Handyman. Co-founder @icebreaker_xyz. Ex @coinbase, @google, startups. ❤️ Art + AI + crypto + privacy + history
NYC
Joined February 2009
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Multiple breakthroughs in cryptography, privacy, machine learning, and automation are converging- enabling myriad applications. Soon technology is going to feel like magic again.
Dan 🛡️ web3pm.eth retweeted
Introducing Arete-27B: Qwen3.8-27B, post-trained to reinforce Western values.
Chinese open models are currently the strongest available, but they ship with state-aligned behavior in the weights. We built an 803-prompt eval across seven value categories, including freedom of expression, democracy, and privacy, and measured how often a model adopts China’s party line.
After fine-tuning on roughly 53 million tokens, Arete-27B's propaganda rate fell from 22% to 1%, in line with the Western models we tested. Its Hermes Bench score shows no significant performance tradeoffs.
The values in an open model are one fine-tune away.
Our eval, weights, and training data are available now along with the full blog post: nousresearch.com/arete
Check out this "ID verified" impostor from UMich Dearborn that sent me a linkedin connection request.
My backchannel skill immediately flagged a lack of mutuals and an unusual network graph.
Then I noticed his profile pic spells his college "Dearbork".
Didn't stop him from subscribing to LinkedIn premium.
It'll only get worse from here. Soon there'll be more fake profiles than real ones.
Any system that doesn't leverage social graphs won't be able to cope.
A founder wanted an intro to a specific VC. He synced his CTO's network and ran a scan in Claude.
Turns out his CTO already knows the right person there, through Princeton.
"I would not have otherwise figured that out."
AI is only as good as the context you give it.
It's been fascinating to see how many unnecessary services our SaaS is connecting to after installing @littlesnitch
This one (along with 10+ other ad trackers) is coming from Figma via an embedded sign-in flow in Linear
Some of the best ideas need to be retried over and over until someone cracks the formula
Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
“proprietary data will always need to get into the context window for the model to be useful”
🎯
There’s no amount of intelligence that can get packed into AI models that replaces the need for context. For any sufficiently general purpose AI, you will always have to guide it in the direction you want as it has an infinite range of directions it can go in.
As long as the same model is used by a lawyer, an engineer, a financial analyst, or a healthcare professional, and as long as you’re trying to do anything uniquely differentiated or specific, then instructions, domain context, and proprietary data will always need to get into the context window for the model to be useful.
This is partly why AI automation doesn’t come for free, and why there’s still a wide spectrum of who’s getting the largest gains from AI and who’s not. You have to put in real work, and you get real value on the other end.
This is one of the advantages that applied AI will also have in the market. Any layer of abstraction above just the raw intelligence that can meaningfully get you off to the races faster will likely continue to be valuable.
open sourced my luma attendee downloader after speaking with multiple gtm leads at ETHDenver who said "this is insane"
it's your data. you should be able to use it how you want.
Customer used our tool to find 100+ high quality candidates in minutes today.
All referrals from their existing network.
If you’re aggressively hiring in web3 or AI, you should be *starting* with your most valuable resource: your team’s existing networks.
DM if you need help
Dan 🛡️ web3pm.eth retweeted
Want to build credibility without paying $10,000 annually?
Verify handles, colleagues, employment and use your verifications on any platform (not just this one!)
Free and unlimited forever on Icebreaker.
Trust is earned, not bought.
Introducing a new concept that we’ve been building over the last year:
The Hypernetwork
One social graph to rule them all.
paragraph.com/@icebreakerlab…
People trying all kinds of hacks with cold outreach
One pattern I’m seeing is trying to bootstrap social proof by referencing someone I know, even though the sender doesn’t.
There’s a line between scrappiness and outright deception. This one crosses it.
Your reputation will eventually catch up to you
Very psyched to see zero knowledge implementations start to roll out on top of EAS
New modular zk toolkit! ⚡
Use it to generate zkps from offchain attestations.
The flow:
- Sign/use offchain attestation
- Generate proofs with SP1
- Verify with WASM
- Attest verification result onchain (optional)
Special thanks to @shivansheth & @whoisgautxm (zkAttestify) for contributing this and to @SuccinctLabs for support!
New NYC-based Head of Growth role to work with our friends at @AlmanaxAI
Posted on @icebreaker_xyz (link in reply)