be explained to a reader who does not work in the field. Popularity decides what we look at; explainability decides what we publish.
How they are written
Drafts are written with the help of a large language model, working from the original reporting and from encyclopedic background.
How they are checked
Each draft is then reviewed by a second model, which did not write it and is not shown the instructions it was written from. That review compares the article against the original reporting and looks for claims the source does not support. When we cannot retrieve the original reporting at all, we do not write the story — there would be nothing to check the draft against, and an account we cannot check is the one thing we will not publish.
Articles that pass that review are published without a person reading them. Anything the review will not clear waits for one. We would rather tell you this plainly than let you assume otherwise: a machine can check a draft against its source, but it cannot know what neither it nor the source was told. Articles link to the original reporting, which is where credit for the underlying journalism belongs — and where to go when the detail matters to you.
Images
Pictures come from three places, and each one says which beneath it. Most are from Wikimedia Commons, used only where the licence permits reuse and credited to the photographer. Some are the picture the source article published to represent itself, credited to that publication — those are used to illustrate reporting we link to in full, not licensed from anyone. Some are screenshots we took of the page being discussed. Where none of those produces a picture worth running, the story gets a drawn cover instead.
If you hold the rights to a picture here and would rather it were not, say so and it comes down — no argument, and we will not ask you to explain.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. Corrections are made to the article itself and the revision date updated.