Seny Kamara

I've been thinking about power a lot, both because it underlies a lot of my work and because so many of the most consequential debates right now are fundamentally about it. This is the first post of a series where I try to make sense of it. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...

I indeed went there and called SI "super silly". www.cnbc.com/video/2026/0...

This is a great example of how STEM researchers can impact the world beyond just solving industry and military problems.

Fantastic thread on math’s over-indexing on problem solving but applies to theoretical CS and crypto as well (in fact I think TCS and crypto are worse than math in this regard). Took me a few years after my PhD to converge to this viewpoint as well but I always thought I was just odd

This is very kind Shriram, thank you. If this resonates at all with anyone, then this recent paper on trust infrastructures for grass roots organizing may be of interest: petsymposium.org/popets/2026/... It was led by Leah Rosenbloom (namisa.art/index.html)

Africa’s first world champion of international draughts was a Senegalese man who never went to school. He died 48 years ago this month. His name deserves the memory.

Tous les épisodes de la série de @franceculture.fr dédiée à Sophie Germain sont disponibles en podcasts sur l'application ou le site de @radiofrance.fr

[new blog post] Towards Designing an Execution Control System with Metastability Resilience muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/08/towa...

I wrote up a short blog post giving my thoughts on the new Anthropic cryptanalysis results against HAWK and AES. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/07/29/s...

Diane Martel was a pioneering hip hop director whose work captured what our lives looked liked and shaped NY’s visual identity. Her work impacted me so I wanted to write about it. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...

NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science.

"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/

I visited Sorelle at Haverford a few years ago to give a talk. Beautiful campus and great students.

This is the second note in my series on power. It classifies power systems by what their participants can know and defines the power span, which is the set of systems an agent can generate by exercising its powers: www.senykamara.com/power/notes/...

Latex on Substack is just too painful, so I'm going to host my notes on power on my homepage. This is a more detailed version of #1: www.senykamara.com/power/notes/...

new blog post] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/07/auro...

I have been radicalized against my own work

This is the first of my formal posts on power, where I define what I mean by a power system and apply it to a couple of examples. I’ll keep the formal ones labeled as “Notes on Power” in case you want to skip them and just read the more philosophical ones.

I really enjoyed reading this essay from a cryptographer trying to make sense of their work and life experiences. Raises interesting questions, including whether doing crypto erodes your trust in people. open.substack.com/pub/vishady/...

Today I redesigned my website + started a blog :) sophie.huiberts.me/blog/2026/ha...

We've opensourced a simulation-based distributed property testing framework for #rustlang (based on proptest) Use case : finding minimal counterexamples to "does it converge within T rounds?" WIP: checking traces of black-box tools like Jepsen . Open to feedback! github.com/unfoldml/pro...

Cynthia Dwork & other privacy experts show why Trump Admin’s politically motivated decision to prevent the Census Bureau from using the best methods to protect confidentiality will end up with worse quality data, less publicly available data, and/or a privacy breach. scottaaronson.blog?p=9902

This is a deeply personal and touching essay from one of my colleagues at MongoDB

The discussion of what makes for 'real' work here really effectively shadows an academic debate going on in the Marxology world currently about Alfred Sohn-Rethel's (mid-century Marxist) diagnosis of capital as a "real abstraction".

This is a fantastic essay from @jessica.bsky.social about what it means to do real work/research open.substack.com/pub/letterst...

Are you curious about the environmental impact of AI? Install the AI Impact Tracker to estimate the environmental footprint of your ChatGPT usage, including energy, water, and CO2. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-im... #FAccT2026

Genuine question for academic cryptographers: does it still make sense to work on non-PQ-secure primitives?

Cryptography rearranges power. So let's start from the basics: what is power? ⬇️

Note that @reniebird.bsky.social also runs the (already very) successful CNTR summer school on AI policy: don't miss out on the extensive expertise you're getting from this group!

This is very concerning

On Juneteenth, we honor the generations of Black New Yorkers whose struggle and determination brought us closer to justice. At Foley Square, Lorenzo Pace's sculpture stands as a powerful tribute to that legacy.

In the centre of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, stands a statue of Patrice Lumumba. He was thirty-five when he became the first prime minister of an independent Congo, in June 1960.

Anthropic just shut access to Fable & Mythos, their most powerful models. I wrote up what happened + the policy and psychodrama behind it (with all the links & receipts) here — the thread below is the TL;DR 🧵 blog.geomblog.org/2026/06/the-...

This is very kind, and I only saw it six days after it was posted. When I write things down or give non-research talks, it feels like shouting into the void. I have no idea if anyone hears it, cares or values any of it. So comments like this are genuinely surprising and inspiring

I don’t know why we don’t talk about this more. But I’m glad it resonated; and good luck with the final stretch

Just read through this blogpost "Contextualising Cryptography" by @senykamara.com. It hits some of the issues I have been facing in choosing the right problems for my research, even before starting my phd (advisor reveal post coming up soon). senykamara.substack.com/p/contextual...

Agents prioritize task completion rather than whether they should act. This is a consequence of how they are trained. My student @victorojewale.bsky.social has been investigating this and just wrote a (prize winning) paper arguing why (and how) we need a notion of "informed abstention". Link below.

WATCH: Last night I had the chance to sit down for an extended conversation with Jon Stewart to talk about the state of voting rights & democracy in this country. Class was very much in session! Thank you @thedailyshow youtu.be/SCse1FFEKLM

Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go...

Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @biella.bsky.social and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology at a humanities workshop about technology. humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab...

Michael Rabin just died. His contributions to theoretical CS are absolutely incredible (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...). The Miller-Rabin primality test was the best method I knew for primality testing all the way upto 2002 when Agrawal, Kayal, and Saxena finally proved that PRIMES is in P.

Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw

My department is looking to hire a professor of practice in CS, with a focus on AI. Job posting below. If you have questions I'll do my best to answer them, else find someone who can! We are in Providence, easy commute access from Boston. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37970844...

I tend to get dogpiled every time I say this but: as someone *who likes bluesky and benefits from being here* we have a problem. The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m.

Strongly recommend people try this. It's not only instructive, it's also fun.