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Built with OpenEUDI — open source (MIT), live on npm. GitHub: https://github.com/openeudi · npm: @openeudi/core and @openeudi/openid4vp Originally published on eidas-pro.com . The Developer's Dilemma You need to verify user identity in your application. Traditionally, that meant integrating a KYC provider — uploading documents, waiting for manual review, handling edge cases. With EUDI Wallets launching in December 2026, there's a new option. This comparison is written for developers who need to choose between — or migrate from — traditional KYC to EUDI Wallet verification. Architecture Comparison Traditional KYC Flow User uploads document → Your server → KYC API → Queue → AI/Manual review ↓ Result (minutes to days) ↓ Webhook to your server EUDI Wallet Flow Your server generates QR → User scans with wallet → Wallet authenticates ↓ Cryptographic VP sent back ↓ Result (2-5 seconds) Side-by-Side Comparison Aspect Traditional KYC EUDI Wallet (OpenEUDI) Verification time Minutes to 48 hours 2-5 seconds User effort Photo upload, selfie, manual entry Scan QR, tap approve Data you receive Full document images, extracted PII Only requested attributes (e.g., age_over_18) Data you store Required to store for compliance No PII storage needed API complexity REST + webhooks + polling REST + SSE (real-time) SDK cost Paid (per verification) Free (OpenEUDI is MIT) Production cost Per-verification pricing Managed service from EUR 49/mo Cryptographic verification You trust the KYC provider You verify the issuer's signature yourself Cross-border Provider-dependent All 27 EU member states Regulatory basis Provider-specific compliance EU Regulation 2024/1183 GDPR burden High (you store PII) Low (no PII retention) Offline capability No Yes (proximity/NFC flow) Integration Effort Traditional KYC (Typical) // 1. Create verification session const session = await kycProvider . createSession ({ type : ' identity ' , country : ' DE ' , documentTypes : [ ' passport ' , ' id_card ' ], redirectUrl

Quick answer: The Google Ads Transparency Center is a public registry of every ad Google runs — but it ships no API and no bulk export . To get the data programmatically you scrape it. A Google Ads Transparency scraper sends the same RPC call the website uses and returns every ad creative for an advertiser as structured JSON. The Apify Actor below does it for $0.0012 per ad (~$1.20 per 1,000), with the TLS fingerprinting, proxy rotation, and pagination handled for you. Google's Ads Transparency Center is one of the most underused datasets in marketing. Launched in 2023 under the EU Digital Services Act and parallel US pressure, it indexes every ad campaign currently running on Search, YouTube, Display, Shopping, Maps, and Play — keyed by advertiser. Google's own counter lists 300,000+ active creatives for a brand like Nike . For your nearest competitor, it's usually 50–500. The catch: there's no download button. Just an interactive UI that paginates 40 creatives at a time. If you want this as a CSV — for a competitor sweep, a trademark audit, or a RAG corpus — you have to extract it yourself. Here's what that actually takes, and how I shortened it to one API call. What is the Google Ads Transparency Center? 🔎 The Google Ads Transparency Center is a public, Google-operated registry that shows the ad creatives any verified advertiser is running, the date range each ad was shown, and roughly where. Google built it to comply with ad-disclosure regulation, so the data is public by design — you're reading the same registry a regulator would. What it gives you per advertiser: Every ad creative currently or recently live (text, image, video) The landing domain each ad clicks through to First-shown / last-shown timestamps and a rough impression count A deep link to each creative inside the Transparency Center What it does not give you: a search-by-keyword mode, region-filtered results from the server, or — crucially — an API. Does the Google Ads Transparency Center have an A

