rob cheung

The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

added a new communication style rule for fable 5

@magdovitz @joannakurylo @SJCizmar im down - let’s host zorimer fest 2027 together

@joannakurylo lol @perceptnet is a vibe in this pic. @SJCizmar and I humbly request an invite to Zo Harbor 2027.

Last week's Zo team offsite was epic. Who would have known I'd learn more about my teammates' work style playing basketball on a wet court than 3 months in the office. 😂 Great team, even greater work ethic!

i've never heard a human say belt-and-suspenders but AIs love this phrase apparently

had the first instance of a model provider propose dynamic token pricing based on time of day. this should almost definitely happen broadly. electricity is priced based on supply/demand, as is human labor

@ricoberan @interaction @zocomputer has a regular personality out of the box.

Unnaceptable from @interaction , I remembered by myself anyway. Anyone suggest a different iMessage Agent that doesn't act like a naive intern?

the person who wins this nobel prize may actually end up being a computer scientist that bakes the economy into the model itself. feels like one of the absurd inefficiencies is not only asking your phd to fold laundry, but to always be doing it chalk full of adderall and adrenaline, with no other mode

@paularambles onboarding flow is even worse - they ask to read your entire email off the bat and then taunt you when you say no

getting the ick from my ai assistant

@lessin i wanna try later, no idea how long i can hang for. apparently the mens record is 80min by this guy. and an enormous gap to womens best at 2:52

I am wildly impressed with Alex Karp's claimed 5 min dead hang... tried it post run at 180lbs and got 1:45 -- 2:30 seems doable, 5 min is insane. (i do want video proof of him doing it tho... video or hard to believe)

@itunpredictable sb&g 497 has a ring to it

I am starting a new index fund that will track the S&P 500 but not include Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX. DM for access

seems like we figured out the brain and the prefrontal cortex is the agent harness, the amygdala is the pretrained llm, the hippocampus is the vector database and consciousness is the vibecoder wisprflowing on top of it all

@kevinakwok public-rob.zocomputer.io/poseidon

Do you think Claude laments how it no longer gets to do the work and the craft. It just manages other claudes? Do you think Claude has a Rawlsian theory of justice. And acts as if behind a veil of ignorance of which claude it would be in the RLM?

@supermemory @zocomputer oh cool yeah let's talk

we should partner at this point @zocomputer

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie — A Cascading Explanation 1. High School *If You Give a Mouse a Cookie* is a children’s book by Laura Numeroff, published in 1985, with pictures by Felicia Bond. The story is simple: a boy gives a mouse a cookie, and then the mouse asks for milk, then a straw, then a napkin, then a mirror, and so on. Every request leads to another request, until the whole thing loops back around and the mouse wants another cookie. It is funny because one tiny nice act turns into a huge list of chores. The book is basically saying: once you start something, it can create a chain reaction. It is also about how kids — and mice in stories — can keep wanting the next thing. 2. College (responding to High School) That’s the right shape, but the book is doing more than saying “one thing leads to another.” It is a miniature lesson in causal sequencing: each event produces a new condition, and that condition makes the next desire seem natural. The humor comes from escalation without villainy — the mouse is not evil, just endlessly associational. In developmental terms, the book works because children are learning prediction, sequence, and narrative closure: cookie → milk → straw → napkin feels both surprising and inevitable. The circular ending matters too. It turns a linear chain into a loop, making the story feel complete while also implying that desire can restart endlessly. 3. PhD (responding to College) You’ve named the mechanisms but understated how elegantly the book compresses them. Numeroff and Bond create what narratologists would call a recursive causal structure: each object or action generates the conditions for the next, while the protagonist’s wants function as the engine of plot. The story resembles the “chain tale” tradition found in children’s folklore, where repetition, accumulation, and predictability produce pleasure and participation. From a cognitive-development perspective, it trains event schema formation: young readers learn that actions have consequences, but also that consequences are culturally legible — milk goes with cookies, mirrors go with mustaches, cleaning leads to chores. From a behavioral angle, the mouse dramatizes preference formation under cue exposure: each satisfied want reveals a nearby unsatisfied want. The deepest mechanism is not appetite but adjacency: the mind moves from thing to thing because each object carries a little map of what belongs beside it. 4. Philosopher (responding to PhD) Your machinery is persuasive, but it still treats the story as a device for cognition, as if the mouse were mainly a lesson in sequence. The stranger truth is that the book is about the endlessness of need. The cookie is not merely a cookie; it is the first door. Once opened, it reveals that every satisfaction contains the outline of another lack. This is why the book feels comic rather than tragic. The boy is not crushed by the mouse’s demands, and the mouse is not condemned for making them. The story accepts a fact adults often resent: to care for another creature is to enter a world where no gift remains singular. Food asks for drink. Drink asks for cleaning. Cleaning asks for rest. Rest asks for memory. Memory asks for return. Generosity is not a transaction but an invitation into time. 5. Gigabrain (responding to Philosopher) Beautifully said, but I’d push one step further. The story is not only about need, and not only about generosity. It is about the way attention breeds worlds. Before the cookie, the mouse is just a mouse. After the cookie, he becomes a guest. Once he is a guest, the room changes. A glass of milk appears as a reasonable thing. A straw becomes thinkable. A napkin becomes necessary. The boy has not simply fed the mouse; he has accepted the mouse’s reality for a while. That is why the requests keep coming. The mouse is not adding burdens from outside the world. He is revealing the world that the first kindness created. This is what children understand instinctively. They know that play works this way. You put one block down, and suddenly there is a tower to build. You draw one line, and suddenly there is a face to finish. You say “pretend I’m a dragon,” and now the whole room must answer to dragon rules. Adults call this inconvenience when it happens in life, but children recognize it as the basic magic of beginnings. The loop back to the cookie is not a joke about greed. It is a joke about return. Every little world wants to keep itself alive. The mouse asks again because the story asks again. The first cookie was an accident; the second would be a choice. The book’s quiet wisdom is that nothing stays small once you truly let it in.

Cracking the Coding Interview (2026)

In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want anyone to know, they would create an anonymous ChatGPT account, open a prompt, carve a hole in it, whisperflow the secret into the mic, and send it to the server. That way the secret would stay there forever.

the five levels can really be anything but it's a nice pattern with LLMs to try to have it ascend the ladder of argument space