Sampled

sampled

**Don't bite someone else's style.**

Hip hop settled this decades ago. There's sampling, which is how most things get made and which requires credit. There's arriving somewhere on your own, which happens constantly and is nobody's fault. And there's biting, which is taking something, forgetting where you got it, and presenting it as yours.

Everybody outside that culture just carries vague anxiety about it and hopes nobody notices.

`sampled` runs on your own work before it goes out. You bring the framework, the thesis, the positioning line, the name, the concept. It tells you which of the three you're doing, component by component, with sources and dates.

The idea that makes it work

**Resemblance doesn't decide it. Exposure does.**

Two ideas can be nearly identical and both be honest, if neither person could have met the other. Two ideas can look different and one still be biting, if somebody absorbed the structure somewhere and rebuilt it in their own words.

So this isn't similarity matching. Most of the work is reconstructing what you were actually exposed to. What you read, who you follow, who *they* quote, what's canonical enough in your field that you absorbed it without noticing. Convergence is the default assumption, and biting is the claim that has to earn its way in with all three of close resemblance, established exposure, and clear priority.

The thing it usually finds is cryptomnesia. You read it, kept the structure, lost the citation, and later experienced it as your own thought. That's ordinary memory, not dishonesty, and it has ended careers of people who weren't lying.

The two rules that don't bend

**It can never tell you something is original.** It can tell you what it searched, what it found, and what it couldn't check. Every single output ends with its coverage stated, especially the clean ones, because a clean result that hides its blind spots is worse than no result. Books, podcasts, conference talks, private communities