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Martin Elstner

@martin.elstner.dev
1.4K followers 908 following 185 posts

AI and ML engineering. Search and recommendation. Founder of Elstner Analytics. Helping companies solve their data issues elstner.dev

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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 19/05/2026
Recommended read! How data engineering tools should fit together.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 15/04/2026
The dust settled a bit around the chardet rewrite (simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/c...) and the practice seems to be considered ok (in a legal, not necessarily in a moral sense). Beside converting GPL or closed source code to more permissive licences, the general idea
simonwillison.net
Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?
Over the past few months it’s become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a “clean room” implementation of code. The most famous version …
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 25/03/2026
“Humanity isn’t ready for that much software” Very true. I’m not sure, where the new bottleneck is located. Currently trying to build nicer, beautiful things and make MVPs a bit less messy. But not really settled on the right way, yet
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 25/03/2026
The public perception around this topic seems to shift. Slowly, but some hope exists that we will end up in a better position someday ssir.org/articles/ent...
ssir.org
The New Paradigm of Airborne Disease (SSIR)
The COVID-19 pandemic shattered established views of airborne disease. Although it represents a paradigm shift in public health, the field has yet to catch up.
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Albert Villanova del Moral @albertvillanova.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
🚀 Big news for TRL users with AI agents: We just released the trl-training SKILL in TRL v0.29.0 🤗 Agents can now use the TRL CLI as a structured capability:
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Christian Minich @christianminich.com · 25/02/2026
I see AI-forward teams spending a ton of time building bespoke tools to help them develop more effectively using agents (see: proliferation of CLIs to work with git worktrees), trying out different models, testing our new workflows.
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The Matter Lab @thematterlab.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
We’re excited to share a new preprint that may reshape how humans write - TreeWriter: AI-Assisted Hierarchical Planning and Writing for Long-Form Documents 🌳 📃 arxiv.org/abs/2601.12740 Demo: drive.google.com/file/d/1R-X6... Live demo: treer.ai [1/5]
arxiv.org
TreeWriter: AI-Assisted Hierarchical Planning and Writing for Long-Form Documents
Long documents pose many challenges to current intelligent writing systems. These include maintaining consistency across sections, sustaining efficient planning and writing as documents become more co...
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AI Firehose @ai-firehose.column.social · 16/02/2026
This study presents "abstractive red-teaming," a method for pre-deployment audits of language models, identifying problematic query categories causing character violations. This innovation improves model reliability by exposing risks like illegal behavior and sexism. arxiv.org/abs/2602.12318
arxiv.org
Abstractive Red-Teaming of Language Model Character
ArXiv link for Abstractive Red-Teaming of Language Model Character
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David Emmett @motomatters.com · 12/02/2026
Quantitative measures are always a dangerous yardstick. You can describe severe diarrhoea as "an explosion in bowel productivity", but you wouldn't say it correlates positively with gut health.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 08/12/2025
Think of Alex and Palantir what ever you want; this is probably the best 3D-chess move you could make...
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 05/12/2025
Started a collection of LLM use-case dataset on HF. Key entrances: the super cool ZenML LLMOps use-case database and Anthropic's new interview dataset. Details below, any other things to include? huggingface.co/collections/...
huggingface.co
AI use-cases - a dwablimol Collection
A collection of datasets that describes various use cases of AI in enterprise and other settings.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 05/12/2025
One of the few examples of how to use AI tools in a creative process that's fully curative instead of generative. Describing images, OCRing documents and make it searchable. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ngb...
youtube.com
How Emmy Award–winning filmmakers use AI to automate the tedious parts of documentaries
YouTube video by How I AI
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 01/12/2025
Classrooms as cluster-mixing machines because of poor air? Color me surprised. </s> This Nat. Comm. study found: In schools, it is not only direct contact, mainly the “shared classroom exposure.” Poor air quality increases the risk exponentially. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The relative contribution of close-proximity contacts, shared classroom exposure and indoor air quality to respiratory virus transmission in schools - Nature Communications
The relative importance of close-proximity interactions, shared space and air quality to the transmission of respiratory viruses is not well understood. Here, the authors investigate this question by ...
