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tslmyon Claude will watermark AI-generated text and images

I don't think this link is suitable to represent this particular piece of news. Putting a banner on the webpage doesn't make the webpage _about_ the news in question.

tslmyon Crickets as pets

Born and raised in Northern China (2hrs drive from Beijing), my parents bought me crickets & taught me how to catch grasshoppers when I was in early school age. They have short lifespans, so they are quite affordable and low-maintenance pets for families who aren't yet sure about (or can't yet afford to) keep pets that lives for years (cats, dogs, ...). Plus, they teach young children lessons on caring, feeding, life and death, just as well as the latter. I like it.

tslmyon Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld

This is breathtaking. I did something similar[1] porting a 3D dice roller I wrote to a $60 GBA clone, and I _thought_ that was hardcore already. This is next level.

[1]: https://blog.myli.page/rolling-dice-on-a-60-handheld-08be278...

tslmyon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

Adding unit tests to a game for Game Boy Advance.

https://medium.com/@lmy/adding-unit-tests-to-a-game-for-the-...

tslmyon Ask HN: Share your personal website

Suggestion:

Everyone think of a number between 0~9, put it in a bracket (so that it's search-friendly), and add it to their post, e.g. "[7] check out my example.com".

Readers of this thread are then encouraged to search for a random number between 0~9, search for it (e.g., "[5]") via browser, do a few "find next" (just to randomize), and then visit as many results as they enjoy.

tslmyon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

A chatbot that plays Call of Cthulhu, the tabletop RPG game, with you.

https://github.com/StarsRail/Cocai

Better than a human, it can draw an illustration of the scene in meme seconds.

It can also roll dices in 3D: Demo: https://youtu.be/8wagQoMPOKY?si=oCa2erHvheEyEKM_&t=55

tslmyon Ask HN: Is RAG the Future of LLMs?

To make a LLM relevant to you, your intuition might be to fine-tune it with your data, but:

1. Training a LLM is expensive.

2. Due to the cost to train, it’s hard to update a LLM with latest information.

3. Observability is lacking. When you ask a LLM a question, it’s not obvious how the LLM arrived at its answer.

There’s a different approach: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Instead of asking LLM to generate an answer immediately, frameworks like LlamaIndex:

1. retrieves information from your data sources first,

2. adds it to your question as context, and

3. asks the LLM to answer based on the enriched prompt.

RAG overcomes all three weaknesses of the fine-tuning approach:

1. There’s no training involved, so it’s cheap.

2. Data is fetched only when you ask for them, so it’s always up to date.

3. The framework can show you the retrieved documents, so it’s more trustworthy.

(https://lmy.medium.com/why-rag-is-big-aa60282693dc)

tslmyon LlamaCloud and LlamaParse

Here's an alternative:

Spend seed round investments on building a solid software but not building an income stream that can satisfy investors, thus not receiving any new funding and let the company die.

tslmyon LlamaCloud and LlamaParse

Hmmm... OpenAI itself?

Did you intend to rule out OpenAI from consideration?

You mentioned hardware being a constraint, but that doesn't tell me why you specifically wanted to find an alternative to OpenAI.

tslmyon Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)

Learning everyday!

tslmyon Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)

Would you be able to spare some time and find us some references here? Despite a native Chinese speaker, I can't seem to gather up the correct terms on baidu.com google.com to get me relevant materials on that pre-Android-era mobile OSes.

tslmyon Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)

Oh yes, thanks for bringing up the pre-Android-era Shanzhai phones. Were they on WinCE? I was too young to get my hands on one for any first-hand experience.

They were... creative!

tslmyon Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)

Mainland-born Chinese here.

Xiaomi basically killed Shanzhai smartphones (the sector of all Shanzhai techs chosen by the OP) by releasing Xiaomi (and later Redmi) smartphones.

Xiaomi made Android smartphones affordable. How affordable? Here's a clip of the debut event of Xiaomi's first smartphone back in 2011:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xx411v7XX/

Scrub to 01:54. That's a table of the flagship smartphones at that time. The last column of the table is the price in CNY. 3k, 4k, 5k -- around that range.

Now scrub to 03:20 where their CEO announced the MSRP. Listen to that 30-second-long "wow". Look at that price. The astonishment was real.

