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Comment by thombles | Hacker News Reader

Even if you don't want style advice from an LLM (I generally don't, not for blogging), for a technical blogger "please check this post for factual accuracy" is a good way to not look like an idiot. Often it complains about hyperbole, which I tend to ignore since there's no point blogging unless you have some firm opinions, but on at least one occasion it pointed me towards some documentation that undermined my entire post - and led to a much better one a week later once I'd processed and applied that new information. Thanks, LLM.

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I do this all the time. It's shocking how well it works. A year or two ago suggesting that someone use LLMs for fact checking would get you laughed out of a room, but today the good ones (Fable, GPT-5.6/6) with a search tool enabled are genuinely excellent at this.

They can even retrieve articles you link to and check that you aren't misrepresenting them.

I do something like this with code all the time, “is this idiomatic <foo>?”, I find it very helpful.

This is bad advice for anything serious that can be subtly wrong. I’ve had Fable being consequentially wrong about what a certain, rather small, code block does in our codebase. Not even on something very complex which wasted a lot of time and effort from the team until we checked the code ourselves. I think these tools are still useful and one should learn to use them but blind trust for anything of importance is misguided IMO.

To paraphrase, "if a junior programmer doesn't understand what your code does, it's bad". If Fable doesn't understand, well...

Did you just paraphrase yourself in quotation marks?

You don't blind trust them in the fact checking. You check what they point out.

Fact check the fact checker!

I use Fable to give me feedback on things I write. But I discard about 50%, because it often does not have the context and thus tends to favour hedging stuff. Also, it does not always vibe with my writing style.

But the 50% I do take into account, improves the text! And, like TFA, I never ask it for concrete text. It only helps me diagnose the issues, I prescribe the medicine!

Hyperbole = strong opinions? If you're stating your 'strong opinions' as fact, then you deserve the push back. If you're stating your strong opinions as strong opinions, then fair game.

> If you're stating your 'strong opinions' as fact

Is there anybody on this site who isn't?

I like the "strong opinions, loosely held" approach myself.

If I want to say that iOS is useless for developing Bluetooth 5 features then this is true for all practical purposes and doesn’t deserve elaboration in my text, even if Apple’s API technically exposes one or two tiny pieces.

You say this but fact and opinion are very similar and not at all easy to distinguish.

For instance, if I said the grass is green vs if I said the grass looks nice vs if I said the grass is doing well and looks how it should vs if I said in my opinion the grass is healthier than its ever been.

If a model complains about hyperbole, that doesn’t mean the text is hyperbole, and this can be because of the context of the text or because of the hedging the models are wont to do

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