rob cheung

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rob cheung

rob cheung

@perceptnet

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

brooklyn Присоединился 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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ben guo 🏇
ben guo 🏇@0thernet·
*Slavoj Zizek sniffs loudly* Ah yes, yes, the ABG. The Asian Baby Girl. Sniff This is, you see, this is a perfect case study in what Lacan would call, you know, the sliding of the signifier. Yes? Sniff Because what is happening, what is happening here is fascinating. The fob, the fresh off the boat, she arrives in Cupertino, in Palo Alto, and she encounters this term, ABG, and she does not know, you see, she does not know the genealogy. She treats the signifier as, how do you say, a flat-pack from IKEA. Some assembly required. Sniff And what is the criteria, what is the criteria now? You drink the boba, ABG. You play the League of Legends, you say "hi" to a stranger at the Whole Foods, ABG, ABG, ABG. Sniff In this way, you see, every Asian American woman who is not actively crying over a textbook becomes, ontologically, an ABG. The category devours itself. It is, how do you say, the Hegelian bad infinity of the H1B imagination. Sniff But here, here is where it becomes interesting, you see. Sniff The ABG AI CMO. Sniff This is a new object. A fantasy object. Because the original ABG, she did not care about your seed round. She did not care about your transformer architecture. She was, you see, sublimely indifferent to your cap table. Sniff But the new one, the fob ABG, ah (Sniff) she is the perfect aspirational-honeypot, yes? She must be intelligent enough to discuss, you know, the mixture of experts, but also hot enough that the YC partner forgets to ask about retention. She is, you see, the Lacanian "objet petit a" of the Sequoia partner. Sniff And this, this is why the SF mid, and we must use this term clinically, with love (Sniff) the SF mid sees in the ABG not a person but a portal. A portal out of the dimly lit WeWork of her own facticity. She organizes the meetup. She buys the gold hoops on Amazon. Sniff "Look, I am ABG now." No. Sniff No, my dear. You are performing ABG for an audience that is also performing ABG, in a recursive loop of mutual misrecognition. It is, you see, it is ABGs all the way down. Sniff
Zhu Su@zhusu

I think abg has taken on a different meaning among fobs in the bay area for a couple main reasons. Fobs are unaware of the etymology and poorly educated on the aesthetics. What they’ve done is broken down the term piecewise: e.g. asking themselves, am I asian? Am I baby? Am I girl? Secondly, fobs think possibly all Asian American women can become abgs. They think going to the beach without an umbrella makes them an abg, or drinking boba, or playing LoL. Being social as opposed to studying, is abg. Listening to English music is abg. Saying hi to strangers is abg. Using instagram is abg. The idea of the abg ai cmo, however, is actually a novelty. It is at its core a fob, almost aspirationally-honeypot, identity. She has to be smart enough to be in ai, yet hot enough to use her looks to do marketing. This is why sf mids aspire to be considered abgs, and why groups of them are creating abg meetups.

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ben guo 🏇
ben guo 🏇@0thernet·
@zhusu i read this in slavoj zizek's voice
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Zhu Su
Zhu Su@zhusu·
I think abg has taken on a different meaning among fobs in the bay area for a couple main reasons. Fobs are unaware of the etymology and poorly educated on the aesthetics. What they’ve done is broken down the term piecewise: e.g. asking themselves, am I asian? Am I baby? Am I girl? Secondly, fobs think possibly all Asian American women can become abgs. They think going to the beach without an umbrella makes them an abg, or drinking boba, or playing LoL. Being social as opposed to studying, is abg. Listening to English music is abg. Saying hi to strangers is abg. Using instagram is abg. The idea of the abg ai cmo, however, is actually a novelty. It is at its core a fob, almost aspirationally-honeypot, identity. She has to be smart enough to be in ai, yet hot enough to use her looks to do marketing. This is why sf mids aspire to be considered abgs, and why groups of them are creating abg meetups.
Julie Chen@0xJuliechen

i find it so funny that ppl are trying hard af to tell us what is abg and what is not. this kind of gatekeeping makes me feel like there is breed separation abg is just an aesthetic. it is a self-made community tag, not a credential someone needs to issue you. "you're not abg so you can't use abg" doesn't really hold up. an aesthetic is something you opt into or out of - there's no admissions board. it's so ironic, cuz the whole abg thing was originally anti-establishment, anti-respectability-politics. and we're in SF. the home of punks, freaks, and people who don't ask for permission. gatekeeping here is just sooo embarrassing. i am a fob. and i am proud of it. and i would like to call myself an abg. so stfu and go get a job

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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.
sam lessin 🏴‍☠️ tweet mediasam lessin 🏴‍☠️ tweet mediasam lessin 🏴‍☠️ tweet mediasam lessin 🏴‍☠️ tweet media
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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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