Djoerd Hiemstra 🍉

Research, Teaching and More. Also at Djoerd Hiemstra 🟥 (npub1gjs…pv77) @ https://social.edu.nl
Formerly known as [@hiemstra](https://mastodon.utwente.nl/@hiemstra ) @ https://mastodon.utwente.nl: https://web.archive.org/web/20220701235108/https://mastodon.utwente.nl/@hiemstra

www: https://djoerdhiemstra.com

Public Key

npub1cj5n4d97qsxyp8nrpmtxn38klkaptmd8vl0qh0t2ej8v6575a5yqzvh3qm

NIP-05 Address

djoerd_at_idf.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvf2f6kjlqgrzqne3sa4nfcnm0mws4aknk0hsth44verkd202w6zqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntrqa6gt

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1cj5n4d97qsxyp8nrpmtxn38klkaptmd8vl0qh0t2ej8v6575a5yqzvh3qm

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Last Notes

2026-06-05 11:06:52 UTC

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Goed verhaal, en coole designs!

2026-06-05 08:27:45 UTC

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To conclude, I feel ashamed by the "AI and sustainability" strategy of the university, I cannot support it. The consultants that wrote the strategy missed two red flags. 🚩1 Some of our most talented professors object! A university strategy should be based on consensus. If your strategy is a comprise, forget it! 🚩2 AI is a horrendously unsustainable technology taking all the surplus electricity we have. You simply cannot have both AI and sustainability: Make up your mind, Radboud University!
7/7

2026-06-05 08:24:21 UTC

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And then there's the elephant in the room: AI of the chatbot and generative kind needs large amounts of energy. Letting a chatbot check the grammar and spelling of your text costs a million times more energy than the old Word grammar check (I am generous here, likely hundreds of million times). It's a completely UNSUSTAINABLE technology. Data centers are being built everywhere that strain the electricity grid and use water for cooling. AI is a big threat to the energy transition.
🧵 6/7

2026-06-05 08:19:48 UTC

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Some of our most talented researchers in AI, linguistics and computer science (they're on the Fediverse if you need them) oppose the AI hype. The board and the consultants who wrote the strategy may have listened to these researchers and claim the strategy is a compromise, that it promotes only "value-driven" AI, that we "consciously choose", etc. However, any strategy that is a compromise is a failed strategy. A common strategy must have consensus. Is there consensus? Clearly not.
🧵 5/7

2026-06-05 08:16:40 UTC

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Let me stress, AI as a discipline is important. I consider myself an AI researcher. I wrote my PhD thesis about language models. Some of my colleagues pragmatically embrace the new strategy (more money for us!). Not me, I'm ashamed. Is AI research more important than cancer research? more important that particle physics? more important than language studies? A university board should never even be tempted to make those decisions. Strategic decisions should be made by us, from the ground up.
4/7

2026-06-05 08:10:20 UTC

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This narrative, "AI changes everything", is problematic. It's the narrative put forward by OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and let's be clear why: If you invest trillions in new technology without any clear return, of course, you would have to claim that it changes everything. In reality however, more than a trillion Euro is invested in autonomous agentic chatbots that are correct slightly more often, and that do no longer persuade people to commit suicide.
🧵 3/7

2026-06-05 08:06:31 UTC

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That changed! Our key value sustainability is now "sustainability and AI". The strategy repeats the narrative from Big Tech. AI is "developing rapidly and penetrating more and more areas of society and science", "AI directly impacts our region and society", and AI "can help us make our processes more efficient and enhance the quality of our services". https://www.ru.nl/en/about-us/mission-and-strategy/strategy-and-ambitions/sustainability-and-ai
🧵 2/7

2026-06-05 08:05:41 UTC

Here's some of my thoughts on the new Radboud "Strategy & Ambitions". A university's strategy MUST be determined by, and widely supported by, students, professors and other employees. Our key value used to be "sustainability": You have a part to play! Sure, advertisement bureaus were paid, cringe movies were filmed, social media campaigns were launched, but at least sustainability was something we all can support. https://www.ru.nl/en/you-have-a-part-to-play
🧵 1/7

2026-06-04 17:16:22 UTC

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misschien blijven ze voor jou?

2026-06-04 17:15:22 UTC

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vrees ik ook! Nog een reden om daar snel weg te gaan.

2026-06-04 17:00:14 UTC

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that was fast! Good answer at: https://hear-me.social/@joepbc/116692874262451608 (in Dutch)

2026-06-04 16:55:38 UTC

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Sorry for my ignorance, but what is de-marginalization?

