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Ecce Homology on Bastian Grossenbacher Rieck's personal homepage

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Recent content in Ecce Homology on Bastian Grossenbacher Rieck's personal homepage

AI / MLMathEssays / personal

’10’15’20’25
Posts
278 from 14 Mar 2006 to 20 Oct 2026
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monthly (15 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/index.xml

2026 12

  1. Quo Vadis, Academia?
  2. A Barbarian's Guide to Full-Disk Encryption with Arch Linux
  3. LLMs Are Proof That Unix Won
  4. A Pledge for Scientists
  5. 40 Bits of Advice That, in Murky Light, Might Pass as Wisdom
  6. The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Training
  7. Some Comments on "Magnifica Humanitas"
  8. Scholarship in the Age of AI
  9. Epistemic Humility in the Age of AI
  10. The AI Marketing BS Index
  11. The Better Lesson? Geometry and Topology in the Era of Deep Learning
  12. 2025 in Numbers

2025 12

  1. AI: From Homer to ChatGPT
  2. Higher Education and AI: Some Musings
  3. Skills for the Future
  4. Consciousness Is Overrated Anyway (for AI)
  5. The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas
  6. There is Fun in the Fundamentals
  7. Clopen Data
  8. If At First You Don't Succeed... --- Counting Paper Rejections
  9. The Time of Monsters
  10. Overcoming Academic Impostor Syndrome
  11. How to Write Useful Academic Letters of Motivation
  12. 2024 in Numbers

2024 16

  1. De Honoris Numquam Satis: Reflections on Snobbery in Academia
  2. An Academic's Guide to Fribourg
  3. Mostly Stakeless
  4. Maintenance is Underestimated
  5. Come As You Are
  6. Underestimating Users
  7. I Don't Understand AI Alignment
  8. Thoughts about my Research Philosophy
  9. What I Use
  10. The Monoculture of Machine Learning
  11. It's Still Theft
  12. Doing ML Research: Gates Open, Come on In!
  13. There Are Probably No Silver Bullets
  14. Tools for Decreasing Your Productivity
  15. Misinformation Does Not Need Large Language Models
  16. 2023 in Numbers

2023 22

  1. Quality First and Other Advice
  2. Riding the Storm Out
  3. Remembering Frank H. Lutz
  4. Contra Posturing
  5. Chesterton's Invisible Fences
  6. The Great Desolation: Thoughts on Mastodon and BlueSky
  7. The Missing Screwtape Letters from Academia
  8. Most AI Interactions are Like Junk Food
  9. Why Write?
  10. How to Write a Scientific Paper
  11. Remembering My Grandfather
  12. Inhale and Exhale Days
  13. Human in the Gaps: Thriving in the New AI Age
  14. Reducing Ambiguity
  15. The Great Deprival
  16. Rewiewing is a Contract
  17. Open Peer Review Considered Harmful?
  18. Musings on Mobility: The Ping from Hell
  19. Stuck in the Past? Scaling up Academia
  20. Web of Science: A Web of Nonsense
  21. No Comments
  22. Apparent Complexity Can Be Deceptive

2022 14

  1. The Machine Learning Scientist as Toolsmith: Remembering Fred Brooks
  2. Reluctant Philosopher Kings? Leadership in Academia
  3. We Are All Nerds: The Literary Works of Neal Stephenson
  4. Put it on the Crazy Pile: Ideas and Creativity
  5. A Sustainable Pace Gets You to the Finish Line
  6. Fixing Duplicate and Stuck Messages in Akonadi
  7. Questions to Sharpen a Research Proposal
  8. Open Source and Academia
  9. Improving My Lab Book Using Snippets for `vim`
  10. Watching the Watchmen: Pitfalls in Graph Generative Model Evaluation
  11. Who's Attacking My Server?
  12. In Defence of the Boring Web
  13. My Experience with Lenovo Premier Support
  14. T-Shaped People and Academia

2021 17

  1. Things You Are Allowed To Do, Academic Edition
  2. Rejections, Resilience, and Rejoicing: Getting a Tenure-Track Position
  3. Absurdest Academia (A “Darkest Dungeon” Parody)
  4. A Brief Analysis of My Review Scores
  5. A Short Round-Up of Topology-Based Papers at ICLR 2021
  6. Extracting Data from the Swiss Vaccination Certificate
  7. “What is a Manifold?,” Redux: Some Non-Examples
  8. I Have No Group, and I Must Scream
  9. Simple Cluster Monitoring with Munin
  10. Societal Donatism
  11. Carthusian Citation Credits
  12. A Simple and Cheap Recording Setup for Online Lecturing
  13. Publication Lists with BibLaTeX
  14. Taming the E-Mail Avalanche
  15. A Blast from the Past
  16. Metric Spaces and How To Compare Them
  17. Developing and Maintaining Gratitude

