iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Clickbait* has arrived in academic paper titles. (Congrats to @tkeskinturk.bsky.social on the publication!) _____________________________________ * that primarily baits me, a millennial

The title of a paper by Turgut Keskintürk: Generational imprinting: how political events shape cohorts

Search result in said paper for 9/11: A single, meagre result.

100

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 20h

The magic phrase every researcher should know which will make every infrastructure deployment for sensitive research data a guaranteed success.

An email excerpt:

"Just so you are in the know: This is how I will be approaching this on the VPS:

1. Clone the server repo onto the VPS
2. Create the correct .env file to configure the Django server
3. Run docker build
4. Pray that it doesn’t yell at me"

Point four is highlighted.

110

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

Soziologiemagazin @sozmag.bsky.social · 22h

Noch heute sind wir auf dem DGS Kongress in Mainz vertreten. Wenn ihr mit der Redaktion des SozMag ins Gespräch kommen wollt, wir sind in der Verlagsausteller-Halle zu finden

032

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 29/09/2026

I just tried to cancel my electricity agreement (e.on), and since there were no other options, I tried their chatbot. I asked it to answer in English, the LLM responded: "Hello there! My name is Kim, I can only understand Swedish." They took THE ONE THING LLMs are useful at away from us.

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 28/09/2026

Why is EVERY single app now a gray background with a bunch of rounded boxes on top of it? That gap between the toolbar and the window border on the left side is absolutely hideous. I am rarely complaining about design changes, but that is just … ugly.

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 27/09/2026

The Apple Watch is amazing. It knows in advance when I get ill because my vitals shoot through the roof during the night, and then continues to remind me that, if I don’t do a brisk 12-minute walk I will not make my exercise goal for the day.

130

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 23/09/2026

To understand the political attitudes of the German cultural and political elites you need to understand that the fascist party won 44% in one region; the socialists won 25% in another; and the hot topic this week in the news and feuilleton is how dramatic the result of the socialists is.

121

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

Robert Fietzke @robertfietzke.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Falls ihr es vor lauter Red-Scare und um sich selbst drehender Berlin-Debatten vergessen habt: In #Sachsen-Anhalt droht die erste faschistische Regierung seit 1945. Gemeinsam mit dem BSW bereitet die AfD bereits die Entmachtung des Parlaments und die Isolation der Opposition vor.

311947774

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 21/09/2026

Today I got reminded about a very old article of mine from four years ago. Reading it in today's context, it almost sounds prophetic. All the idiocy we have to deal with today has been foretold in the case of Blake Lemoine. www.hendrik-erz.de/post/is-ai-f...

hendrik-erz.de

Is AI finally becoming sentient?

No, it's not. But yesterday, news broke that allegedly some Google chat bot system may have gained sentience. How credible are these claims? While …

020

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Most papers improve dramatically when you remove the sentence explaining why they are groundbreaking

2283

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 19/09/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ No, AI is never going to kill us all, and we really need to get our act together as a society not to fall for some random thoughts of a tech bro from Silicon Valley. hendrik-erz.de/post/no-ai-i...

hendrik-erz.de

No, AI is not going to kill us all

Currently, the "AI is going rogue" narrative has a resurgence after a staff member from Anthropic quit, quoting lacking AI safety efforts. I argue …

042

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/09/2026

If you're worried that AI may kill us all, then (a) no, it won't, and (b) this statement explains it (+ the linked literature): www.youtube.com/watch?v=pauB...

youtube.com

The problem with "AI whistleblowers"

YouTube video by Adam Conover

010

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 17/09/2026

I like how Microsoft's online services are so broken beyond salvation that it's impossible to log in on some days, and there's nothing you can do but remain locked out of your documents

010

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 16/09/2026

Just got approved for the beta of Siri AI, and … I must say: I'm blown away. Apple appears to be using LLMs exactly as they work best: Not by generating slop ex nihilo but by ingesting loads of data and putting the insight to good use.

100

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 15/09/2026

It’s almost as if LLMs are good at reproducing existing patterns, but not at producing new patterns. It is as if LLMs are merely good as tools, not as the main developer. It almost seems like LLMs are not what Sam Altman or Dario Amodei claim they are.

030

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 11/09/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ Agentic AI is the new buzzword, but it also turns your favorite LLM into what I call stochastic malware. Read more on what stochastic malware is, and why I think you should avoid it unless you know what you’re doing. hendrik-erz.de/post/stochas...

hendrik-erz.de

Stochastic Malware: When Your LLM Randomly Decides to Steal Your Data

The new hot topic of the LLM discourse is "Agentic AI," or a category of software that promises to enable an LLM to work on your code projects …

020

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 09/09/2026

Duo?! They called it DUO? Apple, do you have any idea how many people have a trauma from the green owl?!

110

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 09/09/2026

The best investment of the year was really to buy those overpriced hard drives to reinstate my old music library. I have already spent so many hours browsing old labels and new artists on Bandcamp, and, who would've guessed: I spent more money to artists than I would ever give to Spotify.

100

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 07/09/2026

Currently en route to replaying the Mass Effect trilogy for the third time, and I just realized that the reapers are essentially just a 30 million year old paper clip machine.

100

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 29/08/2026

I love how VS Code is so broken on Linux that when you tell it to auto-detect light/dark themes, it just doesn’t do it and you have to manually adjust the theme every morning and evening. (All other apps I have do it properly.)

