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willeh

321 karma · joined November 24, 2011

http://whn.se/

Interested in distributed systems, event-sourcing, Kafka, Kubernetes, psychology & fin-tech

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/whn; my proof: https://keybase.io/whn/sigs/H019hH_fHHckgen8bShsYIL32PJt7DMPS7Mva2cEq8U ]

me@whn.se

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willeh··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
Since you obviously ignorant of how it works. When you get a degree you get a transcript where all local grades are translated to to ECTS, which you then would use to apply for jobs. Of course in the tech industry grades or even whole degrees are generally disregarded but in finance and other fields they of course, are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECTS_grading_scale

willeh··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
Other than this questionable browser CA thing, do you think there are any specific flaws with the crypto system presented in eIDAS.
willeh··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
University grades are standardised already. This is useful because it allows people to work in other countries, digitally signing them prevents fraud.

This is just one use case for eIDAS, then you have things like interacting with different government institutions, banks, et cetera, et cetera.

There are a lot of people who live in/work/visit other EU countries as is their near absolute right. We should therefore standardise technology on the EU level to make their lives easier.

willeh··on Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]
Generally your refusing to answer can be used against you, ensuring that you are properly represented of course isn't
willeh··on Record whistleblower award went to a tipster on Ericsson
I mean the whistleblower (even if anonymous) probably ends their career by doing it. 30mm might not be worth it for a high-level exec so to me it makes sense to have it uncapped.
willeh··on EU AI Act To Target US Open Source Software
Seems similar to the GDPR, which IMO has been a huge success.

I'm sorry that it will hurt your quarter of a million dollar pay checks. Here we value consumer protection and that's how things will stay.

If your perspective so Anglo-centric that you can't interpret EU administrative law then you will do well to stay out of that market.

willeh··on Some Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon predictions for 6 months time
Speaking of, does anybody have a Bluesky invite and feel like sharing?
willeh··on Russia is persecuting dissenters by taking away their children
I don't mean to be rude but certain aspects of Russian Culture make authoritarian rule inevitable. Some of has to do with Orthodox religious values and some of it has to do with perceived misrule of the country in times where things were more free.
willeh··on Estonia: Become an E-Resident
And that's exactly what they have, specifically they have a unique form of corporate taxation that means that only dividends are taxed at the end of the FY.
willeh··on LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback
It is not insane, far too many orgs are asking how can we shoehorn blockchain into X. The end-result is usually some vaporware, some weird commercialisation, or outright fraud. Libreoffice is a foundation, it should act in accordance with its charter. The public, likewise, should hold its officers accountable for acting in a way best serves these ends.
willeh··on One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine
If you think the BBC is anything like RT you ought to read about the BBCs reporting during the Falklands War.
willeh··on Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden
Given that the paper is published in Nature you should certainly write the editor if you found any clear factual errors.
willeh··on Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain
Basically batteries discharging.

EEG is not a great method overall as it measures electrical activity and data is hard to understand and reason about theoretically. I think it stands to reason that studying electrical activity in certain arbitrary frequency bands doesn't tell us a lot about the brain other than its coordination and power-states (A good computer analogy might be ACPI power states).

willeh··on Open-Source Psychometrics Project
Except it isn't. There is clear evidence for efficacy of various psychometrical inventories in clinical settings. There is statistical evidence for the validity and reliability of the instruments themselves. Certainly there are limitations for what things you can use this type of methodology especially in cases where social desirability plays a large role.
willeh··on FarPlay: Low-Latency Audio over the Internet
Everything is relative and everything is a tradeoff, so I think what they are trying to say with ultra-low latency is that they have tried to minimise possible sources of latency and that make all possible trade-offs to favour lower latency.

A streaming music service might for instance buffer audio (which incurs latency) to get reliability, which FarPlay probably doesn't do

willeh··on Vestaboard – A smart display to connect and inspire
While certainly beautiful, this type of needlessly contrived product is a waste of our natural resources. Buyers need to ask themselves is this a morally defensible use of resources, would and LCD be better would e-Ink be better or should we just go without.
willeh··on Mayor suggests Helsinki declare itself an English-language city
With the important difference being that the Finnish minority in Sweden moved for economic reasons and Finnish is forgotten within a generation or two, while the Swedish minority in Finland are the remnants of the Swedish colonial project and largely marry within that same groups. That said government websites in both countries are available in both languages.
willeh··on On the Rock of Gibraltar
It seems to me central to the character of British imperialism, that the domination of geopolitically important region is pursued not because of some inert ethnocentrism but because they believe themselves to be the bearers of a superior social order and that spreading it is the Anglo-Saxon man's burden. Recently this national pride has turned into xenophobia and their prime minister seems more a character of the Moscow Kremlin than of Downing Street. That he and the UK will have a role in the history of this century seems doubtful.
willeh··on Is GitHub a derivative work of GPL'd software?
I think the maximalist interpretation of copyright as it applies to software is dying out. Just as the phrase "Once upon a time" certainly isn't copyrightable its equivalents in software obviously cannot be either. While the legal system hasn't 100% caught up to this fact because software is still a relatively new thing, it eventually will. Implementing, for instance, Dijkstra's algorithm with the help of a tool that has read a bunch of GPL'd code will not create a derived work, the comments can get you in trouble certainly, but without them I have a hard time seeing it. Even so the standard for damages in most of the world is actual damages.
willeh··on Hasura GraphQL Engine and SQL Server
I've used Hasura for a couple of projects but I feel somehow and sooner rather than later, a requirement shows up that you an't really solve with Hasura. I don't mean oh this is a bit awkward in Hasura but rather this needs to be fully custom code exposing its own graphql (which Hasura would do an excellent job of stitching together). That being said some of the operational challenges with Hasura specifically metadata and migrations are better solved using other solutions.