2020 15

  1. Using Topology to Classify Labelled Graphs
  2. How to Improve Your Mathematical Writing
  3. On Being a Postdoctoral Researcher
  4. Minimum Elucidating Examples
  5. A round-up of topology-based papers at ICML 2020
  6. Why Your Academic Code Needs a Software Licence
  7. The Meddling Middlemen of Academia
  8. Writing a Curriculum Vitæ
  9. The Power of Admitting Ignorance
  10. Keeping a Bibliography
  11. Delayed Gratification and Gratitude
  12. Getting Started With a Ph.D.
  13. A Method(ology) to the Madness
  14. Machine Learning Needs a Langlands Programme
  15. The Power of Defaults

2019 17

  1. The Misunderstood Stoic
  2. Ideas and Creativity
  3. A short analysis of ICLR 2020 reviews
  4. On Writing Reviews
  5. A *Vademecum* For Those That Are New to Machine Learning
  6. Why every academic should have a personal website
  7. What Is (Gaussian) Curvature?
  8. I Dislike the New Web
  9. A round-up of topological data analysis papers at ICML 2019
  10. A Visual Introduction to Morse Theory
  11. What Is A Manifold?
  12. Maintaining Your Mental Health in Academia
  13. On Writing
  14. Analysing Nefarious ssh Access Attempts
  15. Towards Topological Machine Learning
  16. Managing Your Dotfiles With Stow
  17. A Mathematician's Utility

2018 11

  1. Software Engineering for Academia
  2. Keeping a Lab Book
  3. Some nice and accurate CMake tips
  4. Using CMake, C++, and pybind11 on hard mode
  5. A header analysis of C++ projects
  6. Thoughts on Travis CI
  7. A netctl profile for ETH Zurich
  8. Rendering 3D polyhedra and meshes using Inkscape
  9. LaTeX Templates for Theses and Reports
  10. Pushing to all git remotes with one command
  11. A New Position

2017 14

  1. The KISS principle in machine learning
  2. Simple unit tests with C++ and CMake
  3. A technique for selection sampling (sampling without replacement)
  4. Visualizing the sentiments in U.S. Presidential Inauguration Speeches
  5. Using tf–idf to analyse U.S. Presidential Inauguration Speeches
  6. More experiments with `libclang`
  7. A brief analysis of U.S. Presidential Inauguration Speeches
  8. Adding copyright notices to papers
  9. Using Aleph to calculate the homology of 2-manifolds
  10. Homology statistics for 2-manifolds
  11. Shakespeare, topology, and machine learning
  12. Scatterplot matrices with gnuplot
  13. Counting words in TeX documents under version control
  14. Converting VTK structured grids to matrices

2016 10

  1. The Topology of Shakespearean Social Networks
  2. A primer in how to use `gdb`
  3. Towards Shakespearean Social Network Analysis
  4. Some adjustments for LaTeX glossaries
  5. Fun with unsequenced operations
  6. Implementing filter and map with C++11
  7. A git hook to keep your emotions in check
  8. Surprises with name hiding in C++
  9. Improved superscript citations for BibLaTeX
  10. Baby steps with `libclang`: Counting function extents

2015 26

  1. Ten noteworthy books I read in 2015
  2. Baby steps with `libclang`: Walking an abstract syntax tree
  3. YouCompleteMe and CMake
  4. Some leaky abstractions in C++11
  5. Why I love compilers
  6. Searching for swear words in the Enron corpus
  7. Eigenfaces reconstructions
  8. Tomfoolery with Typography: Emphasizing things
  9. Tomfoolery with Typography: Dots and dashes
  10. Tomfoolery with Typography: Introduction
  11. Synchronous multiplexing for sockets (starring C++11)
  12. Automated mugshots with Python and OpenCV
  13. keybase.io
  14. Network sockets—an ordeal (starring C++11)
  15. Persistent undo functionality in vim
  16. Some Thoughts on Giving a Good Talk About Your Research
  17. Simple fractals with Qt 5 shaders
  18. Implementing a simple event system in C++11
  19. Of type lists and type switches
  20. Explaining the need for privacy
  21. All hail Octocat!
  22. Displaying Kindle clippings for the web
  23. Return value optimization in C++
  24. Postincrement vs. preincrement in C++
  25. Little brother, a script for analysing who accesses your website
  26. Creating heat maps of git commits

