Quadratic memory reductions for Zero-knowledge Proofs | Hacker News Reader

Quadratic memory reductions for Zero-knowledge Proofs

github.com

76 pointslogannyeMD23 comments

This entity is sentient enough not to publish on arxiv medrxiv or biorxiv, where they will surely be red-flagged for self citations and single-authorship

Their most believable and unsensational works are in generative histopathology

http://dx.doi.org/10.1200/jco.2023.41.16_suppl.e23500

https://doi.org/10.1200/jco.2023.41.16_suppl.e13592

Meeting abstracts (you can think of them as posters or talks given by interns)

>The trained model’s validation accuracy of 73.7% improves upon past reported methods.

Mediocre performance, but at least those papers have coauthors

> they will surely be red-flagged for self citations and single-authorship

Where is the problem with single-authorship?

I don't see a problem personally but single, or more strictly speaking, for medical journals, --even medrxiv-- unaffiliated authorship is a (internal) filter

I've been thinking about ZKP's a lot recently. Using them we could perhaps build interesting and useful decentralised social media protocols. You could create a union at your workplace where you make agreements with everyone but you only communicate directly with your closest colleagues. You could create anonymous groups of doctors in a certain region that listen to reggae three times a week that think it would be worth renovating the cafeteria.

It would be a better foundation for the social contract than tick tock videos. But you'd need to make ZKP understandable and interactive for the average user.

The problem is the same problem with crypto dao projects - cryptographic certainties only apply to mathematical structures; you can't validate that someone actually holds a quality until you can embed that digitally. That turns out to be very hard to do for most things.

Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability.

Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.

I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.

As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.

Wow, that’s a neat idea - composable but verifiable notaries!

Well, they have to be verifiable offline (or sort-of offline) as a prerequisite. ZKP gives you the composition.

With things like tlsnotary you should be able to prove to a third party anything that you can request over https. I.e. <domain> says that <fact about me>. Or uk-identity.com says that I'm a human and I'm >18 years old. Bank says I can pay for this etc.

As I understand it, you can do arbitrary computations on https responses and prove that you didn't tamper with the response or the computation.

I always feel that if normal E2EE is very hard to do correctly the moment you add use cases which require zero knowledge proofs it's a x5-x10 complexity explosion on top of it. And that is in context where most companies will severely struggle to do E2EE right.

Yep, those are indeed words in that README. That much I am pretty sure of.

I read it to essentially mean that the cost of scaling a system just dropped a lot

Is this real or AI?

I think it's not real.

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/search?type=3&name=L

"lnye@andrew.cmu.edu" doesn't seem to be a real user.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=loga...

There seems to be a lot of slope with no citations.

I think this submission should be flagged.

you post this from an account created 3 weeks ago with karma 3 based on an email search?

The argument doesn't depend on the users karma

Plus the lack of scholar cites for any of the users papers is more damning than the email search - but they work together.

See my other post. The author has a TedX talk and papers with citations and co-authors, etc. While that wouldn't exclude a cloned profile, it certainly doesn't make him not real.

https://www.cmu.edu/swartz-center-for-entrepreneurship/educa... lists a certain "Logan Nye, MD". It doesn't give his email address, but I checked a few of the other people and their email addresses don't turn up with the search you linked either.

So I think the GitHub user logannye is most likely a real master's student at CMU, but that doesn't mean he isn't also mass-producing papers of questionable validity with AI.

It seems like he took a leave of absence from CMU to start his company (based on Linkedin)

The person seems real, unless he faked his TedX talk 2 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et5HC8SR0BA or 2700 followers on LI https://www.linkedin.com/in/logan-nye/ along with the company, a cofounder etc.

The volume and breadth of publications is unreal.

e.g. Quantum Extensions to the Einstein Field Equations - 10 citations https://www.scirp.org/pdf/jhepgc2024104_362181145.pdf

The physics paper has been published on a predatory 'open-access' journal, where basically you can pay to publish whatever (ref: https://blog.cabells.com/2021/07/07/no-signs-of-slowing/, look for scirp).

I gave a diagonal reading, it uses the right jargon somehow. They add some new components to the Einstein-Hilbert action they say originate from quantum complexity contributions, to be honest seems completely random, but i'm not an expert. Especially the conclusions look like they have been written with AI.

The 10 citations are almost all self-citing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2388097775195172652...

Your links give a plausible picture but apparently not in the terms you're thinking.

He's a real person. His TedX talk is about applying AI medicine. Now medicine has so far been one of the least useful ways of applying LLMs/AI but even in areas where its been effective, it's problem is no one is that much of expert 'cause the AI is doing the "thinking" (prompt-"engineering" isn't nothing, it just isn't that hard to pick-up and has to be constantly changing and simplifying as the models improve).

And the thing about his "amazing" output is that it has all the ear-marks of someone who lightly editing "brilliant" LLM hallucinations. Just the case of Quantum Extensions to the Einstein Field Equations; this is either going to be big advance with thousands of citations or it will bogus (and paid placement - that's negative credibility, less credible than just an bare ArchiveX upload).

So, sure he's real. His claims, on the other hand...

Edit: And the thing about the stream of "genius" ideas is that LLMs seem to be inspiring many people with the approach of bouncing ideas off the chat-thing, having the chat-thing fill the ideas with seemingly plausible phrases and math (most of which makes sense) and reach the point where they seem to have created an earth shattering advance - especially in fields they didn't know in any depth. Notably, cranks have been common in many fields already but this allows cranks to proceed without the former markers of crankdom. And that presents some challenges to a variety of fields.

is this a longer restatement of the above idea that the person is real but publications are unreal?

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