I once interviewed for a job at what I think was a civil service branch that developed software for the military. But they were out of budget for this, while the military did have budget, so if I was hired, I'd have to wear a military uniform to the office. A very stylish one, they claimed.

How would that argument support a sale to the US? It sounds like the perfect argument against it. Those technical/legal safeguards clearly didn't work for Microsoft either.

The entire country has been clamouring for this for weeks, and the government has been completely silent about it. A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option, and there wasn't a lot of confidence that the government would do that.

The whole reason for this is that Solvinity host DigiD, the Dutch e-ID system that handles authentication to all government and many other sensitive systems (healthcare). With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where it's hosted, this system clearly should be kept out of American hands.

Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies. No idea when they're going to do something about that.

Also, it's not sharing with society that makes people billionaires, it's taking from society. Had all that profit gone to society, they wouldn't be billionaires. Now often (not always) they provide some value to society but that generates that profit, but quite often even that was based on taking from society. They take natural resources to exploit, monopolise a market, exploit workers, etc.

Although contactless through banking app go through Google Wallet these days, which I hate, so I would prefer if there was a European alternative for that. Could be part of Wero, but it doesn't have to be. As long as it's not part of Google.

Directly, without Tikkie? That's really interesting. I wasn't aware of that yet. My impression was indeed mostly a rebranding and expansion of iDeal.

At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.

This is why I'm not that big of a fan of Tailwind and similar frameworks. To me it feels like they introduce yet another language into the mix. It adds all sorts of classes directly to the html, but now I need to understand what all of those mean. If I write my own CSS, I generally just have to look in one place to understand the styling of an element.

I think I feel kind of like that about overuse of annotations in Java. (Simple/obvious ones are fine, but not all are simple and obvious.)