Thank you for sharing that. Our hometowns were built as means to an end—political or military missions—rather than places meant to last for people. To us, it was our entire world; to the state, it was just a tool. That’s why our personal memories and that sense of disorientation are never truly valued by the powers that be. We are left to wander the ruins of a history that has already moved on.
Interesting, that's a point of view that I didn't consider so far. Growing up in Europe, even the local church often dates back quite a few centuries.
My small hometown has residential buildings that are multiple centuries old, still inhabited today.
The town itself dates back to 1072.
The attitude towards the buildings and history is very different here.
But there are also hometowns of the mind that disappear, e.g. someone who grew up in East Germany would lament that the cartoons and foods they grew up with no longer exists...
As a "West-German", I'd argue that's also true over here. The 80s and 90s are gone. I even sometimes use the construct "Bonner Republik" to refer to the time before unification.
There will be fewer comments because most people have already commented in story 1, but it is nonetheless beloved and I can’t wait for part 3. I hope I won’t miss it (but I don’t want to give my email).
I promised a few people yesterday I’d share Part II today.
First, thank you to Tom (Moderator) and this community for the incredible reception of Part I.
My English writing is still limited (IELTS 6.0), so Part II is also a sentence-by-sentence AI translation. This is an extended version. I added a bit more details that weren't in my original Chinese posts.
As far as I know, yes. The most critical component—the Uranium-235 core—was finished in 404. In Part I, I mentioned a legendary machinist named Yuan Gongpu. He was tasked with the final precision turning of the core on a lathe.
It’s famously known as the 'Final Three Cuts.' Because the material was so rare and the stakes so high, he had to complete the final shaping in three extremely delicate stages. He achieved a precision of 0.001mm (often described as 1/80th of a human hair) entirely by hand. This earned him the nickname 'Yuan the Three-Cuts' (Yuan Sandao) in our hometown history
I asked AI where should I publish my article, it said Medium at first. I submitted to illustration and 10 days later, the article is still pending review right now. So I ask AI again, what should I do? It says HN is the best but also toughest, it's hard to show in the front page. After I tried, I think I kinda made it.
It'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?
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.
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.
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.
