My first PhD student just graduated with an amazing dissertation. It was a great pleasure working together and to watch Théo pick up all the skills to be a great researcher. Excited for the future!

Résultats de la votation de la Ville de Paris ("Pour ou contre végétaliser et rendre piétonnes 500 nouvelles rues dans Paris ?") par arrondissement. www.datawrapper.de/_/2HKVf/

Christian Kroer, Dominik Peters Computing Lindahl Equilibrium for Public Goods with and without Funding Caps https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16414

@dividedargument.bsky.social @williambaude.bsky.social @epps.bsky.social Was just relistening to an old episode and it turns out to include a timely side discussion about auto pen.

Das deutsche Wahlrecht gibt jedem Wähler zwei Stimmen: für einen Direktkandidaten und eine Liste. Aber das Wahlrecht wurde für dieses Jahr geändert, um den Anwuchs der Sitze im Bundestag zu stoppen. Das führt aber dazu, dass 23 Wahlkreise diesmal kein Direktmandat erhalten. 🧵

The German election system lets people vote for both a local representative and a party. But it changed this year: to stop the number of Bundestag members from fluctuating, some candidates that would've become local representatives lost if their party got too few votes. This happened in 23 districts

Feels so good to be able to vent to someone wise and well-read and who tends to agree with you. I have been procrastinating returning this page proof for months now because I get pissed off everytime I open the PDF.

They put palm trees all over Place de la Concorde — Paris Plage in February!

How many conversations I have with different LLMs, per month. Peaks in months where I've paid for the plus versions (e.g. 2024-04 for Claude 3 Opus, 2024-09 for o1-preview, 2025-01 for o1). Surprising that there is no clear growth since Summer 2023.

16:31: I notice a pedestrian signal facing the wrong way, open an issue in the Paris DansMaRue app. 18:36: The city emails me a photo of having fixed it. @paris.fr 👏🔥

New application for LLMs: if you generate a list of counterexamples, you can ask it which one is the nicest looking.

There are too many computer scientists who don't know essential optimization concepts like Farkas lemma and KKT conditions. These seem to not be part of the standard CS undergrad curriculum, but should be.

Academics are slowly starting to get back to work, judging from how often they check the documentation of TikZ (a figure drawing package for LaTeX)

If you want your ideas to become more influential, it seems worthwhile to post translations of articles and papers in many languages. Then they end up in the training corpus of LLMs multiple times, and the copies are expensive to filter out. Plus you get broader accessibility to humans.

I just published my own digitized version of the FSI French Basic course from the 1960s and 70s. Super boring but quite effective, and now much easier to use thanks to audio files synced to the textbook. dominik-peters.de/fsi/

Rennes's first metro line (9.4 km) was quoted at €449 million in 1995 which is €2023 700 million -­> €75 m/km. Line b (14 km) cost €1.3 bn or approx €2023 1.5 bn -> €107 m/km. Part of the difference is related to the higher standards of line b: longer platforms, wider trains, bigger stations, etc.

Today, the €5bn RER E extension in Paris took up full service, after its first 7 months only having limited shuttle service. I went yesterday to enjoy the last day of seeing a brand-new massive station completely deserted in the middle of the afternoon.

Gemini 2.0 now has an actually functional code interpreter!

My YouTube channel with oral argument audio of the U.S. supreme court has reached 1000 subscribers! 🥳 www.youtube.com/channel/UCuX...

“Vitalik” is now following me twice! And Bluesky isn’t fast at handling reports of impersonation.

Feels reminiscent of the Democrats nominating Biden. www.dw.com/en/germany-s...

Reviewing for the AAMAS conference; for all 5 of the papers in my batch, all three reviews recommend reject. I hear similarly dire impressions from colleagues. Something happened to AAMAS or is it some quirk of the reviewer assignment?

@epps.bsky.social fyi in S3 E7, 44:20, Will bets you dinner that the Dobbs leaker will be known by January 2025.

French has the great advantage that years 2022 onwards can be pronounced in just 4 syllables ("deux mille vingt deux"), and easy syllables too. English needs 5-6 ("two thou-sand twen-ty two", "twen-ty twen-ty two"), German needs 6-7 ("zwei tau-send zwei-und-zwan-zig", "zwan-zig zwei-und-zwan-zig").

Peter Thiel in Jan 2020 vs Nov 2024. Is he an Ozempic fan or did something else happen? Sorry for shallow tweet, just found it striking.

The German parliament was planning to change the constitution to make it more difficult to mess with the constitutional court. That's possible as extremist parties are at < 1/3 of seats. But if there are new elections before it is passed, it could be too late. www.tagesschau.de/kommentar/am...

Wegovy (semaglutide) finally entering the French market, but unfortunately restricted to people with BMIs above 35, requiring a prescription from a specialist doctor, and without any insurance coverage. www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio...