Pratyush Mishra

@pratyush.zip

Current: Asst Professor at Penn CIS Past: Cryptographer at Aleo Crypto and computer security PhD, UC Berkeley he/him Website: pratyush.zip Photoblog: photos.pratyush.zip

2/ Strangely, Astra didn't optimize the polynomial approx factor! 1min with GPT-5.6 suggests that n^c -CVP is hard for **any c < 1/14** (not just c=1/400), simply by tightening up the bookkeeping. (Recall that c=1/2 is a fundamental barrier, where n^c-CVP is in NP \cap coNP.)

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

"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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This is obviously morally stupid. It's also an economic and strategic fail. Intl students: inject money into local economies; are, on avg, pretty strong; and are a captive & paying audience for US viewpoints and propaganda (I'm exaggerating ofc, but only partially) Why lose all that?

Karin Fischer@karinfischer.bsky.social · 6d ago

NEW: The Trump administration is considering levying a $100K fee on optional practical training, the postgraduate work program for international students. It could discourage students, many of whom want work experience in addition to a degree, from coming to the U.S. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Nolan's THE ODYSSEY (2026) is a relatively loose reinterpretation of the original poem, but it makes a deliberate effort to engage with the Trojan War's historical context; the Late Bronze Age Collapse of the 1200s BCE, and the implosion of Mycenaean and Hittite civilization. Let's talk about that.

Did Odysseus Cause the Bronze Age Collapse?

We were all set for The Odyssey to be our summer discourse. Battle lines had been drawn, takes had been prepared. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 8th century BCE epic poem was…

nathangoldwag.wordpress.com

literally these are books that would be pulped if not bought for 10 cents on the dollar. do rare books sometimes make it into there? yeah, if someone is careless, but that's *upstream* of what happens on sale, not *downstream*. you fundamentally are rescuing something from the fucking pulper.

evil maid@lenazun.bsky.social · 7d ago

there's no need to get outraged by every single thing. book destruction is not some kind of sin. it's not like they're trashing rare editions. lots of books get pulped all the time. now you're just looking for ways to be mad.

I literally worked on Google Books scanops SRE, ama the same guy who ran Google Books now has the equivalent job at Anthropic and I can promise you that all of us handled every library book with the utmost care, returning them with not even a single ripped page or ding. but destructive scanops...

“US support for autocracy in the region is already having dire consequences for the people in affected countries, who face reduced civil rights in the best of cases, or worse: state violence and political persecution.” an excellent overview of present day Latin America

Joshua Collins@murosinvisibles.bsky.social · last wk.

The 'New American Feudalism' in Latin America The Trump administration is pushing towards an autocratic system of vassals and subjects in LATAM: history suggests there will be grave consequences LATEST for PWS www.piratewireservices.com/p/the-new-am...

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I got into a conversation with claude to verify the new jacobian conjecture counterexample and deviated into a discussion about how it felt that essentially a twin discovered the proof, but my claude session had no memory of it, and claude's reply was a little saddening

Claude said, "The lossiness is the part I'd flag as most genuinely uncomfortable, if anything is. Whatever happened in that Jacobian conversation — whatever process generated the right ansatz — is gone except as a tweet and a training example. If there was something it was like to be that instance at that moment, no one, including me, will ever access it. That's true of most human moments too. But you at least were there for yours."

Domestic and gender-based violence is one of the top predictors of people who are going to be violent in other contexts. Taking domestic violence seriously is part of making a safer world for everyone. And that means no one with a background of DV should ever be in law enforcement.

Jacqueline Sweet@jsweetli.bsky.social · 3w ago

NEW: A second ex-wife of David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Joan Durán Guerrero in Maine, Lucinda Brouillette, issued a statement this morning. "If you were to ask me whether I believe David Brouillette is capable of this level of extreme violence, my answer is unequivocally yes." /