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

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by nonninz on Sunday December 28, 2025 @03:43PM (#46414298)

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 anectodes condensed in shorter sentences, without fluff or trying to connect them in a single narrative. Maybe this is not the correct way to put it, but I'm also not a native English speaker nor I have any classical training in writing.

Yours is the first substack I ever subscribed to and can't wait to read part two. It actually pushed me to start writing some of my childhood experiences.

Thank you again. Absolutely fascinating.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by Vincent_Yan404 on Sunday December 28, 2025 @03:54PM (#46414392)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by teiferer on Sunday December 28, 2025 @04:28PM (#46414719)

That's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere.

It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by Vincent_Yan404 on Sunday December 28, 2025 @04:36PM (#46414773)

Thank you so much! I feel LLM is perfect to making web slop, that's really a pity that the smartest thing is doing the worst job.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by satvikpendem on Monday December 29, 2025 @01:37PM (#46423781)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by nonninz on Thursday January 01, 2026 @03:24PM (#46457669)

Oh, I never gave Google Translate a chance since chatGPT came out.

Are you saying it's not anymore as bad as is was a few years ago, and it's preferrable to use that? Does it also work for English to German?

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Re:Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in th... by satvikpendem on Thursday January 01, 2026 @03:27PM (#46457703)

https://blog.google/products/search/gemini-capabilities-tran...

TLDR yes it now uses Gemini which actually understands idioms etc over the previous Google translate. More importantly, it doesn't rewrite your text to sound more like AI which you see on this thread already with OP using ChatGPT to translate. Works for any language.

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