I don’t really think the Russian economy is any real bottleneck here; they have abundant natural resources, a densely-knit industry and even now still many trading partners. Ultimately the only realistic way to stop the war is a peace agreement, which is why people voted for Zelenskyy in the first place.

There’s this post of mine, also this article gives some background on the application of PIR to anonymous messaging. Basically, I’m trying to do a basic version of that, but using a state-of-the-art PIR protocol introduced in this article. It’s still not great performance-wise, but it’s enough to be practical (as stated, many thousands of users given enough resources).

No, sorry, I haven’t uploaded anything yet, I’ve only coded the protocols and some benchmark code. The idea is for each client to send and receive data continuously. Since text messages are pretty small and YPIR+SP doesn’t have a lot of overhead, that could be a reasonable way to conceal all metadata, as long as there are not enough people connected to overwhelm the server.

I guess we could make one using newer FHE-RAM techniques and some edge case handling.

Well, not really an issue with the existing paragraph being hard to understand, but I would suggest more explicitly stating which symbol from the “math” section corresponds to each variable from the “code” section, at the beginning of the latter.

Hugely cool! Very clearly written too.

Haha yeah, absolutely! Might be too messy to consider it “well used” though… But it does motivate me, seeing all the signs I put there and imagining one day I will conquer that mountain. Maybe not even on the second attempt, but definitely one day.

Yes, that’s true and a better way to look at it, thanks!

Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.

So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq’s mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.

I did learn a lot though. Since then I’ve been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I’ve collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I’ve begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!

One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.

Relevant context