Prisma when combined with Apollo on the other hand makes it easy to build GQL handler, which can handle strange requirements but also makes it easy to avoid Hasura induced awkwardness.

The Hasura team seems very component however and I hope they will work out these issues.

willeh··on Stripe Identity
Absolute game changer, other actors in this market have big bulky sales processes with difficult pricing models and high commitment. If Stripe is competitive on pricing they will definitely win this market.
willeh··on Untapped potential in Rust's type system
Interesting article, but I think the key to writing idiomatic Rust is not to stretch what the type system can do but rather be happy at what It can express and avoid unnecessary abstraction. The compile-time guarantees that we have to prove in Rust, also serve to give a hint for when not to abstract.
willeh··on Bitcoin becomes Legal Tender in El Salvador
A bank by any other name is still a bank. Sure there is definitely a legal difference such as deposit insurance and access to their lender of last resort. For the customer however it doesn't matter they still need KYC, the cops can still see their transactions, they still have to ask where the money is from, they can still knock on your door and put your hands in handcuffs. Many of the advantages to people in El Salvador with BTC is avoiding extreme inflation in the national currency. However one does well to note that inflation woes in the Atlantic world actually correlated with a partial deflation of the Bitcoin bubble, so if you're in the EU/US bitcoin is an investment when money is cheap, not a hedge for your money becoming cheap.
willeh··on The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML
Most of the heavy lifting in accessibility is in the ARIA attributes and being thoughtful about actually including those. The problem faced by semantic tags is that not all websites use them and that the information that they carry is of very limited use for a screen reader. A section-element without any other information is just a div.

Unfortunately adding semantic information to website has gone from a promising avenue for building websites usable from many different kinds to part of the SEO cat-and-mouse game played by Google et al.

Unless you're doing SEO, everything semantic is just a distraction. That said do take accessibility seriously, it will never be justified by profits but doing the right thing is a feeling no amount of money can buy.

willeh··on Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts
This is exactly why these IQ-test companies make so much money. It gives out yeses and no:s confirmation bias does the rest.

Quickly why they don't work:

You create a huge chain correlational assumptions. First that visual-spatial tasks of this kind predict performance on visual tasks. 2. That performance on visual tasks predict general intelligence (whatever that is). 3. That this notion of general intelligence (which is usually and arbitrarily defined not to include social skills) actually correlates with the tasks that you think the person will be performing, and finally that your idea of what the role has an impact on the company. Of course it is completely absurd, what they are selling is snake oil, plain and simple.

The remedy I recommend is simple, talk to the person - do it and you will be able to tell within 5 minutes.

willeh··on “I Could Rewrite Curl”
Every piece of software that people actually use will face criticism. But as quite honestly for some one with the clout of Mr Stenberg to out some poor Joe Codes just because they dared to have an opinion is just as pathetic if not more.

Writing an HTTP 1 client in a weekend is doable and Rust is probably a better language today than C is (with some caveats obviously). Is having that opinion enough to to be publicly humiliated on Mr Stenberg's blog, I sure hope not.

willeh··on Bitcoin Is as Legitimate as Ice Cream
If Government has the right to ban plastic straws it has the right to ban bitcoin. You're not a bad person for drinking out of a plastic straw and neither are you a bad person for using Bitcoin. It is just that a behavior in aggregate is harmful and this in mind makes it defensible for government to forbid it, especially when a viable alternative exists. So the next time you get annoyed by that disgusting paper straw, think of the cryptogeeks who will be forced to use EMV when they would rather use the silicon based electric heater that is bitcoin.
willeh··on Three things to never build yourself: auth, notifications, payments
Regarding auth, I absolutely bought to JWT cool-aid but honestly if you're still on the monolith phase just use the most popular auth framework for your language. JWT adds a lot of complexity and room for misconfiguration, you do get something in return of course - it is stateless (hence scalable), works great with microservices, and improves your security model somewhat by separating issuing from verification. But you do have to pay for it, expiry gets tricky, the client code gets trickier, permissions get trickier. For most people it just isn't worth it
willeh··on Payments down 20% in my SaaS after EU introduced PSD2
Purely anecdotal but I have never had any problems with increased authentication for purchases. It feels safe to digitally sign every single purchase I make and with a good UX on the store front it can be a great experience.
willeh··on Elon Musk, master promoter
It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate.

I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.

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