# 281. Sword of the Yue King
> The cover photo was taken at the Zhejiang Museum over the weekend. I had gone to see the exhibition of the four bronze animal heads, but it was packed, so I walked through the regular halls instead and found something really beautiful. This sword, worn by the son of King Goujian of Yue, looks wonderful, and it made me think how good the taste of the Yue state was back then.
- Issue: 281
- Published: 2026/09/07
- HTML: https://weekly.tw93.fun/en/posts/281
- JSON: https://weekly.tw93.fun/api/en/posts/281.json
- Chinese original: https://weekly.tw93.fun/posts/281.md
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The cover photo was taken at the Zhejiang Museum over the weekend. I had gone to see the exhibition of the four bronze animal heads, but it was packed, so I walked through the regular halls instead and found something really beautiful. This sword, worn by the son of King Goujian of Yue, looks wonderful, and it made me think how good the taste of the Yue state was back then.
> **Recording down-to-earth trending tech I see every week, filtered and published here. Follow this weekly newsletter to get update notifications**
## Trending Tools
**TokenRemain: a free usage tracker for AI coding quotas**
The landing page on the official site looks decent and the whole thing is fairly tidy, so give it a try if you are interested. It also added notifications for Codex quota resets.
**Unclack: automatically mutes your microphone while you type**
This one suits office workers pretty well. When you are in a meeting and typing away, the clatter goes straight into the call, and this mutes your microphone automatically while you type.
**Pulse: network logging for Apple platforms**
A network logging tool built with SwiftUI that covers all Apple platforms. It feels quite refined overall, and among open source projects it is a good one.
## Just Looking Around
**WorkBuddy succeeded because Tencent's office suite is terrible**
An article from Hongxian that analyzes AI in the office software space in a pretty interesting way, worth a read, though I am not as optimistic about WorkBuddy's future as the author is.
**A recommendation for good banchuan noodles: Fuqi Noodles**
For my money the best banchuan in Hangzhou has to be Fuqi Noodles, though Laotaipo, Laojie and Mangzhong are all worth trying for Hangzhou-style noodles too. I shared this with friends and they came back with more, so if you are in Hangzhou you could take a look: Xiaobianzi, Xiaogou Noodles, the topping noodles run by Huzhou and Jiaxing folks in Hangzhou, Laicui Noodles over in Zhuantang, Songmuchang Noodles, Chunxue Noodles in Zhuantang, Yimian Noodles in Liangzhu, Huasanye Banmian, Dangmian Daoxie, Fang Laoda, and Jiaxing Yulin Noodles.
**Just writing: I have decided never to launch a new product on Product Hunt again**
About 7 years ago I loved browsing this platform, and recently I figured Mole could go up there for a launch, so I went and did it, uploaded the video and images, filled in a huge pile of forms, and finally got it done. Then I opened the product page and the first thing I saw was an ad card on the left saying 5k dollars could handle the entire launch for me, which stunned me, and below my own product there was a banner ad for someone else's product.
It felt like swallowing a fly. The launch page I had carefully prepared had turned into someone else's advertising space, though I do understand that companies with budget will buy that service.
Then I picked a time and published, and I even kept my afternoon free to answer questions from any new users who showed up. The funny part is that it never even made the front page, when I remember publishing MiaoYan 5 years ago with a very rough writeup and still landing on the front page timeline.
Later some friends who know the platform explained that it was because I did not get featured by the editors, that you have to get that first, then buy a specialist promotion team to package it for you, and only then can you break through. So it turns out you also have to perform for the platform, buying upvotes and buying comments, which dropped my jaw all over again. How did a perfectly good platform end up like this.
What annoys me even more is that it brought almost no product discussion or user feedback, and instead brought me close to 50 spam emails over the following days, mostly saying they could help promote it better, or that they run a similar platform I should list on. They are still arriving today, and it feels like I walked into something and came out smelling of it.
So the platform looks lively but does not actually do anything, and I even saw services offering 200 upvotes for 100 dollars to get you into the weekday top five, which of course will not bring you a single real user. What it does feed is a whole set of teams that get you to the top of Product Hunt, handling your description, packaging, cover, video, the angle and the selling points, a complete plan delivered to you, and after you pay you get a fake sense of excitement. You play along with the Product Hunt show, your product becomes a prop, launch day becomes performance day, and whether it actually attracted anyone new seems to be something nobody cares about.
What I would really love is a platform where people can talk about products in a genuinely friendly way, where you come across something interesting and can bookmark it, download it, try it out, learn from what other products did well, talk openly, and even give each other suggestions afterwards about what works and what needs improving. Something like the utopian feeling GitHub had 10 years ago, where people do not care about your packaging and your selling points, just a bunch of people who like making things sitting around sharing the good stuff so more people get to use it. I would really love a platform like that, and I would be on it every day.
