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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had an idea for a sci fi story lurking in the back of my head of an earth-based cartel sabotaging space mining to preserve the value of their precious metals. The catch is being able to communicate the economics in a way that’s both accurate and entertaining.

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Without giving too much away, you would probably enjoy “Artemis” by Andy Weir.

As long as you double-check it's work, you could always ask an LLM for help with some of that, maybe? I'd install something local like Ollama or somesuch and download one of the larger more popular more recent models and give it an appropriate system prompt related to being a "writing assistant" or something like that. Then bounce ideas off it and maybe throw a few related articles at it for "context" to work with. It's one of the things a lotta recent LLMs are actually useful for and somewhat good at.

Nah, I’m the kind of writer who views using a thesaurus as cheating. I have no interest in LLM nonsense for my writing.

I can sorta understand that, but both a thesaurus and an LLM when used as tools to enhance and extend your own knowledge and skill can totally be a good thing. The problem is that many try to use such things as a substitute / replacement for their own knowledge and skill, to do the actual human creative work part for them. That's where the real fault lies; Not in the tools themselves, but in the user mis-using the tools.

Also, not sure why the prior comment was gettin' down-voted. I'm just tryin' to be encouraging here. If this guy has an idea and wants to write, I'm just sayin' "go ahead and do it then". Why not? Even if nobody ever reads it, if you enjoy writing it, then something was gained.

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