The Dutch government recently open sourced their intended digital identity app and server code. Although I applaud the transparency (even though it's actually a legal requirement), I'm not too happy about the privacy properties of the implementation. Now I'm trying to understand both the EU regulation and the app implementation itself. Claude is quite helpful for both.
Amendments to a Regulation are like patches. So I figured, I have some Fable tokens left, let me take that analogy to an extreme. The 2024 amendment added all the digital wallet stuff, but it's huge. So I asked Claude to split the amendment into a bunch of commits. And then use the preamble text (which has some weight if there's a dispute about interpretation of articles) as a commit message. Was that really necessary? No.
cool that you're doing this. that said, how far are you personally from just leaving the EU to avoid dealing with this? what would need to happen for you to leave?
The rest of the world not being a shithole :-)
In all seriousness, I can already avoid the age verification nonsense with things like Nostr. These are very bad laws, but it's not like a war where your house gets blown up and you have to leave.
The EU does have the benefit of being democratic enough that one can publicly push back on these bad laws, so that's worth doing occasionally. And having worked on open source digital wallets (for Bitcoin) for over a decade, I'm familiar with the trade-offs, so it's a relatively small effort for me to publicly document the serious privacy gaps. Then someone else can hopefully benefit from that and maybe translate it into legal action.
It just feels like it's a lot of effort to fight this big nested system while there are smaller systems around. You have your local laws to worry about, but then there's EU on top of that. Now, compare that to, say, Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Both have lower taxes compared to the EU. Switzerland has direct democracy and Liechtenstein is famous for the law allowing municipalities to secede.
Switzerland is effectively EU, just like Norway. They have to copy-paste almost every regulation in order to not be excluded from the common market. Yet they have no vote in it.
Direct democracy does not really help privacy, because only a tiny minority cares about it. Switzerland had the Travel Rule before it was EU law: https://notabene.id/world/switzerland
Don't get me wrong, I like mountains!
interesting! i thought it's the opposite and Switzerland has leverage because they are a successful economy. would love to read more on this.
Those commit messages are still awful tho. Maybe you can use grok to reword them into something a bit more amusing.
You can always fork it :-)
But I actually need the literal Eurospeak to make sense of this thing.
I'll put it on the todo.
So now you can do git blame:
Huge commits are painful whether it's code or legislation. Splitting the changes into smaller pieces definitely makes reviewing a lot less overwhelming.