Thursday, Rotterdam, be there:

BitDevs Amsterdam

BitDevs Rotterdam, April 2, 2026

BitDevs Rotterdam meeting 027!

Every six months there's this recurring discussion about daylight savings time. It's a nice opportunity to learn new historical tidbits. E.g. I already know that the Nazis put us on Berlin time, but always wondered why we didn't switch back to London time. Well, that's because we didn't use London time, we stubbornly kept using Amsterdam time (yellow on the map). Still doesn't explain why France and Spain didn't revert. I also still want to go back to per city timezones (using UTC under the hood). Should be no problem with smartphones. Then there's this constant recurring argument that we have adjust the clock for health reasons. I find that pure nonsense. Obviously it's non-issue for people who work from home on their own schedule. But you can also just change the times schools and office jobs start. You don't have to change the clock for that.

Reviewer (on a different project): this looks weird, must be LLM generated? Me (not out loud): I'm sure it does, to someone who doesn't lint their whitespace

Why manually order a few books in two minutes, if you can spend a day automating it?

GitHub

GitHub - Sjors/cloud-print-rs: Small Rust CLI for placing CloudPrinter orders (unofficial)

Small Rust CLI for placing CloudPrinter orders (unofficial) - Sjors/cloud-print-rs

Why do household chores on a Saturday if you can instead ask your agent to get rid of WooCommerce and just use simple BTC Pay Button links on a static website (the book is open source anyway, so no need for securing the download links, though that would be a nice feature):

Bitcoin: A Work in Progress

Bitcoin: A Work in Progress

A book about soft forks, challenges of keeping open source software free of money-stealing bugs, new ways to protect Bitcoin nodes against evildoer...

De minimus de schmiminus, this is more important. View quoted note →

Some Dutch news article about EU age verification on porn sites... of course someone in the replies brags about how a VPN protects him. Then I feel obliged to point out that the VPN company knows which sites he's visiting and that if you paid them with fiat they also know your identity. And since creditcards are to get for minors, pretty much also your age. (and otherwise there's plenty of marketing databases with your name, ago, browser fingerprint, advertising id, etc) So you've opted in to age verification before the EU made you.

Sounds like the Tornado Cash prosecution argument. Why protect encrypted speech when we don't protect encrypted money? Or some such dystopian logic. View quoted note →

You can now ask Claude to check the #OTS timestamp for the Dutch municipal elections! :-) More interestingly though, the data collection does really benefit from LLMs. This is the second election where I've been using them. Still not a smooth ride, but I'm getting better at the process. And the tools are getting better too. There are 13k+ polling stations in the Netherlands. Volunteers count the votes (70x100cm paper ballots) and fill out a form by hand. After that, the computers take over to accumulate the results. But these paper forms are scanned and uploaded on 300+ municipal websites, creating an audit trail. My project then tries to download these PDFs. I don't re-publish the documents themselves, just the list of URLs, their SHA256 checksums, and a timestamp. The repo has scripts that make it easy to redownload and compare checksums. Collecting the URLs, however, is incredibly tedious. Every municipal website is different, the documents are named after the polling station, etc. The first time back in 2023, I spent days collecting the URLs, with scripts and with a few other people helping out. You'd think that for the next election, you just find and replace the year? Nope, all different again. There are a couple of common CMS systems used. Some are easy, at most requiring some rate limiting and a fake user agent to prevent getting blocked. Still, other municipalities use some JavaScript frameworks or even Google Drive— until recently, those required a manual download. This task can't be fully automated by scripts, yet it's too much work to do by hand. That makes agents a great fit. For 80% of the work, I was able to just say "Pick 25 municipalities and divide them over 5 sub-agents," and I'd end up with 25 commits half an hour later. Or a rate limiting error from GitHub Copilot :-) I struggled more with the remaining ones, though I think I'm in good shape for the next election. As a rough guideline: GPT5.4 and Claude Sonnet (both at medium effort) can do most of the heavy lifting, of course with constant "encouragement", whereas subagents with GPT5.4 mini can call a script to fetch documents, do some sanity checks, and commit the result. I briefly tried a local model (nemotron-cascade-2 with Ollama), but it started hallucinating PDF names. I might also try PayPerQ.

GitHub

GitHub - Sjors/verkiezingen-processen-verbaal

Contribute to Sjors/verkiezingen-processen-verbaal development by creating an account on GitHub.

Maybe not #ProductionReady but I vibe coded an iPhone node based on the kernel the other day. Just signet for now, because the kernel can't prune yet. Oh and it syncs from mempool.space :-)

GitHub

GitHub - Sjors/kernel-i-node: Bitcoin Core kernel experimental node for Apple devices

Bitcoin Core kernel experimental node for Apple devices - Sjors/kernel-i-node

Claude: avoid the word "very", make very few mistakes. View quoted note →

The half-yearly #chatcontrol zombie returned and was rekilled. View quoted note →

Is Olas still a thing is there a new thing?

Zullen de Basis Registratie Persoonsgegevens maar gewoon openbaar maken? Half Nederland kan er legaal in grasduiden en de andere helft zit al in diverse datalekken. #zucht

Human Rights in Finance.EU

Banken in BRP? HRIF.EU zegt: geen goed idee! - Human Rights in Finance.EU

Banken in BRP? HRIF.EU zegt: geen goed idee! En dat doen we in deze consultatiereactie. Afgelopen tijd bleek namelijk dat het kabinet de Nederlands...