There doesn’t have to be a sinister plot for the result - mandatory, ubiquitous tracking and bank commisions in the middle - to be real and problematic, is what I’m saying. The governments have all the resources they need to make it possible to pay with cash anywhere you go, but the trajectory they choose is the opposite. Regarding the costs, I think IT and integration work required for cashless payments are an order of magnitude costlier than cash and coin slots, because of the telecom equipment, data centers and IT professionals working on it.

Before city bus cards, there was cash. Then cashless was made mandatory, but possible to prepay with cash anonymously. Then the anonymity was forbidden.

Cash is under attack even in public transit, you are required to provide a working phone number and government name to put money on a city bus card. Here at least. It’s being made inconvenient on purpose.

And the lawyer too? These types of transactions involve contracts and intermediaries.

How would the muggers even know you have the money?

Depends on where you buy a house. There are many rural houses and small apartments in tower blocks. And why a suitcase? You probably have a few dozen low-value banknotes lying around at home, stack them together and see they don’t take up much space (high-value banknotes aren’t thicker).

People who have lived through numerous economic crashes and bank closings. In Eastern Europe, cash in EUR and USD has good reputation, despite efforts by governments to bully people out of paying with cash altogether.

For plain text files, such as changelogs and translation updates, I have a pull request that makes FreshRSS track diffs, without overhead of a full browser: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/pull/8107

Unsurprisingly, only the countries that export very little meat and dairy have a smaller problem, that nonetheless remains significant. There’s no “overuse” as in the title, because for the machine that enslaves and slaughters billions of animals every year antibiotics are an absolute requirement. This industry needs to be abolished.

Thought “behind the scenes” in the title, three authors with good credentials, and featured article category, would mean the article presents some interesting technical details about the bugs, from which a software engineer could learn to plan better programs. But the article is just a verbose, non-technical ad for Claude, same as “The zero-days are numbered” by Firefox CTO in the Mozilla blog.

I’m still sure that direct monetary investments in work on software commons, from public budgets, without AI sellers in the middle, would result in similar or better fixes while producing public knowledge and new generations of specialists. Anthropic isn’t doing a public good by donating early access to an LLM API to Firefox developers, it’s doing extortion: we’ll sell this model to anyone who pays, including your enemies, so give us good PR if you don’t want them to get it first.

Because their app is essentially a website. News, videos, photo galleries. WP REST API is useful for writing a front-end using a different language than PHP while keeping the very convenient admin interface that most content managers are familiar with.