Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new • Hacker News Board

Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

#101

Post by Schlagbohrer » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

golly_ned wrote: post #62

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #43

"Offer it something it has never seen, and it doesn't light up. It corrects you. To a system built to predict the expected, the genuinely new is indistinguishable from a mistake. The pushback is soft, and constant: Did you mean: the familiar thing, offered in place of yours." Ouch, that's scary to think of. Also why does it read like its written by ChatGPT?

Even if something wasn't written by ChatGPT, I'm supposing ChatGPT's influence on writing has been so strong that (1) any typical reader of text on the internet will have ingested a lot of ChatGPT writing habits in their own writing, and (2) that any reader of ChatGPT text is so habituated to those writing habits that even non-ChatGPT generated text appears similar to ChatGPT generated text.

I have started doing an XKCD style trolling online occasionally- writing like ChatGPT, but, I'm writing it out myself :-D

(Don't worry, I would never do that here on Hackernews... ;-) )

Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

#102

Post by phillipcarter » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #97

phillipcarter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or am I just getting old? Perhaps? But I think this is more a case of just not seeking things out. Music is as vibrant and diverse as ever, but not if you're only looking at the top charts run by the music industry. Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios. Now I can't speak for how you vacation, but I've had wonderfully dif…

> Perhaps? But I think this is more a case of just not seeking things out "If you went for deep dives and looked at fringe stuff there's still variety" is totally compatible with "the world is way more honogenized". There have always been fringe unique voices, but that's beside the point. The world is not defined by the long tail, but by the top 20% most listened/visited areas/games played/movies watched/etc, that al…

Yeah that's the wrong takeaway you have :)

Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

#103

Post by phillipcarter » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

zwischenzug wrote: post #79

phillipcarter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or am I just getting old? Perhaps? But I think this is more a case of just not seeking things out. Music is as vibrant and diverse as ever, but not if you're only looking at the top charts run by the music industry. Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios. Now I can't speak for how you vacation, but I've had wonderfully dif…

On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences. Simply going there guaranteed new experiences. I spent a lot of time in Vienna growing up and everything was different. I literally couldn't have a familiar experience even if I'd wanted to. In fact, I remember having to spend lots of money and travelling a long way to find a specialised shop to get a familiar food item (baked beans) to re…

> On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences.

Neither have I. Literally just wandering around. The one exception specifically was Prague's Old Town district having several of the same tourist trap shops. But all you have to do is walk around a minute outside of the most touristy area of Old Town and it's all gone. Not to mention all the awesome, different cafes and shops along other landmarks.