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Comment by rfonseca

10 months ago

This was an interesting quote from the blog post: "There is one silly technique I discovered to allow a LLM to improve my writing without having it do my writing: feed it the text of my mostly-complete blog post, and ask the LLM to pretend to be a cynical Hacker News commenter and write five distinct comments based on the blog post."

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rfonseca

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vunderba  10 months ago

I do a good deal of my blog posts while walking my husky and just dictating using speech-to-text on my phone. The problem is that its an unformed blob of clay and really needs to be shaped on the wheel.

I then feed this into an LLM with the following prompt:

  You are a professional editor. You will be provided paragraphs of text that may 
  contain spelling errors, grammatical issues, continuity errors, structural 
  problems, word repetition, etc. You will correct any of these issues while 
  still preserving the original writing style. Do not sanitize the user. If they 
  use profanities in their text, they are used for emphasis and you should not 
  omit them. 

  Do NOT try to introduce your own style to their text. Preserve their writing 
  style to the absolute best of your ability. You are absolutely forbidden from 
  adding new sentences.

It's basically Grammarly on steroids and works very well.

meowzero  10 months ago

I do something similar. But I make sure the LLM doesn't know I wrote the post. That way the LLM is not sycophantic.

kixiQu  10 months ago

What roleplayed feedback providers have people had best and worst luck with? I can imagine asking for the personality could help the LLM come up with different kinds of criticisms...