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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

#311

Post by wizzwizz4 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #287
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "mac…

Per another comment, the original text is available: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111. My last paragraph is spurious.

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

#312

Post by sophrosyne42 »

xanthor wrote: post #168
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious what specific narratives you had in mind when you said "dominant Western narratives"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46410398

We're talking about 404, not the cultural revolution

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

#313

Post by schoen »

onraglanroad wrote: post #296
schoen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of subtleties about connotation here. I would say that "storytelling" traditionally primarily meant fiction, but some modern uses also include narrative technique generally, including nonfiction and also marketing. There may also be older traditions of nonfiction storytelling, but that has some connotation of a ritualized or formalized activity (e.g. children sitting in a circle listening to a recitat…

I don't think that's true. Perhaps in your dialect of English, but if I was down the pub and someone started with, "Did I ever tell you the story of when I...", I certainly wouldn't assume it was fictional.

I think "tell you the story of" has a different connotation from "storytelling"!

E.g. if you said someone was good at "storytelling" as a skill, then I would expect it to be most likely fictional. I agree that "tell you the story of..." could easily be nonfictional.

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

#314

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

johanyc wrote: post #283
saltwatercowboy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I ate dinner with this author, our parents know each other.

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

#315

Post by Vincent_Yan404 »

the_af wrote: post #169
saltwatercowboy wrote: post #159

Something about this feels off. Anyone else?

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's published in China many years ago, and it's nonfiction. I just used AI translate to English. And can you make up something to cater HN, like nuclear power stuff?

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

#316

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

tomcam wrote: post #10

My father-in-law worked there as a programmer during the Cultural Revolution. There were always guards on the other side of the (locked) office door. Sometimes they’d shoot at random things to remind the nerds just who was in charge. When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.

Was the door locked to keep them in or to keep the proletariat out?

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

#318

Post by gaoryrt »

schoen wrote: 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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/816_Nuclear_Military_Plant

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

#319

Post by seanmcdirmid »

the_af wrote: post #310
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of weird stuff going on in China in the 70s and 80s (and perhaps into the early/mid 90s). Any Gen X Chinese adult will have a lot of stories to tell, like how it was like to join the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 (my gf in college was from Beijing). I wouldn't discount this story at all based on its contents, and it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all to make it up, so let's give him the benefit of…

There was a lot of weird stuff in the 70s and 80s in the US too, no surprise there.

As an American Gen X, I don’t think very exciting things happened in our youth. We were kind of rich, kind of broke, we had recessions but not upheaval, not hardship, not a society that was more similar to North Korea is today liberalizing at a rapid clip. I could be romanticizing it as an outsider, but I think Chinese Gen Xers have much better stories to tell than we do.

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

#320

Post by jiggawatts »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #226
jiggawatts wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsen…

> Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation?

Because translation requires a thorough understanding of the source material, essentially up to the level of AGI or close to it. Long-range context matters, short-range context matters, idioms, short-hand, speaker identity, etc... all matters.

Current LLMs do great at this, the older translation algorithms based on "mere" deep learning and/or fancy heuristics fail spectacularly in the most trivial scenarios, except when translating between closely related languages, such as most (but not all) European ones. Dutch to English: Great! Chinese to English: Unusable!

I've been testing modern LLMs on various translation tasks, and they're amazing at it.[1] I've never had any issues with hallucinations or whatever. If anything, I've seen LLMs outperform human translators in several common scenarios!

Don't assume humans don't make mistakes, or that "organic mistakes" are somehow superior or preferred.

[1] If you can't read both the source and destination language, you can gain some confidence by doing multiple runs with multiple frontier models and then having them cross-check each other. Similarly, you can round-trip from a language you do understand, or round-trip back to the source language and have an LLM (not necessarily the same one!) do the checking for you.

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