meling

Have to say the I get a bit frustrated with all the acronyms in the cryptography space; it’s hard to keep up for those of us with a passing interest.

Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

I’m doing rebasing a lot these days, especially since I started using gh stack. The main struggle I have with rebasing is for git to recognize that a branch has actually been merged when its commits have changed (e.g., if I forgot to delete the local branch with old commits and come back months later and trying to figure out if it was actually merged or not). My understanding is that this is nicer with jj when you work locally, but if you sync with GitHub, I think your still faced with the same problem, or?

What are people doing to workaround this? I’ve tried to ask LLMs, but the complexity is frankly a bit off putting (I don’t have the suggestions handy)

The 24% more PRs was merged, not «landed». Presumably after human code review (but I didn’t check the paper…) Not sure about this particular study, but I «think» my own productivity (coding wise) has improved by more than 30%. In many ways I wouldn’t even have started on many of the things I’ve completed these last six months because I would have viewed their effort to be insurmountable within my time budget as a professor (with all my other duties).

I’m in academia and I try to convert everyone I know… I only recently started using it for a few things, and I used Claude to do some pretty advanced stuff that I wouldn’t have ventured to even try with latex. That is, I think a lot of the relevant CTAN packages can be developed using LLMs more quickly than you might expect.

For next year, I plan to prepare a thesis template for our university and encourage students to try it instead of latex (most of our students use latex now).

I’ve been using Typst lately and it has been great. I’ve made an exam template for my university and made an export feature so that I could generate the exam in the json format that our online exam system (WISEflow) expects, with support for multiple choice and essay style questions.

It is so snappy and with great error messages. I encourage people to try it out. The typst tutorial is very approachable. Thanks to the Typst devs for this great piece of software.

I’ve been using Typst lately and it has been great. I’ve made an exam template for my university and made an export feature so that I could generate the exam in the json format that our online exam system (WISEflow) expects, with support for multiple choice and essay style questions.

It is so snappy and with great error messages. I encourage people to try it out. The typst tutorial is very approachable.

Call me when they have broken ECC with a real quantum computer.

What’s my remedy when Google’s product (Gemini 3.1 pro high) makes a “grave” mistake? This is unrelated to the bans that’s been happening recently, but wanted to share …

This morning I asked Gemini to “save” its output to a local file. However it did more than that … it committed the file (along with several unrelated staged changes that was not ready to be committed) and even pushed the changes to GitHub. I’ve never asked any model to commit, let alone push… I’m not impressed; actually a bit disappointed that it would do this without any warning up front. This happened in Antigravity.