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Comment by Timpy | Hacker News Reader

I remember the first time I played Minecraft and I was in awe at how expansive the play world felt. Without thinking too much about it, I had the feeling that if I set off in any direction I would discover infinitely new things. After enough playtime I saw the repeating patterns and eventually it felt so small again.

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People will always see what they want to see. I've had so many interactions with customers over the years who thought that a service or feature was removed or crippled when in fact nothing had changed on our side. The only thing that changed is their perception. Especially when they can't get something to work and they believe they have succeeded at something similar before, they'll always suspect that the software is at fault instead of their own memory.

This is an excellent theory IMO. It isn't that the AI has actually gotten much worse, it's that the novelty has worn off and they are finally starting to notice all of the repetitious patterns it has and mistakes it makes — the stuff people like me who never bought into the AI hype to begin with noticed from the start — but instead of realizing that maybe their initial impressions of the capabilities of large language models were wrong or based on partial information they are taking the Mandela effect route and just insisting that something outside them has fundamentally changed.

Pretty sure this is going on to some degree. It seems like there should be some kind of regression testing possible on these systems to definitively prove these claims, rather than these anecdotal stories that seem to rarely ever come with concrete examples.

They've now reached a number of under and over ground biomes + dimensions that the feeling now lasts much longer for new players.

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