Introduction
Hi! I'm Brian, most common online handle betaveros. I'm interested in information security, UI design, and puzzles.
About Me
I'm currently (spring 2023) doing interpretability research at Anthropic. My other major hobby is puzzlehunts; I recently finished running the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, after the previous year's GPH and the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt with them.
Previously, I was a security software engineer at Zoom by way of Keybase (2020–2022); finished a Masters of Engineering at MIT in computational music (2020) after a double major in mathematics and computer science (2019); and interned at SingleStore (formerly memSQL) (2019, 2018) and Dropbox (2016).
I have many other interests. Computers-wise, I'm pretty interested in programming language stuff — functional programming, type systems, formal verification, and language design. Math-wise, I enjoy complexity theory and combinatorics. I have also been known to sing/rap/play instruments inside or outside the shower, and graphic design is, as they say, my passion.
Personal Links
Things I've made
- noulith: a programming language with heavy functional influence and way too much syntax sugar
- gph-site: the open-sourced version of the Django app written for Galactic Puzzle Hunts and used by many others
- Puzzlord: a Django app for editing and testing puzzlehunt puzzles, built from scratch for the 2021 Mystery Hunt
- bcodex: a command-line utility in Haskell (as well as tiny JS app) for flexibly converting between puzzlehunt/CTF-y “encodings”. 4861707079 cHV6emxpbmc=!
-
paradoc: a stack-based programming language that can be golfed or written “literately”. Let's solve a small Google Code Jam problem solution with 22 bytes:
vo"Case #%: "oJ{S$p}^P - See more projects...
Tech I've been involved with
- Zoom's end-to-end encryption; I split my time between engineering and cryptography research, including implementing the relatively young primitive of a Verifiable Random Function. See also Rotatable Zero Knowledge Sets, our paper in ASIACRYPT 2022.
- Mavo, a tool for creating web applications using only HTML and CSS; I implemented server-side rendering.
- SingleStore (formerly memSQL): I worked on SingleStore/memSQL Studio, a visual interface for managing clusters. In particular, I co-created and blogged about Visual Explain, a visualizer of the operations used to perform database queries.
- See more tech experience...
Groups I'm part of
- 6.004, MIT's "Computation Structures": I was a lab assistant for the 2018–2019 school year and a teaching assistant for the 2019–2020 school year.
- SIPB, MIT's (oldest) student computing group. We run many services, like scripts.mit.edu, which is currently serving this website.
- ESP, a student group that runs educational programs for middle- and high-school students. I've worked a lot on the open-source ESP website, a custom Django site we manage our programs with.
- Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an annual puzzle event held by ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ since 2017.
- See more groups...
Puzzles I've written
If you aren't familiar with puzzlehunt puzzles, I also wrote a fairly comprehensive Introduction to Puzzlehunts.
- Several puzzles in the DP Puzzle Hunt, including the easy Sleep Talk and debatably-easy Now I Know… (I also led the project and edited many other puzzles).
- Unsafe (2019 GPH, with Jakob Weisblat): A text adventure.
- The Answer to This Puzzle Is... (2018 GPH, with many other members of Galactic): A puzzle in a single sentence. Or is it?
- Puzzle of the Day (2017 GPH): The first, easiest puzzle of the first GPH.
- See more puzzles...
Blog highlights
My blog is very all over the place, but here's a very short list of posts that are some combination of popular and personal favorites.
Collecting this list made me realize that how much I like a post is bizarrely correlated with the length of the title I give it.Links of whenever
I have a collection of links. I have an even larger collection of links that grew too long and disorganized and got mostly culled, but here is a list of links that I sometimes rotate when I feel like it.
More about me
I also like Vim, RSS, sushi, fish (shell), Pentatonix, Ace Attorney, and lots more things.
Through my elementary to high school years, I lived on a small East Asia island whose political status is complicated enough to get its own Wikipedia article.
In my spare time, I improve my mostly irrelevant FAQ; randomly link to TVTropes in order to enhance others' lives; insert hyperbole into literally every sentence; politely encourage people to use dashes instead of hyphens when appropriate; and fly my dragon companion.
Not more about me
My first and last name are very common. I am not any of the following people:
- New York Times tech writer
- software engineer, U of Toronto '19 (and one-time Kattis author? or are these also two different people?)
- cofounder of ROOM and other companies, brief MIT Sloan attendee
- summer 2022 intern at Zoom (sorry, I took the good email)
- the guy I met on an airplane when the airline assigned both of us the same seat (true story)
