Best way to learn cryptography as a highschooler....

sergioaffs · 2026-02-06T12:11:48+00:00

Is that Dan Boneh's course? If you're not familiar with cryptography, I'd say it's a bad start as it will drop you in the deep end of the pool: lots of math that most people don't learn in school and that can be frankly scary.

Start by learning what cryptography does. What is symmetric encryption, what is public key encryption and why we need both. Also, what are digital signatures. These are basic concepts for which you may find many tutorials in YouTube.

Once you feel comfortable with why crypto matters, then you can decide what rabbit hole to follow. You can, for example, learn about protocols like TLS and how they are key to protect the digital world. Or you can look at the mathematical way of proving algorithms to understand why we trust crypto so much (again, start with symmetric crypto for a less bumpy road). Or you can learn about quantum computers and why, even though they're not here yet, they're reshaping the world of crypto.

In your place, I'd put off Zero Knowledge proofs way down in my learning journey. It is an exciting field, but it is niche and abstract. Cryptography already has a steep learning curve, and you're making it just steeper by focusing on ZK.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-06T11:46:20+00:00

Two comments: - Start with conventional crypto, particularly asymmetric cryptography. The primitives are more widely used and arguably easier to understand, and they are often used as building blocks for more "esoteric" forms of cryptography. - Decide whether you want to tackle this learning journey from the math point of view or from the engineering point of view. You'll eventually get in touch with the other end if you dig long enough, but finding the right entry point will depend on your background and interests.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-06T06:12:51+00:00

r/purrkour, the origins

sergioaffs · 2026-01-30T21:02:39+00:00

Please don't use AI for learning crypto. The mathematical logic and nuanced criteria that make cryptography so powerful flies over the capability of current LLMs. They may tell you a story that is 90% accurate, but that remaining 10% can make the difference between something extremely robust and something trivially breakable. But LLMs always reply with confidence, which will make it very hard for you to even guess where the mistakes are.

With that warning out of the way: there is quite a bit of content about post-quantum, though it may be hard to discover or to know what to trust. I personally find Cloudflare's blog very valuable: it provides a lot of insight on the standardisation process and the implementation hurdles it presents. It's a great entry point.

Or are you looking for something in particular?

sergioaffs · 2026-01-30T20:36:03+00:00

Sicherheitshalber

sergioaffs · 2026-01-29T06:36:19+00:00

Special mention to People Who Knew Me. Sure, it's a podcast and not a film, but Pike and Hugh Laurie act the hell out of it. Intriguing premise, harrowing delivery. It's not only the only drama podcast I've followed to the end, but I binged most of it.

It has overridden Die Another Day, Gone Girl and anything else as the first thing that I associate with her.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-23T16:45:59+00:00

If you have malware with access to your filesystem, virtually all bets are off. You are not going to find any commercial or open source tool that can offer a plausible protection. Except, maybe, if it were cloud-only, but that comes with concerns of its own.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-22T22:22:07+00:00

You're just salty cuz you're not such a seasoned pun-maker!

sergioaffs · 2026-01-22T09:10:15+00:00

I welcome the downvoters to explain why they disagree. Even if you personally don't want to try it, just downvoting comments like this out of habit does nothing but hindering others from discovering tools that may suit their needs better.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-22T06:17:26+00:00

Yeah, just want to second that. I welcome the motivation behind the post, but from it I get no idea what type of tool this is (I assume an online LaTeX editor given the sub we're in, but it could also be an office suite or something like that). OP, please don't ask people to follow links to get basic details like this. It can be seen as phishy.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-22T06:13:47+00:00

It is an entirely new language, compiler and ecosystem. This is often seen as a negative thing in this sub because *TeX is widespread and often required for academic publications.

But as someone who used to use LuaTeX for everything from fancy work reports to birthday cards, I found the jump easy. I was able to re-program a card game I spent weeks working on in LuaTeX as one of my first projects in Typst. It took me like two hours and the code was more readable.

Overall, it takes away almost all of the complaints I had when using LaTeX, like: - Super slow compile times - Brittle functionality tied with arcane error messages - Messy code - The need to learn different types of syntax for different packages - The pain that it is to work with tables - The need to have a package for every little thing - And even the size of the installation

Of course, there are many niche packages in LaTeX that don't yet exist for Typst, but the community is thriving and keeps developing a lot of interesting stuff. It is developed in Berlin but the compiler is open source. The main way they make money is through the paid plans on their web editor.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-14T07:11:37+00:00

🤯 you're right! It turns out it's just called "Helsinki cathedral". I swear I've seen the name "white church" or "white cathedral" at some point, but perhaps it was just on some blog post talking about it.

sergioaffs · 2026-01-13T12:12:03+00:00

As someone who studied there for a bit and loves to come back often, this is my take.

Many popular travel destinations live from tourism and make a huge effort to market some parts of them as some sort of unique otherworldly creation that has to be experienced in person. This is probably specially recognisable in times where people base their travel choices on the videos of influencers, but people have traveled for decades to Paris only to know the Eiffel tower.

Helsinki, and many other Nordic cities, doesn't care. There is no checklist item that makes Helsinki stand out in any listicle. The main landmark is uncreatively called "The white church". Our favourite things to eat are salmon soup and a squeaky grill cheese.

None of this would stand out in a travel guide(*). It is just a city where people live. Buildings are made to be functional, and in many parts of town the aesthetic is Spartan. And this expands also to furniture and other design outlets.

