About this website

Hey! I am Wouter-Jan.

I made this website because I was curious what would happen if you feed Belgium's daily publication of new regulation (also called Official Gazette, Staatsblad or Moniteur Belg in Dutch and French respectively) to Artificial Intelligence.

This is the source code of this project: https://gitlab.com/wouter-jan/staatsblad-tldr/.

In short, I use AI or an LLM to summarise the regulatory changes that are published daily by the Belgian government. I use a very simple prompt asking to just summarise the main points. I am currently using OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini because it seems to do the job relatively well for cheap. I could definitely investigate further if other models are more apt for the job.

Next I experimented with OpenAI's Assistents feature, as it seems apt to be fed big documents (the election promises! Man, they were long). I ask this Assitent to check how the regulatory changes are aligned with the promises the government parties made during the elections. The LLM that powers this assistent is again gpt-4o-mini.

It's interesting to read what AI makes of it! It sometimes misses the point, and it perhaps doesn't have the granularity a legal or public policy professional would wish. But just as a normal citizen, as a voter, to have a basic idea what regulation the govenment is pushing through, I find the result somewhat engaging!!

This blog itselfis a self-hosted instance of the amazing free and open source Ghost software: https://ghost.org. Their source code you can find here: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost.

A script will check every other hour if a new official gazette is published, and if it detects a new publiction, it will feed it to the LLMs and publish it to Ghost.

I rent the server where I run these scripts and the Ghost instance from Hetzner's cloud offering. The server is located in the EU (Nuremberg). Not expecting much traffic, I am running this on a simple 4GB RAM, 3 VCPU, x86 machine, just to keep the costs low. Reach out in case you find the website slow (mail@wouterjanleys.com).

I have not installed any additional analytics software so I'm not processing any visitor data.

For any question or feedback, you can reach out by mail: mail@wouterjanleys.com.

Happy government monitoring!

Wouter-Jan