Very hyped about where I get to spend this week 🤩

Just finished my second ever #crochet project! 😺 I learned (the hard way 🤣) that one should do a few rows on a much smaller scale to make sure to understand the pattern. I also learned about crocheting in "chain-1 spaces", which was initially very confusing. Progress! ✨

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Does anyone know where I can find a relatively up-to-date list of the most common advertising trackers present on the Web, with information like overall market share, market share for the most popular websites, and so on?

I got mixed up between Ständerat and Regierungsrat, but otherwise successfully passed the Swiss citizenship knowledge test this afternoon, with 49/50 correct answers 🎉

I have a new intern working with me. He's only here for a few days but I'm hopeful we will have a friendly and fruitful collaboration.

I left home for 2 weeks and this guy decided it was a good time to try and become a real tree 🌱

First ever guest post on my blog! ✨ Georgi Ganev writes about SMOTE, a popular data augmentation technique used in ML training. Despite what people apparently think, it does not provide any privacy guarantees… 🙃 https://desfontain.es/blog/smote-and-mirrors.html 🌈

An older family member, who struggles with tech, seems to have accidentally deleted all their Signal messages (on iOS). Anyone know how that could have happened? The only official method seems way too complex for them to have done it by accident.

What is "privacy auditing"? Ask three privacy experts and you might get three different answers! So I wrote this ✨ new blog post ✨ to shed some light on this admittedly confusing terminology 👀 ➡️ https://desfontain.es/blog/privacy-auditing-terminology.html 🌈

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@tedted/115961697730486110 This seems to have attracted a bunch of bot replies on Bluesky. All promising "no AI" while their portfolios are full of graphics for products/companies that don't seem to exist, and fantasy pictures without a consistent art style. Truly […]

current status: watching german news

Would anyone have a recommendation for a logo designer who does not use GenAI? #FediHire

I just booked a bunch of non-refundable trains for a vacation and it just hit me now that InterRail exists and I could probably have saved a good half of the price with it 🫩

I signed up for my first ever classical chess tournament. Will happen in March, 5 games over 3 days (90+30 time control). It will either be lots of fun, or an emotionally crushing experience, or maybe both 😺

You think answering "thanks, you too" to a waiter telling you "enjoy your meal" is embarrassing? A friend of mine, who is single, wished me a good honeymoon today. Guest what I answered 🫥

Making pumpkin soup. First step: melt 330g of butter. #frenchcooking

I wrote a ✨ new blog post ✨ discussing some proposed changes to the definition of personal data under GDPR. tl;dr: good for my business, not great for society at large 🤔 Link ➡️ https://desfontain.es/blog/digital-omnibus-personal-data-definition.html ✨

Learned how to #crochet during the holidays and made my first hat, complete with cat ears 😺

LibreOffice takes *dozens of seconds* to load even small documents on my laptop. Are there faster alternatives? Preferably open-source, and that don't require me to install a billion dependencies? I don't need many features, this is mostly to read docs & spreadsheets.

I don't have a whisk problem. I can stop buying whisks whenever I want

Wrote up a list of my favorite books read in 2025 ✨ https://desfontain.es/blog/favorite-reads-2025.html

This essay from 2 years ago resonates even harder today. Strong recommend: https://catherineshannon.substack.com/p/everyone-is-numbing-out

Yessss what a nice milestone for 2025 🥳 Reached 1900 in blitz earlier this year too. Maybe I'll get to 2000 in one of the formats next year?

Nouvelle recette : soupe de potiron rôti. On continue sur la lancée de prendre des recettes simples et de les rendre merveilleuses avec un peu d'attention portée aux détails (et beaucoup de beurre) ✨ https://desfontain.es/recettes/soupe-de-potiron-roti.html

I'm packing books for presents and dismayed at how ugly all the covers are. Good art, ruined with unimaginative quotes from people I don't care about, or mentions of random literary prizes that won't exist in 5 years. And don't get me started on back covers that spoil half the story!

