tptacek

21 ms·

541.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I don't know what you think this link shows, but you can just jump to CHI1 on Google Maps (or, you know, drive there) to see what that area looks like.
542.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I can't get past the premise here that data centers are using material amounts of water. You took all the time to write this, but then included an assertion I think we all broadly know isn't true.
543.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I'd love to see a Google Maps picture of a large, attractive parking lot.
544.
by tptacek 3mo ago
No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of
545.
by tptacek 3mo ago
First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs
546.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather ha
547.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore i
548.
by tptacek 3mo ago
I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated. We're talking about office buildings because office buil
549.
by tptacek 3mo ago
When we're talking about things like AES and SHA2, a common answer among experts to (1) is "probably no". (That's not a common answer to the same question about, say, ECDLP, even leaving quantum aside).
550.
by tptacek 3mo ago
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything. Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, o
551.
by tptacek 3mo ago
The office buildings next to the CyrusOne data centers in the western suburbs are not filled with people from Aurora. They're filled with commuters.
552.
by tptacek 3mo ago
You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to?
553.
by tptacek 3mo ago
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects
554.
by tptacek 3mo ago
This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
555.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have o
556.
by tptacek 3mo ago
AES doesn't reduce to a fundamental mathematical problem we're uncertain about, in the same way as discrete logs, factoring, the elliptic curve discrete log, or shortest vectors. It's a simpler idea, mathematically: rigorousl
557.
by tptacek 3mo ago
The trains have a bad habit of hitting them.
558.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact
559.
by tptacek 3mo ago
It's inconvenient for any amount of data, because it essentially begs the question; if you can securely transmit N bytes of key pad to a counterparty, just use that mechanism to transmit N bytes of plaintext instead.
560.
by tptacek 3mo ago
You can certainly invent a weak block cipher, and an LLM would probably do a decent job spotting e.g. something that could be productively attacked with a SAT solver.
561.
by tptacek 3mo ago
There's a lot of basic computer science hiding in it that's been remarkably stable for generations of computer scientists, which is not something you can say about asymmetric cryptography.
562.
by tptacek 3mo ago
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space
563.
by tptacek 3mo ago
LLMs aren't literally science fiction.
564.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Symmetric cryptography isn't based on complicated math the way asymmetric cryptography it is. The right way to think about symmetric cryptography is that the core hard problem is simply making PLAINTEXT XOR KEY work, efficiently, with
565.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Silicon Valley does an elliptic curve attack; it doesn't break symmetric cryptography.
566.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Right, maybe, but Aumasson's whole point is that this prediction doesn't apply to AES, SHA2, BLAKE2, &c.
567.
by tptacek 3mo ago
RC4 is a good example of what Aumasson means when he jokes about weak symmetric cryptography being a quirk of history. It's genuinely weird that RC4 was as popular as it was! DES is broken because it's small, with tiny keys and an
568.
by tptacek 3mo ago
This is JP Aumasson, the co-author of BLAKE2 and BLAKE3. Aumasson is notorious in cryptography circles for his "too much crypto" argument, that modern symmetric cryptography is overly conservative, running more rounds than are nec
569.
by tptacek 3mo ago
To train a large model to do what? Break AES? How would that work?
570.
by tptacek 3mo ago
Counterpoint: nobody is going to care what the front page looks like designwise, as long as the words are right.

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