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Something about this feels off. Anyone else?
by saltwatercowboy 10mo ago
Something about this feels off. Anyone else?
- the_af 10mo agoIt feels off to me as well. 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.
- amdivia 10mo agoFeels AI-ish as well, and OP used em-dashes in some of their replies. But it could be attributed to a language barrier of sorts requiring the use of LLMs to communicate
- nephihaha 10mo agoI use em dashes in prose — and I am not AI.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI'm using AI to translate comments, and it does sounds AI. My IELTS is 7.5, and writing band 6.0, so I have to rely on the tool currently.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoIt is completely plausible, and no details in the story are outlandish for China. Heck, it feels tamer than I would imagine, even.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- robwwilliams 10mo agoAgreed. In my opinion, too much strange embodied experience in this engaged and engaging Part 1. 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.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoThere was a lot of weird stuff going on in China in the 70s and 80s (and perhaps into the early/mid 90s). Any Gen X Chinese adult will have a lot of stories to tell, like how it was like to join the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 (my gf in college was from Beijing). I wouldn't discount this story at all based on its contents, and it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all to make it up, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
- the_af 10mo agoThere was a lot of weird stuff in the 70s and 80s in the US too, no surprise there.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoAs 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.
- the_af 10mo agoFrom 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.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThose pictures photoed by me and my parents,I did use LLM to translate, cause my english is not good enough to write a long article.
- saltwatercowboy 10mo agoI apologise. I write too and I've been bothered by LLM-generated content masquerading as the work it takes to tell an effective narrative. It was the combination of generated responses in the comments alongside what I thought was a generated image that set me off, but I was clearly being far too militant.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoIt's published in China many years ago, and it's nonfiction. I just used AI translate to English. And can you make up something to cater HN, like nuclear power stuff?
- decimalenough 10mo agoIt's translated. Here's the original: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111