Posted by Vincent_Yan404 12/28/2025
It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.
The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.
I think this simplifies the entire discipline of literary criticism and I suppose every other related science. You can write the same prose with both the Bic and the fountain pen; the quality of pen only affects the material quality of the writing—the ink—but not the style (rhetoric? eloquence?) of the writing (i.e., the contents of language, how it’s conveyed, etc.). We aren’t arguing whether it’s appropriate to depreciate writing generated by an LLM to using speech-to-text as opposed to using a keyboard.
The style of the prose does contribute to the value of the artifact and speaks to the repute of the reader in addition. Readers care about what you say and how you say it too.
Nonetheless I as well as others have good reason to interrogate the intrinsic value of LLM-assisted writing especially when it refers to writing like the one being discussed which I reckon qualifies as a part of the “literary non-fiction” genre. So it’s apt that we criticize this writing on those grounds. Many here have even said that they would prefer the 100% genuinely-styled version of the author’s experience which is apparently only 1.5 points lower than whatever their verbal acumen is. [1] Which I imagine places them around the rank of your average American...and I assume so with charity toward the Americans.
While I think some LLM accusations are lazily applied I think communities such as this one benefit from these discussions when waged critically. Especially when status and social capital are of implicit interest.
I don't know if those coordinates are correct. They seem to be the exact coordinates of Jiayuguan City [0], but then the article also says that the 404 site is located "100 km west of Jiayuguan City," with living areas later relocated to Jiayuguan. So I think the article authors just put the Jiayuguan coords there.
Decimal: 40.180185, 97.276804
Geo URI: geo:40.180185,97.276804
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=en¶ms...
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.
If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.
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.
The US...what sort of stories do you get told? Are they experiences that Gen X had in general, or just outliers that perhaps were glamorized by Hollywood? Let me tell you, we really didn't have much going on in general.
Yet these happened in the US. Bizarre and secret government projects also happened. Executions also happened.
That you didn't witness them doesn't mean much. I'm sure most Gen X Chinese, as you call them, had pretty uneventful lives without any massacres either. I do think this is a case of laser-focusing on those who had more "interesting" lives, much like focusing on US antiwar activist who got shot or imprisoned during Vietnam war protests, or KKK activity: interesting, but surely not the norm.
> I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad.
Doesn't seem too exciting to me. It does reinforce the narrative that China = bad, US = good (though this is harder to believe in the Trump era). But it's not something particularly interesting to read about, plus every HN reader "knows" this is life in China, they are authoritarian, etc etc.
Are you confusing GenX with Baby Boomers?
> I'm sure most Gen X Chinese, as you call them, had pretty uneventful lives without any massacres either.
Most? Maybe, I've never met one that hasn't though. So maybe the selection of people I meet is biased?
> It does reinforce the narrative that China = bad, US = good (though this is harder to believe in the Trump era).
Something that was true pre-1995 hardly says anything about China today. Stop reading into supposed western bias where there is none. You would never compare China to North Korea today, but 30 years ago there were some remaining resemblances that quickly dissipated as China hit 2000.
> plus every HN reader "knows" this is life in China, they are authoritarian, etc etc.
Again, you are just projecting some sort of insecurity with this statement.
Maybe it was Baby Boomers, indeed.
> Most? Maybe, I've never met one that hasn't though
I'm sure you acknowledge you're not an expert on general Chinese experience. You were an expat, surely while your first-hand experience was valuable it was also heavily limited to what a Westerner in China would see and be told?
> Something that was true pre-1995 hardly says anything about China today.
"Hardly says anything" is a bonkers statement. The recent past of any country definitely says something about its present. We agree China 30 years ago was different from China today, but what does it have to do with anything?
Do you disagree there's a strong anti-China bias on HN? (Whether justified or not).
> Again, you are just projecting some sort of insecurity with this statement.
Insecurity? I think it's an accurate assessment of groupthink about China here. I may have misinterpreted what you were trying to say though, in which case I apologize.
I lived in west Richland Washington as a kid, my dad worked at Hanford which is a giant nuclear reservation in the western USA. It was mostly typical American kid life, so nothing on your experience, except my dad eventually died of a rare cancer and we got a settlement from the US Department of Energy.
I spent 9 years living in Beijing but first visited in 1999 when thinks were kind of still brutaleski. I’ve had a couple of experiences with the PLA (living in a building where I wasn’t supposed to be living and some off limit areas on the border for foreigners that they don’t tell you about).
It also caters to the usual biases of the HN crowd: China, nuclear projects, secrecy, etc.
How come the Chinese post is from 2016 and complete but now we're getting it in English and in parts?
Of course, none of it means this is fake. It's just, like the parent commenter said, "slightly off".
When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
My feelings toward 404 are deeply conflicted. It was a cage, yet for a long time, I desperately wanted to go back. As I explore in Part 2, the most tragic part wasn't the strength of the cage, but its fragility. It vanished almost overnight, and when the 'cage' that gave us our identity and social standing disappeared, many of us lost our sense of meaning entirely.
We were free, but we were also 'lost' in a world that no longer had a place for us.
