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.
the cheaper it is made, the more effort can be spent elsewhere
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?
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.
If the LLM output was indistinguishable from real human text nobody would say anything, because by definition we wouldn’t be able to tell.
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.
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.
Also, the upbeat and persuasive style ... is my style kek, is it me being too pushy or?
> Kimball was right at the level he was reading it, but wrong about which decision he was reading
What the fuck does this sentence mean?
The main problem is that LLM writing inevitably slips in nonsensical phrases and sentences that are plausible but, upon inspection, turn out to be dilutions at best and deceptions at worst. They are such non-sequiturs that it is indefensible to consider them the crystallized results of a logical thought process, so I greatly dislike them regardless of authorship, and so far, it has been mostly LLMs that produce them. However, this is not a new thing, as Orwell put it from 1946:
> the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts [...] Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
Here are some examples from this article, which I am listing with the sole hope to elicit the same concern of frivolous writing from readers, not as any an attack on the author of this piece:
> The 1955 trade was the system already past its own decision point, picking up the pieces. The blunder happened five years earlier. [...] Everything after, [...], was the system mechanically playing out the consequences of the June 1950 decision.
What is "the system" here? The US government, the FBI, or just a vague blob of fate and the passage of time? What exact had this system been doing that counts as "picking up the pieces"? What was exactly mechanical about the events between 1950 and 1955?
> He later recalled in characteristically dry phrasing that "many of the officers in the U.S. Army in missiles and rockets were students in this program".
Is the quote really especially dry? Is this purported dryness a part of Qian's character? If yes, then we sue did not see it elsewhere.
> The hierarchy in the interrogation room was not what casual U.S.-narrative framings would assume.
What is even "casual US-narrative framings"?
> The Jiang family connection is structurally important, and the 1955 PRC-side claim that Qian was a long-standing Communist sympathiser is structurally implausible because his wife was the daughter of a senior Kuomintang figure
What do "structurally important" and "structurally implausible" mean here? What is the big structure that this connection played an important role in?
> This was the public peak.
The peak of his publicity I guess. The public peak is in Nepal.
> He was, on the public record at that exact moment, one of the leading American aerospace scientists. He was not a junior researcher who could be replaced.
Who read till this point would need this clarification that he was an expendable junior researcher?
> They are produced by a sequence of external shocks that hardens the U.S. political environment around him in the eighteen months before his clearance is revoked.
(Minor but somehow this sentence is in present tense.)
> His later assessment of the trade was accurate pricing made in real time by an official with the position to assess it, though he was reading the wrong decision.
"accurate pricing" as metaphor for "accurate assessment"?
> The imprisonment was the trade's cause, not the trade.
The trade was not the trade's cause, or the imprisonment was not the trade, or something else?
> The Soviets were trying to slow the propagation of capability that had already been absorbed
If the knowledge had already been absorbed, what use is withdrawing the blueprints? The conclusion that the Soviets must have thought the Chinese could become independent because they took the materials away is quite dubious.
> the capability foundation was laid
What does "capability foundation" mean?
> The doctrine is the kill-first-from-distance-using-superior-detection-and-networked-sensors-and-long-range-missiles doctrine that Qian outlined in the Toward New Horizons volume on the launching of a winged missile for supersonic flight.
No mention of the doctrine prior to this sentence, while the next sentence says that the aformentioned PL-15 embodies that doctrine. Could it have just been written as one sentence?
> the structural threat to U.S. naval power projection
"structural" here we go again
> The same pattern is visible at every other layer of the strategic-technology spectrum in 2026.
No mention of any pattern prior to this point, except the vague development of China war capability.
> This is what compounding looks like when you imprison the carrier you needed to retain
Does this event have that many precedents that it deserves to be written down as an aphorism?
> That chain was the thing that walked out the door. The methodology is what the chain was running on
I honestly don't know what chain and methodology here refer to, much less whether the metaphor is sensible.
> The dimension of the transfer that has no Soviet equivalent and no Western parallel is this one.
"The dimension of the transfer"?
> structural features
"structural"
> multi-disciplinary integration across specialties
"multi-disciplinary" = "across specialties"
> The methodology was specifically Western, specifically von Kármán-lineage, and specifically transferable through a single carrier
What does "specifically" even mean when it applies to 3 things at once?
> The fact that he was available to be that carrier was a function of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program, von Kármán's recruitment decisions at Caltech, the wartime mobilisation that placed him at the centre of the U.S. air-power apparatus, and the Red Scare architecture that produced his imprisonment. The full chain had to operate. Removing any link in it produces a different outcome.
A lot to say "changing the past affects the future".
> Wang Huning, who became Xi Jinping's chief ideologist, sits in a tradition that runs directly through Qian's cybernetic-systems-engineering work, and the methodology runs into Chinese state-planning architecture along that lineage
What is this "tradition", and what is that "lineage" exactly?
