Hendrik Erz, PhD

Next: building cheap memory with FPGAs

People on r/DataHoarder are apparently starting to switch to tape storage for their personal racks, and I love everything about this:

The AI-induced crisis is causing the computing equivalent to the vinyl comeback that happened for music listeners.

This highlights two problems:

1. Changelogs do not communicate when a user needs to pay attention because some things might break
2. A lot of software updates silently, which may introduce bugs and undesired behavior which we do not see until it is too late.

The problem here is not that software has bugs. All software has bugs. It is that previously working features suddenly experience severe bugs that really should have been captured in testing. Or, if there were unavoidable changes to configs, they should have been communicated.

We really can’t trust software anymore.

After the horrendous development of Windows 11 and the bug-ridden launch of macOS Tahoe, I am experiencing more and more extremely dangerous bugs.

Just in the past 48h:

* All my Zotero cite keys were gone
* Nextcloud stopped syncing my files in February

(image [and the repost] courtesy of @onatcer.com ;)

You know, kind of like saying to an alcoholic "I don't think this is wise, but now that you already downed your first beer, let's make sure the next three don't kill you."

A tweet by Friedrich Merz

This tweet by German chancellor Merz does a lot in its subtext. I'm not sure if it's possible to convey this into English, but effectively, this seems to imply that, now that U.S. jets are dropping bombs on Tehran, it's important to stick to the plan.

Ahh :D Einen Moment – danke für den englischen Tweet

Wobei, to be fair, die Staaten, die sich momentan am meisten daneben benehmen sind sehr ähnlich zu der Gruppe an Staaten, die maßgebliche internationale Abkommen nie mit unterzeichnet haben.

So … maybe it's still alive?

Welches Recht und welche Völker…?

Ich glaube, das Völkerrecht ist allerALLERallerspätestens mit Trump's Verschwindenlassen von Maduro endgültig über den Jordan gegangen. Also das, was davon noch übrig war.

puhh…

A screenshot from Reddit

The world is going down in flames, but what keeps my mind afloat and working is seeing programmers discuss international politics.

Why Attack Iran? Our Authoritarianism and Our Corruption

How to understand war with Iran? We must get away from propaganda. Facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
snyder.substack.com/p/why-attack...

Aktueller Call4Papers Computational Social Science. Sozialwissenschaften im Zeitalter von „Big Data“ Aktueller Call4Papers für das Heft 1/2026 Direkt den Call4Papers als PDF-Datei herunterladen (PDF, 90 KB) Bis zum 31. Mär...

An dieser Stelle noch mal eine Erinnerung an alle Studierende und Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen, die ihre Texte publiziert sehen wollen. Unser aktueller Call for Papers läuft noch bis zum 31.März. Alle Informationen dazu auf unserer Seite
soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/calls/aktuel...

A photo of my recording setup

I only started my PhD during the pandemic so I didn’t have the chance to build a top-notch remote lecturing setup. But with my old audio setup, a crappy webcam, OBS, and Davinci Resolve, recording my first lecture turned out pretty decent!

Release Release v4.2.0 · Zettlr/Zettlr Preview Mode Updates | Bug Fixes | Quality of Life Improvements This update brings three distinct sets of improvements. First, it contains a series of new features for the preview mode, which make ...

+++ NEW RELEASE +++

Zettlr 4.2.0 is now live! Most acutely, possibly for some of you, it includes a bug fix that improves the interplay with the recent @zotero.org 8.0 update that overhauled their citation key mgmt.

The update will roll out over the coming hours.

github.com/Zettlr/Zettl...

How Political Chaos Is Affecting Americans’ Mental Health - Dame Magazine As political instability rises, so do anxiety, depression, and disengagement. New research shows how national turmoil is reshaping Americans’ mental health.

@casmudde.bsky.social shared this piece a few days ago, and I finally got around to reading it. It does, on some level, validate my views on politics — not just in the U.S., where all of this currently cumulates, but for anyone observing U.S. politics.

www.damemagazine.com/2026/02/18/p...

WebGL Series, Part 7: Adding a Bloom-Filter In the second-to-last installment of my series on WebGL, I explain how a Bloom filter works and how I added it into the processing-pipeline of the …

+++ NEW ARTICLE +++

It's Friday, and this means it's time for a new article! Read the second-to-last part of the big WebGL series. Next week is going to mark the completion!

Afterwards, it'll go back to sciency stuff, I promise :)

www.hendrik-erz.de/post/webgl-s...

just a meme

Too dark…?

I should change my self-described discipline on my website to “Political Gerontology.”

A screenshot showing the two datasets side by side. You can clearly see the end of Gorman's tenure in the left dataset with the last line in which his ID number appears, which coincides with his last year as a minority leader in the Senate. Interestingly, he already left office prematurely before that, but incidentally *not* because he died. This is an outlier.

I mean, look at that. Gorman cheated death once!

But you know what they say — "Fool me once…"

Which is to say: Unless you're seeing an obituary in the New York Times, Schumer is still minority leader. Don't get your hopes up.

Party leadership in U.S. Congress is literally a position for people to die in.

When there is a change in leadership between Congressional sessions, it's a 90% change it's due to "Died in office."

Currently curating a dataset of U.S. party leadership. I have one with identifiers of MCs, and another with leadership positions. Many share similar surnames.

You know how I identify whether I got the right person? When their last line in the data equals the last year of their leadership position.

Hah, I suspected as much. Thank you! It's a shame that plugin updates in Zotero are so invisible. I personally like seeing when something gets updated.

But also I do NOT believe this to be a symptom of “code rot”. It's just super fascinating to see how long this assumption literally “just worked,” and that something now had a small hiccup, and that it has caught so many by surprise.

Personally, I found this very intriguing, because for the past decade, Zettlr could ALWAYS assume that whatever was in the CSL files produced by Zotero and/or BBT were correct, properly formed CSL JSON items.

It is quite intriguing to see that an assumption about data could hold for so long.

I'm mentioning this because quite a lot of people seem to have this issue. Zettlr now has a quick patch for this, which is in the nightlies, if you want autocorrect working again and for some reason can't get Zotero to export proper CSL JSON again.

I have had success with just trashing the entire export and re-doing it.

I have seen in Zotero's changelog that they seem to have changed how they generate citekeys, and thus I believe there's just an unlucky coincidence that causes some hiccups while Zotero and/or BBT regenerates the keys.