While I agree most of this seems to go too far I do like the idea of the Socratic mode with State-Challenge-Reflect reflection. I often use LLMs in the same way with a skeleton "brief" document and separate chapters that I ask it to fill based on my input, basically augmented note taking (such as references, coherence, in-scope vs out of scope, arguments considered, pressure points, vulnerabilities etc)
Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.
10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.
The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.
Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.
Germany didn't turn off Girocard that's just fake News.
I literally paid yesterday using Girocard.
It also works with some big German retailers outside of Germany (like with Billa in Austria which is a subsidiary of Rewe Group)
Maestro and Visa just stopped offering Maestro/V-Pay so they can charge the higher fees vor Visa/MasterCard. The only thing that changed is the Co-Badge on most Girocards
> the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard
Well this is flat out wrong. Every countries banking system pays fees for processing visa and MasterCard. When there is a viable alternative in place with less fees, the bank like any money making enterprise will take it. Framing it as "countries" blocking it demonstrates you either have an agenda against EU or you're not sure how the EU works.
Lots of other Asian countries already did something similar, e.g. Singapore had PayNow QR Codes (probably the closest to Pix) since 2017, Thai PromptPay was even earlier and India UPI (slightly different wallet system) since 2016. China was even earlier but different though private superapps.
What has changed, and I find interesting, is that Card rails are more and more used for political pressure [1], and I feel the "American hemisphere" is probably the reason Pix gets more of this pressure than Asian countries.
Yes I get the irony but also let's not forget that it's over for the Code that Uncle Bob likes. Which is bad, verbose, dogmatic, unreadable, elitist code [1] with "discipline" [2] and a dash of sexism. And that has luckily been over for a _long_ time before LLMs.
There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].
Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?
Payment processors don't allow just brute forcing all card numbers a.k.a. card enumeration or card testing [1][2] and card schemes penalise merchants and payment processors heavily if they don't take measures against it [3].
The rate they try becomes very non frequent when they use multiple card validation apis. I'm not sure how it can be related when it's different pan numbers, different source ips etc.
Enumerating CVC2 with a single PAN is a different story.
That’s untrue. While I would be willing to believe that for a brief period of time there was a bug that could expose it, having been at Stripe between 2017 and 2020, it was my experience that they had a robust system preventing PANs from being disclosed.
That included efforts to mask PANs that were in the wrong place.
We didn’t want them in our internal logging systems, and we certainly didn’t want to leak them back to the merchants.
The chart is also misleading because it paints investment as morally good but ignores most of this investment goes into closed source APIs while the rest of the world does open weights, and does so way more efficiently (spending less money) due to export controls
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