HN user
I actually got a free exam attempt once (I've forgotten which cert it was now), but because their proctoring software didn't work, I eventually just couldn't be bothered to take it lol. As for this, it really depends on your clients. These certificates are for laypeople to look at—kind of like how only non-native English speakers need to take the TOEFL.
While I'm not sure about the exact e-paper panel model used in this project, in my experience with these small e-paper screens, a full refresh is pretty much mandatory every 10 or so partial refreshes—which is significantly worse than Kindle-level performance. Just about every screen I've worked with suffers from some level of ghosting, and it definitely gets noticeably worse in higher temperatures during the summer. Plus, these cheaper e-paper displays tend to degrade quite fast—after a couple of years, the aging becomes painfully obvious.
Unbelievably, even DDR3 isn't spared. Our suppliers have been quoting us much higher prices for DDR3 for months now, and we're experiencing persistent stock shortages. Fabs are abandoning legacy nodes to prioritize AI capacity, making it rough even for maintaining old gear.
The main downside is shifting from inline validation to out-of-band state syncing. For handshakes to stay small, browsers must constantly cache fresh "landmarks." If a device has been offline and hits a flaky hotel captive portal, it lacks these landmarks and triggers a fallback with massive inline ML-DSA signatures—bloating the handshake to 10KB+ exactly when the network is at its worst. It essentially turns a crypto size problem into a browser background syncing challenge.