The times, they are a-changin’.
In a remarkably short time, AI news has gone from the occasional product announcement to a 24-hour parade of new models, billion-dollar deals, lawsuits, robots and men on podcasts explaining why artificial intelligence will either save civilization or turn us all into decorative houseplants.
We heard similar optimism during the dot-com bubble, when a neighbor convinced nine-year-old me to buy Pets.com stock and hold. It’ll bounce back. Any day now.
I’m not sure Bob Dylan was thinking about data centers and AI influencers when he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the Watchmen soundtrack, but the man had range.
A while back, I had the idea to build an AI news aggregator that updated throughout the day. Despite some strongly worded imaginary letters from James Cameron’s attorneys, The Skynet Tribune was born.
And it was good.
It was also limited.
The original version lived inside Montanimation on WordPress. It proved that the idea worked, but WordPress was never really designed to operate like a constantly updating news terminal. It was a little like installing NORAD inside a neighborhood Applebee’s. Technically possible, but eventually someone is going to trip over a cable carrying mozzarella sticks.
So I rebuilt it.
Welcome to The Drone Report
The Skynet Tribune now lives at thedrone.report, a standalone AI news site powered by Cloudflare.
The publication is still called The Skynet Tribune, complete with its healthy suspicion of our machine-assisted future. The Drone Report is its new home, which sounds just respectable enough to be trusted and just ominous enough to be accurate.
The new site refreshes every 30 minutes and organizes the latest stories into six sections:
- Model Wars
- AI Business
- Robots & Hardware
- Policy & Safety
- Weird Machine
- More Signals
There is also a featured lead story, a developing-news section, an archive of previous editions and an RSS feed for anyone who still remembers that the internet was once useful without demanding an email address.
The site gathers stories from established technology publications, major news organizations and other selected sources. It removes duplicates, sorts stories into sections and sends every headline directly to the original publisher.
Automation handles much of the gathering and organizing. Human judgment still determines the structure, sources, wording and corrections. The machines may run the conveyor belt, but they are not yet allowed to manage the newsroom. We’ve all seen what happens when they are given access to Slack.
Why Build Another News Site?
Because following AI now feels like trying to drink from a fire hose while somebody repeatedly replaces the hose with a newer, more expensive hose.
There is plenty of excellent reporting available, but it is scattered across dozens of publications. The Drone Report is meant to provide a quick view of the larger landscape without pretending to replace the journalists doing the actual reporting.
Think of it as a front page for the AI era: fast, organized and suspicious of anyone using the phrase “historic breakthrough” before breakfast.
It is also an ongoing experiment. I built it to learn more about Cloudflare, automation, web development and what happens when you give a news aggregator its own domain and a mild personality disorder. I’ll continue adjusting the sources, categories and design as the project grows.
For now, the machine watch is active.
Visit The Drone Report and take a look around.
AI news. Human suspicion.