reactions: null, because nobody said any of them

[PipFoweraker]

DRAFT ON PURPOSE. Do not merge until pdoom1 and pdoom1-website are ready. This changes the public shape of all_events.json, the file both of them read. Pip asked for the change prepared and proven, not shipped -- EAGxSingapore, 2026-08-29.

What is live right now

safety_researcher_reaction and media_reaction carry invented text on all 1,194 served records.

	source of the text	records
bulk	random.choice over five strings -- transform_to_timeline_events.py:270, transform_enriched.py:242	1,166
hand-authored	the seed author's own prose, styled as quotation	28

"Notable work on AI safety" stands as what safety researchers think about 232 separate papers. "Valuable research for alignment" covers another 229.

The 28 are not better, only rarer. "Microsoft's AI chatbot goes full Nazi in under 24 hours" is written as a headline and credited to no newspaper. That is why the suppression covers all 1,194 and not just the bulk.

The schema was the mechanism, not a bystander

Both fields were required strings with minLength: 10 under additionalProperties: false. There was no legal way to say nobody had commented -- not null, not empty, not absent. event_v1 demanded a sentence for events where no sentence existed, and the generator supplied prose to satisfy it.

Two standing rules already covered this and neither was applied. RULED_2026-08-12: "No shipped sentence states a fact nobody has checked." ADR-001: no anonymous verdicts. A reaction attributed to an unnamed "safety researcher" fails both.

What this does

• Both fields become ["string", "null"] and leave required.
• The producer nulls them on every record, in one named and commented step.
• Emitted as null, not dropped. null is this repo's standing spelling for absent-and-honest; the key stays for consumers that index on it; and the absence reads as deliberate rather than as a fetch that failed.
• Suppression is unconditional. There is no attribution anywhere in the corpus to preserve, so a predicate keeping the "good" ones would invent the distinction it claimed to read. A non-null value returns only with a name attached.
• LINEAGE.json records what was suppressed and why.

Verification

All 28 gating checks pass, including the four rebuild checks and the ASCII gate. The schema patch is 5 insertions / 7 deletions -- an earlier version of it reformatted every inline array in the file and was redone by hand.

What is NOT done here, and belongs to the consumers

Neither pdoom1 nor pdoom1-website has been checked for null-handling on these two fields. That is the gate on this PR, and it is why it is a draft. If either renders the field unconditionally, it needs a change first.

Refs pdoom-data#92, pdoom-data#76. ADR-001, and the #34 family.

[PipFoweraker]

Both consumers are handled. This is ready to come out of draft once they merge.

Rather than wait on the two seats, the guards are written and tested in their own repositories:

repo	PR	what it does
pdoom1-website	#397	sanitize_event_urls stops handing None to a str-only helper; build_reaction_html returns the quote line so a null takes the literal quotation marks with it instead of publishing "None"; the badge reads Not recorded; stats count null as not_applicable. 12 checks, verified must-fire against the unfixed file, where it dies on the real AttributeError at line 937.
pdoom1	#1339	_reaction_text() treats null and absent as the same empty thing, because Dictionary.get(key, "") returns the stored null when the key is present. Copy sites now match the pdoom_impact idiom already in that file. 7 GUT tests, run not just parsed, 7/7 pass; 4 of 7 fail without the fix.

Both were measured in the consumers' own trees before a line was written, not predicted from the signatures.

Neither repo needed a new concept. pdoom1-website already had real_quote / human_summary / not_applicable and a "Found a Real Quote? Suggest it here" button; pdoom1 already used has(...) and ... != null for pdoom_impact three lines below the reaction copy. The correct patterns were both sitting there.

Merge order: pdoom1-website#397, then this. pdoom1#1339 is not blocking, because the game has no network fetch (pdoom1#1101) and re-syncing is a build-time act, but it should land before the next resync.