I'll explain a bit what's going on here. The typical crypto ethos usually isn't aligned with governments or paying taxes at all.
Additionally, banks are heavily government regulated entities, they are almost part of the executive branch. Aiding in the collection of taxes, neutering economic incentives for illegal activities, and implementing public economic policy are common and unquestioned responsibilities placed on banks through laws.
> How do you jump from banks to taxes? Taxes are for the government.
Many reasons to do that jump. I'll give two.
In some countries banks do collect automatically certain taxes that then go to the government. For example in the EU, in Belgium for example, if a stock I owned paid dividends and the bank is the custodian, the bank shall gladly take 30% off the dividends (+ add insane fees on top) and give that money to the government. As a sidenote it's wild that when you receive dividends in some countries you often end up with less than 50% of the actual dividends but I digress.
Still in Belgium: there's now an additional 10% tax on added value (since 2025), in addition to all the other taxes btw, that's always to be paid (say you sell shares of GOOG that went up... Even if you held for years: 10% are due in addition to all the other taxes on added values): and politicians are now wondering if those 10% shouldn't be seized immediately, with the banks collecting the 10% when you sell any equity (stocks/funds) and handing them over to the government. (so by the same mechanism that dividends are already immediately "taxed" by the bank).
"Banks to taxes" is a very real thing. Worldwide, but not in the US, there's the "Common Reporting Standard" (CRS): banks are basically little snitches that transmit all your accounts balances to the local IRSes. Which komrades shall hail has great progress but I digress again.
In addition to that banks have to comply with KYC/AML rules and are expected to do a certain amount of SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) to the government. Government which typically ain't much interested in crime: it's more interested in collecting money (like in the Al Capone case) on non-paid taxes (and the fines that go with it too). Ah, that's a third reason to do that jump: banks shall tell the government there's a suspicious activity from that person, governement then comes asking "where's that money coming from and where are the taxes you had to pay on that amount?".
I don't own any Monero but the link between "banks" and "taxes" is very real: I'm not saying it's good or bad. What I'm saying is that there's a very clear link between banks and taxes.
Now, and I'm still digressing, there are cases where the government/IRS ain't allowed to come see your accounts: some companies and individuals, in certain jurisdiction, have very strong protection against that (like actual jail time for bank employees that'd leak customers bank balances to journalists or the IRS). But, worldwide, it's not the norm.
And as I understand Monero, if someone has a balance in Monero on a self-custodian wallet, there's no bank that's going to report the balance to the IRS. Although now in the EU, for example, if you hold Monero on a centralized exchange (like Coinbase, the HN unicorn), then Coinbase shall send to your local IRS your balance of Monero each year to the government (it's a requirement of the MiCA EU legislation).
> Your own private bank which cannot interact with most financial institutions and merchants?
But you can gift $900 000 to the FSF which, itself, shall, I take it, have a way to transform these Monero into a currency that can interact with financial instutions and merchants right?
AIUI there are merchant accepting cryptocurrencies? Maybe not Monero but, still AIUI, you can use a decentralized exchange to convert Monero to another cryptocurrency the merchant accepts?
My one and only experience with Ryanair was that they were rude and hostile even in places where they weren't trying to fleece you. From in-your face rude signs (official, corporate designed ones, not something printed from Word by a random employee), to a UI where you needed to concatenate strings in order to craft a valid input (something like "enter your credit card number, followed by #, followed by the MMYY validity date"). Maybe that was to make people fail checkin and force them to pay for checkin at the counter, but I think it was early in the booking flow, i.e. where they had no incentive to make it hard.
Over 15 years ago, I think, and I have no idea if it was credit card numbers or something else. It was sufficiently crazy UX to stand out as crazy for a consumer-oriented website even in the much less polished web back then.
Yes, this sounds made-up/not Ryanair. I've used them for over a decade, paid with many different cards and have never encountered this with them (nor anywhere ever really).
> As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.
You have to pay for the service, though, and if you’re already flying Ryan Air, cost is probably a factor.
The service used to be free, and while it was a bit frustrating to go through it, it did save me once. On the other hand I have a friend who, upon me telling my positive story with Kiwi support, told me her negative one. So your mileage may vary.
It’s still a good first site to check to get a general idea of what’s available where, though.
