iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Watching people argue with Dan Bernstein online, it's like: you come at the king, you best not miss

Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I've long suspected GPUs could speed up the NFS (it's an outlier in mem/processor in HPC and not many people work on it) so I'm excited to see if this also improves at non-$100k-compute scales

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

We overproduce and overuse industrial nitrogen not because we need that much nitrogen to feed the world, but because it's necessary for highly-automated capital-intensive farming practices. A quantum computer is (at best!) a bandaid fix for one of the problems this situation creates.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My narrative: monocultures can be easily mechanized, and modern agriculture is labour-constrained and favours large-scale, capital-intensive techniques. It's an ongoing expense to pay people to harvest crops, but machines are mostly a one-time capital expense.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If we believe doi.org/10.14237/ebl..., the three sisters produce 12 mega-calories/hectare; modern corn (with industrial fertilizer!) gets about 16 (and the three sisters give you the nutrients of beans and squash!). Why not just plant the three sisters and forget industrial fertilizer?

doi.org

Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System | Ethnobiology Letters

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The linked post explains that even the basic physical premise might be wrong (bacteria might *less* efficient than industrial processes). But we've known how to match the efficiency of bacteria for centuries: get bacteria to do it. Indigenous Americans used "The Three sisters" (corn, bean, squash)

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I'll rant even more about FeMoCo: plants need nitrogen in the form of ammonia or nitrate. Industrial agriculture produces these but it's energy-intensive. Symbiotic bacteria do it quite efficiently; can we decipher their enzymes (via FeMoCo), copy what they do, and save a bunch of energy?

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 31/07/2026

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

digitaldigging.org

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"you fucked up a perfectly good Markov chain is what you did. look at it. its got anxiety"

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ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · 23/07/2026

The supersingular isogeny problem in time and memory p^(1/3 + o(1)) (Benjamin Wesolowski) ia.cr/2026/1486

Abstract. We prove that under a plausible heuristic assumption (on the smoothness of certain random integers), the supersingular isogeny problem can be solved in time and memory p^(1/3 + o(1)). This improves upon the previous best complexity of p^(1/2) ⋅ (log p)^(O(1)). This problem is arguably the central hard problem underlying isogeny-based cryptography, and the cost of its resolution is a major (and often the only) factor in the choice of secure parameters. The impact on concrete parameter sets remains to be clarified, as the asymptotic advantage of the new algorithm is mitigated by a superpolynomial overhead hiding in the o(1) exponent, and by its high memory requirement.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

(technically it's a mini split heat pump, but those are also undeniably air conditioners)

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Genuinely why are Europeans so scared of air conditioning? This is in a hotel in England. The thing on the wall is undeniably an air conditioner.

Note in the hotel room that says: "Note that our rooms are equipped with an Air Climate Control system (not air conditioning) which is linked to the outside temperature. We understand it may not suit all our guests so portable heaters or fans are available on request."

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I'm realizing that I haven't given boomers enough credit for living through the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation and staying mostly sane

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Looks amazing! I have minor quibbles (who wouldn't?) but this has so many advantages over the current system

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Huh, Le Guin invented "skill issue"

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

(3) knowing the structure of the system, researchers and funders can coordinate research agendas without any explicit communication, and disclosure rules incentivize them to do this I'm sure there's more, as well

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

To spell it out: (1) even if all parties are scrupulously honest, the PR firm's money exerts strong pressures on what gets done (2) anonymity is easy to break and impossible to repair

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

If you have only a basic understanding of how corruption works, this situation looks fine, if not ideal ("more money for research, no strings attached! yay!")

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Impossible is a strange word here. My parents' house's windows don't really fit a window unit, but they have them anyway, with big plastic pieces cut to fit around the unit to seal up the window.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Great example here: Europeans in comments inventing excuses not to do something USA does effortlessly bsky.app/profile/tech...

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

reskeet if your h-index is, apparently, greater than Lov Grover

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Whatever prankster set this up is my hero: scholar.google.com/citations?us...

Screenshot of google scholar showing Lov Grover, with only one paper: the paper that introduced Grover search, with 15,542 citations.

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Reposted by Sam Jaques

Philipp Muens @muens.io · 01/06/2026

Wow! Alfred Menezes just published this 182 page "A Gentle Introduction to Lattice-Based Cryptography" paper. I just skimmed through it, but it looks like an invaluable resource if you want to study lattices and how they're used in (PQ) Cryptography. eprint.iacr.org/2026/1098

eprint.iacr.org

A gentle introduction to lattice-based cryptography

We present the quantum-safe Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (ML-KEM) and the Dilithium signature scheme (ML-DSA). We also develop the mathematical background on lattices needed to understand why Kyb...

