skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on A cryptography engineer’s perspective on quantum computing timelines in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    My position on the urgency of rolling out quantum-resistant cryptography has changed compared to just a few months ago. You might have heard this privately from me in the past weeks, but it’s time to signal and justify this change of mind publicly.

    There had been rumors for a while of expected and unexpected progress towards cryptographically-relevant quantum computers, but over the last week we got two public instances of it.

    First, Google published a paper revising down dramatically the estimated number of logical qubits and gates required to break 256-bit elliptic curves like NIST P-256 and secp256k1, which makes the attack doable in minutes on fast-clock architectures like superconducting qubits. They weirdly1 frame it around cryptocurrencies and mempools and salvaged goods or something, but the far more important implication are practical WebPKI MitM attacks.

    Shortly after, a different paper came out from Oratomic showing 256-bit elliptic curves can be broken in as few as 10,000 physical qubits if you have non-local connectivity, like neutral atoms seem to offer, thanks to better error correction. This attack would be slower, but even a single broken key per month can be catastrophic.

    [...]

    Overall, it looks like everything is moving: the hardware is getting better, the algorithms are getting cheaper, the requirements for error correction are getting lower.

    I’ll be honest, I don’t actually know what all the physics in those papers means. That’s not my job and not my expertise. My job includes risk assessment on behalf of the users that entrusted me with their safety. What I know is what at least some actual experts are telling us.

    [...]

    Scott Aaronson tells us that the “clearest warning that [he] can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems” is a vague parallel with how nuclear fission research stopped happening in public between 1939 and 1940.

    The timelines presented at RWPQC 2026, just a few weeks ago, were much tighter than a couple years ago, and are already partially obsolete. The joke used to be that quantum computers have been 10 years out for 30 years now. Well, not true anymore, the timelines have started progressing.

    [...]

    The job is not to be skeptical of things we’re not experts in, the job is to mitigate credible threats, and there are credible experts that are telling us about an imminent threat.

    In summary, it might be that in 10 years the predictions will turn out to be wrong, but at this point they might also be right soon, and that risk is now unacceptable.

    [...]

    Concretely, what does this mean? It means we need to ship.

    Regrettably, we’ve got to roll out what we have. That means large ML-DSA signatures shoved in places designed for small ECDSA signatures, like X.509, with the exception of Merkle Tree Certificates for the WebPKI, which is thankfully far enough along.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech

  4. Comment on Nearly half of the US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    We're not going to get dramatic efficiency improvements for airplanes or cars because they're limited by the laws of physics. However, a Prius does have pretty good gas mileage and many electric...

    We're not going to get dramatic efficiency improvements for airplanes or cars because they're limited by the laws of physics. However, a Prius does have pretty good gas mileage and many electric cars have pretty good range nowadays.

    Meanwhile, there are no law of physics or mathematical proofs preventing some researcher from coming up with a new AI algorithm that's either much more capable or equally capable but much cheaper to run. For all way know there's some undiscovered algorithm like the Fast Fourier Transform that will dramatically improve things. More likely, it will be a slog with steady improvements coming over the years.

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Designing an agent reading test in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Agents are unreliable self-reporters. Not because they're dishonest, but because LLMs are agreeable pattern-matchers. Show them a rubric and ask if they met it, and they'll find a way to say yes. Self-assessment requires the model to contradict its own prior output, which goes against the grain of how these systems work.

    [...]

    The observer changes the observation. Every time we found a way to get more accurate reporting, we discovered a new layer where accuracy was lost. Score inflation led to qualitative reporting led to reframing as diagnostic led to task-based design led to the discovery of summarization layers led to human-side comparison. Each fix revealed the next problem. At some point you have to accept that agent self-reporting has a fundamental accuracy ceiling and design around it rather than through it.

    Evaluation framing changes agent effort, not just agent reporting. The Hawthorne effect is different from score inflation or unreliable narration. Those are reporting problems; the agent claims something it didn't do. The Hawthorne effect is a behavioral problem: the agent actually does something it wouldn't normally do (retry harder, try fallback approaches, scan more carefully) because it recognizes the evaluation context. You can't fix this by improving the reporting mechanism. You fix it by making the evaluation context less visible.

