Terms of Use

The short version

Read anything. Quote it with credit. Use the code. Be decent in the comments. Nothing here is professional advice, the assistant and the post summaries can be wrong, and the site comes with no guarantees.

Who runs this

Michael Kinder, from Haysi, Virginia. Using the site means you are fine with what is on this page. If you are not, the only thing to do is stop using it. How the site handles data is covered separately in the Privacy Policy.

Using the site

Please do not:

• break it, or try to get at parts of it that are not public, the admin area included
• hammer it with automated requests, scrape it wholesale, or use it to train a model
• use the contact form or the comments to send spam, malware or abuse
• try to make the assistant say something it is not meant to, and then present that as my words

Normal reading, linking, sharing and subscribing by RSS are all fine and need no permission.

The writing

The posts, the pages and the design are mine, and they are not public domain. You are welcome to quote a reasonable extract, as long as you credit me and link to the original. Republishing a whole post, putting it behind a paywall, or passing it off as your own is not on. If you want to do something bigger with it, ask, and the answer is usually yes.

Code samples in the posts are a different matter. Take them, change them, use them at work, no attribution needed. They exist to be useful.

Comments

Anyone can comment, with no account needed. You give a name, which is shown, and if you like an email address, which is not. It does not have to be your real name, but it cannot be someone else's. Posting as another person, me included, is not on.

Your first comment waits for me to approve it, and approving or turning down a comment is entirely up to me. After that, your comments from the same browser appear straight away, though I can still take any of them down.

What you write stays yours. By posting it here you are giving me permission to show it on the site and to let the assistant quote it, which is all the permission I take. If you leave an email, the site will use it to tell you about replies to your comment and for nothing else. Each of those emails has a link to stop them.

The assistant reads the threads as well, so a comment can come back as part of an answer to someone else's question. It is built to say who wrote what rather than to put your words in my mouth. If you would rather something not be quoted, do not post it in a public thread.

Keep it civil and on topic. No abuse, no harassment, no spam, no promotion, and nothing that is not yours to post. I can edit or remove anything, or stop someone commenting, without having to explain myself, though usually I will. Comments are public and searchable once approved, so write accordingly. If you want one of yours changed or removed, ask through the contact form.

The assistant and the summaries

The assistant answers from this site's own pages and comments using a language model. It is built to say so when the site does not cover something, but it is still a model, and models get things wrong. Treat what it says as a pointer to the page it came from, not as a quote from me.

The short summary at the top of each post is written the same way, by a model reading the post. It is there to save you time, and the post itself is what counts if the two disagree.

Do not put anything sensitive into the assistant. Its answers are not advice, not a promise, and not binding on me or on anyone I work for.

Not advice

Everything here is a personal account of what worked for me. It is not professional, legal, financial, security or career advice, and it is not a recommendation for your situation. Anything technical is written for my own setup. Try it on something you can afford to break, and take your own backups.

Views here are mine alone. They are not my employer's, past or present.

Buying me a coffee

The coffee button is a gift and nothing more. It does not buy goods, services, support, influence over what I write, or a reply. It is not refundable through me, since the money never passes through this site. Whatever happens on Cash App or PayPal, whichever you used, is between you and Block or PayPal respectively, not me.

Links to other places

Some links go somewhere else, including links people leave in comments. I do not control those sites and I am not responsible for what is on them or what they do with your data. A link is not an endorsement.

No promises, and what I am not liable for

The site is provided as it is. I do not promise it will be available, accurate, complete or up to date, and I can change or remove any of it at any time without notice. Posts are dated, and an old post stays old rather than being quietly corrected forever.

To the fullest extent the law allows, I am not liable for any loss or damage arising from using this site, from anything other people say in the comments, or from anything you did because of something you read here. Some places do not allow limits like that, in which case this applies as far as it legally can and no further. Nothing here limits liability for anything that cannot legally be limited.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Carrying on using the site after that means the new version applies.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States, without regard to conflict of law rules. If you are a consumer somewhere with stronger protections, you keep those. Nothing here takes away a right your local law gives you.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this go through the contact form. There is no published email address, so that is the way.

Related: the Privacy Policy covers what the site collects and who else is involved.