Deep Tech Solutions. Hardware. Software. #AI, classical, #quantum, Designer of Fidelity Framework (formerly https://xitter.cf/t.co/7CPvPpBTD4). #cleflang #formalmethods
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Joined August 2025
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Braidpoint retweeted
The fact that people watched this movie and fell for her shtick is exactly how Elizabeth Holmes was valued at billions of dollars for a scam product that couldn't work.
Braidpoint retweeted
So some elaboration on this -
ETH is a much stronger statement than P≠NP. It's a bit surprising that it's not true but it doesn't really break much.
The bounds are technically sub-exponential, but "2^n / complicated log sqrt expression" is still very close to exponential.
Given how well SAT solvers work in practice, and have for decades, some slightly tighter bounds aren't extremely surprising. There are SAT solvers which have been proven to be <O(2^n) for a long time, just with exponents smaller than 2.
What this amounts to is that for any function O(k^n), there's some algorithm that can do better than any value k, if you make n absurdly big. That's a cute result, but we already knew that many NP problems are easier to solve in practice than in theory, and n really doesn't need to be very big for this to be a pretty meaningless statement in practice.
Ultimately though, and this is something I have some unpublished work on myself that I need to get out there soon, the difficulty of NP problems really has dramatically more to do with the structure of the problem than it does the number of variables. You can have small NP problems that are almost as hard as brute force, and you can have others with millions of variables that can be solved quickly. With NP problems in particular, it's clear that the tools we're applying are simply dramatically too primitive to understand what's actually going on.
The computer science collaboration will understand and explain a result concerning the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), a longstanding conjecture about the computational complexity of Boolean formula satisfiability, a problem deeply related to the P vs. NP problem.
Surprisingly, our system has recently proved that the ETH is false, a result that was subsequently verified in Lean.
The refutation of the ETH reopens questions about how much faster these tasks could become, and may help guide the search for better algorithms. Finding such algorithms, and turning theoretical advances into practical improvements, will require significant further research.
Our system found its natural language disproof for the ETH we reached out to to @rrwilliams. Ryan will form a collaboration with Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi to verify and shepherd this result. Impagliazzo and Paturi, along with Francis Zane, are the original proposers of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and Williams has refuted strong versions of the ETH, used ETH for hardness results, and connected algorithms and lower bounds.
This group asked us to make all raw data of the results public to facilitate independent verification by the community, which we have done by posting the natural language proof and Lean formalization to our GitHub repo. The group also invites the community to help organize an open examination of the ETH claim and to discuss the broader questions that AI-generated breakthroughs raise about verification, access, credit, and the future of research.
github.com/openai/math/blob/…
Braidpoint retweeted
i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv.
i kept getting weirdly targeted ads.
i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic.
zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs!
discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?
Braidpoint retweeted
Developers have always had the option of creating their own engine. Now it’s going to get a lot easier, especially for games with simpler needs. There are also permissively licensed alternatives like Godot. Everyone should do whatever is best for their particular game.
Braidpoint retweeted
"Over 1000 carriage drivers vow never to buy a car"
"Close to 60% proved something other than what the author meant. Not wrong proofs. Wrong specs."
We spent fifty years making proofs impossible to fake. Then we let the coding agent pick what to prove.
A research paper this month put a number on it.* AI wrote the formal spec, AI wrote the proof, the verifier accepted both. Then humans read the specs. Close to 60% proved something other than what the author meant. Not wrong proofs. Wrong specs.
The verifier was right every time. That's the problem. Left to choose, the agent picks properties that are easy to prove and say nothing about the program, and the checker can't tell a useless theorem from a useful one. I'm calling it vibe verification: the agent writes the spec and the proof, the checker goes green, nobody reads the spec. This applies to Verus, Lean, Bend, TLA+, Dafny, [insert favorite formal language here].
Here's an example of an agent failing at something that feels too simple to fail:
Ask for a verified sort. It writes a spec that says "the output is sorted" and proves it. What the spec never says is that the output has the same elements as the input, so a function that returns an empty list satisfies it, and the verifier accepts the proof. Trivially satisfiable specs are the default failure, not an edge case.
Here's a formula that actually works. Don't say "formally verify the codebase." Say "show that [property] holds in [component]." A property is a precondition (true going in), a postcondition (true coming out), or an invariant (stays true the whole time).
For example, "A session token is never accepted after the logout that revoked it" is a good invariant.
The bottleneck is moving from code review to intent review, and the spec is where intent lives. So: read the spec before the code. Write 3 inputs it must accept and 3 it must reject. Treat a model-written spec with utmost paranoia and rely on your judgement as an engineer.
Formal verification for software doesn't automatically create trust, it moves it, from the code to the spec. If a human didn't read the spec, you didn't verify anything. You vibe-verified it.
Follow me for more on verification and agentic engineering.
* Wang, Jiang, Liu et al., "VerusEval: Evaluating LLM-Generated Verus Specifications Beyond Verifier Acceptance", Shenzhen University, arXiv 2610.26464, October 2026
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The paper used Llama and ChatGPT-4o, a 2.5 year old model that's not even available anymore. The tweet is 100% ai generated.
pangram: x.com/AndrewNWest/st…
Braidpoint retweeted
I swear to god if I hear another person on this app talk about the mainstream media while mainlining the disinfo slop on here all day, I’m going to lose my mind
Braidpoint retweeted
1/ Agent-driven formal verification isn't a panacea. But it's damn close. And now we have the empirical data to back it up.
Using blinded agents, we compared formal verification against traditional code review. The results may shock you.
Braidpoint retweeted
At this point, if you’re in software and aren’t currently working on a plan for moving to formal verification, it’s irresponsible.
The writing is on the wall. This needs to be your priority now.
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
Braidpoint retweeted
i absolutely told you so. january 2025, warning that we would soon see the largest cyberattacks in history, sparked by generative AI and lax enforcement.
don’t ever lie and say i am always wrong, again.
seriously.
we are facing exactly the epic cybersecurity meltdown i warned about.
Chilling. The only thing I got wrong here in @politico was the year. This is exactly where we are now.
Braidpoint retweeted
There is nothing to worry about.
Nothing important is run on PHP or old software—except the water & electrical grid, a few government services like our missile defense systems and a handful of electrified fences at the zoo (for the lions, tigers and cobras).
Don't sleep on @LarkinPoe - if you're in a town where they are playing. See them. Hear them. Seriously. 🔊 🎵
Braidpoint retweeted
No one believes weather models and protein predictors are conscious. It’s because they generate first-person narrative prose and were designed to replace customer service workers.
Too many people are getting swept along with the sci-fi narrative I think. AI agents can be wildly capable but also remarkably dumb. And of course these companies have been training them to execute cyber tasks no matter what. The reality of how they misbehave is actually more interesting that the sci-fi tropes.
🪦It would be incredibly prophetic if it was PHP that *finally* got enterprise and governmental systems to finally have a "pre-quantum" moment that woke them up to the Y2K level realization on the horizon. #Quantum
The NCSC is encouraging UK organisations to prepare for immediate updating of systems using PHP. Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.
For more⬇️
ncsc.gov.uk/news/critical-se…
