hocuspocus

No I'm not.

Ask anyone who tried to dispute a purchase that happened within the EEA, whether online with SCA or card present with PIN, card issuers often tell you to deal with the merchant directly. The interchange cap has significantly reduced revenue made on card payments, they have an incentive to avoid unnecessary manual work.

I've never used iDEAL but I assume the confusion comes from the fact checkout widgets (e.g. from Adyen) are transitioning from iDEAL to "iDEAL | Wero". I assume UX is the same, i.e. scan a QR code with your mobile wallet app?

If I understand correctly it's developed by the same people: Payconiq.

Which is pretty much the case with Visa and MC too. There's little card payment fraud in Europe thanks to mandated strong authentication, and very low transaction fees as interchange is capped by the EU; card issuers don't initiate chargebacks so easily.

I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.

Easy and approachable sound pretty subjective to say the least; feature and syntax wise, Swift has become an absolute monster of a language. Rust's tooling and ecosystem are ahead and these points matter to me more than the raw syntax in the age of LLMs.

Almost exactly the same (or worse) can be said about Google's E2EE RCS, but somehow Apple decided to publicly back the initiative. Most people would much more benefit from 1) a faster and broader rollout 2) every other feature in recent versions of the spec, rather than getting a false sense of privacy, yet we're getting a barely compliant RCS client stuck in 2019, plus performative E2EE.

SEPA transfer fields need to follow a standard. I think it's fine, we shouldn't put more control and censorship there (try to put Daesh membership fee if you want to get your account locked...)

However a chatbot should absolutely not be able to display arbitrary and clickable links outside a pretty tight whitelist (like, the bank FAQ).

I was a teenager when Switzerland introduced the mandatory ID check, in 2003 or 2004 iirc.

My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.

It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...

Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.

Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.

You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic.

Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit, not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of course you lose your CDL permit quickly after your contract expires.

Getting a B permit before FoM would specifically not have been as hard for you as for someone from another continent.

Schengen is not FoM. Visa isn't an acronym. And CERN workers are on diplomatic permits anyway.

FoM doesn't require to stay in Schengen-Dublin though.

To be fair that's not specific to SVP's populist initiatives, the parliament pushes bills with nonsensical names all the time.

Yes. We can cap non-EU/EFTA immigration to zero but that's relatively small anyway. Getting out of Schengen-Dublin and more importantly the Freedom of Movement of workers would basically unravel all bilateral agreements.

And now with LLMs, writing glue in Rust is cheap.

The ML/AI ecosystem is a minefield, and pure Rust rewrites (Candle, Burn, ...) are still immature and incomplete. But I'm pretty sure we're eventually going to see the same uptake that's already happening in the data processing world.

LLMs are leveling the developer experience and productivity in a way that makes Python's strengths almost irrelevant, while it's still suffering from bad tooling (even with uv and friends) and poor performance.

AI/ML: interfacing with C++ libraries directly (or in Rust) is now a real option. For everything else, even 5 years ago I wouldn't have used Python, now there are even fewer reasons to do so. As far as I'm concerned the remaining use cases are notebooks and one-shot scripts.

Which is precisely a reason for not using Python, despite LLMs being good at it.

Pretty weak argument as most points aren't inherent to gradual typing at all.

GPT-5.4 mini seems noticeably better to me, token cost between Gemini 3 and 3.5 Flash.

I'm not sure about broadband data, as it can't be that useful. However on the mobile side, it's fairly valuable as a mobile app can collect A-GPS location and sensor telemetry that are unknown to the MNO otherwise.

And Javascript and Python the best languages.

I think the AI/ML ecosystem is a bit of a mess overall, things tend to work out of the box in Python because that's what everyone targets, but it doesn't necessarily say that much about maturity and robustness.

In Rust you can use many C++ frameworks like libtorch or ONNX or specialized libraries (llama.cpp, whisper.cpp ...) via their bindings. Native projects such as Candle or Burn are not feature complete yet, but I assume they'll eventually get there and drive bigger communities compared to C++.

Hu, no?

The most common scams nowadays involve social engineering to make people log into their online banking and transfer money, specifically because there's no way to revert transactions. The victims are typically 100% liable as they accept and authorize these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbihSwrKhk

https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/kassenstur...

Which has zero incentive to side with the other party. You pay by bank transfer, once the money is on the merchant's account, why would their bank ever agree to a refund in case of dispute? Now it's between you and the merchant, good luck with filing police reports and court claims especially abroad.

If EPI / Wero reach a critical mass then hopefully this will change, as non-Eurozone countries will have a direct interest in making the local mobile payment solution accept the one used by an area of 350+ million people.

Then the EPI protocol could become the least common denominator and you might be able to use Vipps, Twint, Blik... in Sweden? I believe similar scenarios are happening in Asia around Alipay and UPI, for instance I think I can use the Korean Kakao Pay on a payment terminal in Japan, because both sides are compatible with Alipay+.

This is a false dichotomy. You can have very cheap transaction fees, Pix is state-run and probably operates at a loss, with merchant fees as low as 0.2~0.3%. In comparison the cheapest card payment under the EEA interchange cap is probably slightly above 0.5% when you add scheme fees and PSP costs.

However businesses do require payment systems and not just barebones bank transfers. Except for high trust, low volume transactions such as buying a car, paying your rent...

The UK has had instant transfers for many years.

Switzerland since last summer, but banks aren't forced to expose the feature to retail customers yet, at least not for free. We could have had that 15 years ago if our government wasn't so afraid of upsetting the banking lobbies.

We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock.

We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere

Switzerland is not part of SEPA

We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).

I don't understand what they solve. [...]

I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.

You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.

Swish is even older.

The issues with Twint:

- Switzerland hasn't gotten Apple to open up NFC payments at the same conditions as the EEE, at least not yet.

- Twint is part of the EMPSA which hasn't really delivered anything tangible. On the contrary there's now a real push from EPI and EuroPA to make Wero interoperable with non-Eurozone networks. Hopefully Twint will get on board too.

- Transaction fees are on the higher side, consequently merchants don't have any reason to push Twint or disincentive debit card payments.

Even better, as an exchange, they don't even necessarily care whether the line goes up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles to quote the Wolf of Wall Street. As long as it goes somewhere, and customers are charged fees.