PeterisP (u/PeterisP)

PeterisP commented on Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet bozmen.io/fhe... · Posted by u/barisozmen

ipnon · a month ago

Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbox but I imagine it's there.

PeterisP · a month ago

FHE solves privacy-from-compute-provider and doesn't affect any other privacy risks of the services. The trivial way to get privacy from the compute provider is to run that compute yourself - we delegate compute to cloud services for various reasonable efficiency and convenience reasons, but a 1000-fold less efficient cloud service usually isn't competitive with just getting a local device that can do that.

PeterisP commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793

gspencley · 8 months ago

> Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO.

What we need, admittedly, is more research and study around this. I know of one study which supports my position, but I'm happy to admit that the data is sparse.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374

From the abstract:

"By analyzing activity in 30,737 files, we find that low quality code contains 15 times more defects than high quality code."

PeterisP · 8 months ago

The parent point isn't that shitty code doesn't have defects but rather that there's usually a big gap between the code (and any defects in that code) and the actual service or product that's being provided.

Most companies have no relation between their code and their products at all - a major food conglomerate will have hundreds or thousands of IT personnel and no direct link between defects in their business process automation code (which is the #1 employment of developers) and the quality of their products.

For companies where the product does have some tech component (e.g. refrigerators mentioned above) again, I'd bet that most of that companies developers don't work on any code that's intended to be in the product, in such a company there simply is far more programming work outside of that product than inside of one. The companies making a software-first product (like startups on hackernews) where a software defect implies a product defect are an exception, not the mainstream.

PeterisP commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793

IshKebab · 8 months ago

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve?

I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job.

> This is ego speaking.

It definitely isn't. LLMs are useful for coding now, but they can't really do the whole job without help - at least not for anything non-trivial.

PeterisP · 8 months ago

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing a significant fraction of programmers.

PeterisP commented on Federal Court Says Dismantling a Phone to Install Firmware Isn't a 'Search' techdirt.com/2024/12/04/f... · Posted by u/hn_acker

toast0 · 9 months ago

I mean, having firmware that securely wipes your phone in case it's used by an unauthorized party is a reasonable and desirable feature. It's not generally illegal to set that up.

Same with destroying documents. Having a retention period and destroying documents which have PII and could be used for identity fraud is a good practice. It's not generally illegal to do that either.

Where you get into trouble with the courts is when you have a specific obligation to retain or transfer information and you destroy it instead.

PeterisP · 9 months ago

Intent makes all the difference in the eyes of law.

If a jury of your peers decides that you configured that firmware to protect your data from thieves, then it is not a problem.

But if a jury of your peers doesn't buy your assertion of that, and instead becomes convinced that you applied that (otherwise reasonable and legitimate) feature with the intent to destroy evidence of a crime so that it doesn't reach the court, then setting it up was a felony.

PeterisP commented on Kyawthuite is so rare it's only ever been found once sciencealert.com/the-worl... · Posted by u/pseudolus

adwn · 9 months ago

Can you be more specific, please?

Also, I hate these kinds of lists. Are we just supposed to take the author by his word? He says:

> If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

PeterisP · 9 months ago

Your IT system may need to handle entries linked to people who don't have names, for example, recording that some treatment was given to a baby who died soon after birth before being given a name.

PeterisP commented on Python type hints may not be not for me in practice utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve

rcfox · 9 months ago

Pretty much anywhere you're tempted to use a namedtuple, you should be using a dataclass[0] instead.

And typing JSON-like data is possible with TypedDict[1].

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.TypedDi...

PeterisP · 9 months ago

I don't get why I would choose a dataclass in cases where I've already decided that an ordinary tuple would be a better fit than a normal class (i.e. "anywhere you're tempted to use a namedtuple")

To me, namedtuples are a convenience to give a nicer syntax than ordinary tuples in scenarios where I don't want the overhead of having to store a copy of all the keys with every object, like a dict would. Dataclass seems to be even more stuff on top of a class which is effectively even more stuff on top of a dict, but all the use cases of namedtuples are those where you want much less stuff than an ordinary class has. And I don't want to have to define a custom class just as I often don't define a custom namedtuple in my code but use the one the database driver generates based on the query, which is a very common use case for namedtuples as efficient temporary storage of data that then gets processed to something else.

PeterisP commented on Most American farmers have second jobs to stay afloat marketplace.org/2024/11/2... · Posted by u/ilamont

rajamaka · 9 months ago

Still need to eat tomatoes when we are at war with country we buy tomatoes from.

PeterisP · 9 months ago

Those farmers with second jobs would need protection from local megafarms who are outcompeting them, not other countries - it's not about location, it's about size of the operation.

PeterisP commented on WhisperNER: Unified Open Named Entity and Speech Recognition arxiv.org/abs/2409.08107... · Posted by u/timbilt

Tsarp · 9 months ago

Wouldnt it be better to run normal Whisper and NER on top of the transcription before streaming a response or writing anything to disk?

What advantage does this offer?

PeterisP · 9 months ago

The general principle is that "pipelines" impose a restriction where the errors of the first step get baked-in and can't effectively use the knowledge of the following step(s) to fix them.

So if the first step isn't near-perfect (which ASR isn't) and if there is some information or "world knowledge" in the later step(s) which is helpful in deciding that (which is true with respect to knowledge about named entities and ASR) then you can get better accuracy by having an end-to-end system where you don't attempt to pick just one best option at the system boundary. Also, joint training can be helpful, but that IMHO is less important.

PeterisP commented on Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates lancaster.ac.uk/news/huma... · Posted by u/gmays

baq · 9 months ago

I don’t like that we’re even talking about money in this context. Money is almost fake, it’s right there in the ‘fiat’ name, yet that’s all most people care about.

PeterisP · 9 months ago

In this context money is just a unit of measurement. If we say that we need more of a particular kind of infrastructure and reduce a particular kind of activity, etc, then the discussion requires being able to say how much of those (many!) things and we can quantify all of those in terms of dollars.

PeterisP commented on AI makes tech debt more expensive gauge.sh/blog/ai-makes-te... · Posted by u/0x63_Problems

cpeterso · 9 months ago

But where did these companies get the ColdFusion code for their training data? Since ColdFusion is an old language and used for backend services, how much ColdFusion code is open source and crawlable?

PeterisP · 9 months ago

I'm definitely assuming that they don't limit their training data to what is open source and crawlable.