work

Almost nothing to report from work this week! I sent a few emails while I was away and got a few updates. This weekend I'll have to spend some time doing some work that I put off unfortunately. It should all be manageable, but I do kind of want to just still relax. My goal is to just block out a few hours today and tomorrow and segment my time cleanly.

As an aside, I noticed that there were more LLM-powered breakthrough results while I was away! The encroachment into quantum computing and CS has me particularly impressed. Together with the recent cryptanalytic improvements, it makes me feel very uncertain about the future of academia. I still lean toward thinking of this stuff as a tool, but it'll be scary if there's a mass restructuring of academia and research! I guess we'll just have to see where it goes. :-)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the ZK podcast episode I was on was finally uploaded here! Hopefully, it's helpful to some people.

non-work

I just came back from my partner and my two week Europe trip yesterday! Hitting four different cities in such a short time was ambitious, but we managed to pull it off pretty well. Our trips to Amsterdam and Rome were particularly tourist-y and heavily packed, which was fun since I had never been there before. We did so much, but I think my big highlights from the trip are probably the Anne Frank walking tour, the Colosseum, the Vatican, and the Death Note musical in London.

I'm very grateful I was able to take the time away and enjoy the sites. Now that I'm back, I can go back to my more mundane off-work activities. It's very exciting to go back to the more standard stuff, since I'm just so exhausted from the trip. Also, I've missed just spending more normal time with my friends.

questions

• Is there a quantum algorithm for hard lattice problems?
  • A recent preprint claims to sketch an algorithm that implies better quantum algorithms for lattice problems
  • I'm very excited to hear someone more expert than me unpack the algorithm
  • If correct, I wonder if this will dethrone the current "Simon's algorithm" as the new defacto "Simon's algorithm" since it's by the same author
• What is "lattice cryptography?"
  • I watched the Security, Cryptography, Whatever podcast on my flight back, which lays out a lot of what's known and what's motivated in lattice-based cryptography
  • They point out that it's not so crisply defined, and that cryptosystems like NTRU are considered "lattice problems" now and weren't before
  • Is there any good, clean characterization of this line of research?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are a few pictures from Rome and London.