work

This was a crazy week. Mostly, this because I had my first lecture of my CS 579 class on Wednesday. It was a little hectic and felt very long, but I managed to get through it despite the hiccups. Overall, I definitely need practice, but I wasn't expecting to be perfect. I got through the material I wanted in my outline, but after talking to a few students, I may have gone through it too quickly and not taken enough breaks. I think I'll be much better prepared next week, now that I know more about the room and the students. (I also get to do real crypto next week! Rather than just probability and classical ciphers.) Good luck to all my students and I hope they can bear with me while I iron the course out.

Fortunately, the adrenaline or something from the pressure of the lecture also focused my other work. I finished a few new sections of papers that needed some work, and I also have a handful of regular meetings which were productive. There are a few things I'd like to have more progress on, but all thing considered it was pretty good!

non-work

It was a pretty undramatic week outside work (thank god...). A lot of my time has been consumed planning for an upcoming move, but I still have kept up with a handful of games and my regular reading. I finished Isles of the Emberdark this week! It was such a fun glimpse into where the Cosmere is going and had a lot of interesting tidbits about dragons and throwbacks to some previous books. I'm not sure when the next major Cosmere book is coming out, but I like enough that I might start a re-read soon.

I've since decided to put a short pause on my fiction streak. On my runs, I've started listening to Sandworm, which is about a major cybersecurity incident and the investigation and politics around it. I've been meaning to read this for a while just to learn a bit more context around the vulnerability. It's not very long, and it should be a decent change of pace just to keep my reading fresh.

Game-wise, nothing major happened this week. I'm still working my way through Hades 2 and making some progress on every run. But a lot of time was taken up by my friends and I are playing PEAK for the first time, which is a super fun game. We still haven't beaten it yet — only the 4th out of 5 areas. Shouldn't be long, though!

questions

• Have people explored fine-grained definitions of NP-classes and how they intersect with deterministic/randomized machines?
  • I'm aware of classes like NPTIME(t) for non-deterministic machines. And, I think NPTIME(t) contains language that can be verified deterministically in time t.
  • What if it was also required that the prover had to produce the witness in some fine-grained time (but more time than the verifier)?
  • I think this might be related to understanding fine-grained one-way functions? Where the prover finds some pre-image and the verifier just needs to run the "forward direction" to verify.
  • It's a very half-baked idea, but something that I thought about when people talk about doing alignment by supervising a bigger model with a smaller model.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of my cat wanting to play on the computer.