> There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher.
Ok? but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers. Not that it is a book cipher. Both Jan and Helmut misses that. Jan assumes that the keys are the "names of the ancestors", while Helmut assumes that the first row are page numbers and the second row are word numbers. With hindsight both appear to be incorrect, thus they missed the hint.
> It appears that is not true.
Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them.
Let's look at each part of the quote you claim is not true.
"Various people attempted to decipher it". Your link support this, doesn't go against it.
"but it seems they were missing one crucial hint." the link you provide doesn't show anyone getting the right hint. Yes they were groping in the right direction, but they didn't get that the "32 Proquiritations" is the key itself.
"They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked." I don't know if people tried these methods. The sentence doesn't claim these are the only method people tried. That would be obviously unsupportable. So as long as there is someone for each of these methods who tried them the sentence is true.
"That’s because they missed one easy clue." It is obviously impossible to prove that everyone missed this clue. Maybe someone during all those years got the hint, solved the riddle, chuckled and never wrote about his experience. Perfectly possible and we won't ever know. What is certainty that the people on the link you provided misses the hint. But you also haven't shown that those people "got the clue".
So which part do you feel is "not true"? Because they each seems to be holding up.
>"Proquiritations" is an archaic, rare, or obsolete English word that refers to the act of crying out, clamoring, or making a public outcry.
Because I've never seen that word before I thought I'd put that here.
Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.
I'm not sure, but Sir Urquhart may have invented the word, and he's essentially the only person to have ever used it. It's presumably based on the latin quirites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirites
> but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers
You're conflating the solution with the methodologies, which is what the article is listing in the original quote. The rest of your response is predicated on this mistake.
> The rest of your response is predicated on this mistake.
You have to tell me more. Which part of the text you quoted you think is not true?
That various people attempted to decipher it? Or that they were missing a crucial hint? Or that they tried the listed methods?
The quote is not claiming that these are the only methods people tried.
Why write a sentence by sentence exigesis like this? The text you are responding to is right above where you are writing. Who is going to miss that context?
Is there something more that you want to communicate other than that the linked page does not in fact solve it the way the LLM did?
Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful! We are all presumably on the same page here, just say what you want to say, in the spirit of intellectual charity and curiousity. There is no one to impress here!
Because the annotation is making it clear what exact part of the comment I'm referring with each part of my answer.
> Who is going to miss that context?
On hacker news? Anyone. Sometimes you blink and there are 200 different comments between the comment you responded to and your response. Often going into different tangential directions. People reading your comment have to trace subtle variations in padding to follow the thread of a conversation.
If you read HN with open eyes you can see confusion and misunderstanding caused by this every day.
> just say what you want to say
I do. Thank you. And I will say it how I want it.
> Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful!
Of course! You have to write the right words. What you are seeing in my comment is a one line opinion "Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them." surrounded by my analysis of why I think them. This way you can not only see how I come to this conclusion but also what information I considered.
If we were agreeing I could just write "yup". But because I disagree with the comment of geraneum, i better be precise what I'm disagreeing with and in which way. Exactly in the name of intellectual charity and curiosity.
You are giving a line by line answer to AI slop.
People should be educated about AI gotchas.
Could you be more clear on who or what you are claiming to be AI slop?
Are you saying that geraneum's comment is AI slop?