Notes on Attribution

Not enough people have read their Orange Catholic Bible and it shows.

Writing is a form of thinking. I have no interest in ceding that for a faster accumulation of words, so all of the words I put on this site will be ‘mine’.
Proofreading is not a form of thinking. While rereading my own work ad nauseam is an important part of my process, everything I write eventually benefits from some combination of spellcheck, auto-correct, and auto-capitalization.

Programming is probably a form of thinking too, albeit one I have never engaged in. If writing code is akin to painting, I have never risen beyond paint-by-numbers. While I can cobble together a website or play around with research data, I rely heavily on others’ work and codebases to do just about everything. Getting this site running is an exercise in copying and making changes to code that I don’t understand, seeing how it breaks, and trying again. This has been made considerably easier thanks to the ability to dump raw HTML output into Google and have it identify unclosed <div> tags or property inheritance errors.
This site is built on Jekyll, supported by Rouge, htmlcompressor, and sharp, and originated from Youssef Raafat’s portfolYOU theme. I rely on Sveltia CMS and WEBrick as part of my local workflow, and the frontend uses Bootstrap, imagesLoaded, jQuery; Masonry, and Simple Jekyll Search. Google can take some credit too, I guess, but only if they’re going to also take responsibility for their part in making the internet dysfunctional. #BringBackGoogleReader

I took the vast majority of the photographs on this site (with either a Canon DSLR or an iPhone). Those that I didn’t take are of me and can mostly be found on the Performance page. Attribution can be found in alt text.
While I will tweak things around in post-processing and occasionally use a clone / clean-up tool to remove visual artifacts, I don’t add anything to my photos nor do any composite photography.
As a digital photographer, it’s complicated to say how involved I am in ‘making’ those images. Before I even open my photo editor, they are processed with algorithms that I didn’t write and don’t understand. That’s without even getting into RAW processing. However, while machine learning has had a role in digital photography since before the recent LLM boom, generating images is fundamentally different than the art of taking (and processing) photographs. Although I am interested in the scientific question of how well LLMs can generate images of pelicans riding bicycles, I am not taking them out for a spin myself.