starting two months of freedom
Note: This post was imported and originally posted on leaflet on 2025-07-11
work
I officially have an office! I was able to go to Stevens and I can now finally work from there and get into my new professor-ly routines. Needless to say, I'm very excited and plan to add my own flare to the office soon.
I also gave my last DSO presentation for UChicago on Wednesday! It's always a little weird to give talks so late at night, and I get a little nervous before each one. So, it honestly knocked out a lot of the work I would've otherwise done early in the week. I think it went well though, and now I can finish out my time of my postdoc knowing that I've already done the work for the funding. Almost two full months of flexibility!
Since the presentation, I've gone back into my projects in full force. I had a bunch of meetings, and now I have a full plate of work on so many projects. I'm finalizing a paper to submit next week and I'm hitting the ground running on my other projects to get them written as soon as possible.
non-work
Honestly, I haven't done much since the Miami trip other than work. It's been hot, and I was so busy with the DSO stuff. Fortunately, though, I did have time to finish Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. Overall, I thought it reminded me of like a shorter and more humble Yuval Noah Harari book. It was very high level and used a lot of generalizations and story-telling to justify the perspective that was put forward. For the most part, though, I liked the broad-strokes message of the book. And, I'm sure that it's useful as a nice intro to thinking about the economy. Now that I've finished it though, it's back to Oryx and Crake!
Also, unrelated, there was an IAPP opinion article that annoyed me, so I ended up writing a counter opinion piece. Basically, the first was arguing that blockchain has been putting privacy at the center of technology and spurred developments in privacy. I wanted to argue that blockchain has really done nothing for privacy and that there it shouldn't be the center of support by privacy advocates. I might end up putting it on my website soon.
things i saw this week
A ACLU push to avoid a 10-year ban on state AI regulations
Scott Aaronson posted about a new lower bound for Busy Beaver 6
Google posted about their open-sourced zero-knowledge tools
Matt Ferrell video about using cow dung is used in plastics and batteries
A paper which verifies the Collatz Conjecture up to 2^{71}, a new record
David Eppstein's blog post about ready lists and some algorithms which can use them
Lance Fortnow's blog post provides an interesting perspective on the role of universities and who their "customers" are
questions
Can cryptography help with speedrun validity?
A CFAIL paper this week discussed this problem in a nicely detailed way
This is something that I gave some thought to when seeing all the cheating scandals in speedruns, but I'm not sure if there's anything provable that could be done
How much work has been understanding key-committing encryption and deniable encryption?
As I understand it, these are basically opposite cryptographic promises
What's known about the necessary assumptions or lower bounds for other types of encryption? I've wondered about this question for things like Anamorphic or PRC encryption
What areas of crypto are most ripe for formal/verified theorem proving?
I was thinking about learning Lean to include in some future work, because the area has a history of buggy/broken proofs
Is this something that cryptographers would find appealing? Or would the proof just be too opaque.
Thanks for reading to the end! Here's of the Faena Theater from our trip to Miami Beach:
