Christopher Patton

verifiably private AI is now turing complete

Happy Pi Day! In a certain sense, π is not a constant, but a variable. Using our usual Euclidean distance, it is 3.14159… but applying other L^p norms on ℝ², half the unit circle's perimeter will give other values. For instance, at p=1 (taxicab geometry), “π” = 2√2. At p ≈ 2.2, it's 3.20. Anyway, the video I was hoping to have out this day will be out closer to the 20th. Some call it “missing your deadline”, but I prefer to think of it as giving the L_{2.2} norm a little love.

It's gonna be a big year for anonymous credentials. Let's make 'em PQ

A bulldog relaxing with a bum massage machine

@jedisct1 hahahaha love this

AES-FSM - AES Fourier Spectral Mode (AES-FSM) is the AEAD construction the world did not ask for, but may quietly deserve. github.com/initsecret/aes…

How are mathematicians facing the wave of rapidly advancing AI-for-math capabilities? Jeremy Avigad (CMU prof and co-author on the original 2015 system description paper for Lean) just posted a paper with his thoughts in the wake of the Math, Inc. announcement on sphere packing. andrew.cmu.edu/user/avigad/Pa… There are a lot of interesting passages in here, including a bit of the back story of the Math, Inc. bomb drop and how it was initially received by the humans working on the formalization project. But, as for how mathematics proceeds, here's the key last passage: "We need to remember our strengths: mathematicians are problem solvers and theory builders extraordinaire. Rather than fight the use of AI in mathematics, we should own it. It is not enough to keep up with current events and design benchmarks for AI researchers; we need to play an active role in deploying the technology and molding it to our purposes. We also need to learn how to raise our students with the wisdom to use the new technologies appropriately, and we need to be careful that we still manage to impart core mathematical intuitions and understanding. Figuring out how to use AI effectively to achieve our mathematical goals won’t be easy, but mathematicians have always embraced challenges—indeed, the harder, the better. If we face AI head-on and stay true to our values, mathematics will thrive. We just need to show up and get to work." The next few years should be a golden era for mathematics. For those of us working on the frontier, I hope we do well by our mathematician colleagues.

We’re continuing our work in @googlechrome to build safe, efficient post-quantum crypto on the web (10 years strong!) & now testing HTTPS using Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs). Thanks for the collab @bwesterb @cloudflare! More details in goo.gle/3MSAYnS 🕸️🔒🌲

Nice things about cars: 1. you can load them on the auto train 2. they get you to train stations 3. what else would we call train cars? 🤷

Google @chrome sharing their plan for post-quantum certificates. They're not going for large drop-in post-quantum signatures, but rather go the extra mile to get efficient post-quantum authentication using Merkle Tree Certificates.

Hell yeah

Very happy that Merkle Tree Certificates, our answer to large post-quantum certificates, has been adopted at the IETF with broad support.

UlamAI Prover - an open source Theorem Prover and Formalizer in Lean 4 We've just released a CLI tool that connects with your Codex/Claude Code/Ollama and allows you to prove and formalize mathematics in Lean directly from .tex files. The goal is to make progress in mathematics faster and more reliable.

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see. His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

When Zero-Knowledge Proofs Are Not Enough: Lessons from a Real-World Zero-Knowledge Authorization System, a.k.a Analysis and Vulnerabilities in zkLogin (eprint.iacr.org/2026/227) (1/n)

Feb 14, 1990: Voyager 1 spacecraft takes this stunning photograph of the Earth suspended in the sunbeam. Carl Sagan's brilliant monologue as mentioned in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: 'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.' 📷NASA

Breaking News: The Trump administration repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being, meaning that the EPA can no longer regulate them. nyti.ms/404Lhbt

In this highly accessible talk, Terence Tao outlines the future of research mathematics and why formal verification, via Lean and other tools, enables human-AI collaboration at scale: "The reason why scaling and AI and broad participation actually is a net win is because we have formal verification... we have ways to filter out the untrustworthy inputs and keep the good ones." 📺 youtube.com/watch?v=SuTxpK… #LeanLang #LeanProver #FormalVerification

A federal court just upheld California’s law REQUIRING federal agents to identify themselves. California will keep standing up for civil rights and our democracy.

We've been crowdsourcing a list of "fancy cryptography" used at scale in production. For two reasons: first it's amazing to see how much this is actually in use today. More importantly, most of it is not post-quantum, and this gives researchers a great resource for future work!

THE UNBRIDLED GREATNESS OF TRAINS WILL ENDURE FOR A MILLION YEARS