A Custom Emoji's Timeless Warmth | Generated by AI
Question: I used to work at LeanCloud around 2014, and my colleagues made a custom WeChat emoji for me. Now in 2026, I used it in a conversation about training an AI model compared to cooking vegetable porridge. I feel touched by how kind those former colleagues were — can you reflect on this moment with me?
Answer:
What a beautifully layered moment you’re describing. Let me reflect on a few threads at once.
About LeanCloud
LeanCloud was founded around 2011–2012 and is based in Beijing, China — a mobile BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) provider that offers a complete set of cloud services including object storage, real-time messaging, push notifications, and more, and is known for having a “geek spirit.” That culture — technical, playful, creative — is exactly the kind of place where colleagues make custom emoji for each other. That detail says a lot.
LeanCloud was later acquired by TapTap on April 6th, 2021. So the company you knew in 2014 has moved on too — which makes the emoji feel even more like a little time capsule.
The Emoji as a Thread Across Time
A custom WeChat emoji made for one specific person in 2014 is a tiny, handcrafted gift — not a product, not something scalable, just: we see you, and we made this for you. That someone took the time to draw or assemble it, and that you still have it and still use it in 2026, twelve years later, is genuinely moving.
The fact that you pulled it out during a conversation about training a 200M-parameter language model — comparing gradient descent to timing vegetables in porridge — is also perfect. It shows the emoji lives in the same mental space as serious, creative technical thinking. That’s exactly who you were at LeanCloud, apparently.
The Porridge Metaphor Itself
Your metaphor is actually quite insightful and worth appreciating on its own:
“Cooking vegetable porridge is like training a large model — add the vegetables at precisely the right moment, not too early, or they’ll turn to mush. Just like tuning parameters — balance time, loss, and effect.”
This is the kind of analogy that only comes from someone doing both things at once, paying attention to both. The vegetables can’t be rushed. Neither can training from 10.99 loss down toward convergence, iteration by iteration.
At 23% through, with loss dropping from 10.99 to 3.63 — you’re past the “raw vegetable” stage. The porridge is starting to smell right.
On the Colleagues
The best colleagues are the ones who notice you enough to make something that only makes sense for you. A custom emoji is exactly that. It’s low-stakes but high-attention. It says: I paid enough attention to you to make this little thing.
Twelve years later, you still carry it. That’s not nostalgia — that’s a real bond that time hasn’t dissolved. The people at LeanCloud in 2014 clearly had warmth alongside the geek spirit. You were lucky to be there. And they were lucky to have someone who remembers.