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Two limits apply throughout. The full essay could not be retrieved, so this account rests on its published excerpt, which is shown in search results as “Posted on Sep 29” with no year. Every count and ratio below is the author’s own report, not independently verified.
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The core problem: confident claims are cheap
Publishing a confident claim costs almost nothing. A post that says a tool works, an agent completes tasks reliably, or a product saves hours gives a reader very little to act on unless they can see what would show otherwise. Liem’s point is that the useful question is not how certain the writer sounds but whether the reader can test the claim. The excerpt puts it this way: “Confidence in a claim like that is not a property of the claim, it is a property of how well the writer persuades you.”
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The essay contrasts two kinds of evidence. A screenshot is controlled by the person making the claim: they choose what to crop, what to show and when to take it. A transaction reference, such as a block hash, is a identifier that a reader can look up on a public system the writer does not control. The author uses this as a framing device, and the essay does not audit any particular transaction.
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The distinction has limits that matter in practice. A block hash only means something if the reader checks that it sits on the chain named in the claim, that it contains the transaction described, and that the transaction shows what the post says it shows. Looking up an identifier is a check, but it is not an automatic confirmation that the claim is true.
Why an exact failure beats a failure category
The author says he publishes a list of twelve failed attempts, each with its exact error. This is his description of his own post, and the excerpt does not reproduce the list. His reasoning is in one line: “The specific error matters more than the category.”
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Compare two notes. “The deployment didn’t work” tells a reader nothing they can use. “Step three failed with a permissions error on the output directory” tells a reader whether their own setup hits the same wall, lets them skip a dead end, and gives a later reader something to re-test when the problem is said to be fixed. The specific error turns a vague disappointment into a checkable statement.
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The Mastodon trial
The essay’s clearest example is self-reported. Liem says he tried twenty Mastodon instances to see whether he could create an account on each. His tally, as reported in the essay, is shown below. The remaining row is derived by subtraction from his stated figures, since he says the rest were geo-locked.
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| Outcome (author’s report) | Instances |
|---|---|
| Open registration | 0 |
| Approval queue requiring a human | 3 |
| Geo-locked (remaining, by subtraction from the stated total of 20) | 17 |
The value of this example is not the tally itself. A reader planning to create an account on Mastodon learns the specific barrier that stopped each attempt, rather than a general warning that sign-up is difficult. The trial has not been independently verified, and the essay does not say which instances were tested or when.
The one-in-forty ratio
The author reports “about one paying stranger for every forty pieces of free content.” He calls this his business ratio. It is a personal figure, not a benchmark for creators in general, and the essay does not give the period it covers. Published numbers like this are most useful when the writer states the denominator and the basis for the count, which this one does only partly.
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What the author proposes as checkable references
For agent work, the essay names several kinds of reference a writer could attach to a claim: a block hash, a public URL, a repository with passing tests, and a leaderboard position with the query that generated it. The author offers these as examples, not as a universal standard. The table below applies four editorial axes to them. These axes are inferred for this article from the essay’s contrast between screenshots and checkable references; the author does not present them as a formal framework.
| Reference | Publicly accessible | Specific enough to reproduce or refute | Controlled solely by the claimant | Correction trail remains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screenshot | Only if the writer posts it | Rarely, without the underlying data | Yes | Not stated |
| Block hash | Yes, on a public chain | Yes, if the reader checks the stated transaction | No, the record sits on a public ledger | A correction can be published alongside the original entry |
| Public URL | Yes, if it resolves | Depends on what the page shows | Depends on who hosts it | Depends on whether the page is versioned or archived |
| Repository with passing tests | Yes, if the repository is public | Yes, if the test names and commit are given | Partly, since the owner controls the history | Commit history, if kept |
| Leaderboard position with generating query | Yes, if the leaderboard is public | Yes, if the query is shared and can be rerun | Partly, since the owner controls the query | Depends on whether earlier results are kept |
The table shows why the author prefers references that outlive the claimant’s control. A screenshot shows that something was seen once. A reference a reader can open, rerun or compare over time gives the claim a second chance to be checked.
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How to apply the method
The essay’s practice, as described, can be turned into a short routine for a weekly failure log:
Quick Recap
- Attach a reference to each claim that a reader can open or rerun without asking you for access.
- Record each failure with the exact error, the step at which it occurred and the date, not a category such as “bug” or “limitation”.
- Keep the failure list alongside the success list, so that the two are published on the same schedule.
- State the basis and denominator for every ratio or count, including the period it covers.
- When a published claim proves wrong, publish a correction and link it from the original post. The essay gives the correction trail as one of its reasons for keeping a public failure list.
What the evidence does and does not establish
- Established by the essay’s excerpt: the author’s argument, his description of a twelve-item failure list with exact errors, the Mastodon tally, the one-in-forty ratio and the list of example references.
- Not established: the year of publication. The excerpt shows only “Sep 29”, so the post cannot be dated with certainty from the excerpt alone.
- Not established: whether the twelve failures, the twenty-instance Mastodon trial and the content ratio are accurate. These are the author’s reports.
- Not established: whether the linked publication, llmrt402.substack.com, holds the block hashes and records the essay describes. Those were not checked.
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