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_jackdk_on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany

Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.

_jackdk_on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany

One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.

What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...

> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.

And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.

_jackdk_on The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s

Thanks. I didn't know about the UK specifically but replacing gas boilers with heat pumps makes a lot of sense.

_jackdk_on Passkeys are not a trap

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...

> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties

This threat, because someone dared to give users control, is completely unacceptable to me.

_jackdk_on The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s

> decarbonizing heating

I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.

_jackdk_on Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

I haven't seen anyone write about wiring FRP systems to traditional GUI toolkits. Do you have a blog?

_jackdk_on Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

It really is funny how you go through learning all these fantastic abstractions, and then at the end your line-of-business code ends up looking a lot like it always did. But expecting your data structures and control-flow functions to behave according to laws makes things so much more predictable and easier to wrangle.

_jackdk_on How to save a life without knowing CPR

That's fair. They teach it as "Dr's ABCD", which is a reasonable mnemonic.

_jackdk_on How to save a life without knowing CPR

> The "ABC" of airway, breathing, circulation they taught us may not be current advice.

The version taught in Australian first aid classes is DRSABCD: check for (D)anger, check for patient (R)esponse, (S)end for help, (A)irway, (B)reathing, (C)irculation.

_jackdk_on GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design

This argument applies to learning to code in general. What is your estimate of the ratio between "just shipped whatever the clanker spat out" vs "interrogated the LLM about its own output†" vs "deliberately interrogates LLMs to learn"?

†Untrustworthy, because it will either double down on its own output in its context, or will flip-flop to whatever the user said .

_jackdk_on The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)

As in the Steve Jackson one where you have conspiracies and front groups and fronts for those fronts? I wanted to like it but never could get into it; too many fiddly bits placing megabucks all over the power structure and adding up modifiers. Did you play house rules with friends, or does it get better with more plays, or was I just doing something wrong?

_jackdk_on CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3

Unfortunately that's accurate. From the SNB whitepaper linked at https://www.taler-systems.com/en/digital-currency.html you get to https://www.snb.ch/de/publications/research/working-papers/2... and then to https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r... :

> In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.

Well goody.

The idea of blind signatures is cool, as is the fact that the merchant doesn't need to identify the customer, as is the fact that you could deploy neat local currencies with something like this, but AFAIK you still can't give 20€ to your friend without the exchange knowing and approving, or it becoming a race to see who spends the tokens corresponding to the 20€. And that's not very privacy-preserving.

_jackdk_on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

Speaking of page 3, Google's been asking me to sign in if I try to go beyond page 2 of search results. What a wonderful modern WWW we live in.

_jackdk_on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.

_jackdk_on Hang on to Your Firefox

Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.

_jackdk_on “I just chose words carefully”

I did, yes. A but ironic indeed.

_jackdk_on “I just chose words carefully”

I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.

Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

_jackdk_on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer

The blog link I mentioned avoids this cost with literals, by providing using a required type argument to check the string length at compile time without TH. It requires a relatively recent GHC:

    make :: forall symbol -> (IsNonEmptySymbol symbol) => NonEmptyText

    type family IsNonEmptySymbol symbol :: Constraint where
      IsNonEmptySymbol "" = Unsatisfiable (Text "Expected a non-empty string")
      IsNonEmptySymbol _ = (()::Constraint) -- empty constraint is always satisfied

_jackdk_on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer

Liquid Haskell might require you to prove that the divisor is nonzero, but even in standard Haskell there's common idioms for ensuring that a list is non-empty (data NonEmpty a = a :| [a]) or that text is non-empty (newtype NonEmptyText = NonEmptyText Text, with non-exported constructor, helpers like make :: Text -> NonEmptyText, or more advanced tricks like https://exploring-better-ways.bellroy.com/haskell-koan-type-... ).

The big problem preventing this approach from working for numbers is that it's just so cumbersome there. Most of this is because all the arithmetic operators are bundled into a single Num typeclass, and `fromInteger :: Num a => Integer -> a` has a type that's impossible for a "non-zero number" wrapper to satisfy.

_jackdk_on Mold: A Massively Parallel Linker

Given the passing of nitter, xcancel, etc., thank you for quoting the relevant text.

_jackdk_on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop

It helped that Apple had a page for their statutory warranty in AU, so I could point to the sticker price of both machines and say "look, Apple acknowledges the consumer guarantee for at least 24 months after purchase and possibly longer, and I have paid a similar amount of money for a Framework".

https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/docs/statutory_warranty... (Page 2):

> Without limiting consumers rights, Apple will provide its own remedies equivalent to those remedies in the consumer guarantee provisions of the Australian Consumer Law at any time within 24 months of the date of purchase. For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.

_jackdk_on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died

What fun. War stories like this are what keep me coming back to HN.

_jackdk_on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop

Yeah, the ACL is fantastic. I have an AMD Framework 13 that had a fan bearing fail, which caused the fan to scream and spin up/down erratically. I had a long back-and-forth with Framwework support where they told me what I already knew (the fan bearing failed and the fan needed replacing) and that it was out of warranty (yeah nah, not in Australia). As soon as I mentioned the consumer guarantees under the ACL, I was invited to remove the SSD and ship the unit to their service centre for a fix.

The machine has been fine since and I still really like it.

_jackdk_on Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

The 8088 MPH demo, for example, pushed the PC Speaker pretty far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

_jackdk_on Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?

I haven't seen a https://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie in the wild for a very long time. I thought they'd all gone extinct!

_jackdk_on Fastmail offers EU data region

Because Fastmail is one of the relatively rare non-American companies that's managed to get a good position in a challenging market. The UK's "Snooper's Charter" also has a mechanism to send Technical Capability Notices that require tech companies to build things to spy on their users.

_jackdk_on EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation

And how, exactly, will one acquire this "full EU Digital Identity Wallet"? Will I be able to compile it from source and run it on a computing device of my own choosing?

_jackdk_on Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy

Thanks for replying, that's an interesting architecture. The idea of using a high-up parallel state seems particularly neat as a way to ensure every part of the page render stays independent, and to burst up the compute serving the response.

_jackdk_on Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy

That is not a use cases I would've expected Step Functions to handle; I'm intrigued. You're using express ones, I assume, but how are you wiring them up and why?

_jackdk_on Everyone should know SIMD

Single Instruction, Multiple Data.