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Seny Kamara

@senykamara.com
985 followers 358 following 47 posts

I design encryption algorithms for a living but am a Hip Hop scholar at heart. Former CS professor at Brown & research scientist at Microsoft. I currently lead research at MongoDB. I think about how data, algorithms, power and culture intersect

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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 4h
I enjoyed reading this interview with Yarri Kamara on her work in translation. She explains how important it is to know where the characters are coming from and how much personal experience and context shape a translation.
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 08/09/2026
This is a great example of how STEM researchers can impact the world beyond just solving industry and military problems.
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 08/09/2026
Fantastic thread on math’s over-indexing on problem solving but applies to theoretical CS and crypto as well (in fact I think TCS and crypto are worse than math in this regard). Took me a few years after my PhD to converge to this viewpoint as well but I always thought I was just odd
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 03/09/2026
This is very kind Shriram, thank you. If this resonates at all with anyone, then this recent paper on trust infrastructures for grass roots organizing may be of interest: petsymposium.org/popets/2026/... It was led by Leah Rosenbloom (namisa.art/index.html)
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The Africa I Know® @theafricaiknow.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Africa’s first world champion of international draughts was a Senegalese man who never went to school. He died 48 years ago this month. His name deserves the memory.
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Loïc Duthoit @loic-dht.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Tous les épisodes de la série de @franceculture.fr dédiée à Sophie Germain sont disponibles en podcasts sur l'application ou le site de @radiofrance.fr
radiofrance.fr
Avoir raison avec... Sophie Germain : un podcast à écouter en ligne
Au sortir de la Révolution, alors que la recherche scientifique s’institutionnalise en France, la mathématicienne Sophie Germain émerge presque miraculeusement. Derrière le mythe de l’enfant autodidac...
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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
[new blog post] Towards Designing an Execution Control System with Metastability Resilience muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/08/towa...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
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Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I wrote up a short blog post giving my thoughts on the new Anthropic cryptanalysis results against HAWK and AES. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/07/29/s...
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
Some notes about Anthropic’s new results
Yesterday Anthropic published two new cryptanalysis results, both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model. The first of these results attacks a signature scheme called HAW…
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 02/08/2026
Diane Martel was a pioneering hip hop director whose work captured what our lives looked liked and shaped NY’s visual identity. Her work impacted me so I wanted to write about it. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...
open.substack.com
Diane Martel and the Martel Aesthetic
Last September I learned that Diane Martel had passed away.
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NPR @npr.org · 02/08/2026
NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science.
n.pr
We asked a first grader to interview his hero: A bird scientist
NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science.
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 01/08/2026
"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/
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JP Aumasson @aumasson.jp · 31/07/2026
www.bfswa.blog/p/llms-wont-...
bfswa.blog
LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
And Anthropic's cryptanalysis work is great
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 31/07/2026
I visited Sorelle at Haverford a few years ago to give a talk. Beautiful campus and great students.
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 27/07/2026
This is the second note in my series on power. It classifies power systems by what their participants can know and defines the power span, which is the set of systems an agent can generate by exercising its powers: www.senykamara.com/power/notes/...
senykamara.com
Seny Kamara | Notes on Power #2: Observations and Power Spans
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 27/07/2026
Latex on Substack is just too painful, so I'm going to host my notes on power on my homepage. This is a more detailed version of #1: www.senykamara.com/power/notes/...
senykamara.com
Seny Kamara | Notes on Power #1: Power Systems
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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
new blog post] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/07/auro...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP
The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped . Reading it yesterday was an interesting experience, because I spent two years (2022-23) working with...
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Sophie Huiberts @sophie.huiberts.me · 22/07/2026
I have been radicalized against my own work
sophie.huiberts.me
Smoothed Analysis is Bullshit*
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 20/07/2026
This is the first of my formal posts on power, where I define what I mean by a power system and apply it to a couple of examples. I’ll keep the formal ones labeled as “Notes on Power” in case you want to skip them and just read the more philosophical ones.
open.substack.com
Notes on Power #1: Power Systems
In my last post, I described a situation that highlighted the difference between acting inside a system and controlling it.
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 05/07/2026
I really enjoyed reading this essay from a cryptographer trying to make sense of their work and life experiences. Raises interesting questions, including whether doing crypto erodes your trust in people. open.substack.com/pub/vishady/...
open.substack.com
Fully Human
Reflections on trust and power, and how that has played into my experience as a cryptographer.
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Sophie Huiberts @sophie.huiberts.me · 04/07/2026
Today I redesigned my website + started a blog :) sophie.huiberts.me/blog/2026/ha...
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Marco Z @ocramz.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
We've opensourced a simulation-based distributed property testing framework for #rustlang (based on proptest) Use case : finding minimal counterexamples to "does it converge within T rounds?" WIP: checking traces of black-box tools like Jepsen . Open to feedback! github.com/unfoldml/pro...
github.com
GitHub - unfoldml/propsim: Property-based testing for distributed protocols
Property-based testing for distributed protocols . Contribute to unfoldml/propsim development by creating an account on GitHub.
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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Cynthia Dwork & other privacy experts show why Trump Admin’s politically motivated decision to prevent the Census Bureau from using the best methods to protect confidentiality will end up with worse quality data, less publicly available data, and/or a privacy breach. scottaaronson.blog?p=9902
scottaaronson.blog
An American privacy emergency: Guest post from Cynthia Dwork et al.
Scott’s foreword: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pioneer in the fields of differential privacy and algorithmic fairness. On my recent travels to…
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 02/07/2026
This is a deeply personal and touching essay from one of my colleagues at MongoDB
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Lachlan Kermode @ohrg.org · 28/06/2026
