Hacker News: wewxjfq

New comment by wewxjfq in "Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London"

wewxjfq — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:13:01 +0000

> there is single party authoritarianism, but they always take care of their people

What an ahistorical thing to say. Read more books, less comments under cat videos.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Iceland votes 'No' to reopening EU accession talks"

wewxjfq — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:40:35 +0000

What a high quality comment. Meanwhile at the top of every worthwhile metric including freedom indices: Half of the EU + Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

wewxjfq — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:36:34 +0000

With a more benevolent reading of my comment you could have seen that I do consider them equivalent for cashless local payments. My first sentence was meant as "[American] debit/credit cards". This doesn't invalidate anything I said.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

wewxjfq — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:14:58 +0000

Trite comment. Debit/credit cards never took off in Germany because everyone had a Giro card that worked perfectly well for cashless payments. And for online payments, PayPal filled the gap quick enough. The average German saw no reason to request a Visa/MasterCard from their bank for a heavy fee when PayPal did the job. That's also the difference: Germany never had the "Here, have a free credit card" culture.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

wewxjfq — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:29:02 +0000

In the early days of eBay I exchanged money exclusively via bank transfer and had no worries, but for me the Internet has changed and these days I use PayPal to send and receive money from strangers. I see it like this: My email address is already public, so I'm not risking anything when I share it with strangers. My IBAN on the other hand is only known to a few respectable companies, so why change that? Seeing all the online platforms store all your PII without hesitation, but keeping your IBAN only as ****** and handing it straight to a trusted payment processor always reminds me that it's not like the others. Yes, I know businesses put their IBAN on their letter head, but they also have accountants watching their transactions.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

wewxjfq — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:01:27 +0000

Most banks did charge a fee at first, so this rollout is partly to blame for the option being available and the hesitancy.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)"

wewxjfq — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:59:34 +0000

A banana taped to the wall is a deeper and more profound art commentary than yours.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

wewxjfq — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:45:57 +0000

You're assuming the training data is a true representation of language usage, which it isn't. In the "gray" or "overcast" case, a single weather website might already skew the count of these words.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended"

wewxjfq — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:44:20 +0000

You accuse them of being hypocrites for staying silent about some other wars, while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war ("I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you have to be a brainwashed sheep to do that)? Sounds hypocritical to me.

PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?

New comment by wewxjfq in "Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity"

wewxjfq — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:21:10 +0000

Europe sans Russia does not produce uranium - why people constantly paint this as an independent energy source is beyond me. Of all Russian energy companies, it was Rosatom that could not be sanctioned.

New comment by wewxjfq in "The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code"

wewxjfq — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:46:57 +0000

While the Fogbank story is a funny anecdote, I don't see it as a fitting example for atrophied skills. It's like writing a clean implementation of some software and it just doesn't match the legacy version until you realize that the legacy version had an unnoticed bug that made it behave the way it does.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

wewxjfq — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:50:48 +0000

Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction"

wewxjfq — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:37:56 +0000

The author clearly means professional publishers, who have editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack trust. The reply also misses several other points the author makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.

New comment by wewxjfq in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

wewxjfq — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:48:33 +0000

When I ask an LLM to help me decide something, I have to remind myself of the LotR meme where Bilbo asks the AI chat why he shouldn't keep the ring and he receives the classic "You're absolutely right, .." slop response. They always go in the direction you want them to go and their utility is that they make you feel better about the decision you wanted to take yourself.

New comment by wewxjfq in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

wewxjfq — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:14:01 +0000

Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!

New comment by wewxjfq in "US funding for global internet freedom 'effectively gutted'"

wewxjfq — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:12:22 +0000

A program that helped people evade real censorship is "feeding them US propaganda" and social media awash with state-sponsored trolls tearing our societies apart is "an alternative geopolitical narrative" - bit of a spin, isn't it?

New comment by wewxjfq in "The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA"

wewxjfq — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:52:56 +0000

Weird, I remember Western media ran full transcripts of his speech after the Ukraine invasion and every other time he crawled out of his bunker in the Urals. Would you like to enlighten us which important viewpoints of Putin get censored in the West?

New comment by wewxjfq in "America First Risks Becoming America Alone"

wewxjfq — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:20:11 +0000

I don't see any problem-solving being done, I only see the US dismantling the world it created, where - let's not kid ourselves - America always came first. The problems the US faces would be better solved with international cooperation, but the US is flushing its softpower down the toilet and destroying all goodwill amongst its allies.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only"

wewxjfq — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:07:19 +0000

Your upvotes are issued by sheep and wolf in sheep's clothing telling you to not censor propaganda from a country that's been waging war against you.

New comment by wewxjfq in "Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries"

wewxjfq — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:37:01 +0000

Actions speak louder than words and China is supporting Russia.