hocuspocus

So, whataboutism.

There are entire categories of scams that exist only thanks to cryptocurrencies. Do you think random people in Western countries would wire money to human traffickers running pig butchering farms in Cambodia without stablecoins? Or to ransomware gangs in Russia without Bitcoin?

No true Scotsman fallacy.

In other words, they are essentially casino chips, not cryptocurrencies.

Well at least in 2012, people who cared about the space seemed to understand the guarantees a blockchain is supposed to provide.

Where coins are held is completely irrelevant. There are cryptocurrencies on real blockchains, and while the technology is dumb and mostly useless, nobody denies that PoW and properly implemented PoS are decentralized.

And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.

Native images shouldn't be too messy anymore, Oracle put a lot of effort into DX improvements and all major web frameworks are now aware it's an important and growing use case.

Struggling to build native images should be a sign you're reliant on libraries that are dangerously outdated and abandoned.

Most of that monster ecosystem is exactly that: monstrous code in one-off throwaway libraries written by people who don't care about software, as it's not their job.

If you set a bar, any bar, there's really not much offered by Python that you cannot find in a more reasonable language. Especially if you're gluing together C++ and Rust libraries for data processing or ML workloads. Python is still disproportionately popular there but I'm also convinced its days are counted. C++ will be tremendously harder to get rid of, in comparison, if that's even possible.

No, I'm not talking of SEPA direct debit.

Do you pay your groceries with SEPA instant transfers?

Merchants can't just slap a QR code with their banking details on their website or cash registers. Wero offers a convenient layer on top of SEPA transfers, and you can argue EPC QR codes are already enough (though most people would disagree).

Additionally, Wero provides a full payment solution that's integrated with many third party processors, and is basically an evolution of Payconiq and iDEAL. Sure, it does use SEPA rails, but there's a lot more to it. And that's the part that will need to interoperate with more than a dozen mobile wallets in Europe, inside and outside the Eurozone.

Wero should eventually become the interoperability layer in Europe and beyond.

The same way AliPay+ has enabled interoperability among 50+ mobile wallets globally, mostly in Asian countries.

Transfers and payments are different things.

You mean sanctions that have targeted EU citizens.

Wero has the right momentum, it'll get there. But federating mobile wallets in the Eurozone and eventually Europe at large is no small feat.

Vodafone NL data only SIMs are very common for IoT connectivity when devices need to roam in Europe, such as in connected cars.

I'd assume it's not a coincidence and fraudsters made sure there's no easy way to trace anything back from the SIMs.

It's also more token hungry than similar models, so does it really make a big difference in the end?

With GitHub Copilot pricing, I have found no practical reason to use Gemini 3.8 Flash vs GPT 5.6 Luna. And now I'll probably find no reason to use Gemini 4 when GPT 6.1 Sol is essentially as good and a lot cheaper.

Killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in the name of saving oppressed people; it's quite impressive such low-effort imperialist propaganda still works after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya.

If you live in better material conditions than 90% of the world population, you're rich, by definition. This is nearly half the global CO2 footprint.

Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.

In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.

Pretty irrelevant to the last meter, and most ISPs do it for free when you subscribe as they can re-use conduits and sheaths for the legacy copper line, otherwise it's typically a few hours of work.

Where do you think is the last meter if not in the home?

It's not really a big issue. Connecting the last meters of fiber is cheap, either done by default in new constructions, or on demand for older houses. ISP's hardware to run PON is cheap.

Once street level fiber deployment is done, whether market penetration follows or not isn't a huge deal.

The main issue with copper comes from the active infrastructure rather than the physical lines.

I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.

Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.

And in places where FTTH is available, you pay more for 250/100 Mbps than symmetrical 10 Gbps in Switzerland.

France doesn't have much FTTC, VDSL and HFC exist but are fairly rare.

Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.

No, it's a competing ecosystem, even though both are built on Apache Arrow, and their dataframe APIs might look similar on the surface.

DataFusion is being used as a building block for a growing number of databases and data processing engines in Rust, as it offers the necessary primitives.

Codex, Kiro, Grok Build. Pi has a clone in Rust too.

I assume you don't use Twitter, otherwise you'd have noticed that annoying bots are in the replies.

There are many other clues that clearly make them bots: obvious LLMisms, parroting canned talking points, accounts based in developing countries with nonsensical profile bios, ...

But even without all that, it's very hard to believe that suddenly Twitter attracted all the 4chan-level far-right cesspool organically, and that these people have nothing better to do than replying to any post getting traction from people that should be completely outside their interest circles.

Large-scale offshore wind projects in Europe are now nearly as slow and sometimes more expensive than nuclear.

Solar + batteries are still not enough for countries that have long and grey winters.

I'm fine with this, recent geopolitical events showed that proliferation might have deterred the world's biggest bullies.

You don't even need that. Fast breeder reactors are enough.

Nuclear waste is a nice problem to have, and fairly simple compared to most pollution sources associated with our lifestyle.

No need to worry though, on the current trajectory I doubt our civilization will have the opportunity to deal with it.