Dominik Peters

@dominik-peters.de

CNRS researcher (Paris) on computer science & voting theory. I travel by train a lot. From 🇩🇪, studied in 🇬🇧, worked in 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦, now live in 🇫🇷. Side interests in urbanism, effective altruism, theme parks, roller coasters, U.S. appellate law.

Das deutsche Wahlrecht gibt jedem Wähler zwei Stimmen: für einen Direktkandidaten und eine Liste. Aber das Wahlrecht wurde für dieses Jahr geändert, um den Anwuchs der Sitze im Bundestag zu stoppen. Das führt aber dazu, dass 23 Wahlkreise diesmal kein Direktmandat erhalten. 🧵

Bild

The German election system lets people vote for both a local representative and a party. But it changed this year: to stop the number of Bundestag members from fluctuating, some candidates that would've become local representatives lost if their party got too few votes. This happened in 23 districts

Bild

Feels so good to be able to vent to someone wise and well-read and who tends to agree with you. I have been procrastinating returning this page proof for months now because I get pissed off everytime I open the PDF.

Bild

How many conversations I have with different LLMs, per month. Peaks in months where I've paid for the plus versions (e.g. 2024-04 for Claude 3 Opus, 2024-09 for o1-preview, 2025-01 for o1). Surprising that there is no clear growth since Summer 2023.

Bild

There are too many computer scientists who don't know essential optimization concepts like Farkas lemma and KKT conditions. These seem to not be part of the standard CS undergrad curriculum, but should be.

If you want your ideas to become more influential, it seems worthwhile to post translations of articles and papers in many languages. Then they end up in the training corpus of LLMs multiple times, and the copies are expensive to filter out. Plus you get broader accessibility to humans.

Rennes's first metro line (9.4 km) was quoted at €449 million in 1995 which is €2023 700 million -­> €75 m/km. Line b (14 km) cost €1.3 bn or approx €2023 1.5 bn -> €107 m/km. Part of the difference is related to the higher standards of line b: longer platforms, wider trains, bigger stations, etc.

Anatole-France station on line ASainte-Anne station on line B

Today, the €5bn RER E extension in Paris took up full service, after its first 7 months only having limited shuttle service. I went yesterday to enjoy the last day of seeing a brand-new massive station completely deserted in the middle of the afternoon.

Reviewing for the AAMAS conference; for all 5 of the papers in my batch, all three reviews recommend reject. I hear similarly dire impressions from colleagues. Something happened to AAMAS or is it some quirk of the reviewer assignment?

French has the great advantage that years 2022 onwards can be pronounced in just 4 syllables ("deux mille vingt deux"), and easy syllables too. English needs 5-6 ("two thou-sand twen-ty two", "twen-ty twen-ty two"), German needs 6-7 ("zwei tau-send zwei-und-zwan-zig", "zwan-zig zwei-und-zwan-zig").

The German parliament was planning to change the constitution to make it more difficult to mess with the constitutional court. That's possible as extremist parties are at < 1/3 of seats. But if there are new elections before it is passed, it could be too late. www.tagesschau.de/kommentar/am...

Kommentar: Unabhängigkeit des Verfassungsgerichts muss gesichert werden

Der Schutz des Bundesverfassungsgerichts vor Einflussnahme ist ein zentrales Projekt, das die Parteien unbedingt noch abschließen sollten, meint Frank Bräutigam. Nach der Neuwahl könnte es zu spät sei...

tagesschau.de