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America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

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Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#31

Post by ninalanyon »

rapnie wrote: post #15
magnio wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, I don't mean to disparage your article. At least it avoids some of the most annoying LLMism I have seen, and given its length you must have put some effort into prompting, researching, or editing. Hope you will find your own voice as you write more and more.

Youtube these days is full of probably great and interesting documentaries, where people put a lot of time in, but when I hear these typical LLM narrations I can't make it more then a few seconds in, they are horrible.

I wish that YouTube would have some kind of indicator to show that the narration was synthetic and a setting to completely block such things.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#33

Post by idontwantthis »

cryber wrote: post #18
magnio wrote: post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege

It’s barely readable. The way it flips back and forth “not this but this” instead of just actually saying anything is maddening.

> Kimball was right at the level he was reading it, but wrong about which decision he was reading

What the fuck does this sentence mean?

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#35

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

magnio wrote: post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

The kneejerk accusations of LLM even when it passes easily-available tests is intellectually lazy and does not belong on HN.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#36

Post by elevation »

512akHaf wrote: post #26
cryber wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege

It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears). The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style. If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthet…

The thought occurs that some day we'll be nostalgic for the quaint LLM speak of yore.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#37

Post by l23k4 »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #35
magnio wrote: post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

The kneejerk accusations of LLM even when it passes easily-available tests is intellectually lazy and does not belong on HN.

I think it'd be rather uncharitable to assume this was written by a human:

>The error was not stupidity, corruption, or ideology, but a structural failure of the threat-detection apparatus to model what the asset actually represented.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#38

Post by SirFatty »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #35
magnio wrote: post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

The kneejerk accusations of LLM even when it passes easily-available tests is intellectually lazy and does not belong on HN.

lighten up Francis.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#39

Post by SirFatty »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #10
samlinnfer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in asia.

unless you are Alexander the great and even then, your armies would get tired of fighting for so long for a piece of land far far away from their homeland and they would wish to get homes.

whooosh...

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#40

Post by js2 »

512akHaf wrote: post #26
cryber wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege

It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears). The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style. If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthet…

Where the heck did LLMs (Claude in particular) pick up the "load-bearing" tic I wonder? I'm over a half century old and read a lot, and I don't think I've ever seen load-bearing used so much before I noticed Claude using it all the time a few months back.
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