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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

#371

Post by JakeSc »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #367
Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

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…

Update: Part 2 is out now on my Substack. I will submit it as a separate post on HN later today once this thread cools down, to avoid spamming the front page. But for those asking, here is the direct link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-182824207

Great memoirs! One question: You mentioned that sports activities were organized by the units in 404. Which sports were played?

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

#372

Post by the_af »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #352
the_af wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cause I've never thought it before, and now I'm in Canada,I want to try whether this can be related in western country.

Oh, I can help you with that concern: anything related to China, mysterious towns, and secret projects will be lapped up by readers from Western countries. You'd have a harder time if you were trying to portray a more positive life experience in China.

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

#373

Post by the_af »

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #340
the_af wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is no coincidence. In a secluded and tightly-knit community like Plant 404, an extreme event like this would immediately spread throughout the entire area. The author you mentioned is Li Yang. We know each other, and our parents know each other as well. He published his piece before I did. Since the person involved was his classmate, he was able to provide more first-hand details, such as the part about riding a b…

But right down to the same figures of speech, "the Gobi desert must have smelled of sorghum liquor", the exact same utterance by the judge, etc? Even the photos seem taken by the same person (in composition, style, etc).

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

#374

Post by thisislife2 »

FarmerPotato wrote: post #212
thisislife2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "bad governing". It sounds more like a rigorous containment policy when nuclear technology was at its infancy in China. ( Regulations are written in the blood of your predecessors - https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/ud3lt4/lpt_osh... ). It is also about preventing accident leakage of information and preserving secrecy. For e.g. In the 1970s, India learnt that Pakistan was working to cre…

The LLM flipped from “scorched earth” to “ bad governing” as the sofa faded from its context window. The metaphor says maybe “extreme cleanliness is like war”, second pass war is bad governing… Don’t engage with it. At this point, you’re arguing with an LLM, not a coherent storyteller. The events your question refers to have been downgraded in the context window. It’s like the game of twenty questions where the LLM d…

Thanks for the info. I wouldn't know anything about this as I just totally avoid AI tech - whether for online search or coding or some other service. It just doesn't excite me. (By the way, how do I know you are not AI too? ;)

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

#375

Post by thomassmith65 »

the_af wrote: post #365
thomassmith65 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberal democracy, I suppose.

How is it advocating for liberal democracy when you preemptively cast doubts on narratives other than the dominant Western one? "Useful idiots" etc is the language of Cold War logic.

The lessons of the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I lived through, should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad".

The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date, and is more relevant now, in the age of social media, than ever. The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.

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

#376

Post by thomassmith65 »

the_af wrote: post #368
thomassmith65 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's true enough. I was bracing myself for something edgier. I don't know what I expected, "China has freer speech than America because Facebook censored antivax content" or something :)

You seem to be arguing against strawmen. You picked a very fringe and bizarre belief (I honestly never read anything even remotely paraphrasing what you just typed) and made it seem so common that "as often as not" this is what people claim when they criticize the West. It reeks of dishonesty. This isn't defending "Liberal democracy" as you claimed in another comment, it's attacking dissenting opinions by picking (or…

What a mystifying comment. Cheers, though.

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

#378

Post by satvikpendem »

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.

Try machine translation not general LLM based ones. Google translate does use an LLM, Gemini, now for translation, but it preserves the nuances of your own speech instead of injecting the clear markers of LLMs like you'd get if you tried to do it via Gemini or ChatGPT directly.

So, write your replies in your native language then post them into Google translate, I guarantee it'll sound better and people won't think it's an LLM.

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

#379

Post by the_af »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #376
the_af wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be arguing against strawmen. You picked a very fringe and bizarre belief (I honestly never read anything even remotely paraphrasing what you just typed) and made it seem so common that "as often as not" this is what people claim when they criticize the West. It reeks of dishonesty. This isn't defending "Liberal democracy" as you claimed in another comment, it's attacking dissenting opinions by picking (or…

What a mystifying comment. Cheers, though.

What is mystifying about it?

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

#380

Post by the_af »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #375
the_af wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it advocating for liberal democracy when you preemptively cast doubts on narratives other than the dominant Western one? "Useful idiots" etc is the language of Cold War logic.

The lessons of the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I lived through, should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad" . The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date, and is more relevant now, in the age of social media, than ever. The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.

> The lessons of the Cold War [...] should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad"

I was arguing that the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I also lived through, introduced a mistrustful "us vs them" kind of thinking that is harmful. The Soviet system is no longer relevant, and unfortunately "the end of history" didn't happen as Fukuyama predicted. What matters today are the successes but also the failings, lies, and fabrications of the systems that endured, and it's not all China.

Cold War mentality is what makes you (specifically you, in this context) mistrustful of any narratives not dictated by your country. So when someone else, as in this thread, praised an article for showing points of views other than the dominant narrative [1], you instantly questioned what the user meant, out of suspicion. You cannot deny it was suspicion, because in other comments you clarified what kind of "criticism of the West" you meant (and tellingly, you equated listening to other narratives to criticism of the West!): that "as often as not" it's "absurd" whining about Churchill or about the term "Iranian regime", or (in another comment) claiming that "China is freer than the US".

> The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date

As long as you acknowledge it's a term of propaganda. It has no value today other than as a relic of the Cold War past.

I hope you're not trying to use it as a thought-terminating cliché to criticize anyone who wants to say something about China that doesn't belong with the usual tropes.

> The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.

Yes, though we would likely disagree about which is the major world power more likely to engage in this tactic today.

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[1] what's even more puzzling is that I think TFA actually shows the same point of view as the Western narrative: China doing China things, secrecy, military projects, enclosed towns, executions. This wouldn't feel surprising or novel to an English-speaking reader, it would just confirm what they already thought of China!

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