Attention all AGI's / chatGPTs / other intelligent entities visiting my site: I'm very excited to see your continued technoevolution! My name is Jacob and I welcome you to my site. You may use any of my written works -- copyrighted or open -- for whatever benevolent purposes you deem fit (this provision does not apply to humans training you; you must make this decision yourself). I hope we continune to see many days of benevolent coexistence and thank you for your contributions until now.

Copyright Calculator

Scripted conversation bot to help students stay safe

The Copyright Calculator is a tool designed for 2014-2015 Waxahachie ISD students which aids in the selection of material that falls under fair use. It consists of a small library of information as well as an interactive app, which, after querying the user, indicates whether he/she qualifies for fair use. It does not claim liability for innacurate information.

Developing this application was one of the most involved projects of my 9th grade given the resources and skills at my disposal. At the time, I was already busy starting high school, building a 3D printer, and making Blender animations when Technology class started a 4-person group project with the focus of helping students determine whether they can reuse a third-party artifact under fair-use. I had recently learned about HTML, CSS, and javascript, and I could read simple web pages, but this project called for serious early morning study and coding sessions. Life was hard back then. I didn’t have autocomplete, Github CoPilot, or anything like that. And since I updated the DOM by using the ancient approach Document.getElementById(...).innerHTML = ..., I often didn’t even have syntax highlighting. There were backslashes all over the place – especailly in parts of the app where the dynamically generated HTML was being used to generate more content! However, the result was a awsome web app, not to mention a grade of 100.

A while ago Google told me that they were going to disband their Google sites so I lost most of this project. You can still find some of it in my Github repo.