So did you really write this, as claimed in the title, or did you vibe code it? If the latter, how much of the code did you review? How much of it do you understand and could rewrite by hand if necessary? How much of it are you confident you can find and fix bugs and exploits in?
If you think that asking “how much of this thing you claim to have written did you actually write and understand” is comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, it seems fair to assume that you probably wrote and understand close to nothing of it. Thank you for clarifying.
Surely you’re doing nothing to dispel the notion. If it isn’t true, say it. My questions were genuine, I don’t understand your defensiveness. Either you understand the code or you don’t. There are people who will be fine with it and use it anyway, and people who won’t be and will use something else. But they all will benefit (and temper expectations) from an honest answer.
my favourite thing about the present is how entirely people have lost their minds with LLM-augmented work, to the point that they'll openly interrogate people who have obviously been writing software for three decades about how much of their personal project's boilerplate is TrUlY ThEiRs.
if someone chooses to use an LLM in 2025 and they're not fresh out of boot, it's simply good manners to assume that they're doing so responsibly and transparently.
i think the most annoying thing of all is when people openly volunteer that they have used an LLM to write something and it opens up a front of ideological warfare for people who are simply terrified of losing their livelihoods.
Your HN account is from 2013. You have one comment, this one in this thread. You also have one submission, which is to the website of the author of this tool. What an amazing coincidence that in 12 years of HN, your only two interactions were promoting and defending this person.
rofl, what does any of that have to do with what i'm saying, detective columbo?
wait, i need to _use_ more _italics_, that's how we know we've made an _excellent point_
i only have one post on deviantart too, shall we get into that? come on lets have a fireside chat and settle your nerves as you tremble before the inexorable weight of technological change.
If _you_ can read the code, and it's of reasonable quality (I can and this code appears to be), then what exactly is the point of this argument?
Before the authors work, however you choose to define that word, this did not exist. Now it does, and it isn't slop. Why then does it matter how it came into existence?
This feels like a petty attempt to diminish the fact that someone just gave us a piece of useful open source software.
> This feels like a petty attempt to diminish the fact
It feels that way to you because you misunderstood the point and are outright assuming bad faith (as evidenced by sibling comments).
> I can and this code appears to be
Yes, appears. To know for sure you’d have to read more of it. You’d have to spend time to understand it. If you know the author and know they have been writing code before LLMs and they tell you they have written it all themselves or at the very least reviewed it all, you’ll place a certain amount of trust in the code based on the author. If, however, they say they vibe coded all of it and verified nothing, you’re no longer trusting the abilities of the author but the random musings of LLMs.
Those two scenarios entail different levels of trust and verification and they affect how much time you yourself will decide to spend on doing your own review to go from appears good to “I’m confident it is good”.
This is not hard to understand. All you have to do is not assume that everyone who makes a question about LLM usage is immediately bashing the project. In other words, don’t engage in bad faith and don’t assume motivation from strangers.
> Yes, appears. To know for sure you’d have to read more of it. You’d have to spend time to understand it. If you know the author and know they have been writing code before LLMs and they tell you they have written it all themselves or at the very least reviewed it all, you’ll place a certain amount of trust in the code based on the author. If, however, they say they vibe coded all of it and verified nothing, you’re no longer trusting the abilities of the author but the random musings of LLMs.
Dude you are taking this very simple piece of software way too seriously. Not everything requires this level of attention or effort. This is a Bluetooth controller adapter, not a an O2 regulator on the ISS. My criteria here are quite simple:
* Is the code readable, so that _if_ I ever have to actually modify it I can? Yes.
Before LLMs, did you ask maintainers how much of the code they wrote themselves, vs how much of it did someone else write, and how well they reviewed the code? Because I haven't seen this ever, everyone just went by "does this library work for me? If not, I'll fix it or stop using it".
It's only now, with LLMs, and particularly on HN that we're so all up in arms about authorship all of a sudden.
Yes! It’s insane to not worry about how well a maintainer reviews submitted code. Every semi-competent open-source developer understands that merging code they do not understand is a recipe for disaster and maintenance burden. Furthermore, they understand that not doing so is how you get malicious vulnerabilities merged. Have you truly not seen any such cases in recent memory? The fact you don’t think good reviews are important is worrying and puts into question all your repos.
