I'm also quite skeptical of performance/determinism over a real world load but if I'm not mistaken, a 10 000 qps with large shape of queries would not benefit much either from genetic algos, would it?

I've seen this kind of performance coming out of PostgreSQL, so they do help somehow.

Your website claims not to carry affiliate tags but /verdict/ definitely does so your FAQ claims seem false.

Some prices are shown as "0$" which is obviously a bug.

Seems to me that your decision model is basically "look at camelcamelcamel's slope for the item", which is a decent idea (I do this myself).

The model and concept is so strong and we are at the launch stage and surely will fix these bugs and inconsistencies but we assure our users that we aren’t taking any commissions and our model uses different logics and resources and programs and scripts and not camelcamelcamel ! Nice catch though

It's a protected title in several european countries but I've never seen enforced, despite myself being part of an officially sanctionned body of engineers.

Afaik claiming to have an MD (for obvious reasons) or a PhD would land you in hot water much, much faster, despite technically being exactly the same "offense"

Let's accept that engineering has 2 different uses and that's okay. If I tell people that I'm a civil engineer with nothing to show for it, it'd be as big of a problem like pretending to be an MD. For software engineering, however, you'd just be at the start of your career.

I think it's fine.

As noted by others, it is indeed a book promotion [1] The "petty criminal" has himself published a series of books [2]

However I take issue with your argument with "hacking would have been easier". DCs in the 2000s were (and to a large extent, still are) extremely easy to access. If the data at stake were actual "banking" data, in the 00s, it could have been still largely "air-gapped" (in the loose sense) from the internet. Hacking would have required a lot of lateral movement. And experts.

Hence, a large trail. Arguably larger than "hey bobby, here's a wad of cash, go in that building, steal these boxes in corridor A"

I also take issue with the "physical locations of DCs are still secrets" angle of the article.

Anyone working in a DC-adjacent industry and is curious enough can locate the back-entrance to any DC they have some business with. If it is a secret, it's not a well kept one (for good, operational reasons!)

Sites like DC Map give you the exact physical location, for instance.

The story is entertaining but it has clearly been romanticized.

[1]https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619794/cloudthief/ [2]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C9YVP3X2

Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.

Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)

The UK Government just replaced Stripe with Ayden for most payments, so good suggestion.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...

There was a thread about it, and Ayden will not talk to you if you sell less than $5mm/yr using online payments.

I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"

I've never been so confused implementing something. I sat there thinking, this is it? There is nothing else to do? How can this be it?

It does have all the features and API craziness other processors offer but you don't have to use any of it.

This could be Adyen's opportunity for a growth spike if they seize it

Unfortunately service reliability of Scaleway was terrible last time we used them.

This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.

It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.

Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?

Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.

Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)

For other readers, please be aware that only BBC World & BBC Radio 4 can be streamed outside of the UK.

For about a year now, BBC has been aggressively geoblocking other radios.

I've been told by the head of compliance of the largest European banking group that 2.5% is exactly the threshold at which they begin to be very worried/ at systemic risk

Apparently they operate on very low level of tolerable risk (way lower than I thought)

>2.5% is likely still survivable, but i think risk departments + regulators are all a lot less risk tolerant after seeing how quickly things went south in 2008 and worries about an out of control spiral

There are currently teasing additional region in Milan, IT.

Definition of "high status" vary by demographics.

Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.

The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?