Stacking, Bidirectionality, the Encoder-Decoder, and LSTMs Last post ended with a simple RNN and three promises: LSTMs, bidirectional RNNs, and attention. This post delivers the first two, plus the refinements that turn a working-on-paper RNN into something you'd actually deploy. By the end, you'll know how to stack RNNs for depth, why reading a sentence backward as well as forward (bidirectionality) makes representations sharper, how the encoder-decoder turns one sequence into a different one for machine translation, and exactly what breaks in a simple RNN that LSTMs and GRUs were invented to fix. Attention, the fix for the last problem we'll hit, gets its own home in the transformer post, so we'll stop right at the edge of it. The simple RNN was the idea. This post is the engineering. A vanilla RNN carries a thread of hidden state through time, but in practice, that thread frays on long sequences, only sees the past, and bottlenecks everything through one final vector. Each section here is a fix for one of those problems. Put them together, and the path from "RNN" to "transformer" looks less like a leap and more like a series of obvious next steps. Stacking RNNs for Depth The first refinement is the easy one. Nothing says an RNN's output has to go straight to a prediction. You can feed the entire output sequence of one RNN as the input sequence to another. Then another. These are stacked RNNs (also called deep RNNs), and they usually outperform a single layer. Why does depth help? The same reason it helps in vision. Each layer learns representations at a different level of abstraction. The lower layers pick up fundamental, local properties; in language, that's roughly the level of parts of speech and named entities. The higher layers compose those into bigger groupings: descriptive phrases, "this is the answer to a question," and so on. We can't point at layer 3 and say "this one does coreference." But the theory holds up well enough that researchers have probed m

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask: Does Your Skill Actually Help? You spent an afternoon crafting a carefully structured Skill for your agent. Clear steps, thorough edge-case notes, well-formatted output requirements. You tested it manually a few times, the outputs looked great. You shipped it. Three weeks later, you notice that some task success rates have gone down compared to before the Skill existed. This is not a hypothetical. In May 2026, Microsoft Research published two concurrent papers — SkillLens ("From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption") and SkillOpt ("Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skills") — that measured this failure mode at scale. Their finding: negative transfer happens in 25% of cases , and you cannot reliably identify the bad skills just by reading the text. One paper answers "why skills sometimes backfire." The other answers "how to make skills systematically better." Together they sketch a new paradigm for agent capability improvement. Part One: SkillLens — Mapping the Full Skill Lifecycle A Skill Is Not a Point — It's a Pipeline Most practitioners think of a Skill as "a block of text instructions for an agent." SkillLens decomposes this into a three-stage lifecycle : Stage 1: Experience Generation Target model M runs training tasks, producing an experience pool of trajectories (both successes and failures) ↓ Stage 2: Skill Extraction Extractor model E distills the experience pool into a structured skill document — procedural knowledge under a fixed budget ↓ Stage 3: Skill Consumption The same target model M, equipped with the extracted skill, is evaluated on held-out test tasks Notice there are two distinct roles in this chain: the Extractor (distills knowledge from trajectories) and the Target (consumes knowledge to improve task performance). SkillLens's central insight is that these two roles are independent — a strong task executor is not necessarily a strong extractor, and vice versa . Two New Metrics: EE and TE To separate thes

Top API Gateways for AI Applications and Agentic Workflows (2026 Developer Guide) Hadil Ben Abdallah Hadil Ben Abdallah Hadil Ben Abdallah Follow May 28 Top API Gateways for AI Applications and Agentic Workflows (2026 Developer Guide) # ai # api # apigateway # backend 49 reactions Comments 6 comments 10 min read

This is a submission for the [GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge] What I Built LeadBotX is an AI-powered lead generation platform prototype designed to simulate how modern businesses can automatically discover, filter, and manage high-quality leads using intelligent automation workflows. This project is not just a simple frontend demo — it represents a revived college-level concept that I initially started earlier but left incomplete due to time constraints and complexity. For this challenge, I revisited the idea and transformed it into a fully structured SaaS-style frontend system with improved UI, better workflow representation, and a more realistic product-like experience. The main goal of LeadBotX is to visually demonstrate how an AI-based lead generation system works end-to-end in a real-world SaaS environment. Tech Stack This project was built using modern frontend technologies: React.js → Component-based UI structure CSS3 → Custom responsive styling system AOS (Animate On Scroll) → Smooth scroll animations Lucide Icons & React Icons → UI iconography GitHub Copilot → Assisted in code generation, debugging, and UI improvements Demo Source Code: https://github.com/Khushisingh-dev/LeadBotX Production Landing Page: https://lead-bot-x.vercel.app/ Before (Initial Version)- After (Final Version)- The Comeback Story This project originally started as a college-level concept during my development learning phase. At that time, I built only a basic structure and initial UI, but I was unable to complete it due to time limitations and complexity of the idea. It remained an unfinished project for a long time. When I came across this challenge, I decided to revisit LeadBotX and transform it into something more meaningful and complete. Instead of just polishing the UI, I focused on: Rebuilding the structure into a proper SaaS layout Improving workflow clarity and user journey Enhancing UI/UX consistency across all sections Making the product feel like a real-world AI tool prot

