work

Almost nothing to report this week at work. I exchanged a few messages as needed for some projects in early January. If I've ignored others, I'm sorry! An old project from UChicago also got rejected, which sucks, but it's definitely offset by how fun the vacation has been. I'm still confident that the paper makes some interesting points and would be really useful to a wide audience in published, but we'll have to wait for another venue for that.

Looking ahead to the next few weeks, I'll be in San Diego visiting my partner's home. So I'll still keep up with my remote meetings, but will work time shifted. It shouldn't be too bad, since I'll mostly be putting finishing touches on papers and prepping CS 579 materials.

non-work

Obviously, this busy was much more active outside of work! My partner was visiting Hoboken, and we had a great time eating dim sum, shopping around Hoboken, and watching movies at night, making pottery, and so much more. I'm glad she was able to take the time off to very generously spend her time with me and then after to visit my family for Christmas!

Going back to Greenville is always exciting, but this Christmas was especially fun. We had our cat Timmy with us, and my nephew (18 months) is old enough to participate a lot more. He's worked hard to enunciate mine and my partner's names, and I love how often he practices :). Timmy was the first cat he ever pet, so now he's also obsessed with his name. I also had the (increasingly rare) opportunity to talk with my siblings and family and understand more about what's going on in their lives. I'm very grateful that my family is all in the same area that's easy to visit, and that they are so welcoming and kind to me and to each other. It left me, as always, looking forward to my next trip to Greenville.

My games have stalled while I had more in-person time with the people I care about. But my reading has only slowed a bit, since I do a lot of audiobook listening while running. My partner and I are close to the end of Katabasis, and I'm excited to read how it ends and share my thoughts soon!

questions

This week, I tried not to actively avoid work-related questions. :)

• What is the best way to introduce an upper-level undergrad to theoretical CS/Cryptography?
  • I sent a list of open questions I'd like to attach to a student. I said we could unpack the ones that interested him the most
  • Would it have been better to just give a concrete problem? Maybe that only works well if you've already taught the student?
• What is the best LLM usage policy for a cryptography course?
  • I'm thinking to highly discourage it, but I don't know if it'd be better to take a more firm stance.
  • I really think there are good ways to use LLMs for quizzing your understanding or generating practice problems, but it's hard to carve that out.
  • It's also just hard to actually enforce.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are pictures of a mini Shiba we met at our pottery class and Timmy traveling to Greenville.