Exactly. You have to manifest at a high vibrational frequency.

Thanks for the laugh.

"aren't you part of the problem?"

Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

> Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time

I know a lot of people who tried playing this game frequently during COVID, then found themselves stuck in a bad place when the 0% money ran out and companies weren’t eager in hiring someone whose resume had a dozen jobs in the past 6 years.

You obviously haven't gone job hunting in 2026

I hope you get the privilege soon

Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.

Not in general. As people have pointed out elsewhere, it's true if x is real. That isn't always a helpful assumption. (When x is real you can plug that assumption into Mathematica. Then Mathematica should agree with you.)

But consider sqrt(i) = sqrt(exp(i\pi/2)). That's exp(i\pi/4). Your rule would give 1 as the answer. It's not helpful for a serious math system to give that answer to this problem.

When I square 1 I don't get i.

This is sometimes helpful. But more often it has very little overlap with what I need when I "simplify" some math.

"Simplify" is a very old term (>50y) in computer algebra. Its meaning has become kind of layered in that time.

It doesn't, because we might consider different outputs "simple" depending on what we're going to do next.

Sure, an example would be nice.

Examples in TFA and at least one in the thread. Or say 4-quadrant atan might be simpler or less simple than 2-quadrant atan, depending on what you're doing next. Lots of stuff like that. Is a factored polynomial simpler than unfactored?

Possibly you might be missing the point. Unless maybe this comment is subtle humor?

If it is subtle humour it's too subtle for me ;)

Yeah, hiding the recipes for how the math is really done would make the whole system kinda guess-and-hope for serious users.

His rebuttal? His critics' rebuttal?

I feel he'd want to rebut the use of an LLM for this task to begin with (i.e. find issues/nitpicks with the LLM judgment whether it said he's right or wrong)

What's your take on TFA then?

His increasing accuracy derives from him wisening up and criticizing LLM’s only in domains where there is a consensus, and keeping his more grand criticisms unfalsifiable.

I’m not the OP, and haven’t read much Marcus, but an analysis linking “chains of claims” together could be interesting, devaluing specific true claims when they are used to support a false claim. The claims dataset appears to evaluate each claim independently.

If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.

Ha — you're probably right that it would have been less controversial. But I kept it precisely because it's arguable. Added a parenthetical acknowledging the HN debate and framing it as on-the-fence by design

Hey Michael, great project! If you don't mind me testing you, as a word game builder, what do you think about the latest developments of international policies?

Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

"Monkey wrench" is a word already found in the dictionary, so it wouldn't be a useful example. It already met the bar.

The article is questioning why some words don't meet the bar for inclusion in the dictionary. The word "boiling water" is one such word that it sees as being on the fence. The comments here demonstrate exactly why it is on the fence, but it remains unclear exactly what would be necessary for it to tip towards inclusion.

It is objectively a phrase, and not a word, because you can substitute the water for literally any other liquid and form a perfectly coherent phrase. boiling oil, boiling syrup, boiling coca cola. "Boiling" in this context is just a participial adjective, modifying the noun "water". If "boiling water" is a word, so are "six men", "good idea", "large rock", "7 year old boy", "Californian trees", "metallic flooring", etc.

Better yet, you can take advantage of English's adjective ordering to demonstrate this point. Would I describe the water I'm currently boiling for the purpose of cooking "cooking boiling water", or "boiling cooking water". Since purpose tends to be the last adjective we use, any native speaker would choose the later.

I know "objectively" is completely made up just as much as the rest of English, so perhaps you are not using it as I recognize the word, but as I recognize it there is nothing objective about English. It is all just made up and used as one feels like. Obviously "boiling water" can be a word, just like "six men", "good idea", "large rock", etc. can be.

Simply put, "boiling water" is a word whenever someone uses it as a word. It is reasonable to say that it isn't commonly used as a word, but that's kind of the point of the article: Asking when a word becomes worthy of inclusion in the dictionary. The very similar "hot water" is a word that is found in the dictionary. Of course, it is a word used frequently, so the inclusion isn't suspiring.

But it remains unclear where the line is between worthy of inclusion and not worthy of inclusion. The article is asking where that line is.

Sure, but monkey wrench is in the dictionary. Heck, it's even in my printed copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.