Full Transparency Disclosure Statement Revision 4.2
Updated after community feedback indicated previous version was insufficiently transparent
In the interest of complete honesty, I am obligated to disclose every tool, system, biological process, and cosmic force that contributed to this project.
Artificial Intelligence
AI assistance was used. I reviewed the output, rewrote portions of it, disagreed with it, accepted its suggestions anyway, and take full responsibility for the final result. The AI does not have feelings about this project. I have checked.
Spell Check
Microsoft’s autocorrect silently corrected “necessary” three times, “maintenance” twice, and once suggested I meant something entirely different by a word I am too embarrassed to repeat here. I cannot in good conscience claim sole authorship of this document’s spelling. Satya Nadella deserves partial credit.
Grammarly
Grammarly read this sentence and called it “unclear.” Grammarly is not invited to the project retrospective.
Google Search
I queried an index of hundreds of billions of webpages — the accumulated written output of human civilization, scraped, ranked, and served to me within 0.43 seconds — to confirm something I was pretty sure I already knew. I was wrong. The internet was right. This was humbling.
Stack Overflow
Between four and thirty-seven strangers who answered questions between 2009 and 2022 are spiritual co-authors of any code in this project. Most of their answers were marked duplicate. They helped me anyway.
Wikipedia
I used it. I then went to the sources section, opened one tab, felt very academic about it, and closed it without reading anything. Wikipedia gets full credit. The citations do not.
The Electricity Powering My Devices
Generated offsite, likely by burning compressed ancient biomatter or by coaxing electrons through a dam. I did not produce this energy. I cannot verify its ethics. I lit no candles in its name. It powered my work regardless.
My Computer
Assembled in a factory I have never visited, from components extracted from the earth in countries I could not point to on an unlabeled map, by workers whose names I will never know. I did not build it. I do occasionally blow into the vents and call that maintenance.
My Chair
Provided continuous lumbar support for the duration of this project. Has never complained. Has seen things. Gets no credit in traditional acknowledgment sections and I think that’s worth examining.
The English Language
A collaborative work-in-progress spanning approximately 1,400 years, assembled by people who are entirely dead, none of whom I have cited. I am, at best, a remixer. Stephen Colbert did not consent to his influence on my blog voice, but here we are.
Other People’s Writing
I have read things. Those things changed how I write. I cannot always tell you which things or how. My “voice” is a sedimentary rock of other people’s sentences that I have slowly forgotten were not originally mine. This is called having a style. I am told this is normal.
My Own Brain
A biological system I did not design, running on approximately 86 billion neurons I did not wire, shaped by four decades of inputs I did not curate — books, conversations, bad takes I encountered and absorbed before I could stop them, one particularly formative argument in 2008 that I think about more than I should. I claim authorship of the outputs of this system while acknowledging I have limited administrative access to it.
Caffeine
A Schedule-nothing psychoactive compound consumed in quantities my doctor would describe as “a problem.” It materially altered my cognitive state, shortened my tolerance for scope creep, made me painfully aware of inflation, and is directly responsible for at least one paragraph in this document that I wrote very fast and then kept.
The Concept of Sleep Deprivation
Present. Noted. Partially responsible for the tone of this document.
My Childhood
Formative. Unresolved. Cited here for completeness.
The Sun
Provides the conditions necessary for human life on this planet, without which no projects of any kind would be submitted to this forum. I did not build the sun. I have not contacted the sun regarding attribution. I assume it would want credit.
If I have omitted any tools, influences, celestial bodies, or unresolved personal experiences that contributed to this work, please notify me in the comments. I will update this statement. I will use spell check to do so. I will disclose that.
This disclosure statement was written using all of the above.