Even with that, you can't really prove or provide evidence they aren't silently slinging the data elsewhere during transport anyway. Unless you're doing Homomorphic encryption, it all seems to be for show.
There's also the nvidia enclave stuff. If you trust their hardware, then you can also trust its cryptographic proof that the data was not seen by the inference provider.
Ignoring whether or not there could be backdoors, security holes in the Trusted Execution Environment stuff are still being found on a regular cadence.
I'd guess it's good enough to avoid bulk surveillance (and therefore extraction of training data, which I guess is the attack that Notion was running when they screwed up and leaked the data), but that's about it.
Apple's stuff is a similar story. (And so are VM enclaves, which have been around longer.)
I think this is true for some tasks where you want a clean slate, but increasingly I find myself constantly referencing specific skills, or having files with prompts I use all the time. I'd much rather have an agent that remembers things about me and specifics about my workflows and "taste" - of course having the ability to reset context sometimes or prune memory is valuable but I think the future of agentic AI is blocked on "omnipotent context"
Yeah there’s a need for the distilled learnings of all past hard earned insights. But i think much of the value is in the distillation.
in my experience, even within a single project, the more agentic cycles, the more features and the more surface area the more cruft builds up. This is an obvious observation, but I suppose I’m at the point I think the move forward is to create a new project, keep only what worked from the preceding as modularized entities and intentionally wipe away all past of how we got there save for the API interface truths.
Hi, cofounder of Tinfoil here. We're working on implementing prompt caching. It just requires more work than with traditional, non-private inference and requires some careful considerations to actually implement it.
This is almost always the case. Discussion quality went down during the last few years but HN is still _the_ place to attract people who really know what they are talking about.
It's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all user data with a valid warrant or in an emergency context [1]
If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders.
I still have the Be My Eyes app installed but haven’t had a call in over a year - I think it’s a testament to how powerful AI vision models have become. I find it cool that AI works well enough for vision impaired people to solve all their problems.
However there was something very human and nice about helping out a stranger with a small random task from time to time. I fondly remember one older lady who spilled a box of blueberries on the kitchen floor and I helped her hunt them all down by guiding her around. It was 10 minutes of connection with a random person doing something fun and which is till remember fondly 4 years later
Beautiful lecture. As with a lot of things that shape our everyday life we forget to contemplate their qualities. For example fonts subtly impact how we perceive, understand, feel about any text yet we fail to give it much thought as Etienne points out. A shape of a letter, especially in math papers, can influence how "beautiful" and understandable the proof is. Really appreciate that Knuth spent years building LaTeX so that compsci and math papers could be formatted as beautiful PDFs and not published as Word documents
I practice calligraphy as a hobby and took on an online course[1]. This was specifically for the Trajan hand (which is a favourite of mine but which I still can't do very well). The first exercise was to write each letter on a large grid on a sheet of A4 paper. One letter on one sheet of paper on a large square grid. Every serif, every curve, the points at which various parts of the letter fit together, widths of various strokes etc. all got magnified. I did this for a long time and imbibed a lot.
Now, I can see those patterns when I look at lettering in public places and many aspects and it enhances the beauty in many subtle pleasing ways.
Also, when I write (using a dip pen and calligraphic ink), all the things he mentions about embossing, the texture of the letters etc are all things that I enjoy. The smell of the ink, the texture of the paper, the scratchy sounds while writing. It's a very sensual experience and something I treasure deeply.
Absolutely. Interestingly, if there's a paper and it's not typeset in LaTeX, I can't help but start predjudiced. "Is this a Word document? These are not serious people."
> I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Probably a better question would be ask the Amish how happy they are? G-D was conceived to fill this gap in the human experience. The Amish harness it to set limits on desire.
From all the parochial nationalistic close minded savage bigoted homophobic toxic macho corrupt Putin boot licking behavior they regularly exhibit, and their spectacularly brutal self-destructive war criminal performance in Ukraine, you'd think they all lived on a community farm, raised as livestock and cannon fodder.
Living in modern cosmopolitan Moscow yet still acting and thinking that way is so much worse than actually being born on a community farm without choosing that lifestyle and mentality.
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