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This post was organically written, non-AI farmed
A couple of years ago, I posted a review on an AI conference’s papers. I’ve been playing with Claude Opus 4.6 at work for some time now, and while I still stand by my statement, I do have some opinions on the real productivity gains to be made here.
TL;DR: It’s cool, and helpful, and a bandwidth maximizer, but not a…
TL;DR it’s not promising.
Introduction Hardware tends to move slow. And for good reason. When you spend millions of dollars in capex, you want to eliminate as much risk as possible.
Still, the demand just keeps increasing. I (knock on wood) don’t foresee the world needing any less amount of hardware, and thus, any less amount of verification. And there’s really not that…
On Goals and Identity Goals My friends often call me goal oriented. I disagree often (they also call me argumentative).
Consider this random article from this hippie clickbait Buzzfeed article that has zero scientific merit but good enough for off-the-cuff conversations with my friends. I don’t identify with a single one of these traits.
Of course, one’s self-perception of…
Are you a lucky person?
My parents have regularly donated blood. Wack Chinese medicine aside, they tell the story that my sister and I needed major blood transfusions as newborns. In my sister’s case, the need was incredibly urgent, and there was no blood available, with little visibility for the next unit’s arrival. My parents themselves couldn’t donate blood in time, as it…
10/3 EDIT 0: This is the first draft, and honestly I have a problem with writing drafts too much and polishing too much. But given this is more of a survey and my intent is to be a bit more piecemeal, I am just decided to call it here and add more as I continue. I am very fine with it being an incomplete list, and it will necessarily have to be filled in.
A little lie can travel half way ‘round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots.’ - Mark Twain
Recent news about potential superconductor LK99 or rather the fact that it isn’t one are quite timely for me (the Nature article details a great summary). It’s just another example about the difficulty and importance of verification.
There’s many mixed…
Inventing it is 80% of the fight
The Cost of Nukes Alex Wellerstein argues that inventing the nuke was hard, but maintaining it was harder. In terms of the technical and social cost over decades, all the old warheads we upgrade, nuclear waste caves we create, and the political capital spent domestically and abroad to ensure our tools of science are used benevolently are immense.
In the…
I totally write this on Chinese New Year’s Eve rather than actual New Year’s to be celebratory, why do you ask?
Honestly, 2020 and 2021 were quite a blur, and only in 2022 did I really feel like I actually had change. There may be overlap with 2021 as a result.
Part of the reason I like to write is to fight back this feeling of time blazing past. I have like 20 draft posts that…
Preface I want a PhD before I die.
Why? Same reason(s) other people might. Something something passion.
Cynical reasons aside– nothing else useful to do with the major; it’s a bureaucratic checkmark; I want Tenure and coast the rest of my life– people want to have impact in their work and contribute to the world, and a PhD is what many view as an avenue to do…
And all I got was this lousy board!
I actually had one of these during school as part of research, but had to give it up since I didn’t buy it. My student freeloading days are sadly over.
But money is handy so I got one.
Figure 0: *Cat tax!* NewAE provides tutorials to better learn the toolkit, and as I do the tutorials, I find they’re a bit too handwavy with the theory and…
Been a while, oops.
Interestingly, there are not very many Set 5 writeups. There’s a lot of code for Set 5, but not very many explanations.
This is annoying. For some things, pure “code” is enough, e.g. “Implement Diffie-Hellman”. You can learn it by reading the code. For others, code really isn’t enough and needs a further explanation. That’s like…
last updated: 9/18
I somewhat frequently talk with friends on startup ideas. Some dumb and silly, some pertinent to what we need. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It’s all in the execution.
Here is a (living?) collection of these dumb conversations. Will definitely be pretty off-the-cuff.
Shamir’s Secret Sharing Password Manager First, password managers are good. Use one. Honestly…
This is the first blurb on a potentially many-part series on what problems I aim to tackle in my career.
Three People Sean is a CPU architect. His job is to work on the system’s memory hierarchy– store queues, fill buffers, translation caches, etc. Or at least, his job used to be simpler back in the day, before these annoyances.
Now, in code reviews, he’s asked whether he…
Skip to the bottom header “My Favorite Number” if you care little about my rambles.
New Life Events Life’s been a tad busy. Instead of doing cryptopals (whoops) I’ve participated in HACKDAC2020 where I was pretty much the only single person participant; the rest consisted of pretty large teams (from what I saw, ranging from size 4 – 12).
I was in the process…
I spent 20 hours on this set, but I also didn’t do one challenge since it involved MD4– perhaps I’ll revisit it with some other hash that’s vulnerable to length extension attacks (like SHA2). Overall, this set was (as stated) a bit easier than the last one.
One thing that I learned/found pretty cool was implementing SHA1 myself and really internalizing why length…
In total I probably spent 30 hours on this set, and half of that time was refactoring some previous functions I wrote in previous challenges.
With the completion of this set, I’ve officially caught up to my freshman self, hopefully with a bit more mature coding style.
Set 3 Challenge 1 (Number 17): The CBC padding oracle Puzzle This is the best-known attack on modern block-cipher…
Been a while since I wrote about Set 1, but frankly it takes probably twice as long to explain something than it does to actually do it.
Anyway, here’s Cryptopals Set 2.
Set 2 Challenge 1 (Number 9): Implement PKCS#7 padding Puzzle A block cipher transforms a fixed-sized block (usually 8 or 16 bytes) of plaintext into ciphertext. But we almost never want to transform a single block;…
Cryptopals is a set of cryptography challenges. Pretty straightforward– just do them.
I first stumbled across this sophomore year (nearly 4 years ago, I’m old :)) and I’ve been meaning to finish it up for years, only getting up to ~halfway set 3. I’ve made excuse after excuse, like school or internships or other projects, but no more! After my resolution and stumbling…
In 2019 my goal was to become more adventurous and explore. At this point last year (1/1/2019) I was in my last semester of undergrad and was incredibly nostalgiac of my time at Champaign-Urbana, so I had decided to invest more time in friendships and grow a bit more as a person.
In previous years my goals were more technically-oriented or concrete, such as “complete x project for my…
Test (and first?) post This marks the start of my blog. As of this date, I am 22 years old and have graduated 3 months ago from the University of Illinois.
I start this blog largely for my own edification, to document what I learn in life. I realize now, after graduating, that I’ve learned an incredible amount during the last 4 years, and I regret not realizing or documenting my personal…
Hi! I’m Lucas. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and went to school at the University of Illinois– Urbana Champaign (UIUC) where I graduated with a B.S. in computer engineering in 2019. UIUC has always been a top-5 school, and as of 2019 has been ranked #3 in CompE according to U.S News college ranking. I am very proud of where I came from and will talk your ear off about it.
This page is to show cool pages/websites I’ve ran into in no particular order. I should probably sort them by time/subject some day. Typically hardware or security related.
Psuedo-bookmarky page as well :)
Hardware The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Burned-out Flash Bricks Older Teslas ChipWhisperer Wiki: Hardware Security Tutorials I no longer have…
I’m a firm believer in a growth mindset. Being wrong should be embraced. Thus, inspired from here, if something I write is blatently incorrect, I will pay a bounty.
I’m starting this bounty program as of 10/9/2021, so I haven’t decided the ranges yet, but let’s say $1–$100.
Below is a list of caught mistakes.