Great post showing the ironic revenge of opinionated architecture in times of cheap code. Exactly what LLMs can’t deliver, they always seem to be bias towards added complexity, not simplification.
Outsourcing usually gives you exactly what you pay for, arguably more transparently than other ways. It’s just that transparency (i.e. the price for quality) is sometimes not passed on from management / procurement taking that decision down to the team eventually having to work in a distributed fashion.
I think that’s also where the assumptions of the original post are off - the difference between DeepSeek and a frontier model is not usually what low quality outsourcing can cover. So you probably end up paying a highly qualified outsourced engineer who may not be significantly cheaper (most outsourcing is not just due to cost but capacity and capability).
I agree the post looks a little AI written but generally this kind of analysis is quite common. Leaving aside human heuristics that are generally too well known to catch real scammers (like time travel or "7 days", which is bad because often weekly patterns are important so at the very least look at 10 days) and actually have low precision, what I find odd it that all results just return a user ID.
So this is really just surfacing cases, but with not enough context to be useful to prioritise. I would expect a score to be included.
Apart from that it misses a lot of signals like refunds, declines, disputes etc [1].
Thanks for clarifying the rule - I wasn't aware of that and follow it next time. But I also don't think it's a marketing link. The post explains why specifically in the cases of transaction fraud other signals are important, with specific SQL examples, and that should translate to any other payment provider.
While I agree most of this seems to go too far I do like the idea of the Socratic mode with State-Challenge-Reflect reflection. I often use LLMs in the same way with a skeleton "brief" document and separate chapters that I ask it to fill based on my input, basically augmented note taking (such as references, coherence, in-scope vs out of scope, arguments considered, pressure points, vulnerabilities etc)
Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.
10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.
The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.
Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.
Germany didn't turn off Girocard that's just fake News.
I literally paid yesterday using Girocard.
It also works with some big German retailers outside of Germany (like with Billa in Austria which is a subsidiary of Rewe Group)
Maestro and Visa just stopped offering Maestro/V-Pay so they can charge the higher fees vor Visa/MasterCard. The only thing that changed is the Co-Badge on most Girocards
> the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard
Well this is flat out wrong. Every countries banking system pays fees for processing visa and MasterCard. When there is a viable alternative in place with less fees, the bank like any money making enterprise will take it. Framing it as "countries" blocking it demonstrates you either have an agenda against EU or you're not sure how the EU works.
Lots of other Asian countries already did something similar, e.g. Singapore had PayNow QR Codes (probably the closest to Pix) since 2017, Thai PromptPay was even earlier and India UPI (slightly different wallet system) since 2016. China was even earlier but different though private superapps.
What has changed, and I find interesting, is that Card rails are more and more used for political pressure [1], and I feel the "American hemisphere" is probably the reason Pix gets more of this pressure than Asian countries.
Yes I get the irony but also let's not forget that it's over for the Code that Uncle Bob likes. Which is bad, verbose, dogmatic, unreadable, elitist code [1] with "discipline" [2] and a dash of sexism. And that has luckily been over for a _long_ time before LLMs.
Ah yes, EU Sovereignty when a post makes it to the HN front page.
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