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Many countries in EU will have a similar QR code payment system like Thailand based on SEPA. Slovakia is rolling out its own in 2026.

The problem is to standardize all these things built on top of SEPA to work across the UNION.



There is already a QR payment standard. You can pay a Thai-QR with a Malaysian Wallet.


PromptPay use is different from SEPA. My comment was meant that QR payments are already possible with SEPA in EU it's just there exist different systems built on top of SEPA which are not cross compatible and available across the member states.


My point is, there is a standard for QR payments (I think it's ISO 5201 but it was a long time since I dealt with that). Cross-border support will depend on the country/bank support; but theoretically if everyone adopt it, you'll be able to scan any country QR and then use your wallet to transfer funds (assuming your bank support cross-border payments).

I think ASEAN largely adhere to the standard though the cross-border part is limited to ASEAN.


European cards typically cannot do chargeback.


Credit cards often can, though European banks I've used don't do them as willy-nilly as American banks. With debit cards, charge backs are practically impossible unless payments were done in a very specific way that does not directly prove your authorization.


Do you mean Europe-based issuers of Visa- and Mastercard-branded credit and debit cards do not have chargeback processes?


Credit cards often have them, but subject to stricter terms than their American counterparts.

I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.


Poorly worded on my part. Europeans typically get debit cards and not credit cards anyway


Credit cards do. At least in Sweden it is part of the law that you as a consumer has the right to chargeback.


I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.

Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?

Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.

We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.

I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.


SEPA payments are now instant in almost every country. I understand the rollout is gradual but in some of the countries QR payments through SEPA is has been highly popular for few years now.

I have merchants/restaurants asking me if i can pay with QR instead of card because they get more money. And in local eCommerce all the online stores give it as option and often have it as prefered default.

I think the problem is that many countries have huge lag in adoption and often lie about it. Electronic crossborder prescriptions (ePrescription) was pushed and countries claimed to adopt it so they got some EU money yet when you are in Greece (one of the countries claiming support) nobody has ever really heard about ePrescription.

The other problem is constant Not invented here syndrom of Germany that never wants to adopt anything already running and instead invents their own variation.


Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.

Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.


Exactly. I dont understand how many europeans dont see this at all.


You have lost faith in the EU because they want to do exactly what you want ...?

Does the Thai payment system work in a German restaurant? Then why should the EU one work in Malaysia?

Can you pay with WeChat in France? Can you pay with CashApp in Ireland?

This is a very silly comment. I for one more than welcome this new payment system.


In very touristy places it is not uncommon for merchants to allow Chinese payment networks to be used.


You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.

Instant no fee payments.


SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.

It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?


>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK. This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.

>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?

The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.

The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.


ES has Bizum, NL has Tikkie, and iDEAL, IT has Bancomat, Poland has BLIK.

Thailand is just a country. Why are you comparing Thailand to the world's second biggest economy?

Are you really telling me that failing to coordinate several dozen countries, some with their own currency, is a showcase of failure of the EU?

This makes absolutely no sense.


Those services you mentioned along with some others (like German Giropay) have been connected under one umbrela of Wero in 2024.

That's whats so confusing about this Digital euro. Why not just push Wero? It already is cooperation of many banks that have presence all around europe. I guess difference is that Digital euro will be going through european central bank? That could be huge fail because by 2029 (when digital euro should start) SEPA instant payments with QR codes and initiatives like Wero will be super established.


It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.


Thailand is definitely not an affluent country.


That why I used the word relatively. Many of its neighbors are way less affluent.


Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.


Swift and SwiftUI on macOS are the most complete UI framework that is native, fast, performant and works very well.

Basically no other platform comes even close in terms of ease of use and performance. The best would be to extend that kind of framework on Windows (and/or Linux) and make it work same / similar.


I've never used SwiftUI (nor Apple platforms) personally but I find its approach elegant.

This is an attempt to build apps with SwiftUI idiomatics https://aparoksha.dev/ (blog on it here https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/). It's implemented using SwiftUI on MacOS, WinUI on Windows and libadwaita on Linux.


Funny that you mention performance

> For instance, Apple's SwiftUI is reportedly slow[1][2][3][4],


Typically you have multi-az setup for app deployment for HA. How would you without traffic management controll solve this?


I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about the AZP service, or ... ?


It's a best practice to have a Deployment run multiple Pods in separate AZs to increase availability


Yes I get that. But are we talking HA for this lookup service that I've made?

If yes, that's a simple update of the manifest to have 3 replicas with ab affinity setting to spread that out over different AZ. Kyverno would use the internal Service object this service provide to have a HA endpoint to send queries to.

If we are not talking about this AZP service, I don't understand what we are talkin about.


If you have the setup on 3 AZs how would you route traffic only to the AZ where your RDS resides?


> If you have the setup on 3 AZs how would you route traffic only to the AZ where your RDS resides?

So specifically for RDS, AWS will provide two endpoint for the client application: A writer and a reader endpoint. Similar to this: mydbcluster.cluster-c7tj4example.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com : Writer endpoint mydbcluster.cluster-ro-c7tj4example.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com : Reader endpoint (notice -ro part).

The writer endpoint will always resolve to the active master, which is what the client application is configured to use, and thats the hostname my lookup service will use as input to determine the current location of the Writer instance.

My solution works only for hostnames that returns a single IP address, so it won't work for the Reader endpoints. As I wrote in the repository, a requirement for this is that "The FQDN needs to return a single A record for the external resource".