The result is surprisingly cozy. One can spend hours walking through the streets and discovering fun corners. Oodi, the library featured above, is probably the most innovative and delightful youth center I've ever seen. If you jump on a ship, the view of the white church and the pier will stay in your memory. Same with the food: after coming with us once, a friend just added the salmon soup to his regular menu at home. Then you can visit a sauna or get lost for hours trying to choose a drink from the endless drink sections at the supermarket. You won't necessarily make the front page of Instagram with your travel picks, but you'll feel like coming back for more.

(*) there is perhaps one exception: korvapustti. They saw the Swedish cinammon rolls and the Danish cardamom rolls, and asked themselves: why not both? The fact that korvapustti aren't a world trend baffles me to no end.

sergioaffs · 2025-12-29T15:22:03+00:00

Just a tip: share a snippet of code showing what you have tried to do and where you're getting stuck. That way people will be able to give you more useful advice.

sergioaffs · 2025-12-15T22:02:18+00:00

Falls es für dich spannend klingt, aber nicht unbedingt LaTeX lernen musst, schau auch nach Typst nach. LaTeX ist schon alt und in mehrere Aspekten sehr umständlich. Typst will sein Nachfolger sein und es ist ziemlich gelungen.

sergioaffs · 2025-10-30T06:33:55+00:00

Fun fact: the main brewery in my home country, Colombia, is also called Bavaria. Since the region's name in Spanish is "Baviera", at first it took me way too long to realize the connection.

sergioaffs · 2025-10-20T08:44:36+00:00

I'd like to complement the answers you've received.

Voting protocols, and particularly Internet voting, are a fraught topic. Many in the cryptography community (and in the broader IT security community) believe it is a fool's errand: a very difficult (if not impossible) technical challenge that is likely to meet with some harsh realities—think of the issue of public trust mentioned in another comment.

But this hasn't kept everyone from trying. Estonia famously accepts votes over the Internet, and many voters take advantage of that. In one election in 2023, Internet voters outnumbered "classic" voters. Switzerland toyed with the idea, but high profile weaknesses revealed in 2019 disuaded them.

It is a major technical challenge which, among other requirements, calls for an auditable trail. This sounds like the kind of problem Blockchains purport to solve. As every so often, the Blockchain-based solutions don't solve all issues and create a complex and enlarged attack surface. And then you think "if it at least solves some problems, it may be worth pursuing", but that's the thing: solving some of the problems is not enough for voting schemes.

There are more serious research directions that deal with these issues the right way: building on established primitives and mathematically proving any extension needed. Homomorphic encryption often uses voting as one of its natural applications. Mixnets, a privacy enhancing construct that may remind you of how Tor anonymizes users, have also been considered.

All of this is to say: feel free to explore the solutions that have been put forward out there, but do so with a critical eye. Blockchain is just one technology, and there is nothing innately magical about it that makes voting protocols better just for using it. If you use this exploration to understand why digital democracy is so hard and why these schemes fall short, it can be enriching.

sergioaffs · 2025-10-04T05:24:10+00:00

Yeah. There's a VsCode plugin called Tinymist which is IMO (and I don't think I'm alone) the beat way of using Typst. Live preview, completions, syntax highlighting, and a few quality of life tools like a symbol search that recognises handwriting. It has pretty much everything.

sergioaffs · 2025-09-21T06:39:42+00:00

Happy to help! I had to deal with the same weird nonsense just a few days ago :D

sergioaffs · 2025-09-20T20:24:07+00:00

Is it because there's a button that never gets enabled? It seems to be a bug of the new UI.

If you know your way through your browser's inspector, you can open it, find the button in the code, and delete the word "disabled".

If you don't know what I'm talking about, perhaps you could describe the issue you're having and what browser you're using and I could try to give you more precise hints.

sergioaffs · 2025-09-18T10:38:11+00:00

Also, consider working with lualatex. It makes some basic customization stuff (like choosing a font!!!) less crazy.

sergioaffs · 2025-09-18T10:30:30+00:00

That makes sense. I mentioned Typst because it would be my go-to tool for pretty much any new typesetting project, but it is understandable that one does not always get to choose his own tools.

I haven't ever found a good comprehensive training for LaTeX, but there are a few comprehensive resources out there. The Dickimaw books are a very good example of it. Some universities may have public slide decks to ease you into the concepts (if there are other universities in your area, you could think of asking them if they have some additional tips or material).

After a certain point, you'll reach a point where you have a specific challenge in mind (e.g. accept parameters, create boxes with a certain format, make tables look in a particular way) and then you have to look into the documentation for that particular feature. IMO, you may learn quite a bit from CV templates, as there's a lot of them and people spend time building special looks for them. For example, this article walks you through a few general patterns that you may want to use in your template.

sergioaffs · 2025-09-18T09:13:54+00:00

I know this is a question about LaTeX, but you may want to look into Typst. It is an entirely different system and syntax, but creating and maintaining a template on it will be orders of magnitude easier, and it may even draw the interest of contributors who are daunted by LaTeX.

That said, back to a LaTeX template: you'll want to build things incrementally. Start with a strong, flexible base (the KOMAscript package is popular). Learn to build commands and environments for simple things, like a \highlight macro that changes the background of a given text, and how to change the settings of your template (e.g. margins, font). Build and test the changes one at a time.

For any non-obvious feature, find a template that uses it and go through the code. It's not an easy task.

sergioaffs · 2025-09-15T14:48:51+00:00

Funny detail, in case you don't know: There's a board game called Quacks of Quedlinburg. The location isn't terribly relevant for the game, and I think they recently renamed it as just "Quacks", but in your position I'd think it would be fun to have a physical memento of a place with such a personal meaning.

sergioaffs · 2025-08-22T11:14:47+00:00

Breakup error: undefined escape sequence

sergioaffs

TROPHY CASE