Issue 002 · Periodical
On the Road
Back at a new job and on business trips again, with recent notes on agent tools, product design, hotels, and music.
A Photograph
Back at Alibaba, and back to the rhythm of business trips. I took this on June 22, on the train from Hangzhou to Beijing. It was an early service. Someone was sleeping on the floor; he must have been exhausted. People joke that this is a workers’ special headed for the grasslands.
Useful Things
AgentKey: connecting agents to external data sources
I have not used it in practice yet, but I am very curious about how it connects reliably to social and commerce data sources such as Xiaohongshu and Taobao. I looked into this before, and many of those sources do not offer paid APIs.
Image from the AgentKey website
Bukong: make sure a fishing trip is not for nothing
I came up with this slogan for the founder. It is a very small, vertical use case, and I am curious how weather and other signals can predict where fish might be. Maybe it will be useful when I am older.
Image from the Bukong App Store page
Codex CLI: an open agent harness
Saving this one. I want to see how it works when I build an agent later.
Build or Skip: copy first, then do better
Before building a product, look at whether someone is already selling it and whether anyone is buying. Starting from a real need and looking through existing products for something to emulate can seem similar, but the distance between them is actually quite large.
Image from the Build or Skip website
Open Analytics: lightweight collection with AI analysis
At first glance, the branding made me think it had something to do with Google Analytics. It does not. It has a lightweight collection SDK of its own, then feeds structured data to AI for analysis.
Image from the Open Analytics website
Things from Life
A hotel worth staying at: Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth, Montreal
Suite 1742 is the room where John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote and recorded “Give Peace a Chance.”
Image from Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth
New logos: newer is not always better looking
I have recently been taken by the clean, sophisticated design of Blue Bottle Coffee. Put it next to several recently refreshed wordmarks and you can see that a good logo is not simply the one with fewer elements or a flatter surface. It is the one people can still recognize and remember when it is shrunk down, reproduced, or placed in an unfamiliar city.
Image from toodaylab
PixelMug: a glowing cup that can talk
A charming idea: a ceramic cup, a pixel display, an app, and a little AI pixel art turn an ordinary daily object into something that can express a mood.
Image from sspai
Happy Shrimp: a name that brings back another era
When I saw the name, I did not first think of an AI music model. I thought of music players like Xiami Music and TTPlayer. The internet changes so fast: downloading songs, listening on MPC, all of it already feels like an earlier age.
Image from TechFlow
Michelin Guide for Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou, Shenzhen
Michelin guides for Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Saved for later.
Image from toodaylab
Lately
The age of AI riches: I cannot imagine what an annual salary of one hundred million dollars even feels like, or what kind of age this is. I increasingly feel that AI is widening the gap between wealthier, more elite people and everyone else. AI itself is becoming a form of power.
On the other hand, AI + mRNA: a Phase III cancer trial brings exciting news from another field. Without AI, it is hard to imagine when something like this might have happened, or at what speed.
That is how recent conversations with friends have felt too: anxiety and opportunity together; awe at AI’s strength alongside worry about one’s own place in the world. We are becoming more rational and efficiency-driven, while facing a deeper spiritual crisis.
An age of fracture.