Me: urgh, why is Typst using _text_ for italic and *text* for bold, this is a pointless and annoying divergence from the Markdown syntax Me after a week of using Typst: wait actually this makes so much more sense than Markdown's syntax, all hail Typst

Some draws feel more satisfying than victories

La CNIL recrute pour leur équipe d'ingénierie et d'expertise technique: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/offre-demploi/ingenieuree-experte-au-service-de-lexpertise-technologique Des gens sympas au service d'une mission positive et importante =)

Nouvelle recette: soupe de carottes caramélisées 🥕 Parfois, le secret, c'est un procédé scientifique optimisé 🧪 Parfois, c'est du beurre 🧈 … parfois, c'est les deux 👀 https://desfontain.es/recettes/soupe-de-carottes-caramelisees.html

Words to live by in Ed Zitron's latest blog post: « I learn a great deal by coming to things from the perspective of being a dumbass, a valuable intellectual framework of "I need to make sure I understand each bit and explain it as simply as possible." »

First time making fried rice in my fancy new carbon steel wok ✨

In case someone here has an idea of how to do this simple-sounding but weirdly complicated thing: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79828554/python-open-an-editor-with-text-in-it-without-saving-the-file

Managed to draw this position, with 5 seconds on the clock, in a 2+1 game \o/

Nicholas Carlini's latest blog post about the risks of LLMs is, as always, worth a read: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025/are-llms-worth-it.html

✨ New blog post ✨ on a hot, trendy, exciting topic: ISO standards 🙃 More precisely: how to implement ISO standards on re-identifiability analysis in a principled way? This is not trivial (these standards are not great), but it can be done […]

Just hit "publish" on a blog post I've been working on for a couple of months, which took a lot more time and effort than expected. Very happy to be done with it… Except of course GitHub Pages decided to have an outage at this exact moment, making new deployments fail 🙃

Just tried Magic-Wormhole for the first time. Game changer. So easy. The second code I got was "8-miracle-freedom", which really sums up my feelings towards it 🩵

I want the optimism of the judge who told OpenAI to "exhaustively de-identify" 20 million ChatGPT chat logs in 5 days, and the confidence of the NYT saying that "no ChatGPT user’s privacy is at risk" if they were receiving that data 🫠 […]

Deux nouvelles recettes publiées ce soir : gâteau moelleux de potiron (largement plébiscité) et mixed spice, pour des gâteaux complexes et délicieux 😋 ➡️ https://desfontain.es/recettes/gateau-moelleux-au-potiron.html & https://desfontain.es/recettes/mixed-spice.html ✨

Got frustrated with how annoying it is to tweak default typography practices in Google Docs, decided to give @typst a try. It is *fantastic*. I am never going back. Hurray for people making delightful software 💚

J'ai publié la ✨ nouvelle version ✨ de mon site de recettes, avec plein d'améliorations, notamment une plus jolie page d'accueil avec plein de filtres, et un flux RSS pour être tenu au courant de ce que je publie 🔔 Le lien ️➡️ https://desfontain.es/recettes/index.html 🥘 Retours bienvenus! 💝

Five unsolicited tips to make all your baking better, from someone who regularly gets asked "how is this so good?!": - Brown the butter - Toast the nuts - Use cake flour - Stop mixing when you can't see flour anymore - If using a U.S. recipe, divide sugar content by 2

I hate that Google Docs lets you select default styles for headings & text, but not for links nor monospace fonts. There are workarounds involving Apps Script, but they seem to rely on running a function for *every single character* in the doc, which huh does not seem particularly efficient

Perpetually alternating between "I'm so happy I wrote this blog post, I can just link to it instead of repeating myself" and "I wish I had written a blog post about this, I keep repeating myself, this is very annoying" There's a lesson in here somewhere, what could it be 🤔

My server broke down, so I moved my personal website & blog to a different hosting solution. Some things might no longer work, please let me know if you notice anything broken so I can fix it!

Ah yes, LinkedIn. Because I have "expert" in my job title, I'm definitely interested in hearing about random job offerings for "expert" roles. Thank you for the helpful suggestion.

Look what came in the mail! 😺 You can get the open access PDF for the low price of $0 here: https://www.nowpublishers.com/Article/BookDetails/9781638284765 Or you can also buy a print copy for $135. You do you.

Announcing (w @adamsmith.xyz @thejonullman.bsky.social) the 2025 edition of the Foundations of Responsible Computing Job Market Profiles! Check out 40 job market candidates in mathematical research in computation and society writ large! Link: drive.google.com/file/d/1zvsr...

This week I threw a 1st century-themed party, and cooked about 10 period-appropriate dishes from various civilizations. Well, authenticity is hard, but I tried my best! Here's a list of the recipes I tried, ranked. #history #food