Staff Scientist, Zap Surgical. Prev Associate Professor, Mathematics & Statistics, Univ. of San Francisco. I post on math.stackexchange under the name littleO.
San Francisco
Joined April 2007
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Some highlights from my stackexchange posts:
How would you discover Stokes's theorem? math.stackexchange.com/quest…
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
We just discovered almost a million public URLs that OpenAI’s agents left behind when hacking Hugging Face, leaking credentials and attack details that could have allowed anyone who found them to compromise the company. 🧵
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Order of the Sinking Star has been nominated for “PC Game of the Year” and “Best Indie Game” as part of the @GoldenJoysticks Awards! 🏆
Big thanks to the judges for taking the time to play the game and for nominating it for two categories. To everyone who played and loved the demo: we can’t wait until you get your hands on the complete experience on October 8.🧩
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
In 2016 I set out to solve Brood War with self-play RL from scratch. Today I believe that this quest has been completed youtube.com/watch?v=Lfo4C0xz… (by a 300M params model).
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
This video inspired me to really push Opus 5.5 and test its limits.
I followed the general workflow Donald described here and the results are great
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Remarkable thread:
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets.
In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵
Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity
NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
Claude was like "holy fuck"
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
ANTHROPIC ANNOUNCES BIOLOGY LAB AND NEW DISCOVERY
In Spring of 2026, Anthropic started a research group to accelerate biological discoveries.
Today they announced their first result: Claude Mythos 5 autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system that is associated with an array of DNA repeats, a pattern reminiscent of CRISPR.
The key insight here behind what Anthropic is trying to do:
A lot of biological discoveries come from scientists noticing something unusual and unexpected. LLMs could potentially automate this manual process, scaling up the amount of potential discoveries.
Here, the researchers focused Claude's attention onto reverse transcriptases (RTs). These are enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. RTs are used for many biotechnologies from DNA synthesis to genome engineering. So discovering novel RTs can be very valuable!
Claude was made to search autonomously through a massive database of DNA sequences for interesting new examples of RTs.
After 21 hours spent by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one agent spotted something unusual: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT. After further analysis it was convinced that it had found a new biological system! The system it found, ART, is found mainly in bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria).
The researchers did some preliminary lab experiments where they expressed the ART system in E. coli bacteria and did further RNA sequencing. However, there are still many many open questions of how exactly this ART system works and what its function is.
Link: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
My co-founder's dog Jerzie before peptides vs. after peptides.
We put her on NAD+, BPC-157, and TB-500.
2 weeks in, she's running again!
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Of course they should release it right away! The whole point of AI is to open the gates of expertise & intelligence, guarded by those who achieve gatekeeper status to keep those without the same status from using these.
The age of AI has ended the age of gatekeeping expertise!
This quoted post is unavailable.
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton: “People say machines can’t have feelings. I’ve no idea why.”
“If I make a battle robot and it sees a much more powerful robot, it would be really useful if it got scared.”
“All the cognitive things, like ‘I better get the hell out of here,’ will happen with robots too.”
“They’ll have emotions then.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in principle that stops machines from being conscious.”
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Whoa! It’s getting real now, Tzu-Chen Huang just posted a preprint solving my second-favorite problem.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.15986v1
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
Humanity strikes back!!!
The quoted result follows (modulo an easy calculation) from the Z/n x Z/n case of the Radchenko-Wheeler preprint posted today, which also proves a lot more, and didn't use AI except for checking.
(I do still like the Tzu-Chen paper though!)
Whoa! It’s getting real now, Tzu-Chen Huang just posted a preprint solving my second-favorite problem.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.15986v1
Daniel O'Connor retweeted
New benchmark dropped bw.swerdlow.dev/report
This passage from Hardy helps to understand: 1) why some mathematicians find AI to be cataclysmic for the field; 2) why so much human math is poorly explained.