How RAGScope Knows Which Chunks Your LLM Actually Used Your retriever fetched 10 chunks. Your LLM only used 3. RAGScope shows a precision score of 30 out of 100. The question every new user asks: how does it know? There is no OpenTelemetry attribute that says "this chunk was in the context window." RAGScope infers it — and the way it does this is the most consequential piece of engineering in the whole tool. There Is No "In Context" Attribute in OTel The OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for generative AI ( gen_ai.* ) define attributes for model, input/output tokens, and retrieved documents. They do not define anything like gen_ai.chunk.reached_llm or gen_ai.retrieval.used_document_ids . When your RETRIEVER span fires, you get a list of documents. When your LLM span fires, you get a prompt and a completion. The two spans are connected by a parent-child trace relationship — but there is no attribute that maps which retrieved documents appear in which prompt. This gap matters. A reranker might drop 7 of your 10 chunks. Your application code might apply a token budget and truncate 4 more. From the trace alone, you cannot tell. RAGScope needs this information to compute the precision sub-score — the highest-weighted metric at 40% of the overall score. Getting it wrong would make precision meaningless. The Substring Match — How assembleContext Works RAGScope's answer is in src/enrichment/pipeline.ts , in a function called assembleContext : function assembleContext ( chunks : RagChunk [], llmSpans : ParsedSpan []): RagChunk [] { const llmPrompts = llmSpans . map (( s ) => s . prompt ). filter (( p ): p is string => !! p ); if ( llmPrompts . length === 0 ) return chunks ; let position = 0 ; return chunks . map (( chunk ) => { if ( ! chunk . content ) return chunk ; const inContext = llmPrompts . some (( p ) => p . includes ( chunk . content ! )); if ( inContext ) { return { ... chunk , inContext : true , contextPosition : position ++ }; } return { ... chunk , inContext :

Most apps don't just call one API endpoint. They call a whole chain of them. For example, you might log in, get a token, and then pass that token to another service. Tracking these multi-step chains can get messy quickly. To help fix this, the OpenAPI Initiative created the Arazzo Specification . It gives us a standard way to link different endpoints into clear workflows. But writing these workflow files by hand in a regular text editor is tough. It is very easy to lose track of how data moves from one step to the next. That is why I built Arazzo Visualizer for VS Code. It is a free, open-source extension that makes the Arazzo spec visual and easy to use. Live Interactive Graphs The extension reads your workflow files and turns them into interactive maps on the fly. See Data Flow: Look at exactly how data moves between steps. Catch Errors Early: Spot broken paths before you even run your code. Clean Layouts: Navigate large workflows without getting lost in thousands of lines of text. Built-In Workflow Runner Seeing the map is great, but testing it is even better. The tool has a step-by-step runner built right into your editor. Run a single step or execute the whole chain. See real-time data payloads and HTTP headers. Watch requests happen live to pinpoint bugs fast. Give it a Try The project is fully open source, and you can grab it or check out the code using the links below: Download: Install it directly from the VS Code Marketplace . Source Code: Check out the repository, report bugs, or contribute on GitHub . Deep Dive: Read my full technical breakdown and design on Medium . If you are working with API chains, I would love for you to try it out. Drop your feedback in the comments below! Note: Arazzo v1.1.0 is out with official AsyncAPI support. I am currently updating the VS Code extension to support these new features. Stay tuned for future updates!

I used to deploy Node.js apps on EC2 and manage servers like it was my second job. Port configs. PM2 restarts. Nginx rewrites. SSL renewals. Then I ran my first AWS Lambda function. 80% of that work is gone. Here's what Lambda actually does that nobody explains clearly: → You write a function → AWS runs it ONLY when triggered → You pay for milliseconds of execution → It scales from 1 to 1,000,000 requests without you touching anything As a full-stack developer in Bahrain, preparing for my AWS Developer Associate exam, this is the shift that changes how you think about backend architecture. Not "how do I manage a server" but "what should happen when this event fires." That mental model switch took me a week to fully get. I'm documenting everything as I study. Drop a 🔥 if you want me to share my Lambda notes weekly.

