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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

lol i clicked on the article prepared to be angry that GK Chesterton wasn't mentioned and he was the first one mentioned. His collected works run to at least 37 volumes:

https://www.chesterton.org/store/product/volume-xxxvii/

i have the first four

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When your job is to produce writings every week, you produce a ton of writings.

About 15 volumes in I started to realize I’d read most of what he had to say; but it was still entertaining each time.

Given his size, perhaps he was the Largest Language Model.

lol, he must have plagarized himself so many times over the years

Most (but by no means all) prolific authors do, eventually. You see it especially in podcasts, many of them start to somewhat repeat after a few tens or hundreds of episodes.

Absolutely. When I was doing a more full-time analyst thing, I didn't reuse content wholesale but there was often very little point in rewriting an explanation of some basic concept with different words. (And, yes, as to volume, it really adds up if you're doing 1,000 words or so most weekdays.)

If you listen to hours and hours of someone who does "speeches without notes" you start to realize how they do it - they have "building blocks" that they piece together in different orders.

When I was doing more presentations than I do today, I didn't reuse presentations (unless it was part of some sort company roadshow). But, yes, I'd reuse bits and pieces--often tweaked--rather than each presentation being created from scratch.

I happened to dip into Heretics recently and thought, if someone were to publish one of these essays as a blog post today, it would be decried as AI slop. This must be who the models learned to write from.

Interestingly, several internet posters are in the same range as GK Chesterton and that includes HN's tptacek, Stack Overflow's Jon Skeet.

There's people who've written 2x to 4x more than Chesterson like James Dean, and did so in just 7 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/1ggcxle/how_lon...

Except he referred to him as G.J. Chesterton.

I hear he was good friends with H.F. Wells.

I heard he used to annoy Chesterton by walking into the club and announcing loudly "Herbert Fucking Wells Is In Da House!"

I heard he would prank him by taking down his fence.

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