    Usability testing principles apply directly. The framing "we're testing the documentation, not you" is borrowed from human usability testing, where it reduces performance anxiety and produces more natural behavior. For agents, it serves a similar purpose: an agent that thinks the documentation is being evaluated has less reason to try heroic workarounds than one that thinks its own capabilities are being measured.

    [...]

    Separation of concerns is the most reliable pattern. The final design works because each participant does what they're good at. The agent does what agents do: read web pages and answer questions. The scoring form does what static analysis does: compare strings against a known set. The human does what humans do: judge whether "pool_size = 10" in the agent's summary matches "pool_size = 10" in the reference. No single participant is asked to do something it's structurally bad at.

    [...]

    The Agent Reading Test has 20 points across 10 tasks: 16 from canary tokens and 4 from qualitative assessment of task responses. A perfect score is unlikely for any current agent. The tasks are calibrated so that each failure mode affects at least some agents in practice.

    [...]

    The most interesting results come not from the score itself but from the pattern of what's missing. An agent that scores 12 with all truncation canaries but no tabbed content tells a different story than one that scores 12 with tabs but no content past 40K. The scoring form's implications text tries to make these patterns readable for anyone running the benchmark, not just people who designed it.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Nearly half of the US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    We don't have a Moore's law for LLM's like we do for chips, but my guess is that something similar will happen: it's going to get more efficient and usage will grow at the same time.

    We don't have a Moore's law for LLM's like we do for chips, but my guess is that something similar will happen: it's going to get more efficient and usage will grow at the same time.

    5 votes

  8. Comment on Nearly half of the US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers in ~tech

    skybrian
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    Moving a bit slower doesn't seem like a bad thing since it will encourage efficiency improvements. Just since the start of the year there have been some interesting research papers about improving...

    Moving a bit slower doesn't seem like a bad thing since it will encourage efficiency improvements. Just since the start of the year there have been some interesting research papers about improving inference efficiency.

    16 votes

  9. Comment on Can a country get too rich? Norway shows the potential pitfalls of uncommon prosperity. in ~finance

    skybrian
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    The article talks about inefficiency in terms of wasted money. The question is what are the real-world impacts of that? It might be increased environmental impact or wasting people's time on...

    The article talks about inefficiency in terms of wasted money. The question is what are the real-world impacts of that? It might be increased environmental impact or wasting people's time on "bullshit jobs" compared to a more efficient system.

    A more in-depth investigation would answer questions like that.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes. The coding agent I use is more like a command-line interface, so that’s “traditional” in an old-school sense. It’s not “as you type.” One way to think of it is that I can imagine a command...

    Yes. The coding agent I use is more like a command-line interface, so that’s “traditional” in an old-school sense. It’s not “as you type.” One way to think of it is that I can imagine a command that does what I want, and then I can ask the AI to do that (in English). It will use the appropriate tools.

    But I can turn the tables by asking it if it has any questions or suggestions for improvements. I commonly ask it to review design docs.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp

    skybrian
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    Are you using a tool that limits what you can ask for? At a prompt, I can ask the coding agent to do whatever task I want.

    Are you using a tool that limits what you can ask for? At a prompt, I can ask the coding agent to do whatever task I want.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on Competence is lonely. Nobody talks about why. in ~health.mental

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like a workplace has to be pretty dysfunctional for things like promotions and raises to be entirely independent of effort? Sure, there are places like that, but it seems pretty cynical.

    It seems like a workplace has to be pretty dysfunctional for things like promotions and raises to be entirely independent of effort? Sure, there are places like that, but it seems pretty cynical.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Colorado passes first law in the US to ban arrests based solely on colorimetric drug tests in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Colorado just enacted the nation’s first law banning arrests based solely on the results of colorimetric drug tests – a field test widely used by law enforcement across the country.

    The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.

    But these inexpensive tests also lead to false positives at alarming rates, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found.

    While the actual error rate nationwide is unknown, previous studies by manufacturers have put it around 4%. But the UPenn researchers believe the actual rate is much higher, from 15% to 38%. And a study by the New York City Department of Investigation showed test error rates from 79% to 91% in some correctional settings.

    10 votes

  15. Comment on Nation's largest urban battery is being built in Daly City, California in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't think this sort of comparison can be made without doing detailed calculations. For example, there are limits on how much energy power lines can transmit, so time of day might matter? Some...

    I don't think this sort of comparison can be made without doing detailed calculations. For example, there are limits on how much energy power lines can transmit, so time of day might matter?

