tslmy

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.

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.

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...

Adding unit tests to a game for Game Boy Advance.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

Learning everyday!

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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

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.