I have never seen a Tauri app that was significantly less bloated than Electron. Can you share any?


The bundle size is, by definition, much smaller as it doesn't include the browser engine.


You dont have that using Electron app as well. The runtime is bundled with the binary.


Even being in Tauri this application just by doing these things takes around 120MB on my M3 Max. It's truly astonishing how modern desktop apps are essentially doing nothing and yet consume so much resources.

- it sets icon on the menubar - it display a window where I can choose which model to use

That's it. 120MB FOR doing nothing.


I feel the same astonishment! Our computers surely are today faster and stronger and smaller than yesterdays', but did this really translate in something tangible for a user? I feel that besides boot-up, thanks to SSDs rather than gigaHertz, it's not any faster. It's like, all this extra power is used to the maximum, for good and bad reasons, but not focused on making 'it' faster. I get a bit puzzled to why my mac could freeze half a second when I 'cmd+a' in some 1000+ files-full folder.

Why doesn't Excel appear instantly, and why is it 2.29GB now when Excel 98 for Mac was.. 154.31MB? Why is a LAN transfer between two computers still as slow as 1999, 10ishMB/s, when both can simultaneously download at > 100MB/s? I'm not starting with GB-memory-hoarding tabs, when you think about it, it's managed well as a whole, holding 700+ tabs without complaining.

And what about logs? This is a new branch of philosophy, open Console and witness the era of hyperreal siloxal, where computational potential expands asymptotically while user experience flatlines into philosophical absurdity?


It me takes longer to install a large Mac program from the .dmg than it takes to download it in the first place. My internet connection is fairly slow and my disk is an SSD. The only hypothesis that makes sense to me is that MacOS is still riddled with O[n] or even O[n^2] algorithms that have never been improved and this incompetence has been made less visible by ever-faster hardware.

A piece of evidence supporting this hypothesis: rsync (a program written by people who know their craft) on MacOS does essentially the same job as Time Machine, but the former is orders of magnitude faster than the latter.


You can make this app yourself in an hour if you're on Linux and can do some scripting. Mockup below for illustration, but this is the beating heart of a real script:

  # whisper-live.sh: run once and it listens (blocking), run again and it stops listening.
  if ! test -f whisper.quit ; then
    touch whisper.quit
    notify-send -a whisper "listening"
    m="/usr/share/whisper.cpp-model-tiny.en-q5_1/ggml-tiny.en-q5_1.bin"
    txt="$(ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel -8 -f pulse -i default -f wav pipe:1 < whisper.quit \
      | whisper-cli -np -m "$m" -f - -otxt -sns 2>/dev/null \
      | tr \\n " " | sed -e 's/^\s*//' -e 's/\s\s*$//')"
    rm -f whisper.quit
    notify-send -a whisper "done listening"
    printf %s "$txt" | wtype -
  else
    printf %s q > whisper.quit
  fi
You can trivially modify it to use wl-copy to copy to clipboard instead, if you prefer that over immediately sending the text to the current window. I set up sway to run a script like this on $mod+Shift+w so it can be done one-handed -- not push to listen, but the script itself toggles listen state on each invocation, so push once to start, again to stop.


The tech industry has such inefficiencies nearly everywhere. There's no good explanation why an AI model that knows so much could be smaller than a typical OS installation.

I could once optimize a solution to produce over 500x improvement. I cannot write about how this came, but it was much easier than initially expected.

See also: Wirth's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law


It's a matter of trade-offs.

In theory, Handy could be developed by hand-rolling assembly. Maybe even binary machine code.

- It would probably be much faster, smaller and use less memory. But...

- It would probably not be cross-platform (Handy works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows)

- It would probably take years or decades to develop (Handy was developed by a single dev in single digit months for the initial version)

- It would probably be more difficult to maintain. Instead of re-using general purpose libraries and frameworks, it would all be custom code with the single purpose of supporting Handy.

- Also, Handy uses an LLM for transcription. LLM's are known to require a lot of RAM to perform well. So most of the RAM is probably being used by the transcription model. An LLM is basically a large auto-complete, so you need a lot of RAM to store all the mappings to inputs and outputs. So the hand-rolled assembly version could still use a lot of RAM...


A lot of the bloat comes from dependencies like ONNX or whisper.cpp to accelerate running the model itself

While the UI is doing “nothing” most of the bloat is not from the UI


But do you start onnx and whisper.cpp on fresh install / start? I did nothing. I literally just installed the app and started it without selectin a model.


Oh interesting. I totally misread the original comment, I didn't realize you're talking about RAM usage. 120MB is quite a lot. This surprises me too. There's nothing fancy going on really until the model is chosen.


Yeah exactly. Tbh Tauri is touted as more lightweight than Electron but I have never seen a Tauri application that lived up to this claim.


I think AI compute is one of the biggest grifts of century. A capital that is being redistributed from talented people to this compute when we can clearly see it is not making a huge difference (oai vs deepseek) feels like a grift.


As a european I dont believe in European anything. I worked for European scale-ups and they are all bunch of nationalists that primarily succeed in their primary country and then fail to expand in any other country because they meet the local alternative.

The best market to expand besides your own Euro-country is the US but tthen when you enter that market you are too small of a fish to do anything.

There is no such thing as european companies. It's german companies, french companies all mainly focused on their main markets.


Every company in Europe would have some origin story and some stronghold and that's nature. I see OVH being used in Germany despite Hetzner being in place and I am sure Hetzner is being used by French market as well.


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