Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 391 posts

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

#321

Post by thenthenthen »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #86
thenthenthen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing. I have been researching this topic for about ten years now and no first hand accounts like to talk or are they alive anymore, this is a very important story, especially in contrast the the dominant Western narratives, thank you!

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.

Short generalised answer; I grew up in Europe. The dominant media was of course Western media, more specifically American media, think Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It is extremely difficult to break out of that bubble.

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

#322

Post by the_af »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #282
andruby wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What exactly are you advocating? You seem to be going back to Cold War logic.

Your initial assertion that people online criticizing the West are "often" criticizing "absurd" things is simultaneously wrong and condescending, some sort of thought-terminating cliché.

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

#323

Post by the_af »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #314
johanyc wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His story recounts some of your paragraphs word for word, e.g. the execution of the murderer who hacked another man with an axe, right down to the judge uttering the exact same phrase, the same anecdote about using sorghum liquor for the smell, that "the whole Gobi desert smelled of liquor", etc. It's too much coincidence for the two of you to write the exact same things, word for word, all from memory, after so many years.

Did you write the exact same paragraphs by chance, were the two blog posts a collaborative effort, did you get together and pooled your recollections, or what?

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

#324

Post by the_af »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #260
Aboutplants wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I’m confused

I posted this in Chinese first.And use AI translated.

Why did it take you 8 years to repost it in English? It's not because of AI, because other translations existed before LLMs and were more than adequate.

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

#325

Post by the_af »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #311
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And do note non-LLM translation works pretty well with that article.

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

#326

Post by ggm »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #58
ocfnash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing these memories. I'd be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have about Jung Chang's book "Wild Swans". I read this book a year or two ago and learned a lot from it, but I also learned that many people who grew up in China take issue with the author's account. I'd be grateful for any remarks you may be able to share.

You’ve touched on a very sensitive and important point. It’s true that many people who grew up in China have a complicated relationship with narratives that focus on negative historical periods. There is often a defensive reaction, a feeling that such stories are 'smearing' the country's image. However, as a writer, I believe that truth is always more important than a curated image. Authentic memories are often scarc…

Wild Swans has received criticism for ignoring statistics and human demographic evidence on the scale of the famine, and therefore lacks an element of verifiability and number inflation. However the author wrote in a spirit of truth telling from familial experience as I understand it: she was finishing her PhD when I was studying at the same UK university (York)

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

#327

Post by the_af »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #319
the_af wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From someone neither from the US nor from China, you sure did your share of weird things too. So I think that yes, you are romanticizing it as an outsider.

Almost all of the stories we get told in the West are from the US perspective, so there's that: anything from China feels fresh in comparison.

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

#328

Post by ggm »

eunos wrote: post #14
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.

There were programmers already during Cultural Revolution in China?

A generation of gifted, and hard working graduates emerged out of the bitter ashes of the cultural revolution. Their delayed entry to tertiary education and the circumstances behind it gave added impetus to their desire to study and gain knowledge.

I've met several across different disciplines and two (at least) in computer science and networking. When the barriers for travel came down, many studied and worked abroad, I met some in Edinburgh at the end of the 70s who worked in advanced language areas (think the foundations of ML) formal methods, CSP, you-name-it. People like these in networking (I subsequently know and worked with in governance contexts) built and led the chinese academic internet. These people are now senior academics in the Chinese academy of science. They're serious, smart people.

There was also a late 1970s VLSI boom in China. It's why they were so successful in the 80s and 90s outsourcing chip commercialization space.

So to my own knowledge if not "in" the cultural revolution certainly very rapidly afterwards assuming you take its run up into the 70s.

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

#329

Post by r58lf »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #138
quakeguy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great article, thx for sharing it! What i want to know, where exactly is this city? I mean geographically, i even could not locate it on GMaps or the like?? I mean, i get it, thats the whole point isnt it? Still curious.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B013'48.0%22N+97%C2%...

that's the work site. The residential town is about 10km SW of that marker.

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

#330

Post by ggm »

> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.

It's definitional in Gwh of productive, usable energy produced per tonne of damage to health. It also demands a lot of rigour against other forms of embedded energy regarding fugitive gas leaks, unassociated third party injury which is usually an externality. And of course it predates the rise in general efficiency of solar and wind and may no longer be true unless very specific criteria are applied like constancy.

But, awful though the trail of tears is behind example contamination events, including Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukishima, counting death in coal or oil demands recognition of a huge problem in life shortening from contamination and injury at large in the whole cycle mine to chimney.

More people died from translocation consequences than direct nuclear radiation consequences in all three of the above. Not to minimise their deaths but if you move a million people in a rush, some die who otherwise would have lived.

"Modern" here is > 1949 and < "whenever wind and solar and batteries got so good"

Post reply on HN