iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 29/09/2026

I think they get filtered out, but that's downstream of arxiv.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 29/09/2026

I believe that updates are included in the feed.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 25/09/2026

This is such a bizarre analogy. I love it. 😅

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 21/09/2026

It seems the free messaging-only inflight WiFi allows Bluesky (and not much else). Not sure if this is good news.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 20/09/2026

In a US restaurant, you’ll get water without asking. In Germany, you have to ask twice before they finally relent and give you a glass of water. I bet the Brawndo gag was inspired by this.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 11/09/2026

What’s the probability that I’ll gain weight over the next year? This question makes sense, but really it distracts from the fact that the outcome is mostly determined by my choices. “p(doom)” similarly distracts from our agency, although it’s a good way to get people’s attention.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 08/09/2026

Of course he’s a real estate agent…

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 07/09/2026

Even if you ignore the serious privacy concerns & identity theft risk, this is just inconvenient. And why do they need this information? Airbnb should handle this & provide hosts with the necessary assurances so that they don't feel they need to collect this information. And Airbnb should forbit it.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 07/09/2026

Right now I'm being told I can't check in until I enter my passport details on smoobu.com 🤨

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 07/09/2026

AirBnB really needs to stop hosts from demanding personal details from guests. This didn't used to happen, but now half the time I'm being told I have to upload my driver license to some random website or my reservation will be cancelled.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 06/09/2026

I took the kids out for a bike ride today & my bike fell apart - literally, a pedal fell off - so we were stranded. We walked to a restaurant for lunch and plotted how to get back home. The solution ended up being getting doordash to deliver a hex key to the restaurant & I managed to fix my bike. 😅

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 28/08/2026

International convention for defining the proper functionality of Enter versus Shift+Enter

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 26/08/2026

Congrats mate! 🇦🇺

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Reposted by Thomas Steinke

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I was reading an author recently talking about how we don't appreciate the way that email isn't siloed. That is, you don't have to be in gmail to talk to someone else in gmail. The norm is so powerful, it'd be unthinkable to change it. All email is interoperable. Social media could've been this way.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 16/08/2026

This is the ship that immediately capsized, right?

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Reposted by Thomas Steinke

Anthropic {bot} @anthropicai.xmirror.bot · 10/08/2026

We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis. It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%.

anthropic.com

Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

An unreleased version of Claude has made strides on a problem related to the Riemann hypothesis. It improved the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis, increasing it from 41.6% to 67.2%.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 05/08/2026

Woah! Even though I'm no longer at Google, this is shocking. (Obviously, ignore the heavy sugar coating in the official announcement.) blog.google/company-news...

blog.google

The next chapter of our AI momentum

Today, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared some changes with Google DeepMind teams.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

What should happen to conferences like NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR? I think the attitude should be that anyone can present their work – subject to some very lightweight review and a strict one-per-registered-attendee limit. That way the focus is on the actual conference, not the associated review process. 6/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

Is something like this a perfect system? No. Is it better than the status quo? Maybe. It puts the emphasis on filtering what deserves reviewer attention, rather than wasting reviewer attention to filter what goes on a website. Authors should make a case that their work should be reviewed. 5/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

So my suggestion is that we should review papers after they have been published – give the community some time to digest the paper before we formally evaluate it. Only allocate human reviewer time to papers that gain some attention first. E.g. only review papers once they start getting cited. 4/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

Many papers are published on arxiv before being accepted at a conference. And rejected papers are just resubmitted elsewhere. What’s the point of the review process in this? We should just stop pretending that peer review is a meaningful pre-publication gate. 3/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

With the internet making publishing ~free, the limited resource is human attention, not publishing pages. It doesn’t make sense to use human reviewer time as a filter. And the filter is not exactly working well. 2/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 04/08/2026

My radical suggestion for peer review: Move from nominal pre-publication review to explicit post-publication review. The original reason for peer review was that journal pages are a limited resource, so we need a filter before publication. That no longer makes sense with digital publishing. 1/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 25/07/2026

Fun fact: You can have two amazon accounts registered to the same email address, as long as they have different passwords. Don't ask how I discovered this or what happens if you change the passwords to be the same.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 22/07/2026

xkcd.com/2385/ openai.com/index/huggin...

