I think what has surprised me is just how quickly the pendulum has swung. From becoming useful in early 2025 to cracking down on costs has been maybe 18m in total.
This is literally the purpose of most of the European EUDI wallets, but automated. You create an account with whatever part of government handles ID, you get a "wallet", and then services can ask you to share minimised data from the wallet. This can be implemented in such a way that the government doesn't know who requested and the requester doesn't learn anything about you other than the minimum covering set of attributes required.
I think that if we are considering technical solutions to the social problems here, the answer is well understood by professionals working in age/ID verification. You allow someone to perform a more thorough check verifying your age and identity (such as the government or your smartphone vendor), and then you use a privacy preserving protocol to provide a proof of whatever attribute (such as age) you are trying to verify in the absence of the remaining personal data. This can be as simple as exposing a "is age over {16, 18, 19, 21, 25}" api in the OS or browser, or as complex as a ZKP as needed. What doesn't work is requiring each service to independently perform verification which leads to a massive expansion in the proliferation of personal data and is incompatible with the modern approaches to data protection.
This is a solution that hopefully will cease to be relevant as soon as the remaining infrastructure is finished.
I have but it seems to me that the stuff that's actually particularly well priced is really old (2016-2018ish). Even a single DIMM of used 32G DDR4 from ETB is now > 250GBP. The used market is also blown to pieces because of the price pressure.
> If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not work the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3
Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)
I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.
Yes but paying massively inflated prices for compute are not anymore. Even for consumer gear I am being quoted prices that are more than 2x what they were only a year ago (and availability is hard).
This is such disappointing news. I was planning on migrating some of our workloads to hetzner specifically to take advantage of the AX162 pricing which was incredibly competitive.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers?
I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s.
I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.
I think that SUSE and RH can definitely work well in a fairly secure setting as needed. I certainly don't think it's any less secure than your typical corporate windows setup.
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
Exactly what is the "data" that's being shown here? Is it essentially some kind of marketing material showing "this sort of thing is what you should expect to see" or is it actually data or for compliance? If it's essentially marketing material or an instructional example that isn't meant to be representative it being magically clearer than real life doesn't seem like a great sin (unless it's being claimed it is representative). If it's something to be relied upon for compliance or as data to be used, that's pretty damming.
I don’t think it needs to be the FTSE and I don’t think it even needs to be all that much in UK funds but if you look at the default allocations of many large pensions it’s single digit UK equity exposure which I think isn’t really acceptable.
I think European countries need to get serious about investing money locally. The UK is a particularly egregious example but it’s taking begging and pleading with the mansion house accord to even convince pensions to try to invest in the UK economy. Every country should make a portion of local (at least within Europe) investment a prerequisite for whatever favourable tax treatment pensions and similar products get.
So much wealth is tied up in pensions and it’s folly to let it all go to supporting the U.S. and eschew local investment altogether.
From initial application to permanent residency it costs around £6k in visa fees and around £5k in health surcharges over the course of 5 years. Citizenship is another ~£2k all in.
You make three applications with those fees divided slightly differently each time.
That’s without any legal fees if you need someone to help you prepare your application which will be ~£2k per application.
If you have non-British children or stepchildren (which is generally quite rare) it’s approx those fees per kid as well.
For most other European countries including Ireland the fee is <€500.
The asylum system and immigration system are surprisingly disconnected from each other in the UK.
Pretty much all forms of permission to stay in the UK other than asylum can only be granted from within the country if you hold an existing long term status. So if you're visiting as a tourist you can't then decide to apply for a spouse visa or even a working holiday or student visa without leaving the country first. If you're already on a student visa or a work visa or similar you can change categories without having to leave.
The graduate visa is essentially an extension to the student visa with slightly different permissions - it makes sense that you can only apply to extend if you're in country and you view it from that lens.
The historic reason behind all this is that there used to be a substantial difference between being granted "leave to enter" and "leave to remain" (out of country vs in country applications). Leave to enter used to be granted by embassies etc and the foreign office, but leave to remain was granted by the home office. Now the home office handles everything in the UK centrally so the distinction is not significant.
Many other countries including UK enforce a similar rule. It's very inconvenient in those countries, but there's a significant difference: in most other countries that have this kind of policy, visas can typically be processed in a timely fashion (and are actually processed at all). It's insanely expensive and very arduous administratively to get a visa for the UK as the spouse of a British citizen, but the process will typically only take a month or so.
I'm really looking forward to the temporal api being universally available. Moment and Luxon are fairly good but sensible date/time handling is something that really ought to be baked into the platform ootb.
I think all of this article is true, but I suspect that the vast bulk of people entering retirement each year have few if any of these things beyond perhaps the sense of identity.
It's very true that retirement means losing many of the fun perks associated with a high-flying career, but you have to have those perks in the first place.
Even here on HN, many of us are living fairly ordinary lives, perhaps working on cool technology, but I think even in our fairly exclusive club, not all that many of us have PAs and frequent high-class work travel, even at the apex of our careers.
For those who have all those things and lose them it can be very profound. For a lot of people in that position they spend almost all of their time working in some sense or other, and retirement ends all that. I think that's why people in super successful careers often end up doing advisory work or ending up on boards, so they can keep some of the perks with less of the commitment.
I'm shocked that someone would write a blog post like this in which they openly admit to something that is widely understood to be fraud. Even if I'm sympathetic to why this individual chose to do this, and the technical side is interesting, I think the decision to just publicly tell a story in which you criminally defraud the villain is not a choice I'd ever make.