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A lot of people doubted this could work. After all, railway tracks are a dusty, hot environment with tons of vibrations that could cause microcracks.

I was in the doubter team too, but if this really worked out, that's great news. Congrats to the project team! Will be interesting to see if this scales well.

Latency doesn't matter for music and Fiio supports both LDAC and aptX.

Keeping the battery charged is a weak point though, agreed.

An alternative to a wired dongle is a high-quality bluetooth amp, e.g. from Fiio. It's reliable, keeps your phone free from cables, but you can keep using your high quality wired headphones.

Fair, this may be a legal option for ordering alcohol. I really don't see the pure cryptographic hash "is older than 18y" as a big privacy issue though, as long as it is properly salted, does not provide other information on my identity and is unlinkable (i.e. multiple such signed claims are different).

The last time I opened an account for a financial service, as well as when creating an account with a service for digital document signatures, I had to do a video ident process with a private third party company. There was no other option, and I felt quite uneasy about it. I would have preferred the E-ID by far in both cases.

Both companies will inevitably store information about me to provide their service, independently of the identity verification. That is legitimate and inevitable for their service. That other, third party company storing a video of me holding my ID and my face into the camera is now not inevitable anymore.

Quite a few actually do require ID-scan-through-email (which is horrible). Or, they simply delegate to a third party video ident service, often in another country (because cheaper).

How exactly is the status quo not much worse than "I give you a cryptographic hash proving that I am over 18, but nothing else, and without the state knowing that this transaction happened"?

Companies can already request and will still be able to request a PDF scan of your ID. Or worse, video ident through a private third party.

This is the status quo for ordering alcohol online, or if you want to open a bank account.

The new E-ID based on SSI (self-sovereign identity) is so much better than the status quo from a real-world privacy perspective towards companies that must verify your identity or age.

This is interesting.

How did you measure the caffeine content in the capsule? Also, I assume that is the total amount of caffeine present in the capsule, and not the caffeine dissolved in a cup of coffee (since that would depend on the amount of water running through it, and possibly on temperature and mineral contents as well.)

Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.

Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.

Many people in Switzerland love to buy used cars with cash, even if they cost a few thousands.

(But we can also just scan the QR code of the recipient's bank account with the e-banking app and initiate a transfer that way.)