a new plan for this blog

I've mostly just been using this blog as a place to put new articles that I read throughout each week. However, I think that keeping a log of what I've read with AI summaries has actually made me lazier when consuming the news. There are definitely some articles that I would just AI summarize and not read in depth, which detracts from the journalists who put in the time to write those pieces and also from my own understanding of the news. (Not to mention that AI summaries would sometimes have errors or other weird artifacts). I'm glad that I did it, and I may still accumulate new articles without AI summaries. But, I don't plan to post them on this website anymore. Instead, I think it will be better to just occasionally write about what I'm thinking about professionally and non-professionally. That's what I'm going to try to do with this new series of blog posts, which I call "vibe check."

updates

So, what have I been up to? It's probably easiest to start with the professional updates. I graduated about a month and a half ago at this point with my PhD, and I've been working as a (pseudo)postdoc at UChicago. And, I'm grateful that I can continue to do that for about another year. My plan right now is to move to New York City, where I'll collaborate with some of the connections that I have there, while still continuing my projects with people at UChicago remotely. I'm excited about the move (not only because I'm a little sick of Chicago after 6 years), but because I think it will be good to work with other people.

I also recently started a project called Cryptology City, which is essentially a version of the Complexity Zoo but tailored to cryptographers. It's super bare-bones right now, but I'm hoping that I'll have more time to add to it. And, it's nice to have something relatively easy to go back to, where I still feel like I'm contributing something. In terms of research, I'm still interested in working further on language model watermarks and private information retrieval. I'm also signed up to do some investigating and presenting on Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions, so I'm excited to see if there are any open problems using those that interest me. I'm still a little undecided between academia and industry, but I'm hoping that searching for both opportunities in NYC for a month or two will help me distill my thoughts on that down a bit more.

Non-professionally, I've been running more. I've gotten into a good running habit here, that I hope I'll keep up after the move. I'm not a super far or fast runner, but I enjoy just having some sort of regular activity that lets me get my energy out a little bit. I've also been focused on collecting my thoughts and getting into healthy habits around writing, both papers and just fun things like this. The Cryptology City project is a little bit of that for me, since I can just write up primitives in my own preferred notation in a way that could potentially be useful for other people. Also, shifting my blog to post more update-driven stuff like this (and hopefully some other more technical blog posts) is a good way for me to get in the habit of actually putting thoughts onto a page.

fun stuff

In addition to the updates above. I thought I'd share just some of the things I've seen recently that I'm personally excited about.

• I only recently found out about Excalidraw! I added to my useful links page and am already making diagrams for blog posts with it. I really like how easy it is to use and the aesthetic. And, I'm always excited when an open-source product some out with good features and a good look.
• I saw that Proton launched a private docs feature! This seems pretty clearly built on tools developed by Standard Notes (what I'm using to write this post), who Proton recently acquired. I'm glad they've already launched a pretty functional feature. It's a little clunky to use right now, but I'm optimistic that the teams will improve on it and build good products in the future, considering how quickly this launched. I'm always on the lookout for new online tools to support.
• I also rediscovered Freetube, which I've been very pleased with. If you aren't going to watch YouTube sighed into a Google account, it definitely feels like the way to go. I understand that some people might not want an independent client, but for me, I actually prefer it to having a YouTube tab open in browser. The fact that it can privately keep my watch history and subscriptions is also a big appeal, so much so that I'm thinking about turning off my YouTube RSS feeds.
• I've been getting ads for expanding/transformable furniture which is certainly out of my price range but gives me /r/oddlysatisfying vibes, so that I thought I'd share.
• In the last month or so, I have listened to podcasts a lot more for some reason (especially on my runs and the bus). But, on a recent episode of Hard Fork (with Alison Roman) they discussed the Flipper Zero which I had seen before but forgotten about. I'm considering getting one to play around with, but it's also pretty expensive.
• While I've been planning to move to NYC, I've been concerned about my budget. I found out about the state cost of living ranking which I have just found interesting to compare state head-to-head. It's useful to see what kind of income you might expect in different places.