The discussion of what makes for 'real' work here really effectively shadows an academic debate going on in the Marxology world currently about Alfred Sohn-Rethel's (mid-century Marxist) diagnosis of capital as a "real abstraction".
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 27/06/2026
This is a fantastic essay from @jessica.bsky.social about what it means to do real work/research open.substack.com/pub/letterst...
open.substack.com
on doing Real work
a working theory
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sorelle @friedler.net · 26/06/2026
Are you curious about the environmental impact of AI? Install the AI Impact Tracker to estimate the environmental footprint of your ChatGPT usage, including energy, water, and CO2. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-im... #FAccT2026
chromewebstore.google.com
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Pascal Junod @cryptopathe.me · 24/06/2026
Genuine question for academic cryptographers: does it still make sense to work on non-PQ-secure primitives?
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Himanshu @h-vash.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Cryptography rearranges power. So let's start from the basics: what is power? ⬇️
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Note that @reniebird.bsky.social also runs the (already very) successful CNTR summer school on AI policy: don't miss out on the extensive expertise you're getting from this group!
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
This is very concerning
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 23/06/2026
I've been thinking about power a lot, both because it underlies a lot of my work and because so many of the most consequential debates right now are fundamentally about it. This is the first post of a series where I try to make sense of it. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...
open.substack.com
What is Power?
And can we reason about it precisely?
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless, and a team somewhere else is a decade into a problem that may take another decade to crack... If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 19/06/2026
On Juneteenth, we honor the generations of Black New Yorkers whose struggle and determination brought us closer to justice. At Foley Square, Lorenzo Pace's sculpture stands as a powerful tribute to that legacy.
youtu.be
Triumph of the Human Spirit
YouTube video by NYC Mayor's Office
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The Africa I Know® @theafricaiknow.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
In the centre of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, stands a statue of Patrice Lumumba. He was thirty-five when he became the first prime minister of an independent Congo, in June 1960.
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Anthropic just shut access to Fable & Mythos, their most powerful models. I wrote up what happened + the policy and psychodrama behind it (with all the links & receipts) here — the thread below is the TL;DR 🧵 blog.geomblog.org/2026/06/the-...
blog.geomblog.org
The "fable" of Anthropic and the USG
News moves fast. 12 hours ago I was enjoying the demolition that the US put on Paraguay when I heard that Anthropic had shut down access to ...
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 13/06/2026
This is very kind, and I only saw it six days after it was posted. When I write things down or give non-research talks, it feels like shouting into the void. I have no idea if anyone hears it, cares or values any of it. So comments like this are genuinely surprising and inspiring
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Seny Kamara @senykamara.com · 08/06/2026
I don’t know why we don’t talk about this more. But I’m glad it resonated; and good luck with the final stretch
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Himanshu @h-vash.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Just read through this blogpost "Contextualising Cryptography" by @senykamara.com. It hits some of the issues I have been facing in choosing the right problems for my research, even before starting my phd (advisor reveal post coming up soon). senykamara.substack.com/p/contextual...
senykamara.substack.com
Contextualizing Cryptography
What Is Cryptography For?
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Agents prioritize task completion rather than whether they should act. This is a consequence of how they are trained. My student @victorojewale.bsky.social has been investigating this and just wrote a (prize winning) paper arguing why (and how) we need a notion of "informed abstention". Link below.
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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
WATCH: Last night I had the chance to sit down for an extended conversation with Jon Stewart to talk about the state of voting rights & democracy in this country. Class was very much in session! Thank you @thedailyshow youtu.be/SCse1FFEKLM
youtu.be
Sherrilyn Ifill - What Happened to the Voting Rights Act? | The Daily Show
YouTube video by The Daily Show
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Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing @simonsinstitute.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go...
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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @biella.bsky.social and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology at a humanities workshop about technology. humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab...
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
“Silicon Valley would not exist without [taxpayer-] funded research.” www.thenation.com/article/soci...
thenation.com
How Silicon Valley Is Turning Scientists Into Exploited Gig Workers
Tech elites are enriching themselves by plundering STEM institutions—and offering researchers scraps.
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Michael Rabin just died. His contributions to theoretical CS are absolutely incredible (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...). The Miller-Rabin primality test was the best method I knew for primality testing all the way upto 2002 when Agrawal, Kayal, and Saxena finally proved that PRIMES is in P.
en.wikipedia.org
Michael O. Rabin - Wikipedia
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A. Jesse Jiryu Davis @emptysqua.re · 08/04/2026
Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw
emptysqua.re
LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right!
A new Raft enhancement for fast, consistent reads.
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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
My department is looking to hire a professor of practice in CS, with a focus on AI. Job posting below. If you have questions I'll do my best to answer them, else find someone who can! We are in Providence, easy commute access from Boston. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37970844...
jobs.chronicle.com
Professor of the Practice in Computer Science with a Focus on Artificial Intelligence - Providence, Rhode Island job with Computer Science | 37970844
The Department of Computer Science at Brown University is seeking applicants for a Professor of the Practice position at the assistant, associate, ...
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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 03/04/2026
I tend to get dogpiled every time I say this but: as someone *who likes bluesky and benefits from being here* we have a problem. The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m.
Unique daily likers as a graph over the last year. It's down from about 1.6 million a day a year ago to 1.1 million a day now.
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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Strongly recommend people try this. It's not only instructive, it's also fun.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
While Washington wages war on science, NASA just sent humans to the Moon's vicinity for the first time since 1972. Bravo #TeamNASA — proof that public science, when it's funded and trusted, still does extraordinary things.
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A. Jesse Jiryu Davis @emptysqua.re · 01/04/2026
What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
emptysqua.re
Review: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks
What we talk about when we talk about time horizon.
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