Richard Fu

LinkedIn API Approval Rejected: What They Actually Require

August 9, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

Part 3 of 4 — publishing. Part 1: every safety net failed silently · Part 2: the free stack · Part 4: what it returned

I built social posting into my portfolio tool so it could publish its own buy signals — four platforms: X, Facebook Page, Threads, LinkedIn Page. The code took hours per platform. Getting permission — the LinkedIn API approval in particular — took weeks, and two of the four never sent a single request.

Free LLM API Tiers: Running Three Models for $0/month

August 9, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

Part 2 of 4 — the stack. Part 1: every safety net failed silently · Part 3: publishing signals · Part 4: what it returned

Part 1 was about the safeguards in my portfolio monitoring tool and the six ways they silently stopped running. This one is the boring, useful half: what it actually runs on, why every component is a free LLM API or free tier, and which of those free tiers turned out to be load-bearing in a way I hadn’t thought about.

Finance

AI Portfolio Monitoring: Every Safety Net Failed Silently

August 8, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

Part 1 of 4 — the safeguards. Part 2: the free stack · Part 3: publishing signals · Part 4: what it returned

Three months ago I wrote up how Richfolio went from v1.0 to v1.6 — the guard pipeline, the two-stage Think/Plan prompt, the reasoning persistence, all of it borrowed from patterns I liked in OpenAlice. Richfolio is my AI portfolio monitoring system: a cron job that reads my holdings, asks two language models what to buy, and emails me a brief.

WebGL

Background agents that feel alive and cost almost nothing

July 31, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

Most games are full of things that don’t matter. The crowd behind the fence, the birds, the cars in the next lane over — none of it is gameplay, but all of it is the difference between a world and a set. The catch is that “doesn’t matter” has to also mean “doesn’t cost much,” because the moment your ambient decoration starts eating frame time you’ve paid a lot for something the player was never looking at directly.

Game Dev

Particle Trail Stuck at X=0: A Unity Update-Order Bug…

July 1, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

I wanted a simple thing: a little particle trail that streams behind a fast-moving character as it runs down a lane and slides left/right. A few hours and six failed fixes later, I finally understood why the particles kept piling up in the dead center of the lane while the character was clearly off to one side.

The bug had one strange, very specific signature that I ignored for far too long:

Shader

Unity WebGL Particles Invisible? Causes and How to Fix…

June 29, 2026June 29, 2026
by Richard Fu

I spent the better part of a day chasing a celebration firework that played perfectly in the Unity editor and rendered absolutely nothing in the WebGL build. No errors. The particles spawned, played, sat right in front of the camera — and stayed invisible.

I diagnosed it confidently four times. The first three were wrong. The only thing that ever found truth was a dumb A/B test in the actual build — not in the editor, not by reading shaders, not by theorizing. That turned out to be the real lesson, so I’ll tell it honestly — wrong turns and all — and then map out what WebGL genuinely can and can’t do with particles.

Building MESH: A Civic Resilience Platform With AI Agents

May 23, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

A one-day hackathon project at the Claude Impact Lab (Melbourne, May 2026). The brief was open. I built MESH — Melbourne Exchange & Solidarity Hub — a gamified civic platform where residents see their suburb as a node in a network and AI agents read live open data to suggest the most useful thing the community can do next.

Read more “Building MESH: A Civic Resilience Platform With AI Agents” →

Richfolio, three months in: AI architecture in production

May 22, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

From v1.0 to v1.6 — what I rebuilt, what I borrowed, and what’s running in production for $0/month

Three months ago I shipped v1.0 of Richfolio — a zero-maintenance side project that emails me a daily AI-powered portfolio digest. I wrote about the original motivation and v1 architecture in this earlier post if you want the background.

Shader

Unity WebGL Safari Hang: The First-Draw Shader Stall

May 16, 2026August 9, 2026
by Richard Fu

TL;DR — This is a war story about a Unity WebGL Safari hang: a game that ran beautifully on Chrome but froze for ~3 seconds on the first major animation event in iOS Safari. After a long detour through material instancing, shader keywords, animator transitions, and post-FX, the culprit was a single prefab nobody thought to warm up: an overlay spawned by an obscure event handler one frame before the animation started. Mid-game Instantiate of a prefab with a custom shader triggers Safari’s webglPrepareUniformLocationsBeforeFirstDraw on first render — synchronous, main-thread, ~3ms per uniform lookup, ~200 uniforms across a complex prefab = 2.8s stall. The fix is to render the prefab once during the splash so the cache is warm before gameplay needs it.

Read more “Unity WebGL Safari Hang: The First-Draw Shader Stall” →

Re-skinning a 3D Character with AI Image Tools (Without…

May 3, 2026May 3, 2026
by Richard Fu

TL;DR: I bought a well-made chibi farmer model and wanted to reuse it as a zookeeper character — same mesh, same rig, same animations. Meshy.ai’s Retexture didn’t work for me, and naive cropping of the UV atlas pulled in neighbor pieces. The fix turned out to be embarrassingly simple: connected-component labeling to extract one UV island at a time, send each piece to ChatGPT with a tight prompt, then composite the AI result back with an intersection-of-silhouettes mask. I packaged the workflow as a Claude Code skill — furic/texture-atlas-roundtrip — and ended up with a wildlife keeper that took a couple of evenings instead of a couple of weeks.

Author: Richard Fu