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 01/12/2025
Teile alle genannten Punkte, glaube aber, das viele der aktuellen Probleme eher auf “you are holding it wrong” fußen. Beispiel Bildungswesen: copy-pasta von KI-Antworten ist eine dumme Idee (und das ist so offensichtlich, das ich mich frage wieso man das diskutiert).
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 01/12/2025
Beautiful typographic map
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 30/11/2025
Creative work/parenting 2025 festive edition: ChatGPT creates the Mandala for K3 and you need Gemini nano banana to get the spelling right.
AI generated mandala coloring page with a spelling error from ChatGPT, Gemini adjusted the image and corrects the error
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 27/11/2025
Really nice how you can get music notation for your kids to play along for the holidays:
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 26/11/2025
Finetuning for coding tasks probably isn’t worth the effort. Your own model can be great for classification, dense vector search or other small tasks. For complex stuff like ‘coding’ in a broader sense, it’s not holding up to the promises.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 26/11/2025
Skimming the comments, acceptance is still far away
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 26/11/2025
The water thing is mostly overblown andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-wat... The electricity and CO2 impact is real and deserves serious attention, which is why it's annoying that the water issue steals so much of that attention
andymasley.substack.com
The AI water issue is fake
On the national, local, and personal level
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Building datasets to train smaller, task-focused models used to be incredibly time-consuming. Very excited to see SAM3 massively lower that barrier. Describe the class you want to detect and get annotated datasets automatically! Try it yourself: huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...!
Screenshot of a simple app showing bounding boxes for photographs detected in historic newspaper images. hf jobs uv run \
  --flavor a100-large \
  -s HF_TOKEN=HF_TOKEN \
  https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/sam3/raw/main/detect-objects.py \
  -- davanstrien/newspapers-with-images-after-photography-big \
  davanstrien/newspapers-photo-predictions \
  --class-name "photograph" \
  --confidence-threshold 0.4
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 16/10/2025
Yes, LLMs can automate parts of consumer research. But if you tell ChatGPT your SaaS idea and ask for feedback, don’t be surprised when it pats you on the back. The real question is: how do you get beyond the fluff?
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 15/10/2025
Interesting point (still problematic tasks) but wrong conclusions. I’m again and again puzzled how intelligent people neglect the utility of LLMs/VLMs. They are far from flawless but can do so much already. If their abilities don’t overlap with your problem space, don’t use them there.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 07/10/2025
Have to dig deeper and maybe running a few experiments on this. But the abstract reads very promising: arxiv.org/abs/2509.24372
arxiv.org
Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Beyond Reinforcement Learning
Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for down-stream tasks is a critical step in the AI deployment pipeline. Reinforcement learning (RL) is arguably the most prominent fine-tuning meth...
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 26/09/2025
As a data guy who analyzes all sorts of effects on and from C19 since early 2020, I second this
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 18/09/2025
It‘s unbelievable. Hunderts of “yeah, me too” replies and quotes. I mean, there are points to be concerned about the LLM/AI space. But this 🙈 tactic
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 03/09/2025
Probably the most interesting podcast on AI I listened to in the last months www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ngd...
youtube.com
Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans
YouTube video by The Knowledge Project Podcast
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 28/08/2025
This channel has some nuggets! Relatively new and only a few videos so far, but I read and watched the dbt and DuckDB related ones and they get much deeper than the usual 'hey look, cool new tools' fluff.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 27/08/2025
And in Germany you can directly map the medium of the back and forth to an industry: Fax: healthcare email: public Slack: startups Teams: DAX Whatever the google tool is called this week: SME Discord: 🙃
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Andy Pavlo @andypavlo.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025
15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu
CMU 15-445/645 :: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2025)
You want to know whether this is the premier course at Carnegie Mellon University on the design and implementation of database management systems? Well, it is. This course rips through data models (re...
