Hacker News: danielmarkbruce

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "AI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market"

danielmarkbruce — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:32:54 +0000

This seems silly. It's analogous to an electricity market where every megawatt is a different voltage, in a different city with no transmission lines... might stop working halfway through the job, and only works properly if you buy another 500 megawatts from the same supplier... good luck getting this market off the ground.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Launch HN: Laminar (YC S24) – We trained a model to catch silent agent failures"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:19:08 +0000

Correct, latency is not critical.

Yes, it can get expensive. We do something in financial markets where the cost of a single end to end task could be $100. That doesn't mean cost doesn't matter though, it matters a lot - if we screw up and it propagates, it's money down the toilet. And if we could get the task down to $20, it would make a difference.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Launch HN: Laminar (YC S24) – We trained a model to catch silent agent failures"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:10:23 +0000

There are all manner of documented architectures in papers and books, I don't know that there is anything new under the sun at this point, the devil is always in the details. That said, some of the things we use off the top of my head: generate multiple responses using different models and have a third model judge the best answer; generate an answer and have another model critique the answer and then a third take the answer and critique and generate a new answer; multi-model debate; iterate in a loop either x times or until some condition is satisfied; pipelines of specific single calls to check for specific conditions.

I'd say in general, with respect to errors/low quality responses etc you have to be extremely clear about what you are doing because once you get into the weeds, what is and is not an error is very grey in many cases.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Launch HN: Laminar (YC S24) – We trained a model to catch silent agent failures"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:54:26 +0000

To answer your question - we use cheaper models to just flag if something looks obviously flawed. That covers the vast majority of things because it's the propagation of obviously stupid stuff that causes a problem for our system. To the extent we are doing something sophisticated, we use an appropriate architecture, like it's built into the system.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Gold is now the top U.S. export"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:19:31 +0000

Copper is a valuable metal with many uses, and it can't be printed. You can make diamonds, but not copper.

However, if you made half the copper disappear, you'd have a big problem.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Gold is now the top U.S. export"

danielmarkbruce — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:50:48 +0000

What's crazy about it is if that ship sunk, as long as nobody knew, it wouldn't matter one bit. Shows just how much of a waste gold mining is.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:06:08 +0000

Sure. I guess the reason some people don't feel so bad for the math folks is the people in those careers you highlight tend to not have the asset a math researcher has - a giant brain that is valuable outside their little world of math proofs.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:04:36 +0000

It's a bad analogy. Math proofs lend themselves to just throwing more compute at the problem both in training and at inference, you can verify when you are done. Most tasks don't lend themselves well to training or inference.

Robotics isn't really a coherent grouping. Some things that would be termed "robotics" are already "solved", other things aren't even close and need actuating and sensing capabilities that are miles off or so cost prohibitive that it doesn't make any sense.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:47:50 +0000

Perhaps. But as someone who uses AI to automate something that seems in the bucket of things you are talking about - it's harder than it seems, the edge cases are endless, claude code is worse at building real systems than people think and humans are doing a lot more than people realize once you start trying to automate.

All I'm saying is the math advances of late really hasn't changed much outside of math as far as AI is concerned.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:40:47 +0000

We are miles away from that.

Math proofs are right in the sweet spot for training LLMs with RLVR. It isn't some general "LLMs are getting insanely smart!". Even most software development itself is miles away from being as well suited to training as math proofs are.

The majority of math research is akin to professional chess. Completely useless and the folks doing it are using their giant brains to play a game that no one outside themselves benefits from.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:23:59 +0000

Fair enough. It just makes him and the foundation sound so soulless. We need more folks like him, not less.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:21:49 +0000

Read "the man who solved the market". It's a remarkable story. He was a remarkable dude, extremely smart, has given a lot of money to promote math and science.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:27:03 +0000

Respectfully, you didn't answer either. Jim Simons was a brilliant mathematician, has done a lot for math and people involved in math. If you assume they are "pro math and pro math people", the why is simple too.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:57:51 +0000

I see you saying a lot of intelligent things - do you really not know much about the Simons Foundation?

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

danielmarkbruce — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:35:47 +0000

You never had some god given right to be a math researcher. You have a big brain and training in a field that is very useful in various industries.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

danielmarkbruce — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 22:14:21 +0000

Nah, he's a hack, extrapolating the recent past into the future.

I'm not the one making up numbers...

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

danielmarkbruce — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:31:15 +0000

Completely made up numbers. Real returns to all assets haven't been close to 10%, and real GDP growth globally has been higher than 2%.

Anyone can parrot Piketty. Anyone with half a brain knows he is a hack.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:41:29 +0000

Historically r>g, no one is debating that. It's the idea that it will just persist which is silly. Capital isn't immune to supply/demand.

And, r is the return on all assets, not just the s&p 500, and 1 year of returns means nothing...

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:14:45 +0000

It seems unlikely a few rounds of rl are going to fix the following problem: most things are more complex than they seem on the surface, and decisions to be made. There are always trade-offs.

New comment by danielmarkbruce in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

danielmarkbruce — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 02:37:36 +0000

r dropping below g isn't "unwinding". r has been falling for decades now. The world is awash in capital.