2026-05-29 16:08:03 UTC

RE: https://digipres.club/@dsalo/116658250189345975
The mission of your generation is to destroy AI, kill it.
Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Our generation’s upcoming battle…is going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge, it’s going to be mastery versus faking it, it’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles
#note1e0x…l8ww

2026-05-16 08:54:59 UTC

#PWAsForFirefox is a tool to install, manage and use Progressive Web Apps (#PWA) in Mozilla Firefox.
https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox

2026-05-13 05:51:39 UTC

Well done. The #ACL removed ("desk rejected") over 100 accepted papers from the #ACL2026 program and proceedings that contained citations to non-existing literature:
"The inclusion of these non-existent references is a clear violation of the ACL Policy on Publication Ethics."
Some authors may have already made travel plans. Statement at: https://2026.aclweb.org/acl_statement/

2026-05-03 08:44:10 UTC

RE: https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@mottg/116474491390856287
Nice, the state of Information Retrieval in 2026 by Mohan Krishna. Lots of interesting references and thoughts, if you're into leaderboards and state-of-the-art performance on benchmark test collections. #InformationRetrieval
#note1klv…stzv

2026-04-30 08:18:36 UTC

As I grow older, I more clearly see how science is never truly objective; That all scientific studies have political implications.
To my horror, I am starting to realize that some of the things I learnt and taught, such as significance testing, are rooted in vile, violent racism. Please, read Aubrey Clayton's "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics: Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers."
https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014

2026-04-06 17:04:31 UTC

I worked with several colleagues that were educated at Sharif University. Today, the university was bombed by the USA and Israel. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/irans-top-university-bombed-as-us-israel-intensify-attacks-34-killed

2026-03-27 15:33:30 UTC

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Wat betekent "progressief" ook alweer?

2026-03-21 09:29:48 UTC

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Misschien kunnen @npub18k9…30hx en @npub170m…2mn6 een woordje doen?

2026-03-21 09:28:23 UTC

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Politiek is duidelijke keuzes maken: Kies je voor: Amerikaanse, commerciele, manipulatieve, fascistische sociale media van durfkapitalisten? Of voor: Globale, transparante, publieke sociale media zonder winstoogmerk ontwikkeld in Europa, @npub1gcn…9c2t?

2026-03-21 09:14:56 UTC

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2026-02-23 17:59:50 UTC

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Well said, [@Frederik_Borgesius](https://akademienl.social/@Frederik_Borgesius )

2026-02-01 14:16:04 UTC

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You can do it, [@Frederik_Borgesius](https://akademienl.social/@Frederik_Borgesius )!

2026-01-29 16:31:11 UTC

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Tip: mix marking with another boring task, such replacing the Outlook calendar with a calendar on SurfDrive: https://idf.social/@djoerd/115978749887214835

2026-01-29 15:26:13 UTC

Mission accomplished: Exam #Databases graded! This year's results were good: 130 out of 173 students passed the course: 75%. Lowest grade: 1.7; Highest grade: 9.8
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/979/077/297/648/571/original/b68a3cf5d5d074e8.jpg

2026-01-06 15:51:14 UTC

Good riddance! I deleted my #Google (#Scholar) account. Find my h-index and other gameable statistics on #OpenAlex at: https://openalex.org/authors/a5108167267
BTW, my publications are still there at: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=djoerd+hiemstra

2025-12-19 16:26:59 UTC

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You too, [@Frederik_Borgesius](https://akademienl.social/@Frederik_Borgesius ) !

2025-12-11 14:55:31 UTC

Call on ABP: break ties with BlackRock: Sign the petition!
Why? Because #BlackRock keeps investing money in fossil-based industries. #ABP is one of the largest pension funds of the Netherlands. It organises pensions for academics like me. I don't want my money to support Blackrock. I don't want my pension to evaporate when Blackrock starts depreciating their investments.
https://gofossilfree.org/nl/petition-abp-break-with-blackrock/

2025-09-17 08:39:14 UTC

https://pearsproject.org is a decentralized curated search engine. You can start your search instance on a specific topic and link it PeARS search.

2025-09-08 09:51:20 UTC

[Ik] sluit mailadres van Radboud af als protest tegen Microsoft...
https://www.voxweb.nl/nieuws/hoogleraar-sluit-mailadres-van-radboud-af-als-protest-tegen-microsoft

2025-09-01 10:36:02 UTC

Starting today, I protest the genocide in Gaza by refusing to use Radboud University's central Microsoft Outlook 365 service. If you email me at my official @ru.nl mail address, you will receive the following automatic reply:
This is an automatic reply. To protest the genocide in Gaza, I refuse to read email sent to: djoerd.hiemstra@ru.nl
To contact me, please resend your email to: my@other.email
For more information, read the statement at: https://www.cs.ru.nl/~hiemstra/radboud-against-microsoft/.
This is week 1 of my protest.

2025-08-06 18:33:05 UTC

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Nice! This is mine: https://github.com/djoerd

2025-07-23 17:18:07 UTC

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https://idf.social/@djoerd/114903638819678944

2025-07-23 17:06:27 UTC

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Really? Now Fairphone is ALSO using false marketing? You're paranoid, mate! I used to be a happy FirefoxOS user. You cannot scare me with less-than-state-of-the-art hardware.

