Payments, SQLite3, Dungeon Master, Tor, Nuclear Power

1. Bank transfers as a payment method (@ kalzumeus.com). Partially agree and disagree about this. But payment is a promise, is something I've said so many times. I also agree it's funny that most of "new payment methods" are often some bs frosting on credit card infrastructure, which is horrible legacy stuff anyway. - When SEPA came, I expected more of the direct bank transfers to be used, but that didn't happen, at least in Finland. Basically nothing changed. Even the parties which earlier used "direct debit", now often just send electronic invoice, which is separately confirmed, so it's not technically direct debit anymore. At least GoCardless makes a fresh difference. - In my blog, I've also posted (too many) complaints how many online stores make payments almost impossible. UX is absolute nightmare. I decided to buy this, but nope, won't buy, because payments are failing - I really do like the privacy features mentioned in the article, it depends on situation, if that matters or not, but in general for random daily transactions that's preferable. - Also credit cards online give poor user experience, because the extra authentication steps. Why would I bother to first give all credit card information, and then authenticate with bank separately. When I can just directly authenticate the payment with bank. - About verifying transactions, I've noted many times that even if there's a promise of payment, it might not still get actually paid. Yet, many businesses omit that confirmation step, sometimes losing a lot of money. This happens because there's a reasonable promise to pay, but no actual guarantee. kw: fintech

2. SQLite3 3.37.0 (@ sqlite.org) with STRICT Tables (@ sqlite.org) - Finally forcing strict data types. If I would have used this, I've might have avoided some fun issues, like well, getting integer as a string. So classic traps.

3. The rise and fall of the Dungeon Master (@ medium.com) - Good old article, I guess we've all seen Dungeon Masters. And a good reminder about organizations, technology and how things develop and change.

4. Russia Blocking Tor? Not unexpected development in Russia. Luckily Tor got countermeasures for blocking and they're prepared for situations exactly like this. Just run your obfs4 and snowflake proxies. kw: blocking, blocked, censorship, internet - I'd guess that it's due to the tor directory servers being blocked, and public bridges and bridge indexes being blocked. It's just like blocking DHT / node-list bootstrap servers won't bring down the P2P network, but can make new clients joining the network hard(er). One way to work around that is just to copy existing fresh DHT / node database / list and avoid bootstrapping completely. It has worked well with so many P2P platforms in similar cases. - Yet after quick check it seems clear, that Tor relies (too much?) to bootstrap servers and if those aren't available the system simply won't work. Nor there's clear node cache file, which could be easily manually copied to circumvent the bootstrap process.

5. Olkiluoto-3 (@ Wikipedia) - Finnish nuclear power plant finally becoming ready? - Well, let's see, it's only 12,5 years delayed, so... Probably we'll see some more delays, right? - Nice example of a project taking bit more time than expected.

6. Something different, got distracted by - Nuclear Power and reminded my-self about: High-temperature gas reactor (@ Wikipedia), Sodium-cooled fast reactor (@ Wikipedia), Fast Breeder Reactor (@ Wikipedia), Fast-neutron reactor (@ Wikipedia), Electromagnetic pump (@ Wikipedia), Supercritical water reactor (@ Wikipedia).

2023-02-12