The context is mine. The ideas, the motivation, the thing I wanted to find out — those start in one place and it isn’t a machine.
The rest is a blend, the way it is at any company where several working parts combine into something none of them makes alone. I spent the better part of a decade running businesses. I never wrote every line of the deck, and the deck was still mine, because I decided what was true in it and I signed it.
That’s the arrangement here. But “it’s a blend” is the kind of sentence I’d complain about if someone else wrote it, so here is the org chart.
What never blends
Where a piece comes from. Everything here is downstream of something I actually built or ran. A redaction system that classified the word “son” as a corporation. Five copies of a spreadsheet with no way to tell which was real. A scheduled job that didn’t run for a week and never mentioned it. I don’t write about things I read about. If it didn’t happen to me, it isn’t here.
The concession. Every long piece argues against itself somewhere in the middle, at length, under its own heading. That section is mine, always. It’s what decides whether the argument survives, and it isn’t delegable.
The retraction. Same.
The decision to publish. Nothing goes out that I haven’t read and ruled on. There is no queue that empties itself.
What’s a blend
Research, drafting, structure, the second and third pass, the checking, and the pipeline that carries a piece from a note to a scheduled slot. I use AI heavily and I’m not going to be coy about it — it’s the subject of half of what’s here, and it would be strange to write about somebody else’s tooling while hiding my own. Posts carry a label saying so.
What it doesn’t do is decide what’s true. It drafts. I rule.
Numbers
If I quote a number, I can rebuild it. When a measurement has a naive version and a conservative one, I publish both and say which is the floor. When I cite a figure from an earlier piece, I re-run it rather than quoting myself, because a number that was right in March is just a number now.
I’ve published figures that later needed correcting, and said so in print.
What I won’t do
Invent a mechanism to make a procedure sound complete. Publish a figure I can’t reconstruct. Describe a system I couldn’t reach. Apportion blame to a private individual, or a company when the point is that the system(s) are to blame.
Corrections
Everything here will eventually be wrong about something. When it is, you’ll hear it from me first — on the corrections page, with what the wrong version said still legible.
Named for the failure mode, not the policy.