Yet another Hacker News

23 points joeriddles 1 hour ago 12 comments

jamiejquinn 30 minutes ago | parent

"Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice."

Loved the (possibly not deliberately ironic) use of the LLM'S favourite analogy, load-bearing.

Nice wee article though. I particularly agree with "Don’t take all of the model’s copyediting advice." I've been using LLMs to review teaching material and often it just doesn't get the point of teaching. It's good for prompting reflection on your writing but it's still an idiot savant.

ameliaquining 11 minutes ago | parent

There's no way in hell that wasn't a deliberate joke.

abc3354 25 minutes ago | parent

This article was so much better than what I though it would be

Does anyone know about "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" ? Seems like an interesting book

stackghost 21 minutes ago | parent

Can't vouch for that but I can vouch for `Dreyer's English` as both hilarious (if you're the sort of person who relishes finding le mot juste, like me) and excellent as a style guide.

bobmarleybiceps 7 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it's very short, but I can't remember if I read all of it, or just flipped through pieces. It has good advice and I think fairly "famous." (edit: this reminded me I still have my copy :-D)

I know someone in a profession that does a lot of writing, and it blew my mind how clearly feedback was communicated by a superior. Made me wish tech people had better written communication skills. ;-;

S-E-P 21 minutes ago | parent

I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used. This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.

If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?

Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.

boplicity 14 minutes ago | parent

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?

That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.

jakeinspace 13 minutes ago | parent

Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.

Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.

sixtyj 52 seconds ago | parent

There is a recent PISA research that students slowly decline in understanding the long reads.

E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”…

So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway…

awithrow 10 minutes ago | parent

I've seen this in action as well. The biggest value by far is seeing the overused phrases and tics in your writing style. The prompt I like is to tell it to highlight and flag passive voice and run ons since those are my major pain points. I can also tell when its getting out of "real" advice since it'll offer the same "trim 10-15%". Also important to tell it to highlight specifics otherwise it'll give vague editorial advice that isn't anchored. Another fun exercise is to submit other authors writing as well. Say a short story from a magazine. Some of the edits are legit, but do it enough times and you'll start to see the same generic writing advice gets applies to just about any input.

another iteresting thing models can do is to highlight and notice themes and motifs in a piece. I find that helpful when thinking about a piece of work. Might be obvious ones, sometimes it can be subtle themes. Good for stirring your own brain.

sixtyj 8 minutes ago | parent

> use them like a copyeditor rather than a ghostwriter

This is what you need to know. Seriously, after 25 years in news (writing), you realize that you need “second eyes”, not the first hands.

trane_project 1 minute ago | parent

This is similar to how I've come to use them but it's focused too much on the mechanics or writing. They are also useful at role-playing as a specific profile of reader and asking it how they receive the arguments advanced by the writing and what counterarguments they could present. After some few rounds of this process, you either close all the gaps in the argument or realize it's not a strong one.