Throughout my software development career, especially over the last 20 years, I've constantly sought a balance between system and software aspects. One of these balancing points is the issue of application size. On one side, I have an engineering instinct that says, "Every kilobyte matters, every excess is a cost," while on the other, a pragmatic perspective that argues, "Delivering value-adding functionality to the user as quickly as possible is essential." Navigating between these two extremes has been a significant part of my career. So, should we really fight for every kilobyte? Or should we prioritize functionality? This is a gray area that varies depending on the project's context, target audience, and even deployment model. In my experience, there's no clear-cut answer to this question, but the best results can be achieved by asking the right questions and making conscious trade-offs. In this post, I'll share my thoughts and observations from different fields on this topic. The Harsh Realities of Size in the Mobile World The importance of size in mobile applications is undeniable. Especially in markets like Turkey, where mobile internet is widespread but not always fast or unlimited, app size directly affects download rates, user experience, and even how long an app stays on a device. Years ago, while developing my own Android spam application, I experienced this reality repeatedly. The smaller I made the app, the higher the download and installation rates became. For example, at one point, my app's main package was around 12MB. After several rounds of optimization (cleaning up unnecessary resources, code compression with ProGuard, optimizing native libraries), I managed to reduce this size to 7MB. This 40% reduction directly reflected in my Play Store download statistics. This difference was critical, especially for users with low-bandwidth connections or those using capped mobile data. Some users even provided feedback stating they refrained from downloadin

By Takeshi Yokoyama — Onecarat Labs Hi. I'm Yokoyama, and I build a local-first AI text editor as a side project, along with a few other experimental tools. Working on them, I keep running into the same question about where the web is going. This post is one observation, plus a small experiment I built to test it — including a Chrome extension you can actually try. The short version: I think websites will increasingly be read through AI agents, reshaped per reader, on the fly. And once that happens, there's a clear gap between sites that are easy for an AI to read and sites that aren't. What's starting to happen Until now, people read websites as websites. You open the top page, follow the menu, read the body, click a button — tracing the path the maker designed. As local AI and AI agents become normal, that breaks. People stop opening the page directly. They tell an AI what they want — "Can I try this quickly?" , "I just want to check it's safe" , "Just the gist" — and the AI reads the web and reshapes it into the form that reader wants. What the reader receives is no longer the layout the maker built. This isn't speculation. The idea that AI generates the interface for the reader already has a name — Generative UI — and it's one of the hottest areas in frontend right now, with Google, Vercel and others building toward it. But notice who's holding the pen in almost every version of that story: the site , or an AI embedded in an app — something under the maker's control. What I'm looking at is one step past that: a local AI, in the reader's own hands, reshaping any site into that person's preferred form — with no involvement from the maker at all. The initiative moves from the maker to the reader. The part that nags at me as a builder I build software too. So this shift nags at me. A site carries its maker's intent and rights. The order things appear in, what gets emphasized, the tone. Design, copy, flow — all of it is deliberate. Having an AI quietly reorder, rewri

A walkthrough of the architecture decisions behind Flacron Gamezone a production full-stack app built with Next.js, Express, PostgreSQL, and Redis. When a client approached me to build a live football match discovery platform, the requirements sounded straightforward on the surface: show live scores, let users subscribe, handle authentication. But the moment you start thinking about how those pieces connect in production, straightforward gets complicated fast. This is the story of how I designed the backend for Flacron Gamezone — what decisions I made, why I made them, and what broke along the way. Table of Contents The Problem With "Just Building It" The Architecture: Four Distinct Layers Why This Matters to a Client The Bug That Taught Me Something Real The Full Stack at a Glance What I'd Do Differently The Problem With "Just Building It" The easiest version of this app is a single Express file: one route handler that queries the database, formats the data, and sends a response. I've seen this pattern in tutorials everywhere. It works for demos. It falls apart in production. The problems are predictable: you can't test business logic without hitting the database, a change in one feature quietly breaks another, and the moment a second developer joins the codebase, nobody knows where anything lives. I wanted to build something I could actually be proud to show an employer or a client. That meant committing to a proper layered architecture from day one, even on a project this size. The Architecture: Four Distinct Layers The entire Express backend is organized into four layers. Each layer has one job and talks only to the layer directly below it. Route → Controller → Service → Repository Here's what each one actually does. Routes are just maps. They declare that POST /api/v1/subscriptions exists, attach the auth middleware, and hand off to the controller. No logic lives here. Controllers handle the HTTP boundary. They extract data from req.body or req.params , call th

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From specialized motors to the use of machine learning algorithms, Turkey’s billion-dollar hair-transplant industry is the result of a constant process of innovation.