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Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

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Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#211

Post by desmoulins »

This is really interesting, from what the first part describes, the design and operation of "factory 404" has a lot in common with similar facilities built in the US and Russia. The US built the Hanford/Richland site in the desert of eastern Washington, and Russia built Mayak/Ozyorsk in an isolated part of the Urals. They're all versions of this project to build a self-contained 'utopia' city in the wilderness, dedicated to secret work on nuclear technology. There's also the same social tension between highly skilled workers, transient unskilled workers, and the military/political leadership. (For anyone interested, Plutopia by Kate Brown is a good read on the subject)

I wonder if this site in the Gobi ended up having the same problems with radioactive contamination from accidents and unethical experiments that Hanford and Mayak had?

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#212

Post by FarmerPotato »

thisislife2 wrote: post #145
NotGMan wrote: post #35

>> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me. It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.

I don't know about "bad governing". It sounds more like a rigorous containment policy when nuclear technology was at its infancy in China. ( Regulations are written in the blood of your predecessors - https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/ud3lt4/lpt_osh... ). It is also about preventing accident leakage of information and preserving secrecy. For e.g. In the 1970s, India learnt that Pakistan was working to cre…

The LLM flipped from “scorched earth” to “ bad governing” as the sofa faded from its context window.

The metaphor says maybe “extreme cleanliness is like war”, second pass war is bad governing…

Don’t engage with it.

At this point, you’re arguing with an LLM, not a coherent storyteller. The events your question refers to have been downgraded in the context window.

It’s like the game of twenty questions where the LLM doesn’t have a persistent secret object, it’s just simulating consistency.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#213

Post by pyuser583 »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #80
Keyframe wrote: post #79

What's the deal with AI here in the comments?

You caught me! Yes, I am using AI to assist with the translation. My IELTS score is 7.5, but my writing band is 6.0. I write my thoughts and comments in Chinese first and then use AI to translate them. The entire article was also translated from my original Chinese manuscript.

In the technology industry, many people are not native speakers.

Low-level English is normal and accepted.

On the job, I never speak above the level of a 13-year-old.

AI generated English is hated.

Consider using English, not software translation.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#214

Post by decimalenough »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #96
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You caught me! Yes, I am using AI to assist with the translation. My IELTS score is 7.5, but my writing band is 6.0. I write my thoughts and comments in Chinese first and then use AI to translate them. The entire article was also translated from my original Chinese manuscript.

I would like to read the original Chinese version as a native speaker. Is there any chance you post that (the article itself) too?

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#215

Post by sersi »

xanthor wrote: post #207
sersi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, my father in law who is Chinese and had to exile himself during the cultural revolution would pretty much say the same thing about the Cultural Revolution. Educated people in China who lived through it will certainly criticise the Cultural Revolution (or The Great Leap Forward for that matter) if they are in a situation when they can be honest about it. So I'm not sure that specific comment would be consi…

Read Dongping Han

Oh the fact that there has been some positives from the cultural revolution (by having educated people sent to the farm and rural area) doesn't stop the fact that the cultural revolution was a net negative for the country. How many works of arts have been destroyed due to it? How many people suffered? Nothing is ever white or black but it doesn't mean that we can take a small positive outcome and use that to justify atrocities.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#216

Post by robwwilliams »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #181
the_af wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels off to me as well. It's the kind of unverifiable story that we would like to believe, but there's almost zero way of having independent confirmation. The photos could be from anywhere. The author seems likeable and writes an interesting story, but who knows how much of it is true. The story seems almost tailored to cater to HN, with secret projects, nuclear power, China, and secrecy.

It is completely plausible, and no details in the story are outlandish for China. Heck, it feels tamer than I would imagine, even.

Agreed. In my opinion, too much strange embodied experience in this engaged and engaging Part 1.

If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#217

Post by pixl97 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #165
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please use actual machine translation systems, not generative AI.

That’s some grade A nonsense. The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That…

Heh, it's amazing how people have already forgotten exactly how terrible older ML translation was.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#218

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

edgineer wrote: post #161
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…

What would you say to someone who has long been fascinated by nuclear weaponry and hopes to one day witness a test explosion? I see even China hasn't tested in decades and so my chances of doing this are close to nil, but I ask because your answer could tell more how you feel about the technology and its future. My physics professor told me to study supernovae instead.

To be honest, for me, nuclear explosions only exist in the imagery of propaganda and documentaries. I am not a physicist; I don't understand nuclear physics on a technical level.

My perspective on 'the nuclear' is purely emotional and sensory—I simply find it terrifying. I resonate much more with the raw, human suffering described in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl than I do with the scientific future of nuclear power.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#219

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

allan_s wrote: post #210
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s so kind of you! I did write and publish this story in Chinese first. You don't need an AI translation for them; the original text exists and has been quite popular in the Chinese corner of the internet.You can search for it using the title:《我在404长大》

在腾讯新闻找到了，太谢谢你！我准备慢慢看，真有意思！

和目前的版本有一点出入，中文版没有“放射性沙发”这部分。

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#220

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

sgnelson wrote: post #203
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…

Did you interview Yuan Gongpu or was this part from another source? I'm interested in the laborers who did the work, not just the scientists who designed everything. Thanks for your story.

Sorry I didn't，his Chinese name is 原公浦，you can search this and there and many articles about him.
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