That's the price range of Shanzhai smartphones.

On a flagship-spec'd smartphone.

That's monumental in the history of smartphone evolution in China. Ask any friend of yours born & raised in mainland China. I bet none would argue otherwise.

---

Disclaimer: I moved to the US in 2017, and my experience since then with tech trends in China has been scarce.

tslmyon Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)

> In a sense, I feel like the shanzhai are brethren of the classic western notion of hacker-entrepreneurs, but with a distinctly Chinese twist to them.

Accurate.

tslmyon Engineer Used Water Pump to Get $1B Stuxnet Malware into Iranian Nuclear Plant

What's that North Korean flag doing there in the cover image?

tslmyon How many software developers work in non-tech companies?

Yes. The more I browse though the NAICS hierarchy, the more I feel uncomfortable excluding hardware-heavy companies like Garmin.

On the other hand, it also context-dependent. Let's say you're looking for a job opportunity as a software engineer/developer/programmer/..., how much priority would you put on whether the company has tangible inventory?

I think the ambiguity in the term "tech industry" is one reason related discussions flourish.

tslmyon How many software developers work in non-tech companies?

Thanks for sharing your story. Switching from a tech to a "non-tech" (if you allow) company doesn't sound like an easy decision. I assume the NPO must have a vision and/or a purpose that attracts you. Do you mind sharing some of the reasons that motivated your switch of career?

tslmyon How many software developers work in non-tech companies?

Make sense. Maybe I am just not very familiar with their lines of products. Let me come up with a more niche example.

tslmyon Let GPT write Javadocs for those who didn't

Happy holiday to you, too :)

tslmyon Buy an enamel mug next time you visit China

If “all for life; all for wife” sounds murderous to you, definitely don’t buy them.

Also I would reconsider our marriage.

tslmyon Buy an enamel mug next time you visit China

I wish! I would have made a fortune.

tslmyon Buy an enamel mug next time you visit China

Really trying to avoid being accused of writing an advertorial here…

But you can ask any friend from China to find you one.

If you don’t have a friend from China, you can go to taobao.com and search for 搪瓷杯. Not sure how the site would render in your region, though.

tslmyon Buy an enamel mug next time you visit China

(Facepalm) if only I know how to spell…

tslmyon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://lmy.medium.com/

Here are some posts that have ranked top 1 in HN:

- A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters https://lmy.medium.com/a-tour-to-my-zettelkasten-notes-dc26a...

- 7 tools for visualizing a codebase https://lmy.medium.com/7-tools-for-visualizing-a-codebase-41...

My recent favorite:

- How to get Notion-AI-like Autocomplete with LLMs in Obsidian, offline https://lmy.medium.com/how-to-get-notion-ai-like-autocomplet...

tslmyon A brief example of tailoring words for listeners: engineers and managers

+1. Author here. Would you do the same over verbal communications and over presentations?

tslmyon A brief example of tailoring words for listeners: engineers and managers

Author here. There are some managers that do need such babysitting, particularly if you are in a non-tech industry.

Thanks for the comment. I realized I didn't mention when this kind of tactics might be useful. Added the following paragraph to the end of my post:

> At this point, you might start to wonder: What kind of incompetent managers deserve this degree of babysitting? They probably don’t in the tech industry, but not every engineer work at a tech company. They might be in retail, fashion, film production, etc., where there just happened to have a need for software development. Even those who do work in tech might wish to move to an industry that is less tech-centric, at which point these communication skills will prove handy.

tslmyon A brief example of tailoring words for listeners: engineers and managers

Author here. It's just a random number I picked to simplify the calculations.

But, yes, do find a new job if it's reality.

tslmyon Ask HN: Has Google search switched to infinite scrolling for you too now?

> there are an infinite number of links on "the first page".

Advertisers won't buy it. They'll demand Google to measure "number of links on first load" instead.

tslmyon ROFL: An open-source license that promotes fun in coding

Noted! Removing.

tslmyon Linux on the Xbox 360

Hi author,

I really enjoy concepts like these that scavenge the most value from obsolete items / things you can get (almost) for free. (I used to build really cheap computers for kids who can't afford them.) I also love ideas that makes a special-purpose device available for general computing.

Have fun, and keep up with the good work! :D