Don’t. It’s a cool idea and vibe coding it doesn’t make it less interesting. You don’t owe anyone anything and the mean behaviour you’re in receipt of says more about them than you.
Please stop assuming bad faith. I didn’t complain about anything, I asked a few questions to make an initial call on the level of engagement I’d want to have with the project. I even openly said I’d have just moved on without further reply if it was admitted to be entirely LLM generated with no review.
If multiple people are assuming bad faith: perhaps you should adjust your communication in future rather than trying to change their mind. An apology wouldn’t hurt, either.
It’s not “multiple people”, I asked that of one person multiple times.
And respectfully Mike, you’re not the person to be schooling others on respectful communication and requesting apologies. You are incredibly abrasive, often rude, and the reason many people avoid Homebrew altogether. You’re repeatedly criticised for “being a dick” or an “asshole” (I personally would use neither), including on HN submissions. You are very far from the paragon you are exalting.
I used to defend you when I contributed more regularly to Homebrew, but as time went on I now only ever find you in contexts of trading insults and never giving an inch or admitting wrongdoing. Even when it seems you are, you always find a way to end with some subtle jab at the other person.
For sure I could do better. I try and often fail, and that’s how we grow. But it is profoundly hypocritical of you to act like you are an example.
No shade on most other Homebrew maintainers, though, and thank you nonetheless for all the work you do.
You will find many examples of me apologising and changing on Homebrew’s issue tracker, they just tend to not be the cases that people decide to bring up here. It’s unsurprising to me that 16 years of working on Homebrew most days has a bunch of suboptimal communication in that time. I am not perfect but also never claimed to be.
Attacking my communication here doesn’t help you. I got involved in this thread after seeing someone saying they regret sharing this (interesting) project from your reaction and feeling the same way after your reaction to something I’ve shared. Feel free to ignore me as is your right.
Ignoring the specifics, your first paragraph applies to me. You simply decided to assume it doesn’t and stoke a fire which, as far as I was concerned, was already out.
Please don’t do that. It’s not the first time I see it. You come in, say what you want, then leave and say “you can ignore it”. So can you! You could’ve ignored it. I guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of times you do that, you’ll just make the other person mad and the situation worse. If you want to do better, and I believe you do, those backhanded dismissals need to stop.
I did not reread the whole thread before replying and should have done that at which point I would have seen your apology. I apologise for not doing that. Good on you for apologising. I will ignore more in future.
Can you explain why it makes a difference what the answers are?
When using an open source library assumptions should be:
- The code does what it advertises.
- The owner is responsible for the functionality.
- The owner's reputation is based on the quality.
You're making it sound that you're more sure for the above when the code is "hand-written" than LLM-driven. Why exactly? Do you tend to deeply understand the strengths and limitations of every coder whose software you're using in your projects?
As long as the owner is responsible for the quality of a project why does it matter how it was executed?
> Can you explain why it makes a difference what the answers are?
You answered it yourself:
> the owner is responsible for the quality of a project
If you didn’t write, review, or understand the code, then you cannot be responsible for its quality. If you don’t have the skills to write it by hand and understand it, you don’t have to skills to properly address bug reports or understand and prevent malicious submissions.
All of those are legitimate concerns and considerations when deciding if you want to invest your time in a project.
Honestly, if the author had responded “I vibe coded it and didn’t review any of it, but it’s been working for me for <however long>”, that would’ve been fine. It would have been a clear, honest answer that would let everyone decide how they want to proceed.
No, I disagree with the premise, that's why I don't want to answer. I am responsible for the quality of the project by virtue of publishing it, not because I wrote it in a way you agree or disagree with. Your questions are irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is whether my name is on the repo or not.
If I didn't think it's good enough to release, I'd say something like "I vibe-coded this and didn't check it, use at your own peril". How much of the code I understand and how much an LLM wrote is entirely irrelevant.
What premise?! I made general questions that I want to know for myself. They were questions, not accusations. The fact you saw then as such says something about you, not me. You flipped out for no reason.
> that's why I don't want to answer.
Then you could’ve said that too, instead of dismissing it with a sketch and lamenting without any clarification.
> Your questions are irrelevant.
That’s not for you to decide. Silly example: Imagine you have a peanut allergy and go to a restaurant. You ask the waiter if some dessert has peanuts in it and they answer “that is irrelevant”. Questions are relevant to the asker. You didn’t even try to understand why I made the questions, you simply assumed bad faith.
