work

My goal this week was to clear the deck as much as I can before I go back into doing new research. I was asked to do one more EC review and had procrastinated on my S&P reviews, so that was my main focus this week. I got my stack down to just two more though to finish by next Wednesday! On top of that, I've been doing some revisions on our Model Exfiltration paper, and we should hopefully upload the improvements to arXiv relatively soon.

Of course, I couldn't totally focus on pushing through reviews and edits. I also have been working on editing old lecture notes and more generally preparing for my class. One of my goals for the class is to provide good lecture notes for all the topics we cover because I think it'll help both the students and me teach in the class in the future. I have a few old lecture notes from my advisor's cryptography courses at UChicago, but they don't cover all the topics I will have to cover in my class (since UChicago is on the quarter system). It's a really great resource though, and it gives me some buffer room, so that I don't need to write everything from scratch. I'm also agonizing a bit over the details of the syllabus and how to structure grades. I don't want to overthink it, though, so I might just do something traditional and adapt in future iterations.

non-work

I'm still in San Diego with my partner! The flight over was pretty crazy: we barely made our connection, it was a long trip for the cat, and United lost our checked bags for a few days. The time after we landed, though, we've been having a lot of fun! And I'm fortunate to be able to avoid some of the crazy winter that's already started in the NYC area. During the week, we established a good working rhythm and have figured out ways to spend time together while still being productive. Even though it was a working week, we've also been able to go to a lot of our favorite places in the area, and we have more plans to hike and see museums while I'm here!

I still haven't finished Katabasis, but I'm closing in on the end. I really should finish it because there are a few books that I'm excited to start but feel blocked on. I haven't been able to play many games, since I don't have my desktop computer here. I'm still brainstorming for fun things to play on my Mac that are lightweight enough to play efficiently. So far, it's mostly been Chess and Slay the Spire. (I did play Baldur's Gate at about 10 fps with my friends, but that was pretty painful...)

I've also been experimenting with a lot of self-hosting project over the break, like making my own Forgejo instance and using Actual Budget. I may have more updates on that in the future, but for now it's just a little hobby project.

questions

• What is the best way to balance problem sets in a syllabus?
  • I'm thinking of making problem sets completion-based and only count for a small percentage of the final grate ~10-15%. I could then move the percentage into the midterm/final and make those easier by just asking students to reproduce problem set problems on the tests.
  • Is this better than making problem sets ~25% and grading normally? Ideally completion grades would discourage LLM use compared to correctness grading, but I don't know if that would actually happen.
• What are good resources to learn about pairings from a CS perspective?
  • The first IACR paper of the new year was about a new "Cokernel Pairing."
  • I realized that I know very little about the efficiency and algorithms that go into pairing-based crypto.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy spending time with his older brother Georgino that he hasn't seen in a while: