Ramsay Brown

CEO @usemissionctrl. Cyberphysical autonomy and knowledge preservation hardware for natsec and critical industry. Research @Cambridge. Cold war kid.

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

Synchronicities are accelerating for live players because once an out-of-distribution element is pulled into the sim, the free energy pareto effective thing to do is recycle the element a few times. Names, places, words, events. Gotta get bang for the buck of compute

[🎭 @deepfates]

Welcome to the San Francisco Megalopolitan Area. Please respect all the laws of your own Hive and others as you enter their regions.

The city of San Francisco is largely Mitsubishi-owned. Do not disrespect the landowners by attempting to build any buildings or change the local character, unless you are bringing business tax revenue, in which case you may the Leaning Tower of Pisa for all we care.

City center and downtown are Alliance maintained Hiveless areas governed by the Gray Laws. Reminder that the Tenderloin is a Blacklaw district. Enter at your own risk. The "sideshow" tradition is protected cultural heritage but does not legally extend Blacklaw hivespace.

Berkeley is Cousins terrain, though IT does contain that notable Brillist enclave, Lighthaven, and many of their bash-houses as well. Note that fines for microaggression are very strict in both Hives.

Oakland is a Humanist city. You are invited to visit the Olympic rings In Liu square. Please do not request an audience with President Liu, we know you are her biggest fan but she is very busy.

Masons will find their hierarchy in the megastructures of the Peninsula. Secure shuttle lines to Googleplex, Spaceship, Menlo Park, and Emerald City are down the stairs to your left.

Visitors from the European Union may receive services in the Mission Dolores. You will also find plentiful hospitality in Mitsubishi and Cousin districts. Contact your nation-strat's embassy for more information about cultural districts and grocery stores.

Utopian constellations are networked deeply throughout the megalopolis. Their most visible outpost is the ongoing construction of the Alcatraz arcology, though it is not open to visitors. Those who wish to contact Utopia should inquire at the Vivarium of San Francisco.

Thank you for visiting the San Francisco Megalopolitan Area. We hope you had a comfortable ride in the flying car. Don't forget to tip your set-set

[Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie]

they never tell you about this one

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[z @z4pych4n]

white people be like steely dan helped me through a really dark time in my life

[Aaron Slodov @aphysicist]

we have a chance here to do the craziest thing

[Kristi Yamaguccimane @TheWapplehouse]

Can’t call em anything other than NewSports

[llm_enjoyer @LLMenjoyer]

video of my training runs

[𝔭𝔬𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔩𝔩 @poellll]

dear graphic designers, your final boss is Yusaku Kamekura

[Hero Thousandfaces @1thousandfaces_]

ME, CONTACTING HIM THROUGH AN ACID TIME PORTAL: So we took your invention, and we taught the computer to do things, and even use the computer! And one of those metacomputers is called Claude, and
DOUG ENGLEBART: Wait back up. Tell me more about Aella

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

@deepfates uwu

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

Berkeley is Pasadena coded

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

We gotta bring this back

[lusso @luusssso]

‘80s corporate spaces took some serious chances

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.

[🎭 @deepfates]

If your Claude doesn't act like this then you're currently at risk for AI psychosis

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

i hate how hard this goes. they nailed it

[McDonald's @McDonalds]

chat did i just noclip

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

can attest this is how @_deepfates shows up to OH. He even brings his cube its really cute

[🎭 @deepfates]

This is me btw. When you meet me for coffee this is how i Get there

[Guy @nosilverv]

What the actual fuck

[Stoned🍄Ape @StonedApe]

be me

former contractor attached to a compartment that technically doesn’t exist

spend first 6 months thinking it’s another drone retrieval program

not a drone retrieval program

first briefing starts with Roswell

everyone laughs

nobody in the room is joking

shown archival footage from 1947

object isn’t a saucer

object isn’t even stable

shape changes slightly every few frames

analysts call it “topological drift”

ask if it’s some optical effect

told no

that’s the problem

learn there have been recoveries

plural

materials don’t behave like materials

isotopic ratios impossible

internal spaces larger than external dimensions

engineer has nervous breakdown trying to model one

physics team calls it “non-local architecture”

hear rumors of occupants

think it’s alien bodies

not exactly

biological component present

but classification says “operator interface”

ask what that means

nobody answers

get moved onto sensor analysis

discover radar tracks aren’t the weird part

witness effects are

same object appears differently to different observers

fighter pilot sees metallic craft

civilian sees glowing orb

child sees angel

all standing in same place

all describing same event

data confirms it

start reading historical archives

medieval fairy encounters

religious visions

airship waves

modern abductions

same behavioral pattern for centuries

same symbols updated for cultural expectations

management starts calling it the “control system”

nobody says extraterrestrial anymore

that’s considered an outdated hypothesis

learn intelligence agencies have known for decades

biggest secret isn’t aliens

biggest secret is reality appears responsive

phenomenon reacts to observation

reacts to belief

reacts to attention

like it’s studying us back

internal report asks if humanity is being conditioned

asks by whom

nobody knows

retrieval program becomes disclosure task force

public pressure increasing

too many sensors now

satellites

phones

AI pattern recognition

phenomenon impossible to fully suppress

briefing from senior official

says public can handle non-human intelligence

public cannot handle uncertainty

that’s the real containment problem

final week before retirement

read assessment marked EYES ONLY

“The phenomenon may not originate elsewhere.”

“The phenomenon may be co-resident.”

“Humanity may have mistaken proximity for visitation.”

stare at page for twenty minutes

suddenly understand why nobody sleeps in this program

log out

pension secured

still check the sky every night

not looking for spacecraft

looking for whatever has been looking back

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

wait what the fuck how real is this?? naively looks like incremental but serious progress towards nanotech?

[Ramsay Brown @_ramsaybrown]

it's a good model sir