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America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen
- Nasrudith 5mo agoI don't quite get why the author thinks it would be impossible to get a big budget nose-rub in the dirt to the security apparatuses about their incredible abilability to create self-fulfilling prophecies against themselves via bigotry. It isn't like it takes pentagon cooperation for history biopics, the tech is all old.
- greesil 5mo agoI doubt it's the greatest given all that's happened in the past year. But it's certainly up there, no pun intended.
- 0x3f 5mo agoIt's hard to say how much it contributed to the pre-eminence of modern-day China. But overall the rise of China surely dominates anything that's happened in the last year. No other nation even comes close to vying for hegemony with the US. We could have another full-on Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iran and it wouldn't even be a blip in comparison.
- magnio 5mo agoIf you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/missile-genius-america-lost-and-china-gained https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoUnfortunately there is too much detail here for me to write more candidly.
- magnio 5mo agoNo 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.
- rapnie 5mo agoYoutube 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.
- ninalanyon 5mo agoI wish that YouTube would have some kind of indicator to show that the narration was synthetic and a setting to completely block such things.
- douglee650 5mo agoSo obviously generated
- cryber 5mo agoThis is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege
- 512akHaf 5mo agoIt 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 synthetic LLM voice that is optimized for rhetoric.
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoI don't really think there's a tangential detail that is related to the message. Which one are you referring to? Also, the upbeat and persuasive style ... is my style kek, is it me being too pushy or?
- elevation 5mo agoThe thought occurs that some day we'll be nostalgic for the quaint LLM speak of yore.
- Apocryphon 5mo agoI've thought that a lot of present LLM-speak is a distant descendant of the heyday of the "Now See This", Buzzfeed, et al clickbait that was en vogue about a decade or dozen years ago. A sort of chirpy contrarian provocation to drive reader engagement. "You won't believe how this X" begets "this isn't just Y -- it's Z." So it will be a style that eventually leaves as new models are trained on other writing.
- js2 5mo agoWhere 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.
- RankingMember 5mo agoWhy would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? The topic seems super interesting otherwise and would benefit from the real human voice. OP, can you elaborate on why you decided to go this direction?
- 0x3f 5mo ago> Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? What diference does it make as long as the content is interesting and the tone not grating? It's possible for a human being to use an LLM but guide it to a well-written piece that's worth consuming.
- mingus88 5mo agoThe tone is grating. That’s why we notice it. If the LLM output was indistinguishable from real human text nobody would say anything, because by definition we wouldn’t be able to tell.
- rubenflamshep 5mo agoNah, if a human can't be bothered to write it themselves, I can't be bothered to read it.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agobecause it is a propaganda piece the cheaper it is made, the more effort can be spent elsewhere
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoI considered against publishing this piece because it could be taken as propaganda. But America did derive the same idea, back in 1878 and was part of philosophy behind the New Deal. So what do Americans have to be sour about and call it propaganda for, when the American academia and government abandoned empiricism for whatever they believed in 2026?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ofcourseyoudo 5mo agoThe kneejerk accusations of LLM even when it passes easily-available tests is intellectually lazy and does not belong on HN.
- l23k4 5mo agoI 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.
- SirFatty 5mo agolighten up Francis.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago> The methodology, not just the man
- axus 5mo agoThanks to your link, I read both. There's distinct information in each of them, I'd say its worth reading both. The blog author is an "LLM enthusiast", at a minimum I'll give them credit for pointing their agent at an interesting set of Wikipedia articles. Maybe a blog platform tied to Markdown format is going to produce similar looking posts.
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoWikipedia alone does not contain these information.
- jmilloy 5mo agoI'm not getting LLM-voice, but I do find it hard and unpleasant to read. This usni article is much better.
- dang 5mo agoThanks. Someone posted that link (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211409) and I've moved the relevant comments thither.
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoThe article is a sensational piece without a large historical caveat on the Soviet response to Qian moving to China, along with the very important information that his wife was KMT, and they were treated as traitors to the Taiwanese government at the time. However Qian was insistent on removing any trace to America and he refused to visit America thereafter.
- dang 5mo agoI don't fully understand this, but I appreciate that the articles contain different information and there may be significant differences. However, HN readers really don't want to read LLM-generated text. The feeling in the community is that rather than sharing the generated output, you should share the prompt, i.e. the part a human actually wrote. Users here are quite capable of interacting with LLMs themselves.
- danieltanfh95 5mo agoThis is pretty much my writing with some edits around content I wanted to simplify. The article linked is not the same content at all. Not only does it only focus on the American perspective, it proposes the opposite of what I was trying to convey. The idea that this article is anywhere the same as "read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice" is just flat out misleading.
- dang 5mo ago> pretty much my writing with some edits Content producers greatly underestimate the markers and imprints that LLMs leave on text while editing. Content consumers (a.k.a. readers) are increasingly sensitive to these, and once they sense them, they instantly reclassify the content as AI. This appears to be a spontaneous and involuntary reaction. This is leading to a class distinction in writing: anything the audience classifies as genai becomes low-status. And the reverse: writing that the audience classifies as human becomes higher-status. Two caveats: (1) the above is true of HN readers but there are many other audiences and some no doubt react differently. (2) the above is true of the current moment but nobody knows where these things will end up over time. But at least on HN and at least for the near future, it's not in your interest to post this kind of text to HN.
- pickleglitch 5mo ago[flagged]
- samlinnfer 5mo agoIt's one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in asia.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agounless 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.
- stevenwoo 5mo agoThe destruction of the research and development education pipeline in the USA that took 75 years to build because “college and women and minorities bad/Israel always good” was vying for the title only a few months ago.
- pickleglitch 5mo agoOh, that blunder is so 2025. In 2026 we brought our A game.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoTurns out there's a nice phrase that neatly describes these seemingly disparate trends.
- 5mo ago
- zasz 5mo agoI buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?
- xbar 5mo agoThat is a good piece on a truly major technology debacle. The title is overblown.
- delichon 5mo agoReminds me of the results of a large Slavic country going to war with a much smaller, once subordinate, now independent republic that was the source of their best engineers.
- selivanovp 5mo agoIt's a false analogy. Ukraine was no such source. It's just happened after WW2, that as a part or rebuilding a devastated territory, plus a better climate, resulted in USSR relocating several of its best aero/space and in general military institutions to what is now known as Ukraine. For example, their space engines engineers were educated in Russia till 2008 at least, maybe even longer.
- adampunk 5mo agoThis is literal Russian propaganda.
- selivanovp 5mo agoYeah, sure. That's why half of my MIPT faculty in early 00's was Ukrainians from Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk that were sent there to study physics and math and rocket engines for three years, and after that they were sent back to write diploma after practice on the soviet era facilities in mentioned cities. It was the normal procedure since soviet times.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- zf00002 5mo agoI read the whole thing, found this fascinating.
- stevenalowe 5mo agoOr it avoided internal sabotage - no way to know
- davidivadavid 5mo agoFun book that covers part of that, Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence. [0] [0] https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final/ https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...