Thomas Steinke

I'm going to slowly repost my math notes from the other site🐦 here🦋; it's the only thing I posted over there that I think may have some long-term value & worth not deleting. These started out as notes for myself, but people seem to appreciate them. 😅 I'll keep track of all of them in this thread.

Max is about to get TMI.

50 years from now it will be widely accepted that a significant fraction of US politics in the 2020s was driven by hostile foreign actors. People studying history will think everything makes sense through this lens.

I wrote a blog post on "TCS, AI, and the Adults in the Room," addressed to the senior researchers and established academics in our field: minorfree.github.io/Clement/ Thanks to @hunglv.bsky.social for lending me his blog!

My wife's e-bike was stolen. We bought a new e-bike. Two weeks later the new e-bike was also stolen. The thief arrived on a regular bike (likely stolen too) and abandoned it. Then the abandoned regular bike was stolen as well by yet another thief.

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

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.

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.

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. 😅

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

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.

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%.

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...

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Do not make major life decisions without talking to people.

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

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%...

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

You should only cite papers that you have read thoroughly. You should be confident that the papers you are citing are correct; you should also apply due diligence to the references therein. To be safe, you should probably not cite anything, unless maybe it's a self-citation.

I can't believe that in 2026 bibliographies are still more likely to tell you which page of the printed journal the article is on or which city the publisher is based in than to give you a URL. Were page numbers *ever* useful? Did print journals not have a table of contents?

Here's an example of a "hallucinated" citation from a decade ago (i.e. pre-LLMs). The same bad citation appeared in multiple papers. I eventually traced the source to Google Scholar (and it's now fixed).

New blog post by @stein.ke on #DifferentialPrivacy: what happens when you modify the definition of neighbors to make it asymmetric? Why would you do that, and does that buy you anything? differentialprivacy.org/one-sided/