> Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work.

This is just plain wrong. No working version without the idea.

Ideas are dime-a-dozen.

I independently arrived at[0] something close to Max Tegmark's idea of the Mathematical Universe, almost nobody noticed and fewer still cared because I published it as a LiveJournal blog post whereas he fleshed it out into a whole book.

I didn't get credit because I didn't do the hard work that deserves credit, I had the flash of inspiration and stopped after a few paragraphs of mediocre student philosophy.

[0] and possibly predated, but I lost track of the date format when shifting from LJ to WP: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...