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 22/08/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ Recently, a new EU regulation went into force that requires AI watermarking. I see many arguments pro and con online, but feel like they don’t quite get LLMs right. Here’s my counter argument: hendrik-erz.de/post/on-ai-t...

hendrik-erz.de

On AI Text Watermarking

Recently, a new regulation of the European Union went into force that requires AI providers to watermark anything their models generate. While this …

020

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 19/08/2026

BREAKING: The AI fear has reached the PolSci departments

030

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/08/2026

Modern problems require stupid solutions. It’s kind of amazing: as a society, we have learned the hard way to secure our computers, and now a bunch of tech evangelists demands we just yolo it. This article essentially describes malware behavior. jadjoubran.io/blog/prevent...

jadjoubran.io

How to prevent Google Antigravity from accessing .env | Jad Joubran

How to deny Google Antigravity's agent access to your .env in the IDE and the CLI, how to verify it worked, and the settings around it that matter.

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 17/08/2026

EUSN 2026 is over! It was an amazing event, and it was so nice to see so many of the people I hold dearly. Until next time!

020

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 13/08/2026

I wonder how long it’ll take until NPM is declared a national security risk 🙄

A screenshot with a bunch of fresh Security vulnerabilities

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 09/08/2026

We’re in the bus and it’s amazing, because nobody knows nothing about what the plan is because nothing looks even remotely like a plan. From an organizational sociology perspective, it’s a fascinating case study of spontaneous organization

020

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 09/08/2026

Riding with SJ (the Swedish rail company) tonight: The train is more than two hours late, and then it’s not even a train, but a bus, while the actual train still goes, but without my carriage and in Malmö we allegedly can board that same train, that — again — still goes?!?!

110

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 09/08/2026

This right here. If you expect me to read a paper for a day, and give good comments, I expect you to do the same in writing. If you let a machine write your entire thing, you can also let a machine read it. It’s a simple matter of respect for the mental work reviewers put into papers.

120

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 07/08/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ It's 2026, so you should switch to Linux. (Especially if you're an academic. Our software already works there.) www.hendrik-erz.de/post/the-yea...

hendrik-erz.de

The Year of the Linux Desktop

Windows 11 turns worse by the minute, and complaints about Microsoft products from Teams through Office 365 to VS Code are mounting. Nowadays, only …

041

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 30/07/2026

What studying U.S. Congress for six years does to your political stance.

A result from one of those cheap five-questions-and-we-tell-you-your-personality style quizzes; declares me to be a "detached party cadre." Can't say I disagree

210

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 29/07/2026

An accurate depiction of the pain of every text analysis scholar.

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 24/07/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ Your weekend read is here: I illuminate the relationship between code and data and explain what LLMs are made of. Also, of course, some tips for social scientists and our R code! hendrik-erz.de/post/llms-an...

hendrik-erz.de

LLMs and the Blurry Distinction Between Code and Data

There is still a lot of confusion about what LLMs actually "are." A very helpful mental model to understand LLMs a bit better is to recognize the …

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 20/07/2026

The fact that the currently most unhinged take on the improvements in Chinese LLMs comes both from the biggest racketeering company and, more specifically, an important Heritage Foundation fellow, tells you everything you need to know that OpenAI is scared sh**less. Which is good.

010

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 19/07/2026

Oh sure, because the politics academia subordinates itself to is wokeness. Famously the most anti-scientific politics of them all. Jesus Christ, why are people so incredibly tasteless?

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 19/07/2026

I agree that peer review has its issues, but this take is just insane. “Experts point to good ones” is not how science works. The solution to AI is not to throw one’s hands up in the air and give up, but by enforcing ethical standards. Defeat is not an option.

001

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 19/07/2026

Dark times are upon us. I just received a bunch of perfectly valid and useful PRs for Zettlr from what I could gather, but the descriptions don't follow the template, and reek of LLM-speak. I really don't want to close them prematurely, but I really also don't want to talk to an LLM.

220

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

But ethical considerations don't stop with impacts on the people being directly studied (even if IRB concerns usually do). Among other things, I worry about this study legitimizing using review-shaped blocks of synthetic text as anything of value in the actual process of peer review. >>

1494

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/07/2026

Also, @emilymbender.bsky.social just made this point much more sternly: bsky.app/profile/emil...

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/07/2026

Lots of thoughts on this piece, but one dimension seems to be amiss right now: a moral and science logical dimension that pertain to the “what” and “why” of doing science in the first place. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...

100

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

This article ends with a good conclusion, but it is extremely misguided along the way. It is also a rich text for exploring how clear language helps make the point better. A thread: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... >>

science.org

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

27222

Reposted by Hendrik Erz, PhD

SocArXiv @socarxiv.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

"AI slop in the scientific record and generally on the internet is making science less trustworthy ...AI enthusiasts are telling the world that the remedies should all be easy to automate...That’s not the reality for scientific publishing right now or likely in the future." @holdenthorp.bsky.social

science.org

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

12317

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/07/2026

I’d counter that the dominance of a Democrat-Republican system is more the exception rather than the norm. Once you take a look at Congress in the 19th century, you suddenly have insanely volatile parties. My guess is that the Reps will split and one group becomes their successor.

110

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/07/2026

If you don’t follow German politics closely, this is how polls look like since a few months. The two new major parties are center right and right-wing. Poland and Hungary may be back on a more democratic track, but Germany is heading the other way.

000

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 17/07/2026

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++ Stop taking "smart notes." Start doing whatever brings you closer to the goal of having a finished paper. I argue that the online productivity discourse is snake oil and a distraction from reflecting on your workflow. www.hendrik-erz.de/post/how-to-...

hendrik-erz.de

How to Smartly Take Notes

Taking "smart" notes is a business. Dozens of influencers on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the likes, try to sell you the next best workflow, …

020