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

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241–250 of 391 posts

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

#241

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.

Write your comments in Chinese, we will use our own translation.

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

#242
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.

Part 2 is the harsh part, including death and execution. And now I know how hard life was, but when I was a kid, I just feel 404 is the sweetest home.

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

#243
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.

Those pictures photoed by me and my parents,I did use LLM to translate, cause my english is not good enough to write a long article.

I apologise. I write too and I've been bothered by LLM-generated content masquerading as the work it takes to tell an effective narrative. It was the combination of generated responses in the comments alongside what I thought was a generated image that set me off, but I was clearly being far too militant.

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

#244
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.

Feels AI-ish as well, and OP used em-dashes in some of their replies. But it could be attributed to a language barrier of sorts requiring the use of LLMs to communicate

I'm using AI to translate comments, and it does sounds AI. My IELTS is 7.5, and writing band 6.0, so I have to rely on the tool currently.

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

#245

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…

> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base. Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up? I…

These are just numbered designations for many military organizations, just like in the Soviet Union. For example, pre-WWII Plant No.8 -> Artillery Plant 88 -> post-WWII Research Institute 88, nowadays known as TsNIIMash, with Special Design Bureau 88 led by Korolyov (known as RSC Energia today) as a spin-off.

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

#246
post #237

In the U.S. we have belatedly had declassification of various parts of military history, including lots of details about Los Alamos (where the U.S. atom bomb was invented). Sometimes this has happened on a delay of many decades and there are certainly still some things that the public might think of as part of "history" that are not officially declassified. Has there been a similar process in China where older milita…

See also "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" by Alex Wellerstein.

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

#247
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

While reading through the post, I too felt it being similar to LLM generated text, but the stories and the perspective is uniquely human, or is there something specific that sticks out as inhuman from the text? Specific parts that sounds implausible? It obvious that something was used to do the translation, but it doesn't feel worse than any other machine-translated texts, as long as I get the gist and the overall id…

I’m going to guess that the dash gave it away. What a lot of people don’t see to understand is that using an LLM for translations is better than using vanilla translate. The traditional translation apps lose a lot of context and subtly, and they sound even more artificial.

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

#248
post #152

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…

Hi OP, as a side question, are you using an LLM like ChatGPT to translate or write your comments here?

Yes,English is not my first langue, I have to use AI translate for now.

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

#249

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…

Fascinating and well told - many thanks!

Thank you!

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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。

I do not wish harm to befall you, but is it that because of CCP censors that you removed it from the Chinese version? Did they ask you to remove it or did you do that proactively?
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