> The way I read it
A subjective thought! A cause for celebration.
> paired with Chen Yun's 摸着石头过河 as the operational sidekick.
"operational sidekick"?
> The same machinery, operating on essentially the same evidentiary basis, produced bounded internal exile for Oppenheimer and unbounded external transfer for Qian
"bounded" and "unbounded" here mean nothing, as both are bounded by the Earth size? What is even the point of talking about geographical difference when the political difference is of dominant interest here?
> structural dynamic
> moral architecture
...
> The Oppenheimer-Qian-Japan triangle reveals the same pattern repeatedly.
Finding these supposedly aforementioned "pattern"s is like finding Waldo.
> structural rights barriers
> US self-conception
> threat-detection regime
> consequence space
> methodological irony
> structural feature
> structural reading
>The error was not stupidity, corruption, or ideology, but a structural failure of the threat-detection apparatus to model what the asset actually represented.
How many geniuses are leaving the US right now due to Xenophobia?
That was (probably) never anyone's intention, American representative democracy is just schizophrenic by design. For the same reason the US has never faithfully abided by any treaty, laws and policies rarely end up functioning as intended after the political process.
Keep in mind China has a different founding myth.
America is the so called country of immigrants.
The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely.
After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer.
Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.
At least on the American side, it doesn't sound at all like this was uniformly agreed upon; there seem to have been people on the American side (including at least one relatively high-ranking military/government official) who felt strongly that this was a strategic blunder. That doesn't mean your counterargument is incorrect, but I don't think it's as simple as "they knew what they were giving up".
A large part of the argument of the article seems to be that the political pressures for the US were misaligned with the long-term incentives, which is a plausible explanation for why the president (who is not a subject matter expert for most things) might override a decision from someone who is much more knowledgeable about the specific circumstances. There are plenty of places to disagree with the analysis presented (e.g. whether it's preferable to have a system that optimizes for this sort of long-term planning or if other things should take precedence), but it's not clear to me from your comment whether you're actually trying to disagree with the conclusions they draw or about the history of what happened.
To be clear, disagreeing about the history would be reasonable, given that understanding what happened is rarely straightforward from reading a single secondary source like this, but if that's what you're doing, it might help to be more explicit about it.
But the theory is that, knowing how to build this apparatus, it couldn't build an organization? That is not plausible. What is plausible is that a missile expert familiar with the rough organization of how to get to missiles and military aviation knew which parts of the organization need to be present. So primarily this was a knowledge transfer situation.
It would be much more convincing if a historical analysis landed on the idea that the Chinese were somehow blocked on progress on the technology. For instance, India received no Qian Xuesen and was a similarly positioned nation with similar aspirations, and had the disadvantage of reduced Soviet technology transfer. So we know from their success what the worst-case for indigenous development without a US-trained specialist (esp. one familiar in military organization development) is. Roughly 10 years across all, a couple of years for aviation, a decade plus for missile tech.
Having accelerated Chinese missile technology one decade (in hindsight), do we consider that trade reasonable? Integrating him after imprisonment would surely have been hard. So the counterfactual is that we don't do the prisoner exchange and find a way to hold him indefinitely? It seems to me that judging based on the outcome is likely saying one should have guessed heads because the coin landed heads and that this is a great blunder.
I think the potential difference here is that the contemporary Chinese government was still pretty new at the time; they only fully took power in 1949, a year before his house arrest started and five years before they were able to have him begin working for them. It isn't that implausible to me that a government less than a decade old might not have a consensus around how to plan longer-term projects, and I don't think that knowing who the right person for a job is can be equated to the knowledge to do the job itself. My reading of the article is an argument that the national security policy of the US was not compatible with the type of planning that would be needed for technological superiority in the long term; they're saying that while they might be aligned for a short time due to the priorities during a time of outright war, in the long term the priorities of the way the US strives for national security change much more due to immediate circumstances.
> Integrating him after imprisonment would surely have been hard. So the counterfactual is that we don't do the prisoner exchange and find a way to hold him indefinitely?
I'm realizing now that I think I might have been conflating this article with another one that seems to have been flagged and the comments moved here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207251), which made the argument that the imprisonment was the unsalvageable mistake. (I guess it was LLM generated? I've suspected for a while that I'd probably be bad at recognizing whether content is "real" or not, so I'm not totally surprised that it wasn't obvious to me when I read it before anyone had flagged or commented on it).
Qian was widely considered as a "strategic" scientist in China. The knowledge he had counteracted the Soviet political apparatus, and was enough to propel China into superpower status in less than a hundred years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons
who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.
How does this man not have a movie?
CCP in 30s was just some ragtags in inner Yan'an
