so it's been almost 7 months since i last said something. a lot has changed for me personally, but there is very little different in the global situation. i think i knew back in may that it was likely the pandemic would continue for a very long time (i.e. into 2021), but i don't think i'd fully reckoned with it. anyway. pandemics are shit, as we all know; i've sat around in my house a lot, as we could have probably guessed.
why has it taken me this long to write something? it's just the habit of a lifetime, i guess. i started off this year at a faster cadence than i had previously operated (after i had declared it my new year resolution to say & write more). but after having all previously laid plans written off by a deadly virus, it became quite draining writing at such frequency. the gap in time has seen my momentum completely congeal, and thus it has taken a new period of confinement to force me to break down the old barriers again.
the other problem that i have is that i'm not being a fan of writing in public, which obviously goes against the spirit of a blog. my meagre public following that is converging to zero people does very little to dampen the worries of posting my thoughts into the void. i think such difficulties are probably quite natural, but i would also just like to get past such trivial concerns.
also, i could just make it easier for myself and write fewer words in each post. unfortunately, i think you could find easier problems to solve associated with well-known cryptographic hardness assumptions.
the summer
at the end of may, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in minneapolis. his death was followed by a series of protests that called for an end to racist policing and wider discrimination against black people and other ethnic minorities. the protests made it in a smaller form to lisbon, which helps illustrate how widely they spread.
at the time, i was spending most of my hours working, with little else dedicated to other pursuits. not only that, but the work that i was doing was benefitting nobody except for the company that i worked for: cloudflare. one of the many tech companies that have profited immensely from the virtualisation of the world's interactions. on top of this, the strain of continuing to work at full pelt, during such a difficult period, meant that i could not even really justify to myself that i was really enjoying it either.
so, i resolved that i would need to find a way to counteract the inherent passivity that was being brought on by my working situation. the protests highlighted to me that there was much more that i could be doing, especially in dedicating more of my time to helping those that continue to be disadvantaged in today's societies. at the very least, i wanted to find new ways of finding purpose in the things (and work) that i do.
various events
the three paragraphs above are a synthesization of a months long discussion that i had both internally and externally with those that are close to me. fortunately, the summer offered a welcome respite from my struggles with this constant work-purpose balancing act. i'll just put some photos from some various places here to reduce the burden on the writer.
we went to évora at the start of june for a long weekend. we cycled around the fields of vines a little bit. with the lockdown just receding, we had plenty of time for the tourist spots; a special mention for the bone chapel.
we travelled down to the algarve for the first time and stayed with some friends near aljezur. amongst other things, spending a thoroughly british-looking afternoon by the seaside.
before the summer ended, we visited coimbra (home of portugal's oldest university). i would assume that there would normally be a lot of student's around, but we had the place to ourselves.
but, for the most part, we were in lisbon.
one thing that i have not really mentioned is the endless heat. the flat we rent is badly insulated to a point that i have not previously experienced. this is bad in winter, but it's even worse on the hot days. at least, it helped me to understand why we always seemed to be the first mugs on our street to be going to bed every night. it's simply not cool enough at 11pm to attempt to sleep.
the autumn
i zapped through the summer at hyper-speed. but the autumn followed, and with it i made the decision to cut loose from the railroads of big tech. i left my job at the end of september and let myself drift into the sunset of the hottest months.
during this time i found and started a postdoc with the social physics and complexity lab (SPAC) at LIP (o laboratório de instrumentação e física experimental de partículas). particle physics is not a topic that i ever thought i would be associated with, but i've thoroughly enjoyed joining the group and returning to the academic setting as a whole. i'm doing research as part of the ERC project on Fake News and Real People. the project investigates the various social and human dynamics that influence the spread of misinformation on the Internet from a variety of scientific perspectives. i am currently looking into the current state-of-the-art around implementations of privacy-preserving mechanisms for statistical analysis.
returning to academia is something that i have been thinking about for a while. obviously, it's well known that the sector in general has its own issues. but i've seen a bit of tech and i'm pretty sure industry is never really going to act in the interests of the people. it's debatable whether academic research has a large impact on the lives of most, but i am slightly more optimistic.
this optimism that i have was initially reawakened by seny kamara's talk at crypto 2020 earlier this year that i would highly recommend (even if you're not a cryptography expert). imo, it is a seminal talk for the area of cryptography (perhaps the most important yet given). for me, it helped illustrate the value that can be found in research if you seek to solve the right problems.
right now
the autumn ended with a new set of restrictions and confinements. fortunately we got to venture a little bit around before everything came into place. i'm going to elide pictures for now, and post these at a later date to keep the post somewhat short.
the restrictions are a little difficult, requiring that weekends are mostly spent indoors and that we observe a weeknight curfew. but, the heat has dissipated, and the weekdays are much more enjoyable. i'm happy with the place that i have landed. i hope that from this position i can start to do more work that benefits the wider society.
so, things are good coming towards the end of the year. as a matter of confirmation, i will force myself to write again before it's over.