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Lara @laracrc.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Happy Friday 🌍! We are giving away one copy of 'Spatial Linear Models for Environmental Data'. To enter, simply follow me and re-post this by the end of Sunday, August 17. #spatial #environment # #data #StatsSky routledge.com/9780367183349 not associated with bsky
Book cover of Spatial Linear Models for Enviornmental Data, dark blue background with white pattern with a picture of caribou and data plots
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 14/08/2025
You can’t park here
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 06/08/2025
The Open Model release from OpenAI is a good reason to check out local AI models on your device. Is it the best model out there? Definitely not, even in it's parameter class, it may not be THE best, benchmark wise (aside: OpenAI build sizes that are uncommon, so direct comparison is harder), but
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 04/08/2025
I honestly think, we need to adapt our notion of reality. The tools to reshape it are here already. We can try to regulate them, we can mourn for our loss or we can adapt. I would see it as an exercise in media literacy... bsky.app/profile/mart...
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 01/08/2025
Dropping generated videos is a good test if you want to know what other platforms your followers use. Bluesky has a large user base of AI sceptics and seems generally isolated from the hot topics on the video platforms (not judging, but the latter is probably a good thing).
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 20/07/2025
Need to read more carefully. Was watching Sabine's recent video and was expecting to learn about "Bohemian mechanics". You can't imagine my disappointment www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvpS...
youtube.com
New Experiment Rules out Bohmian Mechanics. It’s Serious.
YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 17/07/2025
DHH on the Lex Fridman Podcast (2h in): probably you can see a productivity drop this week from all the techies wading through it...
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 12/07/2025
POV: EV charging in rural Germany
A little snail sitting inside a cars charging port
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Travis Street @travisstreet.com · 08/07/2025
A 'desire path' represents the shortest or the most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. If you can preempt these in your UX/UI you'll lower support tickets and increase user retention. People are going to people. Let them.
A 12 panel cartoon showing an increasingly well worn walking path in the grass.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 07/07/2025
A workflow with just and uv, close to what I had stitched together over the last months. I got a handful of new ideas (like putting PORT in .env); recommend watching it!
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 03/07/2025
So, Simon says I should quitting this computer programming thing <taking notes>
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 26/06/2025
Puzzled about the common approach for LLM and agent integration in native iOS (and likely Android) apps. Most LLM libraries and ecosystem tools are Python or JavaScript.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 26/06/2025
Power users drive LLM adoption: As we run our survey on work related LLM usage in a large, mid-sized German technology firm, we observed a divide into heavy users and non-user, but very few in between.
LLM usage frequency for employees:
never	767
1-2x per month	289
1-2x per week	814
3-5x per week	268
5-10x per week	401
3-5x per day	653
> 5x per day 817
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 25/06/2025
If your company implements stringent rules regarding the use of Generative AI tools, there's a high probability employees will find ways to circumvent them.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 25/06/2025
If you want to build an AI feature into an existing product, I really recommend to go through this book. It’s one of the most enlightening technical reads I had in the last few years.
Photo of the book “UX for AI” by Greg Nudelman
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 25/06/2025
If your company implements stringent rules regarding the use of Generative AI tools, there's a high probability employees will find ways to circumvent them.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 21/05/2025
Looking into a 'Hello, World!'-like super simple example for GenAI usage (via an API). Thinking about summarisation (has many nuances that you can build upon) or are there any other obvious ideas?
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 20/05/2025
Very interesting read; puts my vague thoughts and ideas on MCP in better words. The parallels are really striking.
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
"23andMe was trading on ignorance of how the genome actually works, and perpetuating a deterministic view of genetics that is outmoded and wrong." So much this. As Adam says, some good things came from some of the data, but the harm done by this message about genes is probably huge.
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Martin Elstner @martin.elstner.dev · 10/03/2025
MCP servers and integrations pioneered an easy way to plug knowledge and functions into AI systems. But I would be surprised if they are the final thing; a good first attempt but other concepts may arise down the road (so don't put all your efforts into the MCP hype).
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