On the other hand, people (generally) get sent to prison for committing a crime, not for being incredibly smart or talented.
Maybe if you consider "Can't walk wherever I want" as inhumane, all of them are, but there is definitely a difference between a prison in Rwanda vs one in Norway, and probably one would feel humane after observing the other.
I don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)
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.
Hundreds of thousands of micro-computers had been built during that period. For example, there were many used in the textile factories. Workers there were encouraged to learn programming. They wrote programs to control the weaving machines.
After Capitalist Roaders seize the power through a palace coup, they told everybody that, the Great Cultural Revolution wrecked the economy. So most were ditched.
As programmer shortage emeraged in the 1980s, Capitalist Roaders start promoting "grab toddlers to computers".
I still wonder which model it was…
You might think this is about the rise of fascism[0] in the US, Chat Control in the EU, the failure of revolution in Belarus and Turkey, censorship in the UK, martial law in South Korea, etc. But it's about all of those.
I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence (performed or threatened) and that we keep building cool stuff because we get paid a lot, yet we don't own the product of our work and it is increasingly being used against us. We don't have guns to our heads yet but the goal of AI is to remove what little bargaining power we have by making us economically redundant.
At every point in history, oppressing a group of people required controlling another (smaller but better armed) group of people willing to perform the oppression. And for the first time in history, "thanks" to AI and robotics, this requirement will be lifted.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
But a gay man growing up in the 1950s in a rural village was plenty oppressed. It's actually quite fascinating how in the 1960s/70s we had a Cultural Revolution of our own that ended a thousand years of religious oppression! And we didn't even have a Mao.
But never forget we are always one bad week away from sliding backwards.
Rather from numbers in my opinion. "Divide and conquer", or its modern equivalent "confuse and manipulate", is what makes violence effective. It is always striking to compare how much people are similar, even in our divided society, versus how much dissimilar they think they are. I'm used to help organize long boat trips with all kind of people from various backgrounds, and it's funny to watch.
In the past it was easy to convince people that "the other" was strange and dangerous, due to physical distance. Today we achieve the same with social media.
Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.
And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.
But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
The closest I know of is an article exploring why there are is no research into just riots: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/445638/
I follow lesswrong from a distance and they are all about AI takeover but I have seen almost nothing about humans using AI to enslave other humans. And I mean literally almost nothing, I only use "almost" because I remember maybe one post by a person other than me here on HN and that's it.
As for the general trend towards authoritarianism, I see some mentions here and there but I don't think the general population is aware or cares. Usually, most people only start caring when something materially affects them so the typical strategy of divide and conquer ("target minorities first") works quite well.
There might be a small trend of people talking about how wealth works and how the system is stacked against those doing actual work in favor of the owner class: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisKohlerNews and https://www.youtube.com/@GarysEconomics
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The saddest thing is we (the people) should be learning from countries like nazi Germany or current China and Russia about what not to do, or specifically what not to allow other people to do. But really, general education is shit and history is taught by memorizing names and dates. Plus children don't have enough real world experience to truly understand most of the processes driving historical events and I think most people in general never reach the combination of intelligence and systems thinking to apply any knowledge they might have gained. By all metrics, I am well above average intelligence and even I needed to have a fresh look at history once I started realizing basic principles like "incentives drive behavior".
It's the opposite - they (the rich and connected) are learning from history - what didn't work last time and what to do differently.
It's fine if you want to argue that there is a rise in fascism in the US, but you need to actually pose that argument, not just talk about it as if its true and that everyone agrees with you.
Also, there is not currently any martial law in South Korea. That was a brief event that lasted a matter of hours from when it was announced and when it was repealed. It's an open question if any actions were actually performed under the guises of it.
But yes, you are its hysterical fringe voices calling this the “rise of fascism in the US”.
The source I linked is written by a historian[0] - a guy who actually studied how this kind of stuff happens. You'll also notice that his post uses a fairly high standard of proof - using 2 different definitions of fascism and using only the wannabe-dictator's own statements to show he satisfies all points.
There's also a YouTube video and a YouTube video. Here's an actual lawyer talking about the legality of the proto-dictator's actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
Is any of the boxes not checked?
I wonder if this site in the Gobi ended up having the same problems with radioactive contamination from accidents and unethical experiments that Hanford and Mayak had?
1. How did the classification level affect everyday social interactions? Were there topics that were implicitly off-limits even within the city among residents?
2. You mentioned the zoo in the middle of the desert - what drove that decision? Was it purely for morale/quality of life, or were there other factors?
3. Looking back now with perspective, how do you think growing up in such a unique environment shaped your worldview compared to peers who grew up in "normal" Chinese cities?
Also really interested in hearing about the technical side if you're comfortable sharing - what was the general sentiment among the scientists and engineers about their work? Did they talk about it as "nation-building" or was it more pragmatic?
Looking forward to Part 2!
For the adults, 404 was a place of immense pressure, secrecy, and often sacrifice. But for us kids, it was just 'home.' We played in the shadows of giants and nuclear reactors without a second thought.
That contrast—the 'nightmare' for the parents and the 'playground' for the children—is what makes these memories so surreal to look back on. I’m glad that perspective resonated with you.