Founder & Partner @backtracevc; Developer & Lawyer; ¯\_(ツ)_/¯; Infra/Dev Tools Investor 🦇🔊

Joined January 2012
535 Photos and videos
Time to fire up the printers again. Last time it was the PGP source code, this time it’s gonna be lots of A4 print outs of model weights stacked on euro pallets 😝
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
Ona (formerly Gitpod) is joining @OpenAI, bringing their secure cloud execution and async agent orchestration tech to further enhance Codex! Five years ago, I sent @jolandgraf a DM on Twitter after seeing how rad Gitpod was for spinning up cloud development environments. It seemed clear to me that devs needed better ways to manage multiple environments for different projects, especially in the enterprise. I made my first angel investment in 2021. As I got to know Johannes better, I realized what a special founder he is. Always asking the hard questions of himself and his team. Relentlessly pursuing product/market fit. Extensive communication to the team and investors through Notion docs. In 2022, I led their Series A at @PWVentures, a first for me, and one of the biggest checks I've written to a startup. Over the last four years, Johannes and team have been through several mini-pivots, always adjusting to the market. As AI has taken over mindshare, they made their biggest pivot yet, rebranding and leveraging their core tech to bring robust AI tooling/orchestration via secure cloud development environments to the enterprise. Ona's technology is years ahead of competition, and I'm really glad to see it land at OpenAI, where millions of devs will get to experience it make their lives better. Congratulations to @jolandgraf and the whole Ona team—a well deserved success, and a bright future for you and the product!
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Ona is joining @OpenAI ✨ Huge congratulations to @jolandgraf and team @ona_hq! You stayed with the problem long enough for the world to catch up. Hard to imagine a better next chapter for what you have built. 🚀
We’ve reached an agreement to acquire @ona_hq. Its secure cloud execution technology will help Codex take on longer-running work, even when laptops are closed, and help more organizations deploy agents securely in production. After closing, Ona will join OpenAI’s Codex team. openai.com/index/openai-to-a…
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👀
You didn't see this coming in ds4-agent, did you?
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ALT True Its True GIF

For some reason, AI has convinced people that closed-source software is the way forward. It's not. Security through obscurity isn't security. Anyone claiming otherwise is too dumb to understand the problem and thus must not propose solutions. Speak less, listen more.
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Tokenmaxxxing: seeing a stairwell notice about hedge trimming and teaching @_HermesAgent to turn it into an OCR → sabre/vobject → iCalendar → iTIP-over-email pipeline, instead of just adding the damn event to your calendar manually.

ALT Future Is Now Old Man Future GIF

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Greetings from the breakfast table with the family:
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
In the next months I'll provide you with a Hacker News replacement that I'll run myself and I'll guarantee personally: no benefit for whatsoever individual, a team of 10/20 persons since the start, from different time zones, clear rules, total transparency, and a "karma" system. I really want to fix HN and provide something that is not bound to a specific company.
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There is hope that all of those Twitter bookmarks that we never look at again after bookmarking might be useful at some point.
LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
tldr; if you used @vltpkg as your package manager, then you were protected the minute @SocketSecurity flagged the malicious packages in the `axios` attack yesterday. The best time to switch your package manager was 48hrs ago, the next best time is right now. More below: blog.vlt.sh/blog/vlt-build
🧨 Axios only needed to be resolved somewhere in your dependency graph to affect you. Semver transitive deps runtime installs = hidden blast radius. If you only checked your project’s lockfile, you may still not know. socket.dev/blog/hidden-blast… #nodejs
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
mlx-vlm v0.4.2 is out 🚀 New models • Sam3 by @facebook ( realtime mask-only label drawing) • DOTS-MOCR by rednote-hilab Fixes • Qwen3.5 RMSNorm dtype fix • LFM2-VL loads without torch • Magistral image token expansion fix • PaliGemma processor kwarg routing fix • Thinking defaults fixed in CLI server Shoutout to @pcuenq, and @mdstaff for his first contribution! Get started today: > uv pip install -U mlx-vlm Leave us a star ✨ github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-vlm/r…
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Dear Santa, I need a basement, a 19 inch rack and enough of these to stack from floor to ceiling.
Apple Xserve is back !?!?! Apple Xserve 2024 ? ? ? 😱😱A3174😱😱 Looks like 4-way Apple M2 Ultra chips. It even has 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD on the BMC. I think the BMC controller might be an Apple M1/M2 CPU? --- 🤔Are they still using the MacOS Server OS???🤔
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
Mar 25
seems obvious but: things that are changing rapidly: 1. context windows 2. intelligence / ability to reason within context 3. performance on any given benchmark 4. cost per token things that are not changing much: 1. humans 2. human behavior, preferences, affinities 3. tools, integrations, infrastructure 4. single core cpu performance therefore, ngmi: 1. "i found this method to cut 15% context" 2. "our method improves retrieval performance 10% by using hybrid search" 3. "our finetuned model is cheaper than opus at this benchmark" 4. "our harness does this better because we invented this multi agent system" 5. "we're building a memory system" 6. "context graphs" 7. "we trained an in house specialized rl model to improve task performance in X benchmark at Y% cost reduction" wagmi: 1. product/ui 3. customer acquisition 4. integrations 5. fast linting, ci, skills, feedback for agents 6. background agent infra to parallelize more work 7. speed up your agent verification loops 8. training your users, connecting to their systems and working with their data, meeting them where they are
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
I got a 1T-parameter model running locally on my MacBook Pro. LLM: Kimi K2.5 1,026,408,232,448 params (~1.026T) Hardware: M2 Max MacBook Pro (2023) w/ 96GB unified memory Running on MLX with a flash-style SSD streaming path local patching. This is an experimental setup and I haven’t optimized speed yet, but it’s stable enough that I’ve started testing it in an autoresearch-style loop. #LocalAI #MLX #MoE
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Is there something like the forgedev ":prompt" feature for when you are not a fan of oh-my-zsh?
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Can you do slides with @paper, too?
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Is PicoMLXServer still the way to go, if I need OpenAI API? Or what are all the cool kids using today? @ronaldmannak
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Dominik Tobschall retweeted
Mar 17
What if you could run ANY Node.js app unmodified, safely anywhere… without Docker, containers, or security headaches? 🔥 Introducing Edge.js • Fully compatible with Node.js • Sandboxed by design • Pluggable with any JS engine Node.js, but actually safe. And everywhere 👇
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