work

Work this week was about as standard as it gets. I had most of my regular meetings and did some writing papers, grants, and presentations. Concretely, though, I think I have a good first draft for the talk I'm giving to the CS 101 class about cryptographic research! It's a tough presentation because I haven't really given research talks to the freshmen level, so I wasn't entirely sure how to balance background and research. I settled on a version that has an abridged history of cryptography (for some context) and then just a high level overview of the PIR problem. Hopefully it goes well!

I also finished a draft of my SaTC executive summary for the aspiring PI workshop. I think the research that I'm proposing is going to be really fun, but this is also a new audience for me to get used to. It also was pretty hard to pair down the whole proposal into just 4 pages.

non-work

Outside of work, things were more fun, but definitely slower paced than Thanksgiving week. My friends and I finally made it to Baldur's Gate in Baldur's Gate 3! It takes comically long to get there, even after the last segment of the game starts. The ending of the game on my last play through was really fun, so I'm excited to play through the narrative again.

My partner and I also decided to start reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang together! It's a fictional story with a lot of clear criticisms about academia, which is something I can appreciate. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far, it seems mostly focused on fields like Philosophy and Math. I'm interested in those fields tangentially but don't feel like many of the stereotypes hold true in CS or in other STEM fields (could just be a blind spot of mine though). I'm sure I'll have more to say as I get further in.

questions

• Is there a useful way to build cryptography to protect individual privacy?
  • My partner reminded me about the S.T.O.P. project, which does a lot of valuable work. I'm not sure how I could best help.
• Is AI alignment actually a "problem" that can be solved?
  • I hear and read various comments from rationalists, but I haven't been able to buy in to the view. To me, it seems like a pseudoproblem (or at least non-scientific).
  • I'll leave it to the philosophers to figure out though and keep working on cryptography in the meantime.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are a couple of festive pictures from this week. Some people move really quick onto Christmas after Thanksgiving.