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Me: hmm, what's the plural word for emeritus professors? My brain: Emiratis! Me: ... close enough

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Was there ever much of a real market for legitimate Bitcoin users wanting to send cash to a Bitcoin address at a local convenience store?

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

I got asked "which makes a sound when plucked" and one was a picture of a construction crane, and, having half an ounce of imagination...

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 13/05/2026

I see that the new MacOS Tahoe 26.5 update releases *EIGHT* new emojis from Apple's strategic emoji reserve. Folks, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is a software update that you really want to take somewhat urgently

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

The privacy concern is still there: if the log files were sensitive, now Google has that data

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Underrated Linux usability barrier: "I have this problem, how do I fix it?" "Post the log file and I can help" Then the log file is thousands of inscrutable lines that may or may not contain sensitive data about how you use your computer, that you as a beginner cannot understand

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

TIL moka pots follow a much different price:size function than I expected

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I don't expect to win the political battle against age verification (honestly I'm not sure I even want to). I do hope I could push for good cryptography to make the privacy-reliability tradeoff better

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I'm not convinced there is *no* way to defeat proxies, esp. if our goal is high-but-not-perfect reliability. But these aren't new problems with anonymous credentials. My original question was where the state-of-the-art is, essentially

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

If the government issues my anonymous credentials, they already have my passport. Even in private hands, a few issuers can be held to stringent data handling regulations that would be impractical to enforce on *every* company

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Bad terminology, maybe, but I mean something like: can you verify age to access social media without uploading a photo of your passport?

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Do you know who/what is leading in terms of cryptographic, privacy enhancing identification technologies?

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

One of the benefits of travelling is seeing other cultures coordinate to effortlessly do something your culture thinks is impossible

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Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

On DOOMSDAY MACHINES, this week I dive into the idea of “atomic bombs” before the discovery of nuclear fission made them actually feasible. I’ve long thought it makes for an interesting case study — a fateful intersection of scientific fact and science fiction. doomsdaymachines.net/p/strange-ev...

doomsdaymachines.net

"Strange even to the men who used them"

"Atomic bombs" before the discovery of fission

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Reposted by Sam Jaques

Fredrik Dahlgren @fegge.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Two weeks ago, Google published a paper proving in zero-knowledge that they had an efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm. Today, Trail of Bits can prove that we have an even better implementation which beats Google's on all metrics! 🫢 blog.trailofbits.com/2026/04/17/w...

A table listing total operations, number of qubits, and Toffoli-gate count for Google's low-gate and low-qubit implementations, and Trail of Bits' implementation. The Trail of Bits implementation beats Google's on every metric.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Yeah they got a bit of a roasting on scirate over that. Though their 10,000 qubit ECC is only 1000 days. I still didn't include it because (a) 1000 days already gets us to 2029; (b) by the time they finish a computation that long, I suspect another company could build a 26,000 qubit machine

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Overdue quantum landscape update: sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_land... A 2d chart can only say so much. tl;dr new results are still overhyped, but definitely worth taking seriously. This chart is based on surface codes and a big question now is whether new codes can be practical (=>useless chart)

A cluttered and complicated chart relating qubit counts to qubit error rates, comparing today's devices to cryptographic attacks.

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Ah okay, like if I had an encoded circuit and wanted to measure the X value, I can do it just fine by measuring X on all physical qubits. And in any intro qc course it's explained that "measure-X" projects onto |+/-> (which Stim does!), but this assumption breaks for the code; we need state prep

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

If the "transversal" X measurement doesn't preserve the codespace, in what sense is it transversal?

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

What do you mean by "destroy the stabilizers"?

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Sam Jaques @sejaques.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Hot take: IACR submission guidelines should eliminate appendices, bump the page limit to 70 pages, but have an earlier deadline for any paper longer than 30 pages

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Nadim Kobeissi @nadim.computer · 12/03/2026

I was deeply humbled by the unbelievably positive reaction to my talk at Real World Crypto 2026 in Taipei about my experiences teaching applied cryptography in post-crisis Lebanon. The full video for the talk is now available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Hx...

youtube.com

Real World Crypto 2026: Lessons from Teaching Applied Cryptography in Post-Crisis Lebanon

YouTube video by Nadim Kobeissi

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