2025-07-23 08:47:39 UTC

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https://idf.social/@djoerd/114898541964014326

2025-07-23 08:47:00 UTC

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https://idf.social/@djoerd/114898541964014326

2025-07-22 06:26:57 UTC

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About iPhones: I see what you did here, @npub1kwa…e0nj 🤣
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/895/454/593/130/812/original/270b5a43c6ad533c.jpeg

2025-07-22 05:54:25 UTC

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My Fairphone 3 with e/OS does not even have speech to text(!) It does block trackers that are inside Android apps; allows you to use a fake location; you can hide your IP address using the tor network, and if you insist on using cloud storage it seamlessly intgrates with nextcloud. Pretty neat if you ask me

2025-07-20 05:59:05 UTC

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welcome to Mastodon! Yeah, there seems to be a lot of jealousy and little respect.

2025-07-19 17:52:41 UTC

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Seriously, jealous of EU funding? Please. Stop kicking down to your colleagues and start kicking up to the real competitors

2025-07-18 19:27:14 UTC

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Maybe interesting for you, [@Frederik_Borgesius](https://akademienl.social/@Frederik_Borgesius ), @npub1uvp…x3ue ?

2025-06-29 17:23:51 UTC

Israeli newspaper Haaretz tells 28 stories behind the staggering death toll of children in Gaza, their faces, names, and dreams that will never be realized:
Hind pleaded for help for hours. Youssef was killed while watching cartoons. Yaqeen wanted to be a YouTube star and died in a bombing. In death, Maria joined her mother and brothers, killed in an airstrike in 2021. #Genocide #GazaGenocide
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-26/ty-article-magazine/.premium/title/00000197-6464-db73-aff7-7d6c5af30001
https://archive.ph/K5ME7
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/767/989/003/259/575/original/182ca9f0a27d1978.webp

2025-06-28 17:22:01 UTC

Anita Naidu about Rutger Bregman: "Bregman has given elites a playbook for the next chapter of power laundering"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/18/how-elites-rebrand-power-as-virtue/

2025-06-26 17:48:59 UTC

Israel likely murdered 377,000 people in Gaza, A report prepared by Garb Yaakov, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and published on Harvard Dataverse website shows that the officially reported death tolls in Gaza are way too low. Half of the 377,000 that "disappeared" are children.
#GazaGenocide #BoycotIsrael
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QB75LB

2025-06-22 05:45:51 UTC

The #BluesBrothers is my favorite film too! Cory, @npub1fdr…lvhs, Doctorow discusses Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison

2025-06-15 07:30:40 UTC

Vandaag trekken we een #RodeLijn! #GazaGenocide
🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🖍️

2025-06-08 19:32:59 UTC

A surprise to no-one in particular: LLM reasoning models cannot reason about, nor "understand" the Towers of Hanoi.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-knockout-blow-for-llms

2025-04-25 16:47:11 UTC

Holy sh*t. This is a real xkcd, not funny, disturbing, and also one that must be shared
https://xkcd.com/3081/
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/399/608/374/869/195/original/dd919bee4acc9838.png

2025-04-04 09:46:04 UTC

I love you Fediverse ❤️
#Microsoft
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/279/040/882/416/169/original/615d5cfceffd3704.jpg

2025-03-30 15:27:17 UTC

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Sounds awesome, wishing you a great visit!

2025-03-26 10:08:37 UTC

Hi there, beautiful Passau!
https://idf.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/228/177/371/925/897/original/2e597889967a62d3.jpg

2025-02-13 11:51:20 UTC

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Thank you, I joined eV

2025-01-19 07:32:17 UTC

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Have fun!

2024-11-24 17:59:18 UTC

When people claim that a questiion to ChatGPT may need 10 tines as much energy as a Google search, they don't tell you that a Google search today may take at least 1000 times more energy than a Google search 25 years ago... #GreenIT

2024-10-13 12:13:55 UTC

Excellent reasons for not putting all research software in #Github in this post by Luisa Orozco, Daniela Gawehns and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz
1. Github excludes potential collaborators. It is inaccessible to users in countries under financial sanction by the USA. (Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, etc.)
2. Everything on Github creates a single point of failure. It has the possibility of being closed down, similar to what happened to Google Code.
Instead ilnk any git repo!
https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/national-research-software-day-national-infrastructures-for-sustainable-software-f5e20ec3eeff

2024-08-31 14:13:12 UTC

Dear fedi friends,
Who knows a web service that analyzes privacy concerns in web pages? I am looking for a site that checks for trackers, advertisements, etc. In web sites. Something like what @npub1duq…razf is doing for Android applications. Suggestions and boosts are welcome.