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PaulHouleyesterday at 4:07 PM1 replyview on HN

To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:

    I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks" 
    into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a 
    wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers.
    
    This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short.
      
    Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output 
    as part of a processing pipeline
and i get the response

    Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners
which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.

Replies

nottorpyesterday at 5:30 PM

I prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky.

Which looks like what you did.

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