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danbrooks

262 karma · joined March 21, 2018

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danbrooks··on Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms
This type of project looks extremely useful. There was a lot of buzz around Jev, but having models that run locally and can be fine-tuned is extremely helpful.
danbrooks··on LLM Ass Bench
Glad my work blocked this. But can we get a NSFW tag? If this is NSFW?
danbrooks··on A Faster Shortest Path Algorithm
I'm confused.

This seems to imply that they used Claude Opus 5.5 before it was released on September 22nd.

danbrooks··on Claude Opus 5.5
Many people knew this announcement was coming. The betting markets suggested a very high likelihood of Opus dropping today. I was anticipating this quite a bit!
danbrooks··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
Not sure this is as nefarious as it might look at first glance.

Disney+ supports a variety of content types - some of which naturally have ads.

A big example is the Super Bowl (coming in February), which has always had ads.

danbrooks··on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
Nice! Does anyone know how this compares to the Unsloth quantizations of this model? https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8#run-qwen3.8-guide
danbrooks··on Show HN: How Stale Is Your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models
An aside - isn't it nice that have been fewer model releases the past week or so? A brief respite!
danbrooks··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Just gave it a look. Turns out to be a paid service after a bunch of clicks.
danbrooks··on Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools
Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.
danbrooks··on OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
Most LLMs can do a pretty good job of this out of the box.

If you have a coding agent available, ask it to try transcribing a few of the PDFs.

danbrooks··on I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
I had the same inspiration!

I spent a days reviewing the lecture notes for CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch - and then trained a nanoGPT-esque model in PyTorch.

I'd recommend trying it for those who are curious. Computational bottlenecks become much more intuitive when you've looked at the overall process.

danbrooks··on Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”
Typically, companies file these patents to protect themselves against patent trolls.
danbrooks··on Claude-real-video - any LLM can watch a video
I’d imagine they could. I’d try Gemini 3.5 flash with high fps.
danbrooks··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
Super high scores for the community!

I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.

My SAT reading was 760/800.

danbrooks··on MTG Bench: Testing how well LLMs can play Magic
Very cool. I’ve been daydreaming about whether LLMs can be used to reason through gaming decisions.
danbrooks··on CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch
I'd be interested in joining a discord server.

Would be great to have a community to discuss the material - even if folks can't commit to the full course.

danbrooks··on Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies
Theoretically, the fund is non-partisan. I'd be curious to see what happens if some folks claim to be politically targeted by the current DOJ.
danbrooks··on Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
Check which model you're using.

The fast version of composer is the default now (which costs ~x3 as much).

danbrooks··on Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
This aligns with my understanding.

Before 2018-2019, the opt-in process for data sharing was hidden on a website somewhere. Around that time, the form became part of the vehicle purchasing process.

danbrooks··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
The instructions likely mean that the bishop itself is black, not the square that it is on.
danbrooks··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
This was really fun. I like that holding down space bar gives ~20 clicks per second, which helps speeds things up.
danbrooks··on Visualize Any Hugging Face Model
Most hugging face models are implemented in PyTorch, with an architecture specified as a series of layers. This looks like a nice visualization of that.
danbrooks··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.
danbrooks··on What Is Copilot Exactly?
Amazing ending. I have been told "no one should be using copilot" - and I agree!
danbrooks··on AI for American-produced cement and concrete
It's not a joke - but it sure feels suspicious :D
danbrooks··on President's new science council: 9 billionaires and 1 scientist
This feels like regulatory capture by the tech industry. Academic research needs representation as well.
danbrooks··on Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search
I work in content/video intelligence. Gemini is great for this type of use case out of the box.
danbrooks··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
I also prefer the original version - the AI version has a strange vibe.
danbrooks··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
danbrooks··on Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
I got some emails like this from overseas developers looking to borrow my Linkedin to land a higher paying job.
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