Site standards
These are the rules this site holds itself to. If a post breaks one, that's a mistake, and I'll fix it.
How I treat people
I disagree with plenty of people here, some of them loudly. I still try to be the bigger human. These rules apply to every post, satire included.
- Proper names and titles, every time. It's "President Trump," not a last name on its own, and never a nickname. The same goes for every senator, governor and CEO. If I get one wrong, it gets corrected.
- I criticize what people do and say, not who they are.
- Nobody gets mocked for their looks, mental capacity or health, age, gender, race, nationality, political party or beliefs.
- Nobody gets dehumanized. Not by comparing them to animals or vermin, and not by calling them monsters. Not even people I think have done terrible things. That's a road this site won't go down.
- I judge people by their actions, never groups by their members. President Putin is a bad person; Russians are not. President Trump may be a bad person, but Republicans aren't inherently evil, and neither are Democrats.
- Satire aims at actions and absurdity, never at people's bodies, identities or groups.
How I quote people
If I'm going to disagree with someone, I want it to be for what they actually said. Every quote on this site comes with its source, either a screenshot or a link, and it's long enough to show the context around it, including who or what it was about. I check quotes against the original, and when something is only reported by someone else, I say so.
Screenshots of posts are taken in a clean browser with no account signed in, so there's nothing in them but the post.
Every link to another site is marked "nofollow." That tells search engines I'm not vouching for the page, so linking to a source I disagree with doesn't help its ranking. Readers can still click, of course.
How AI is used
I write every post myself. AI helps build the site and checks my work, but it doesn't write the posts.
The writing is mine
Posts, titles and descriptions are written by me. AI never drafts them, rewrites them or "punches them up." What it does is read a finished draft and point out problems. Then I fix them.
Here's what I use it for, with real examples of the kind of thing it catches:
- Spelling. "Definately" should be "definitely."
- Grammar. "The list of models are long" should be "is long."
- Fact checking. If I say a data center uses a certain amount of water a day, AI finds the report the number came from and tells me whether I got the figure, the units and the year right.
- Attribution. If I quote someone, AI checks that they actually said it, in those words, and where it first appeared, so the link goes to the original and not a copy of a copy.
- Clarity. AI tells me which sentence it tripped over and why. It doesn't hand me a better sentence. I rewrite it myself.
- Names and respect. AI checks that people are called by their proper names and titles, and flags anything that mocks who someone is rather than what they did.
- Anonymity. AI reads drafts looking for details that could identify me: places, dates, habits of phrasing, things in the background of a screenshot. I decide what to change.
The rule is simple: AI points, I fix. The only fixes I'll take straight from it are simple ones: a corrected spelling, a bit of punctuation or grammar, a person's proper name and title, or a plain factual correction like a wrong platform name.
What AI can make
The site's code, theme, stylesheets, scripts and plugins can be AI-generated, and so can images. That's machinery, not writing.
How AI images are labeled
Every AI-generated image in a post carries the same caption: the words AI-generated image and a short description of what it shows. It looks like this:
Images that aren't AI-generated get a credit saying where they came from instead.
Two exceptions don't get a caption: the avatar, and images that are part of the site's design, like icons. For the record, the avatar is AI-generated too.