Boston Computation Club Max von Hippel

Arthur O’Dwyer is a C++ programmer and blogger who today joined us to talk about his musings on the algebraic structure of the popular web-game Infinite Craft. Infinite Craft is a clever little experiment in sandboxed exploration, and it turns out to give rise to a rather complex mathematical structure with some interesting background in theoretical CS. Arthur covered all this and more in his presentation, which was super interesting and a lot of fun to watch.

Check out Arthur's original blog post here: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2024/03/03/infinite-craft-theory/



Check out Arthur's slides here: https://bstn.cc/artifacts/arthurODwyer/infiniteCraft.pdf

Evan Boehs is a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT who broke the freaking internet.  What more do I need to say?  Hire this kid.  Maybe I will.  It's a race.  



Evan made an npm package called everything which installs everything.  Then he got stuck in a dependency loop when someone tried to delete something.  It turns out this is a nearly impossible problem to solve and he totally broke npm.  Then a bunch of adults got made at him, when really, they should have been mad at themselves for building a bad system.  



You can read Evan's full story here: https://boehs.org/node/npm-everything

June Marcuse

Adam Karvonen was my coworker at Galois and is a bright guy doing really interesting stuff in the ML interpretability space. Today he joined us to present his work on Chess-GPT, you guessed it, a GPT model that can play chess. The punchline isn't so much how good the model is as it is how the model "thinks" -- Adam provides compelling evidence that the model internally reasons about an actual board state, and learns to make legal moves. The discussion on this one was great and we really appreciate that Adam took the time to talk to us! Also -- you should hire him! He's doing MATS but will be on the job market at the end of the Summer.

Max Ammann is a cybersecurity researcher at Trail of Bits, where he's recently been working on extending his Master's thesis work on fuzzing cryptographic protocols into an industrial-grade fuzzing tool. That work resulted in an S&P publication which is what he joined us to present today. This was a really good talk but also a great discussion, in large part because of the highly engaged audience (with representation from Galois, TwoSix, and academia!).

For this event, Holmes Wilson of Fight for the Future moderated a panel retrospective on the Pegasus malware. Our panelists were:

- Jonathan Rugman: Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Channel 4 News, BAFTA Award-winning journalist, visiting lecturer at University of London, and Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI.

- Raya Sharbain: education and communities coordinator at the Tor Project, and digital rights activist at the Jordan Open Source Association as well as the Digital Arabia Network.

- Elina Castillo Jimenéz: feminist human rights lawyer and digital activist at the Amnesty International Tech Lab.

- Prashant Anantharaman: former speaker at the club who completed his PhD at Dartmouth under Sergey Bratus and now works at Narf Industires. And …

- Hinako Sugiyama: international human rights lawyer and law professor at UC Irvine.

This was one of our best events ever and well worth the listen.