Qasaur

The modern software engineer throws away the requirements specification because the computers he commands are fast and the people he negotiates with are slow. He ignores archival science because his business records are digital and the musings of a geriatric archivist are not compatible with PostgreSQL 18. He adopts the posture of an industry thought leader on X but has never read a standards document in his life. He believes he has little in common with the Roman aqueduct engineer but finds himself in management meetings pleading for more byte-sized stones for the stone god.

Lawyers are informed by ancient case law and bankers leverage trade instruments with roots in medieval Italy. Why is the software profession so exceptional that replacing hundreds of years of engineering wisdom with blog posts on agentic workflows is considered best practice?

There is little reason to invent a completely new design system if your goal is to encourage brand recognition and prevent an operator from confusing tools.

Apple/SwiftUI has accentColor for example where you can inject a brand colour. This is subtle but effective for UI differentiation - colour is a design primitive that evokes subconscious pattern recognition and can be more effective than a complicated design framework that forces a larger context switch in the user's mind.

The basic principle is to ensure that any machine/workload which joins the network (and processes customer data, in this case extremely sensitive PII) has a cryptographically verified chain of trust from boot to the application-layer to guarantee workload integrity.

NixOS is used for declarative and more importantly deterministic OS state and runtime environment, layered with dm-verity to prevent tampering of the Nix store. The root partition, aside from whatever is explicitly configured in the nix store, is wiped on every reboot. The ephemerality prevents persistence of any potential attacker, and the state of the machine is completely identical to whatever you have configured in your NixOS configuration, which is great for audibility. This OS image + boot loader is signed with organisation-private keys, and deployed to machines preloaded with UEFI keys to guarantee boot integrity and preventing firmware-level attacks (UEFI secure boot).

At this point you need to trust the cloud provider to not tamper with the UEFI keys or otherwise compromise memory confidentiality through a malicious or insecure hypervisor, unless the provider supports memory encryption through something like AMD SEV-SNP. The processor provides an AMD-signed attestation that is provided to the guest OS that states "Yes, this guest is running in a trusted execution environment, and here are the TPM measurements for the boot" and you can use this attestation to determine whether or not the machine should join your network and that it is running the firmware, kernel, and initramfs that you expect AND on hardware that you expect.

I think I'll put together a write-up on this architecture once I launch the service. There is no such thing as perfect security, of course, but I think this security architecture prevents many classes of attacks. Bootkits and firmware-level attacks are exceedingly difficult or even impossible with this model, combine this with an ephemeral root filesystem and any attacker would be effectively unable to gain persistence in the system.

Hetzner is great for dedicated servers, but for those of us who need smaller-scale secure/confidential VMs I'm afraid that there isn't really any other choice than hyperscalers.

Does anyone know if there is a VM vendor that sits somewhere in between a dedicated server host like Hetzner in terms of performance + cost-effectiveness and AWS/GCP in terms of security?

Basically TPM/vTPM + AMD SEV/SEV-SNP + UEFI Secure Boot support. I've scoured the internet and can't seem to find anyone who provides virtualised trusted computing other than AWS/GCP. Hetzner does not provide a TPM for their VMs, they do not mention any data-in-use encryption, and they explicitly state that they do not support UEFI secure boot - all of these are critical requirements for high-assurance use cases.

Have you?

Financial crises have been more severe, longer, and more sustained since the introduction of central banking. Let us also not forget that the industrial revolution and the extraordinary growth of Western economies in the late 1800s were mostly conducted under free banking without a central buyer and lender of last resort, and in some jurisdictions where a central bank existed it was regulated to follow a strict gold standard.

Sure, but ransomware is just extortion and that is a concept that has existed for time immemorial. I think ransomware is a relatively small part of the global volume of generalised extortion which is almost certainly mostly settled in fiat and not crypto.

>Buying drugs, money laundering, rampant speculation, rug pulls, fraud, high fees, inefficiency, horrible UX, irreversible SFYL, and destroying the climate.

Every one of these charges happens every day and in some of them to a much greater scale in fiat, especially climate destruction due to inflationary monetary policy, which encourages consumption and waste and punishes thrift and savings.

>From my point of view serfdom is the (block)chain. Only people with enough stake or those who pays are in control.

I disagree with this but even if one assumes this to be the case, I'd much rather prefer a monetary system subject to the control of free market forces rather than the modern monetary system which is subject to a small group of unelected and unaccountable technocrats operating under the feeble assumption of central bank independence and whose power is extended through coercion and not voluntary association.

The United States taxes its citizens globally regardless of residence, yes. One of the only countries in the world that does that (the other is Liberia AFAIK).