Also: The INAS 2026 program is finally out 🎉

I can’t remember asking you whether I want any of your slop, Microsoft. Shut up. The only reason I use Outlook is because your proprietary stuff doesn’t work with normal email clients.

I am now part of the highest status level in one, and the second/highest in another EU country’s rail system. What a life.

Quick Monday puzzle for y’all: I’m on a train and 2 train minutes away from my stop. I have a bit over 1hr to catch my connecting train. However, I am not sure if I can actually make it. Which country am I in?

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ I have a NAS now, and an unexpected finding is that I finally enjoy listening to music again. No more Spotify! www.hendrik-erz.de/post/truenas...

The front fell off.

Come join a cool team of awesome people!

Dear Deutsche Bahn — are you ill? Do you need help? Why are you ten minutes EARLY?

It never ceases to amaze me how absolutely garbage Python's XML parsing is.

Currently attempting to try out "agentic coding" for coding. And OpenCode is such an odd project. It's a terminal app that also has some "debug info". Now, what should it contain? Well, for example settings. What does it ACTUALLY show? Frames per second. In a terminal.

God is dead.

We’re currently running a study, testing whether a bunch of sociologists can fix the inherent UX problems of our office door. Currently trialing version 3.0, results pending

Websites that initiate force-downloads and completely prevent my browser asking me WHERE I would like to save files are the bane of my existence. I hate little more than having to manually drag and drop files out of my downloads folder into the correct target. Just let me use the damn file picker

The first R&R is almost done and, wow, all the changes to that paper have turned my project folder into a mess. I sincerely hope that the reviewers are happy with my changes so that I can finally clean that up 🧹

Every time I walk past this graffiti I wonder: did it ever go away …?

Also, Bandcamp is king for finding super cute gems like this one

I'm currently in the process of re-discovering Bandcamp and OH MY GOD what did I all miss in the past ten years of using Spotify and Apple Music? Wow, actually owning your own music is an incredible feeling.

AI is going great, exhibit #54123

Academia is the institutionalization of the dictum that one has a motivational problem until one has a time problem. *** Or, really: I personally just have no proper time management.

FINALLY I am the average for something and it fits!

I love the smell of GDPR in the morning. Especially if it's a GDPR request towards a U.S. company that really doesn't want to comply. And even more so if it's already subject to a class-action lawsuit in their own country. Imagine doing so badly the U.S. (!) sues you for privacy violations.

Daily reminder that the only real security against "hacking" is attentiveness. Always remember that what we understand as "hacking" is by now almost impossible. It's usually people who compromise themselves.

Tonight! It’s going to be a super interesting panel, I’d love to see maybe some of you there!

Working with LLMs be like

Today is the first day in almost a decade that I have the sole responsibility to teach some students new knowledge. It’s exciting, but I’m also a bit nervous, to be clear 🙏🏼👀

Since that's apparently a trend, Zettlr now also has backup repositories on its own Forgejo instance: code.zettlr.com

Being a customer of the Telekom is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are (in my area) the most competitive ISP. On the other hand, they are too stupid to implement proper authentication procedures.

AI is going great, exhibit #123. www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/systemi...

Panic at the car wash: My car is claustrophobic

Wir sind immer auf der Suche nach neuen Mitgliedern für die Redaktion. Wie ihr mitmachen könnt, erfahrt ihr hier soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/mitmachen-2

Einfach nur "wow"!

My locally running GPT models can now access the web. Who needs ChatGPT when you can do all of that without shilling for Sam Altman?

Funny how a tool chain to run LLMs locally, which includes a web server, a web interface, tons of options, etc., is just 1MB larger than a command line utility for the Azure API.

If there is one benefit from the recent trend to create “skills” files for LLMs, it’s that we now finally get the proper documentation for our tools that we always wanted.

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ A soft-sequel to my article on trust and software. This time I talk about the cognitive load of security advisories. hendrik-erz.de/post/securit...

Microsoft, after announcing they would not push their AI slop so much anymore, has decided to permanently show a Copilot button in the GitHub iOS app with no ability to hide that anymore. Just in case anyone wonders how serious they are. P.S.: many egregious bugs are still not fixed there.

Hot tip: we should take out our dusty authoritarian books and quickly work on a modern typology of autocracies. Because what Trump does has little precedent in its means.

Can someone illuminate why the @nextcloud.bsky.social Desktop app is now over 1 GB in size? I'm asking because, for example, Zettlr, is… * 500MB in size * Has a lot more functionality built in * Is an *electron* app, of all kinds!

I just realized that I can also ask models for images locally. I don't know why this thought never occurred to me. Quite impressive.

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ Heuristics and assumptions are quite boring and common. But when one of them shoots you in the foot because it turned out to be wrong, it becomes spicy. Learn from my mistakes and read my newest piece: www.hendrik-erz.de/post/heurist...

Handling time zones, or: When sociological theory meets engineering.

We really need a companion phrase to "Web 3 is going great", but for AI slop.

Oh my, the first conference I'm not affiliated with has adopted my conference scheduling software: www.benelux-geo.eu/program/conf... (Thanks to @lecoursonnais.bsky.social for letting me know)

Fun findings with Python: If you want a cosine distance of two vectors, and those vectors are of an int-type, SciPy doesn't do any normalization, which means that you'll get not just overflow warnings (because floats can't be stored in ints), and wrong cosines. Learned this the hard way today.

Oh wow, the "dark enlightenment" crowd makes its incursions into actual science.

Surprised nobody dropped this yet.

Heuristics.

“Micron is a company that makes most of its money selling DRAM and NAND chips. Of course they want to sell you way too much.” Fixed that for you. It’s crazy how many people buy so uncritically into this AI fever dream. It’s maddening. www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

Oh, great.

I love how people on Reddit are freaking out over the recent uv package manager acquisition. I didn’t even have the time to migrate from venv and conda. Sometimes it pays off being late to a party, especially if it’s one where Sam Altman crashes it prematurely.