So no more Product Hunt for me, and I would not recommend it to anyone else either. GitHub, X, YouTube and V2EX are all good places to post, and far more straightforward and honest than Product Hunt.
**RIP: He Yong passed away in early September**
He Yong passed away in early September. In my mind he always looks the way he did at the 1994 [Chinese Rock Power concert at Hung Hom in Hong Kong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0L3LRpAdKk), blunt, young, raw, rock and punk. I love Bell and Drum Towers, Garbage Dump, The Lump on My Head, and Pretty Girl, the song that captures his rock style best, and for several years his songs were in my most-played list of the year.
My first contact with Chinese rock goes back 20 years to 2006. I was in the first year of junior high, and my English teacher Richard, a slightly chubby, curly-haired man who looked very gentle, one day turned the volume all the way up in class and played Dream Back to the Tang Dynasty by Tang Dynasty. A room full of kids fresh out of primary school had basically never heard anything that fierce, since what we considered good music back then was Sunny Day, Jiangnan and Fairy Tale. He stood at the front with his eyes lit up telling us about Chinese rock and the stories he loved, and later in the term he would quietly play us classic foreign films. He did everything he could to open these kids' minds, and I slowly came to understand what it means to want openness, to express yourself honestly, to stay yourself and not drift with the crowd.
After that I went looking for the rest of these Chinese rock musicians, and from that concert video I found Dou Wei, handsome and deep and thoughtful, Ding Wu of Tang Dynasty with his long hair and wild roar, He Yong, blunt and young and afraid of nothing, and Zhang Chu, a little sad and full of feeling. Every one of them had their own character and felt completely real, and it made me feel that a life should not be cut from the same cloth, that you should have your own temperament and personality, hold on to what makes you different and not follow the trend. That mattered a lot to me.
Further along, the first one I ran into was Kill That Man from Shijiazhuang by Omnipotent Youth Society, back when almost nobody around me was listening to a band with a name like that. The stories in their songs and what they were reaching for really got to me, and the lyrics are so good. Qinhuangdao later led me to Dong Yaqian, who once went to Qinhuangdao to recover from depression, to Mr. Dong Erqian dreaming his long dream in Ten Thousand Hippies, and Big Rock Crushing My Chest is a wonderful song too.
While I was listening to them, along came Li Zhi, that guy who loves showing off and says whatever comes to mind but is deeply real. I got into him through a video of his New Year's Eve concert, and it was the first time I realized a show could have a string section, or be entirely unplugged, and that someone who normally looks so slack about everything prepares for a concert this seriously. He rearranged and reproduced almost every time, and you can clearly see the same song being treated with real care in different venues. His voice is plain and sincere and easy to recognize, with a storytelling feel, like an old friend next to your ear murmuring at times and shouting hoarsely at others, telling you about Rehe, Marriage, Dingxi, Suddenly, Hangzhou, The End and Them. It all felt very real to me.
Only later did I realize that the two teachers who left the deepest impression on me are actually a bit alike. Richard's eyes lit up when he talked about Chinese rock, and my university database teacher's eyes lit up the same way when he talked about PHP and HTML.
I started university in 2011 studying communications, and in the first year there was a database course that looked unrelated to the major. Besides teaching databases, the teacher would talk about PHP and HTML and show us how to put these things together into fun web pages. Most classmates were not that interested, but I loved it, because you could actually make something.
That year I read through almost every decently rated web development book in the school library, typing out the code and running the examples, and emailing the teacher whenever I got stuck. He answered the simple questions directly and saved the complicated ones for after class, where we often talked for more than half an hour. The two of us were less like teacher and student and more like friends discussing tech, which was a lot of fun. By my second year, and with a lot of influence from Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, I gradually settled on my career path, which was to be a web engineer.
After that I wrote my own blog with the Ruby framework Jekyll, and gave it a rather teenage motto, "Be yourself and don't go with the flow." Maybe that came from rock, maybe from all those teachers with ideas of their own. What is funnier is that the line is still there on the middle bar of my blog, never changed, and Jekyll, that old framework, has stayed stable enough to keep maintaining and using without ever falling over.
Looking at He Yong on the Hung Hom stage in 1994 now, he is still the young man in my memory, blunt, young, raw and afraid of nothing, singing Bell and Drum Towers and Pretty Girl. Twenty years have passed, the blog is still there, that line is still there, and the part of me that does not want to drift with the crowd has not fallen over either. Goodbye, He Yong.