Dietrich Stein

Founder & Research Engineer at Anosic Systems. Rust, cryptography, ZK systems, blockchain, distributed networks, and trustworthy AI.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@thomasfbloom The metric is interesting, but only as "difficulty normalized by succinctness".

Actual "interestingness" would be the expected increase in useful reasoning enabled by a discovery/proof, relative to the connections already available and the research activity likely to benefit.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@AnosicSystems I jumped through the hoops for verification, but it's a manual process so for the first few days it appear that anyone installing it will have to deal with this sketchy-looking bypass modal.

I'm actually glad they do this; even if it is just some DNS automation and an LLM judge.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

Just published this VS Code extension. Code on Github, PRs welcome.

I could make it work for Apple (Intel) relatively easily. Making it work for Apple (Silicon) would require enlisting (annoying) my friends.

Either way, let me know if you're interested!

#vscode #programming

[Anosic Systems @AnosicSystems]

Announcing: Anosic Speech Recorder for Visual Studio Code

Local (Whisper-based) speech transcription for private ready-to-paste input into any AI assistant extension or anything else.

For now, Linux x64 (including WSL2) only.

https://t.co/mOpdyzWIx8

https://t.co/iTjj42E48G

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@TheXSami Thanks!

Asking for things out loud is getting easier.

Trick is still typing for short requests while not forgetting to dictate for complex ones. It is helping me learn to speak more fluently and with more detail.

Needs some things, but I will open source it under MIT soon.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

I made this VS Code extension today that transcribes my voice with Whisper Small (ONNX model) and copies it to the clipboard for me.

Microsoft doesn't allow microphone for these webviews. So I wrote a Rust utility to pipe LE 32-bit floats, mono, 16 kHz to Node over stdout.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@ThorkilVaerge Nice! Will be 1st to go public for sure.

I have been calling this "valid-on-sight". Not sure what Mina calls their transparent version. A few questions:

1. Block payload size?
2. TX per block?
3. Peak prover and verifier RAM?
4. Byte-count stable? If so, after how many blocks?

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@asn_d6 Good list. I would add verifier malleability.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@pierrecomputer My bad, I thought something like it was built in.

https://t.co/KFh6iPTvch with a commit-based parsing like semantic-release would be amazing.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@J_L_Colvin @jessedeansquire @SebAaltonen Gatekeepers will always make insane claims about art and true artistry when technology threatens the prestige and economics of their craft.

There is no goalpost; only their vibes about what ought to be.

Clearly, you won. Breathing artfully is expression, even if by iron lungs.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

Green boxes. Progress towards 223; which would be a major milestone!

Reaching it would mean that weeks of research and formal verification of have finally resulted in a protocol design that potentially delivers both fair economics and secure consensus at the same time.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

This the local view of the current Lean 4 protocol repair work for #Veridium, a pre-launch L1 blockchain protocol that intends to deliver generations of economic mining fairness for commodity hardware.

My agents write the theorems. These charts help me keep them meaningful.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@Zac_Aztec This is what I have suspected. The commonly held assumption that OpenAI and other frontier labs have held onto their cryptographic breakthroughs out of benevolence or fear of backlash has always seemed silly.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@AayushStack #2 but the key is solving supply-chain attacks, so embargo periods and human-only bypasses for dependency locks will be of limited utility.

Declare a Z-day (zero-dependencies) mission to hard-fork everything. Kernel, utilities, drivers, browser, IDE, extensions. Internal E2E TCB

[Thomas Jiralerspong @tomjiralerspong]

New blog post - Chasing the Karpathy Peak (and Falling Off Slop Cliff): Confessions from Slopaholics Anonymous

My story of becoming a slopaholic, who’s most at risk, and how to avoid it (or recover)
https://t.co/9RHumEXfMM

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

2/ But, activation should depend on objectively verifiable evidence that a specified security assumption has failed.

Ideally, using ZK proofs to avoid revealing the underlying witness.

Other forms tend to allowing a discretionary authority to replace cryptographic primitives.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

1/ Crypto agility presents its own problems for blockchain; greatest being the danger of celebrating an abdication of responsibility to defense-in-depth.

Hybrid fallbacks tied to protocol-defined, deterministic transitions to pre-committed alternatives are generally advisable.🧵

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@EliBenSasson Crypto-agility can be a screen for corruption and/or a poorly designed protocol.

Tying it to central/plutocratic governance is a MUST NOT for blockchain protocols taking security seriously.

Tying it to performative (non-binding) governance is greed manifesting as obfuscation.

[Dietrich Stein @pixelsort]

@DBCrypt0 Right, they can only cover so much. If this happens again next month and they do not the pain becomes real.

This is why we can't say "maybe centralization has it's place".

It serves a purpose, sure. But there are under-developed decentralized alternatives to custodial exchange.