rob cheung

556 posts

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rob cheung

rob cheung

@perceptnet

co-founder @zocomputer - prev: founding eng @substack, founding eng @ fin assistant, early team @venmo

brooklyn Bergabung Eylül 2017
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
The computer is the most flexible tool humanity has invented: whatever you can imagine, if you can describe it precisely enough it runs on a machine. I've spent the last 15 years learning how to describe things precisely to computers, and yet my side projects feel less like a triumph of personal computing and more like a graveyard of abandoned threads. Not because I don't want them, but because they take too much effort to build and maintain. Today we're introducing Zo Computer - the computing environment I always wanted.
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Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch@rauchg·
@vercel_dev @techwraith Cool. Zo team has been incredibly visionary. First time I saw an articulation of the “claw” future
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
so excited to be working with SB. it is a huge huge honor
shreyans bhansali@shreyans___

Despite loving independent exploration, I couldn't resist joining @ZoComputer to help build their AI powered cloud computer that is increasingly my home on the Internet. It’s got that magical early startup energy where the people that get it can’t stop talking about it and use it in ways beyond our imagination. It’s incredible to work on a product that I use every day and I get to make it better for myself. Projects are better when shared and because creation and hosting happen in the same place on Zo, things get off of localhost and out into the world sooner. A long time ago, Zo knew that we should be able to text our AIs to do real work. It's exciting to play with ideas that are central to how we work and make things today - agent orchestration, memory, giving everyone superpowers. I think Zo might be one of the best all-in-one tools for small businesses and solopreneurs (like my wife) and it’s pretty rewarding to see how it powers them. I’d already been hanging out at their office with the team, and now I get to hang out and talk with them even more. I love working on projects with friends and @perceptnet and @0thernet are two of my closest and smartest friends and their partnership and this product all felt inevitable and right. LFZoooo!

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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
Oh someone did it!! This has been a pet idea of mine for awhile. Train "vintage" next token models with artificially early knowledge cutoffs, to see how well they can predict the next paradigm/epochs now would love to wire one of these vintage models from before digital computing in a harness with a bash tool and notebook tool to see if it eventually figures out how to program computers
Nick Levine@status_effects

New work with @AlecRad and @DavidDuvenaud: Have you ever dreamed of talking to someone from the past? Introducing talkie, a 13B model trained only on pre-1931 text. Vintage models should help us to understand how LMs generalize (e.g., can we teach talkie to code?). Thread:

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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
@lessin this was also the first marathon Kejelcha ever entered
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sam lessin 🏴‍☠️
sam lessin 🏴‍☠️@lessin·
Can you imagine running sub-2 in a marathon and coming in second!!??!! unbelievable. now it is proven it can be done, decisively.
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
sad to say this because i have always thought of it as a beautiful piece of software but no one should ever model in excel/sheets again
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
And if you have a persistent computing environment where you do this work with your agents and data, it gets even better where you can continuously sync with databases like ClinVar/PharmGKB to ground the agent's analysis and keep up with new findings as they come x.com/perceptnet/sta… x.com/perceptnet/sta…
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Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison@patrickc·
I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
@lessin ya this is the way. your own custom chrome extension too
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sam lessin 🏴‍☠️
sam lessin 🏴‍☠️@lessin·
Now i am just rolling the apps i want just for myself / i don't even care about TestFlight anymore or app review (the bad parts) - just make what i need for myself and command-r it onto my phone. done. wild future we live in.
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Zo Computer
Zo Computer@zocomputer·
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Zo Computer tweet media
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
loved getting this in my inbox yesterday. i feel like i am generally kind of curmudgeonly but for some reason end up on a more optimistic side of this one. some raw reactions -- i feel like the What Comes Next section could be thought of as a single meta-option like "anything, but you have to sincerely choose" the frankl choice feels like a specific incarnation of the camus / dfw / quixote emphasis on choosing something (yes still hard) to be inviolable while knowing that it is not in any objective sense. anything, but likely something communal and local. maybe the more optimistic civilization-level curve is analogous to nietzsche's thing on spiritual development where it starts with the Camel (religion, order built on duty, dicipline, etc // burdensome, docile, simple) to the Lion (secularization, individualism, liberalism, industrialization // clever, productive, complex) and finally to the Child (play, exploration, creation, a sacred Yes // intuitive, unburdened, fickle). still far from utopia, but there's some positive argument here that humanity will find a way out of needing meaning in the same way to impel everything. i definitely agree that the future narratives probably sound less grandiose than before, but that seems fine. orienting your life like this right now sounds somewhere between frivolous and mature, but not crazy to think that the overton window slides more toward mature in the next 50 years but overall it seems like in our lifetimes and our children's there will still be scarcity, there will still be frontiers of knowledge, there will be games of all kinds to play, conflicts amongst groups, etc. i'd expect competence, kindness, levity, grit to still all be pretty relevant virtues, grounded in some kind of shared meaning, same as before
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sam lessin 🏴‍☠️
sam lessin 🏴‍☠️@lessin·
A bunch of people have written me back saying this was the best newsletter I have ever sent (flattering) ... so here it is for those who don't subscribe: AI Is Not a Labor Crisis. It Is a Meaning Crisis.
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Kevin Kwok
Kevin Kwok@kevinakwok·
This is great. Can someone confirm this at larger scale? Would be great if we can go back to link posting era
Philippe Lemoine@phl43

After the exchange between @NateSilver538 and @nikitabier, I did a little test to check whether that was true and, to my surprise, what I found suggests that link deboosting was indeed reversed. What I did is randomly sample 15 tweets by @nytimes between 2019 and today, compute the weekly average number of likes and retweets they got and plot the results along with a trend line. The idea is that likes and retweets are probably a decent proxy for reach and @nytimes only posts tweets with external links, so by looking at this, we should be able to see any changes in the algorithm with respect to how links are treated. As you can see, it's pretty clear that, starting around the spring/summer of 2023, posts with links started to be penalized and eventually they were completely nuked until the spring/summer of 2025, when a reversal of that policy seems to have started. To be honest, this isn't what I was expecting to find, so even if that's just a quick and dirty test and it's hardly a definitive proof, it's good news and I thought I should share the results.

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Garry Tan
Garry Tan@garrytan·
OpenClaw is amazing until it does something funny like alter its own config file because you asked to try the new dream mode and then it can’t restart because of invalid config with the wrong version. This happened to me yesterday morning. I had to go ssh in with Claude Code to get it fixed. But the sheer fact all of these can happen shows you we are at Apple I stage: assemble your own motherboard stage. But the Apple II personal computer moment (where anyone can go to the store and buy a PC and it works) is coming for OpenClaw We are so early and this is the worst it will ever be
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
"what pages increased my heart rate today" not only wild that we can watch wartime odds on a chart, but that we are also in a world with personal ai that all of this data is automatically tracked and ready
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
i guess dario both does and does not seem like the type to like mark fisher
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rob cheung
rob cheung@perceptnet·
big companies have always known the fruits on the other side of hoarding, and now regular people can too! if you don't like the idea of hoarding we can call it "big personal data" @simonw simonwillison.net/guides/agentic…
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Jelajahi

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