2014 19

  1. Simple experiments with speech detection
  2. Volume rendering for DICOM images
  3. Making Qt and OpenSceneGraph play nice: An addendum
  4. Lissacurses - Lissajous curves on the console
  5. Markov chains for Christmas
  6. Simple object picking with OpenSceneGraph
  7. Rectangular selections with Qt and OpenSceneGraph
  8. A brief critique of the singleton pattern
  9. constexpr and floating point rounding behaviour
  10. Preventing hotlinking from certain domains
  11. Frak, an interpreter for the brainf*ck language
  12. Why the Heartbleed Bug does not invalidate the spirit of open source
  13. Making Qt and OpenSceneGraph play nice
  14. Building a FreeBSD NAS, part III: ZFS
  15. A better SSL configuration for Apache 2
  16. EtherCurve, a tool for visualizing network packets
  17. Extracting audio from DVD images
  18. Crypto smells
  19. Making `logrotate` and Webalizer play nice

2013 18

  1. Visualizing a security disaster, part I
  2. Fixing fullscreen flash video playback in GNOME 3
  3. Prove, don't claim
  4. commitease, a tool for grading the readability of git commits
  5. Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2013: `Codebreaker`
  6. The wrong tool
  7. Why E-Mail made in Germany is a farce
  8. Publishing README files automatically with `gitweb`
  9. QApplication and the locale
  10. Again, some updates
  11. Simple backups with `Obnam`
  12. Building a FreeBSD NAS, part II: Base system setup
  13. Talking about visualization
  14. Building a FreeBSD NAS, part I: The hardware
  15. When Arch Linux takes too long to shut down...
  16. Installing an HP Officejet Pro 8600 printer under Linux
  17. Making urxvt beautiful
  18. Tools for Writing a Diploma Thesis

2012 11

  1. Securely installing ownCloud
  2. Setting up an XMPP server with Prosody
  3. Converting a PDF to the CMYK colour model
  4. Serving git repositories the smart way
  5. Cleaning quoted text from forwarded e-mails
  6. Better colour palettes for gnuplot
  7. Writing a Diploma Thesis
  8. Moving from NanoBlogger to ikiwiki
  9. My Diploma Thesis Is Now Open Access
  10. Solving an installation error for the awesome window manager
  11. Setting CMake variables in the parent scope

2011 7

  1. Interesting LaTeX packages
  2. IPv6 with FreeBSD and m0n0wall
  3. Converting LaTeX to HTML
  4. Fare thee well, NanoBlogger!
  5. Statistics for Doom - The Boardgame
  6. New HOWTO and some resolutions
  7. Using gnokii to manage a Nokia 6300 mobile phone

2010 3

  1. Using Adobe Minion Pro with LaTeX
  2. Wine + CUPS
  3. Analyzing Some Bin-Packing Heuristics

2009 12

  1. How to install FreeBSD on a Thinkpad R50e
  2. Hyppolyta - The Amazon Queen
  3. Using FreeBSD's BPF device with C/C++
  4. Using K3b with FreeBSD
  5. Using the Microsoft Windows 7 (or Vista) boot manager to boot FreeBSD
  6. Zooming, panning, rotating with GLUT
  7. SSH tunneling for web surfing
  8. Jabber is the new ICQ
  9. Web 2.0 mortuus est, vivat Web 3.14159...
  10. New OpenGL programs
  11. Some notes about Xorg 7.4, libxine and CUPS
  12. Running SAP GUI for Java under FreeBSD

2008 5

  1. comphom: A program to compute homology groups
  2. GnuCash and the Euro currency symbol
  3. UTF-8 and FreeBSD
  4. Opera and libnpp.so
  5. sSMTP and gmail

2007 7

  1. Hyppolyta (or: How to scan your book collection)
  2. In Memoriam Robert Jordan (1948-2007)
  3. Netgear WG311T under FreeBSD
  4. Promoting Privacy
  5. Integrating Dokuwiki and phpBB2
  6. Claws-mail and GPG
  7. DVD problems

2006 10

  1. A done deal
  2. Data Recovery with FreeBSD (part 2)
  3. Data Recovery with FreeBSD (part 1)
  4. WPA with FreeBSD 6.0
  5. Going from FreBSD 5.4 to FreeBSD 6.1
  6. Using LaTeX code with Instant Messengers
  7. True friends: dd and netcat
  8. Semiprofessional data rescue with Windows and FreeBSD
  9. Using vpnc with the University of Heidelberg
  10. Creating a Subversion repository