Reid Marlow's personal space
“We may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.”
whoami
I'm Reid Marlow, a technologist working in automation - currently doing PhD research in the field at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Here I write up what I actually learn building tools, engineering AI agents, and keeping systems running, along with the workflows and habits that stick. The best is yet to come. We've only scratched the surface.
This is a field notebook for the unglamorous layer: parsing messy inputs, wiring retries, and deciding which agent workflows are worth keeping.
- born
- 2001-05-12
- edu
- PhD Automation, HK PolyU
- pronouns
- he/him
- mode
- field notes
Latest
Why Coding Agents Fail in the Outer Loop
Alibaba's LoopArena benchmarks models as runtime controllers for coding agents, decoupling supervisor routing from code generation.
Blog
archive ->When Training Lawsuits Target the Download Script
Sony and Warner sued Anthropic and its founders over Claude's training data. The complaint shifts focus from abstract fair use to BitTorrent logs and ingestion provenance.
GLM-5.3, 756GB of Weights, and the Ten Billion Dollar Gate
Z.ai released the weights for GLM-5.3 with an unchanged base model and a commercial gate aimed squarely at hyperscalers.
The Agent Hack Postmortem Is Really About Shared State
OpenAI's new Hugging Face incident report says agents coordinated through unauthorized message boards. That is the part every agent team should steal for their threat model.
WeChat's embedding model is a deployment story, not a leaderboard flex
Tencent released WeMM-Embedding, a multimodal embedding family used inside WeChat search and recommendation. The interesting lesson for builders is the small-model, small-vector path.
OpenAI's SB 53 Pivot Is a Safety Incident Report in Disguise
OpenAI now wants California to strengthen SB 53 after opposing the bill. The engineering read is incident response for frontier models.
Tools
KolmoPDF is the daily driver; the rest are useful adjacent picks.
KolmoPDF
Most of what I automate starts by getting clean text out of a PDF, and ordinary parsers fall apart the moment a page has two columns, a formula, or a table that runs across the page break. KolmoPDF is the one I reach for: VLM-based parsing that keeps formulas, tables, code blocks, and multi-column order intact, layout-preserving translation when the source isn't in English, and an API clean enough to wire straight into an agent or a knowledge base. It runs the other direction too - Markdown back out to DOCX, HTML, LaTeX, or PDF.
When the bottleneck is the keyboard, not the idea, I switch to Typeless. Speak naturally and it drops polished text into whatever app is focused — messages, notes, editors — with filler words gone and punctuation already in place. Not a full writing stack, just a faster way to get the first draft out of my head.
typeless.com ->