I'm a little late because I was traveling yesterday, but I'm back in NJ and glad I was able to be home for a while. I might be late next week too, because I'm moving on Saturday. (Probably more on that next week.)

work

I didn't do a lot of work this past week, since I was visiting my family. I was able to keep up with the emails that I needed to though. I'm planning to be back in action this coming week and hopefully to push through a paper to meet the upcoming FOCS deadline!

The week before was also pretty insane, and I didn't give specific updates. Some of it is a bit of a blur, but I gave my midterm to my students, which my course staff and I are still in the process of grading. It was the first time I was fully in charge of creating and proctoring a test, and I've gotten feedback that the test may have been too hard. I also think I messed up one of the problems, so I may have to adjust grades for that.

non-work

Outside of work, I was glad that I was able to stay with my family for so long. It was great to have such a supportive network, and my partner was even willing to last-minute fly across the country to visit for almost a week. It definitely wasn't the Spring Break that I had in mind a few weeks ago, but I always like to see loved ones and was fortunate that I didn't get too far behind on work.

Before the break, I finished Burning Questions finally! It really was just a great book to passively listen to. I appreciated the variety of narrators, and Margaret Atwood has some really insightful perspectives on getting older, feminism, environmentalism, writing, etc. I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to read next. (I basically took a week off reading.) Right now, I think it's between Vigil, Brave New World, or Prelude to Foundation. Could always change though!

cryptology city

(Not sure if this counts as work or non-work, so I'll just give it its own section.)

I also have distracted myself by using LLMs a bit more. Recently, I've been trying to see how good Claude Code is at working on Cryptology City beyond just refactoring it. I'm skeptical that it will hallucinate things, but there is a lot of grunt-work that has to go into collecting citations and writing well-known basics. I think that there's a good chance that it's good at that. For other more advanced things, it's a bit more hit-or-miss, and sometimes I don't like the style it comes up with. Usually though, it summarizes things pretty well. If you look at the GitHub, I'm sure that you'll see me play with it more and correct/edit some of the things it comes up with.

questions

• Have people looked at the relationship between cryptography and bureaucracy?
  • I was thinking about how there are often ways that people can circumvent bureaucracy
  • But cryptography can sometimes completely prevent someone from circumventing guardrails or proper procedures
  • Sometimes there are also settings where you could have cryptographically enforced procedures, like attribute-based encryption, secret-sharing, etc.
  • Not sure if there's a systematic study or perspective on this though

Thanks for reading to the end! Here is a picture of my cat that we took at breakfast before I flew back to NJ.