Hendrik Erz, PhD
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hendrik-erz.de
Hendrik Erz, PhD
@hendrik-erz.de
1.3K followers 540 following 880 posts
Political Sociologist, Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)

I study discursive dynamics and lawmaking in U.S. Congress and Europe.

Program Chair @ic2s2.bsky.social

Website: https://hendrik-erz.de

I develop @zettlr.com, a free academic writing app.
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hendrik-erz.de
Today, I’m excited to be a guest at the Technical University of Braunschweig, where I will talk about my dissertation!
A photo of the TU Braunschweig
November 24, 2025 at 11:09 AM
hendrik-erz.de
Signs of an 8-hour workshop
A screenshot showing that I have >100 slides in PowerPoint
November 13, 2025 at 10:09 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Me when interpreting a topic model
conspiracy meme
November 12, 2025 at 7:49 PM
hendrik-erz.de
I'm back in the phase of sitting idly in front of my computer while it works

*sips tea* ☕️
A screenshot of an LDA hyperparameter sweep
November 12, 2025 at 4:13 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Dear potential contributors to ANY software. Please do not just open PRs entirely generated by an AI thingy. Clean them.

I just had a pretty good feature PR opened to my main repository, adding support for RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc).

BUT, it’s impossible to review on a volunteer basis:
A screenshot from a PR, showing 74 changed files with 16,047 additions and 1,503 deletions.
November 10, 2025 at 6:28 PM
hendrik-erz.de
How doing Computational Social Science with R sometimes feels
XKCD's "Dependency" comic with altered text. Atop: "Doing CSS with R and RStudio", on the bottom: "reticulate and python"
November 5, 2025 at 10:44 AM
hendrik-erz.de
Dream: Update CV real quick

Reality: 20min updating, 4 hours fixing random errors on GitHub Actions.
GHA is a PITA.
October 25, 2025 at 2:59 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Shoutout to the people who helped me achieve this amazing milestone: Prof. @eollion.bsky.social and Jacob Habinek!

You’re simply the best! 🤘
A photo of me with my thesis and my two supervisor, Jacob Habinek (main) and Étienne Ollion (co)
October 20, 2025 at 12:57 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Yeah, sure.
A screenshot showing R's memory usage (ca. 2.88GiB) and the actual memory usage of the process (rsession-arm64; 34,07GB)
October 19, 2025 at 3:21 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Less than 24h remaining

*Final Countdown plays*
A photo of my thesis
October 19, 2025 at 8:55 AM
hendrik-erz.de
It appears Denmark has found a simple solution to its drone problem.

(Seen at Copenhagen main station)
An ad announcing a full drone prohibition across entire Denmark until tomorrow.
October 2, 2025 at 4:40 PM
hendrik-erz.de
And the second nailing is done — I’m just 93 theses apart from my Martin Luther memorial badge!
A photo of me in front of the spiknings-door in Norrköping
September 29, 2025 at 12:21 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Cool: the new iPhone I got supports “visual intelligence.” Not so cool: it only allows you to use ChatGPT.

But using shortcuts, one can recreate this with Apple’s own models. Bonus: it detects events pretty easily.

Whenever I want to know something, a single click on the action button suffices.
A screenshot of a shortcut that uses Apple’s LLMs to analyze pictures.
September 28, 2025 at 12:46 PM
hendrik-erz.de
I nailed it! — quite literally!

Må spiknas!
September 25, 2025 at 6:23 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Finally! Proof that, when your printer complains about missing yellow, it’s lying!

(Seen at my university printing office)
A photo of reserve toner stacks. 2x Cyan, 3x Magenta, 4x Yellow, 3x Black (K).
September 25, 2025 at 7:59 AM
hendrik-erz.de
It's finally real — my printed thesis has just arrived! Isn't it beautiful? 😍

(Link to Open Access: doi.org/10.3384/9789...)
A photo of some copies of my thesis
September 24, 2025 at 6:08 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Microsoft has started to use its AI to review code and it’s going approximately as expected.

(Explainer: macOS is on version 26, but the Darwin kernel, which it uses, is on version 25.)
A screenshot of AI slop
September 22, 2025 at 4:12 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Also, of course, THAT setting is not retained in the "recently used" ones.

Wow, Microsoft, just wow.
A screenshot from VS Code
September 18, 2025 at 6:43 PM
hendrik-erz.de
I wanted to disable, not use, Copilot in VS Code, and Microsoft pulled a classic Microsoft.
A screenshot from VS Code
September 18, 2025 at 6:35 PM
hendrik-erz.de
LaTeX at the limit: Introducing load-bearing spaces.
A screenshot of a LaTeX document with a comment and a non-breaking space (highlighted) below. The comment reads: "Load-bearing non-breaking space: The last paragraph in the abstract is always using a double-spacing, and I couldn't fix it easily. So instead I just add this non-breaking space here to tell LaTeX that the above paragraph isn't actually the last one, but this ensures the linespacing is consistent."
September 8, 2025 at 11:29 AM
hendrik-erz.de
Final proof reading! #PhD
A test print of my entire thesis
September 1, 2025 at 11:33 AM
hendrik-erz.de
At this point, the Windows experience is just gross. I use this computer exclusively for Steam, and yet it has apparently managed to fry itself.

There is literally nothing installed but Steam, and yet, through the magic of Windows update, it screwed itself.
A photo of windows update (no screenshot because I don’t have that computer connected to anything), prompting me to reinstall windows.
August 27, 2025 at 8:18 PM
hendrik-erz.de
What's your take on this? Is it okay to let chapter numbering start with zero in a PhD thesis book publication?

(From my series: Questions I thought I would never ask myself, yet here I am.) #PhD
A search for the question "can i let a book start chapter numbering with zero, or is this bad style?"
August 25, 2025 at 6:21 PM
hendrik-erz.de
Always happy to return here. @stabihh.bsky.social
Entrance of the Hamburg university library
August 19, 2025 at 11:02 AM
hendrik-erz.de
very hot take over at r/PoliticalScience.

Wow.
A screenshot from a post asking "Are all governments by definition democracies?"
August 17, 2025 at 7:24 PM