> If I didn't think it's good enough to release, I'd say something like "I vibe-coded this and didn't check it, use at your own peril".
And how is anyone supposed to know you’d do or not do that? If you had been upfront about using LLMs from the start, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
> How much of the code I understand and how much an LLM wrote is entirely irrelevant.
No, no it is not. It may be irrelevant to you, but it’s not to everyone else. You don’t get to decide what other people think is relevant.
Considering how aggressive they’ve been about internet legislation lately, mandating age checks and asking companies to give them keys to encrypted data, I think I’d rather them not rejoin just yet, we don’t need another country trying to force Chat Control and making it worse.
> I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer'
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
I was unconvinced till I switched my devices, one by one, to Apple products a few years ago. They really do just work, especially with specification abiding devices.
I will say, I have an Apple device minority ecosystem, and it seems to be that the Apple devices are the bad citizens there.
For example, I have Sony and Bose headphones with bluetooth multi point. The way this is supposed to work for example is that I can connect them to my PC and my smartphone and have my PC playing videos or whatever, and my phone can override that when something "priority" like a phone call comes in.
Except if the iPad is one of the connected devices, then it will claim priority once a minute or so, _even if it's playing no audio_, thereby interrupting other audio streams pointlessly. This makes all the other devices look like they can't play audio and the iPad can, and I'm sure the iPad plays nice with airpods, but it seems weird to me that every non-Apple combination of devices I hve also plays nice with each other.
- Reliable internet sharing, especially when connection is spotty, and when your connection switches between operators or countries
- Making alarms randomly silent. I missed a flight once because of this. There is no excuse for this.
- Randomly not working AirPlay
- GPS is terrible compared to any of my previous Androids. Even my first Android in 2010 was better than this.
- Finding an operator can take a loooong time after crossing border
- Random restrictions in App Store, like no torrent clients
- Generally terrible keyboard for my native language (Hungarian). Prediction and basic accent fixing doesn’t work at all. The exception is when I don’t need to change a word with diacritics… when the keyboard’s dictionary clearly contains them
- Apple Maps is still a joke. Many times it doesn’t load the underlying map layer at all. I switch to Google Maps search for what I want, finding it, reading some info, looking some images, then switching back to Apple Maps, and it still doesn’t load. Also, navigation and speed limit information are unreliable to say the least.
- Heavily underdocumented MacOS virtualization API, and half the features can’t be used in a real environment, but these restrictions are completely undocumented
- Wanting to have a running DNS server is a challenge on MacOS
- Unusable GPU when no monitor is connected
- You basically need to turn off all security features in MacOS to allow some basic automation, like with FaceTime
- Generally terrible compatibility with anything non Apple. Do you want to show your photos on your friend’s random TV without hassle? Good luck.
- Many built in features (eg SSH, VNC) are heavily restricted, and good luck if you want to replace them cleanly. Most information on internet is “just use the built in solution”. Also they are many times completely insecure.
There are hacks for these, but “they just work” is not true at all. On the level of how “they just work”, top level Android and Windows devices are also on that level for more than a decade in case of Android, and at least 20 years for Windows (if not more). Maybe Apple TV is my only device which just works without hitting some quirks. Especially compared to my other TV and TV adjacent devices. But even here its FaceTime solution, let’s say “interesting”.
This argument is getting old. Just because you don’t like something, it doesn’t mean everyone agrees and will take the same shortcuts you do. Fortunately not everyone in the world has the same disregard for their own work, and many of us understand the signal it sends when you’re unwilling to even write your own instructions.
If you want your READMEs sloppily written by LLMs, that’s your prerogative. Just like it’s the prerogative of everyone visiting your repo and bumping into a slop README to decide if they want to even give your tool a second look before abandoning it.
Slop READMEs suggest slop code. Soon everyone who’ll even look at your code are other sloppers and (if it ever gets popular) malicious actors who’ll exploit it in an afternoon because no users understand anything the code does.
You’re still alive, thus you still have the chance to live a more selfless life you feel proud of.
> It's amazing these people did not worry about the extra expense and inconvenience of taking care of another person
Seems to me they did worry, but decided to do it anyway.
> with children of their own to take care of.
The children came later, and Ronnie helped to take care of them.
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