    Some power is generated locally (for example, residential solar), so it seems like having some local storage might be useful?

    Pumped storage is good where available but geographically, it's pretty limited.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Evacuation of US troops from Mideast base sends community groups scrambling to help in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Bahrain is the home of the Navy's 5th Fleet, making it a central hub for providing maritime security in the Middle East region, including protecting commercial shipping. The country is an island in the Persian Gulf that sits roughly 124 nautical miles away from the coast of Iran, which makes Bahrain well within range of Iranian drone and missile strikes.

    [...]

    On the opening day of the war, the base, known as Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain, was struck multiple times. Posts on social media showed a ballistic missile and Iranian drones slamming into the base. Satellite imagery from the company Planet shows that at least seven buildings in and around the base were struck between Feb. 28 and March 6.

    In response to an NPR request, a Navy spokesman acknowledged that 1,500 sailors, their families and several hundred pets were relocated back to the U.S. from NSA Bahrain.

    Sailors have been arriving in Norfolk, Va., home to the world's biggest naval base, since at least the middle of March. Several groups that provide aid to military personnel say that the sailors arrived with very little. A call went out to community groups, asking for basic supplies like hygiene products.

    [...]

    "They literally told them, 'Get what you can get in the backpack. You've got to go,'" he said. "They came with no uniforms, nothing. The three we met first, they came with the clothes on their back, what they could fit in that backpack."

    [...]

    When troops move overseas, they don't keep a home in the United States. The military requires service members to designate a safe haven where they will be relocated to in an emergency. Some of the sailors have gone to stay with relatives, while others remain on bases in the United States. MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., and Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina have also been hubs for returning flights.

    On April 1, the Navy released updated guidance for sailors and families who were evacuated. The service has worked out how people can be reimbursed for living in hotel rooms, including families who were temporarily relocated to Italy and Germany before being transported back to the United States.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on Surf Social (from the makers of Flipboard) in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That protocol does exist. It's an RSS or Atom feed. Looks like surf.social does import RSS feeds. I don't know if it will export them as well.

    That protocol does exist. It's an RSS or Atom feed.

    Looks like surf.social does import RSS feeds. I don't know if it will export them as well.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Used electric vehicles are a bargain right now in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Across the U.S., people like Shepard are finding that used EVs are more attractively priced than ever — and are snapping the cars up as a result. It’s a welcome development in what has otherwise been a tough year for an industry that’s key to combatting climate change.

    With the oil shock created by the war in Iran, used EVs are likely to become even more attractive to shoppers. Nationally, gas prices have surged to over $4 per gallon on average; in California, the country’s EV capital, they’re nearing $6. Unlike new EVs, used versions have mostly reached priced parity with gas-powered cars, according to new data from Cox Automotive — making the preowned versions the cheapest way for people to ditch increasingly costly-to-fuel gas cars in the near term.

    [...]

    New EV sales dropped by 28% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, per Cox. That was primarily driven by the loss of federal tax credits under the megabill passed by Republicans in Congress last year.

    By contrast, used EV sales increased by 12% over the same period. The reason? Declining prices. The average cost of a used EV is now within about $1,300 of a comparable gas vehicle, Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, said during a March forecast call. ​“That affordability shift has clearly shown up in the data,” she said, ​“significantly expanding access for mainstream buyers.”

    In the U.S., new EVs still outsell used ones. That’s likely to change as the market matures, since the overall used car market is roughly three times as large as the new car market. Right now, EVs make up only about 2% of the used car market, but that share is growing, according to Cox data.

    [...]

    These latest data points aren’t coming out of left field, said Scott Case, CEO of Recurrent, a data-science firm specializing in collecting information on used EVs. His company tracked a 35% increase in used EV sales from 2024 to 2025, as well as a consistent downward trend in pricing, with 56% of used EVs selling for $30,000 or less as of January.

    [...]

    In particular, a lot of those used EVs are coming off leases made popular by a ​“leasing loophole” that allowed automakers and dealers to offer a full $7,500 federal tax credit, without the income qualification and manufacturer restrictions that applied to claiming the credit on direct sales.

    [...]

    And the latest vintages of used EVs offer an impressive value when compared with their gas-powered equivalents, Case said. Recurrent’s latest data indicates that a used EV is a year newer and has nearly 30,000 fewer miles than a similarly priced used gas car.

    5 votes