iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 04/10/2026

Uh, a new, not cringe trend. I can do that!

9 favorite albums:

Loviet — One
I built the sky — The sky is not the limit
Protest the Hero — Volition
Snarky Puppy — We Like it here
Between the Buried and me — Colors
Porcupine Tree — In ansentia
Touché amore — Stage Four
Plini — Handmade Cities
Pink Floyd — Pulse

Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 30/09/2026

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.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 30/09/2026

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.

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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.

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

And, what can I say? It found the correct events, adjusted the titles, added the Zoom links, and I got eleven prompts asking me to confirm the action (good!) which gave me a quick change preview. And now I have eleven correct events in my calendar, so I don't miss those lectures.

A screenshot of Siri AI fixing my calendar events

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

BREAKING: The AI fear has reached the PolSci departments

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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!

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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

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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

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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.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 06/07/2026

Most companies will send you an email a few weeks in advance when they update their terms. Apple, on the other hand, does not send emails. They send HTTP error codes. (P.S.: the terms update that triggered this error goes into effect TOMORROW.)

A screenshot of a failed request to Apple servers

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 01/07/2026

Not gonna lie: the left hand driving in the UK messes with some hard wired connections in my brain more than I’m willing to admit.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 30/06/2026

London calling! Time to dedust my old British classics.

A screenshot of Maybeshewill – Sing the Word Hope in Four-Part Harmony

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 23/06/2026

It’s Reddit, so not at all authoritative, but allegedly the first engine operators are able to register in the radio network again. We’re grasping for straws here

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 15/06/2026

One of the oddest pieces of Swedish culture that I will never understand is why even self-service coffee machines have a summer break here.

A self-service coffee machine at my university library.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 04/06/2026

For no particular reason at all, I decided to figure out how long I'd have to apply for grants until it would be quite probable to receive at least one (assuming independent review and solid applications, that is). The result is not confidence inspiring.

With a bit of napkin math, I figured out in the current grant climate, I'd have to submit at least 25 applications until the probability of me receiving at least one of those would be bigger than 90%. Which means that there's still a 10% chance of that *not* happening, even after 25 attempts.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 02/06/2026

Satisfying interactions at work.

I could proudly tell IT to nuke an entire database into orbit

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 01/06/2026

Good morning! The week is starting well.

Poor documentation is the #1 cause for high blood pressure.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 31/05/2026

Yes, in Sweden, it is customary to receive a crown of bay leafs as a graduated doctor. Anybody can be a king while shopping, but when do you get to be a Caesar?!

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 31/05/2026

Yesterday, my doctoral journey was finally completed with receiving my official diploma and crown from Linköping University in the traditional ceremony.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 23/05/2026

The Barbecue my friend has started looks like a critique of society.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 18/05/2026

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.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 08/05/2026

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

Arrival board inside the train: scheduled 18:41, actually 18:28.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 06/05/2026

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.

A terminal app showing frames per second.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 05/05/2026

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

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 04/05/2026

Also great are websites that are just broken

cant download from Taylor and Francis I guess

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 02/05/2026

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

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 01/05/2026

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

A compilation of techno from the city I'm based in, Norrköping

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 21/04/2026

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 🙏🏼👀

Selfie in front of the university building

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 11/04/2026

Panic at the car wash: My car is claustrophobic

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 07/04/2026

Heh, accidentally, I made the amount of hallucinations in the GPT model measurable, and developed a way of checking for hallucinated domains.

A screenshot showing an error when a model tried to access a non-existing website

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 07/04/2026

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?

A screenshot of the Llama.cpp WebUI, demonstrating that the recent gemma-4 models are capable of tool-calling.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 07/04/2026

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.

Screenshot of azure-cli (36MB) vs. llama.cpp (37MB)

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 03/04/2026

I love how the first view after pressing that button tells you to buy something, because otherwise it’ll be useless to you. What a joke.

A screenshot of the copilot tab of the app

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 02/04/2026

Suggest to them using gas to power the barbecues this year! Maybe that'll suddenly also spur some political activism from your university towards stopping the … various … wars we have going on right now once …?

A chart with CO2 emissions from burning various substances

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 29/03/2026

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.

Gemma 3 correctly interpreting and describing the classical feed forward network equation.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 26/03/2026

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

A screenshot of a simple function with a ton of assumptions, which led to me writing a comment about 15x as long as the actual function.

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 25/03/2026

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

GitHub now wants to use all your data unless you opt out.

Silly me, I never had a single interaction with the Codex model!

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Hendrik Erz, PhD @hendrik-erz.de · 24/03/2026

Surprised nobody dropped this yet.

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