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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

#281

Post by RealityVoid »

andruby wrote: post #258
thomassmith65 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As often as not, these days, when someone online criticizes the West, it's for something absurd (eg: Churchill interfering with Hitler's continental invasions, or America using the word 'regime' when discussing Iran). Obviously, other times the criticism is wholly justified. What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.

Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb. And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives. If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd…

I think Oppenheimer is pretty fair as it goes. It's pretty clear with it being the US perspective and they give credit to the other countries that they have good scientists that will figure the thing out (and they did). I think for exposing a man's experience, it's quite good. What makes me wrong? (An honest invitation to illuminate me)

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

#282

Post by thomassmith65 »

andruby wrote: post #258
thomassmith65 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As often as not, these days, when someone online criticizes the West, it's for something absurd (eg: Churchill interfering with Hitler's continental invasions, or America using the word 'regime' when discussing Iran). Obviously, other times the criticism is wholly justified. What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.

Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb. And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives. If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd…

The last paragraph is true, but up to the point where one becomes a useful idiot for a totalitarian state. I don't mean you, but on social media there are quite a few people like that.

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

#283

Post by johanyc »

saltwatercowboy wrote: post #166
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given those precautions and your training, was it hard to share about it? Aren't you worried about the Chinese government punishing you for sharing?

He sells a storytelling course... perhaps this is meant to be a 'gotcha' where he reveals the con after the fact? My guess is there are people reading this who know something isn't quite right.

Here's a chinese article about 404 published back in 2020.

https://chaiwanbenpost.net/article/%25E4%25B8%25AD%25E5%259C...

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

#284

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

fragmede wrote: post #250
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When I first write this in Chinese, they didn't censor anything, just let me published without question.The first guy wrote this been called by phone, they said it's secret, but nothing happened later. Before I published here I add some part, for example, the context of the famine, in Chinese version, people know what I talked about.

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

#285

Post by thomassmith65 »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #277
thomassmith65 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As often as not, these days, when someone online criticizes the West, it's for something absurd (eg: Churchill interfering with Hitler's continental invasions, or America using the word 'regime' when discussing Iran). Obviously, other times the criticism is wholly justified. What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.

I don't think I'm criticizing Western narratives. This is simply my personal perspective and experience growing up there.

I know! It was a fantastic read. My comment was referring to another comment with an ambiguous reference.

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

#286

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

saltwatercowboy wrote: post #166
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given those precautions and your training, was it hard to share about it? Aren't you worried about the Chinese government punishing you for sharing?

He sells a storytelling course... perhaps this is meant to be a 'gotcha' where he reveals the con after the fact? My guess is there are people reading this who know something isn't quite right.

And how did you know I sold storytelling course before, did I mention it somewhere?

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

#287

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #263
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please use actual machine translation systems, not generative AI.

这样确实可以避免AI味儿，但是可能阅读起来会体验很差，我最早就是用machine translation翻译，很多部分变得非常wordy，同时令人费解。

What models are you using? I'm using whatever's built into Firefox 140.6.0esr (some Bergamot derivative, iirc), which gives me:

> This can avoid the taste of AI, but it may be very bad to read, I first used machine translation translation, many parts become very wordy, and at the same time puzzling.

Perfectly clear and comprehensible. It's not fluent English, there are comma splices everywhere, and it translated "machine translation翻译" as "machine translation translation", but I understand it – and I'm confident it's close to what you actually meant to say. I can spot-check with my Chinese-to-English dictionary, and it seems like a slightly-better-than-literal translation. My understanding of your comment:

> This can avoid the smell of AI, but it may be a struggle to read. I initially used a dedicated machine translation system, but many parts became verbose (/ very wordy) and incomprehensible.

Generative models don't solve the 令人费解 problem: they just paper over it. If a machine translation is incomprehensible, that means the model did not understand what you were saying. Generative models are still transformer models: they're not going to magically have greater powers of comprehension than the dedicated translation model does. But they are trained and fine-tuned to pretend that they know what they're talking about. Is it better for information to be conspicuously lost in translation, or silently lost in translation?

Please, be willing to write in your native language, with your own words, and then provide us with either the original text, or a faithful translation of those words. Do you really want future historians to have to figure out which parts of this you wrote yourself, and which parts were invented by the AI model? I suspect that is not the reason you wrote this.

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

below43 wrote: post #276
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》

Thanks. It's interesting to compare the original HN article with the browser-translated story (from https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00 ). I definitely appreciate the style of the HN English article, but I think the browser-translated version possibly gives a bit more context to some of the story. e.g. This is the English version "We would clutch candy wrappers in our hands, giggling endlessly. The teacher wo…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by teiferer »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #279
nonninz wrote: post #275

Absolutely beautiful story thank you so much for sharing. I don't mind AI translation at all. The style comes off as a bit weird indeed, but I just took it off as a style I'm not used to because it comes from a different culture than mine. I wouldn't mind much the naysayers, I'd like to see them posting something in chinese and see how they'd like it ;) I really enjoyed the writing style actually, all these different…

Thank you so much! I hope LLM didn't ruin the vibe, so I edited many times, but still, english is not my first language, so it probably still "looks like AI". I will try my best and I will post part 2 on Monday.

That's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere.

It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.

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

#290

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

teiferer wrote: post #289
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much! I hope LLM didn't ruin the vibe, so I edited many times, but still, english is not my first language, so it probably still "looks like AI". I will try my best and I will post part 2 on Monday.

That's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere. It's so sad beca…

Thank you so much! I feel LLM is perfect to making web slop, that's really a pity that the smartest thing is doing the worst job.
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