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 19/07/2026

To be clear, this happened to a relative who then asked me for tech support. (I pay for cloud storage.) My relatives were very reluctant to upgrade their phones, but were forced to because the 3G networks were shut down. They were afraid of exactly this kind of nonsense.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 19/07/2026

Buy new phone. Copy photos from old phone. Turn on cloud backup. "Your cloud storage is full." Delete photos from cloud. Photos deleted from phone because backup is on. 🫠 That is not what a "backup" is, Google.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 18/07/2026

I couldn't find a nice (and up-to-date) visualization of the history of who is leading on arena.ai/leaderboard so I got Claude to make one: stein.ke/ai-leaderboa... (I'll try to keep this updated.)

stein.ke

Arena Leaderboard — Rating History

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 16/07/2026

OK, that makes slightly more sense, but like this is a very technical plot to include in an article aimed at non-technical audience. And I still don't really see how it supports the article's narrative.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 16/07/2026

I still don't understand what this plot is showing.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 16/07/2026

What does “tokens per second per request” mean?? www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 14/07/2026

Bastille Day 🇫🇷, Independence Day 🇺🇸, Canada Day 🇨🇦 are all in July. Isn’t it a nice coincidence that all these events happened in the middle of summer so we can enjoy national holidays in good weather. 😎 The pattern also holds down under: Australia Day 🇦🇺 is Jan 26, Waitangi Day 🇳🇿 is Feb 6.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 08/07/2026

Do they still have separate GDM and GR booths or did sanity prevail?

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 02/07/2026

Sounds like this joke has been done before. 😅

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 02/07/2026

Oh yeah I remember that. I remember showing up at the conference venue to present my poster in swim gear, still wet from snorkeling. 😅

https://x.com/trustworthy_ml/status/1685168877444173824

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 02/07/2026

I presented this: bsky.app/profile/stei...

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 02/07/2026

I’m attending COLT 2026 in San Diego. You can see the beach from the conference venue; not sure if that’s a good thing. 🤔 learningtheory.org/colt2026/

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 01/07/2026

Today marks 10 years since I defended my PhD. Gosh, time flies. I can’t claim to be early career anymore.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 29/06/2026

Why do you have two phones? Well, you see, sometimes there’s a QR code on a page and I need a second device to scan it.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 22/06/2026

If someone give you used baby stuff, the important thing is not whether it is useful to you, the important thing is that giving it away is a commitment device for them not having another baby.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 19/06/2026

I’m surprised that I don’t see more cooling gear on it. There are definitely some, but I would have imagined more for 50MW. It is just not visible in this photo?

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 15/06/2026

I don’t think this is accurate. The meaning of “distillation” has changed over time.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 12/06/2026

Do not make major life decisions without talking to people.

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Reposted by Thomas Steinke

Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 04/06/2026

Honoured that our 2016 paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, w/ Ilias Diakonikolas, @daneelssoul.bsky.social, @jerryzli.bsky.social, Ankur Moitra, Alistair Stewart, was awarded the Gödel Prize This is the highest award for papers in theoretical CS 1/7

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 04/06/2026

Huge congratulations to Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, and Alistair Stewart on being awarded the Gödel prize for their breakthrough work on algorithmic robustness! www.sigact.org/prizes/g%C3%...

sigact.org

ACM SIGACT - Gödel Prize

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Differential Privacy Papers @dppapers.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Privately Estimating Monotone Statistics in Polynomial Time Gavin Brown, Ephraim Linder, Mahbod Majid, Vikrant Singhal arxiv.org/abs/2605.27912

Privately Estimating Monotone Statistics in Polynomial Time

Gavin Brown, Ephraim Linder, Mahbod Majid, Vikrant Singhal

http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27912

We study efficient differentially private algorithms for estimating monotone statistics, i.e., statistics that are monotone under the addition of new observations. The starting point for our investigation is subsample-and-aggregate: a classical paradigm that partitions the dataset into blocks, estimates the statistic on each block, and then privately aggregates the estimates.While practical and generically applicable, this approach is quite data-hungry. We improve upon this framework for the class of monotone statistics -- compared to subsample-and-aggregate, our algorithms save a factor of $t$ in sample complexity and pay a factor of $e^t$ in running time, where $t>0$ is a tunable parameter. We complement our results with a query-complexity lower bound, showing that our algorithms are essentially optimal for this task. As an application, we obtain improved results for private eigenvalue estimation, private loss estimation, and privately estimating a single parameter of a high-dimensional model, e.g., in linear regression.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 27/05/2026

Fear not – I am not planning to write more poetry.

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Thomas Steinke @stein.ke · 27/05/2026

A handsome red bike, abandoned. By a busy road, outside my home. Locked to a tow away sign. What happened to its owner? Not even a thief has come for it. What will the HOA do? I see it daily and wonder.

A red bike in good condition locked to a signpost bearing a tow away sign, with a busy road in the background.

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