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weli

823 karma · joined October 9, 2025

hn@weli.dev
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weli··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
Without fractional banking the bank needs to be way more cautious when appraising an asset and be more conservative with the future gains estimation. Decreasing speculation and inflation of value.
weli··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
The bank lended more money than it has in reserves allowing for speculation and extra inflation of perceived value of an asset
weli··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
It all comes back to fractional reserve banking. It is the root of all evil in our financial system. If Rothbard could only see the current state of affairs...
weli··on [dead]
> If someone threatened me with death or offered a hefty ransom, I would be able to check their mails, sensitive documents or just browser history. And I am happy to never have been in that situation.

That sounds like a pretty sensible reason to not trust someone no? Politicians don't make the most sensible decisions at a time, but the ones were if they were to not work wouldn't be blamed on them.

Let's say there is an attack on Google or [insert random engineer name working for belgian goverment] and thousands of emails from politicians were leaked. The public outcry would be wildly different. In the case of google they would talk about how can a company hold so much sensitive data and power blah blah blah. In the case of random engineer much of the blame would be on the politician on why did they rely on a random person having access to all emails and sensitive information instead of a reliable company like google.

Sometimes the most popular answer is the best one because if you are wrong then everyone is wrong too.

weli··on 5x perf increase on writes with FPW disabled in Postgres
How does it affect HA postgres? (Replicas, consensus, etc). Especially with extensions like citus.
weli··on Zig → Rust porting guide
I'd agree but bun is supposed to be a "drop-in replacement" and is marketed as such. This breaks several packages and projects.
weli··on Zig → Rust porting guide
I love your work on bun. How do you feel about all the constant concerns being raised about the quality of the project lately? I understand some of them might just be typical twitter hate but some of them are real. And I think people are right to question why you are adding image processing or web views inside a javascript runtime when there are bugs affecting production that sit unaddressed. For example on of our biggest blockers right now is https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/6608 which was reported in 2023, still affecting us 3 years later.
weli··on OpenAI models coming to Amazon Bedrock: Interview with OpenAI and AWS CEOs
As a rule of thumb inference offered by the model labs are closer to the "true implementation" compared to third parties. They have other problems though.
weli··on Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero
spain
weli··on Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero
This is pretty dangerous. At least in my country the displayed price must be honored and they cannot refuse the sale.
weli··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
> Also there's the, often, I suppose, intentional confusion of terms. The free market of the economic theory is not an unregulated market, it's a market of infinitesimal agents with infinitesimal influence of each individual agent upon the whole market, with no out-of-market mechanisms and not even in-market interaction between agents on the same side.

Just to expand on this really interesting topic. That's where the common pitfall on planned economy begins. Because to some degree a free market can withstand some amount of regulation; after all, external agents trying to manipulate the market are just that, agents in the market. As long as there are other autonomous agents intervening the market will keep functioning as it was. So the bureaucrat has both the incentive and the justification to expand the intervention. In other words, his economical plan didn't work because it was not intervened enough and just if they intervene in this extra thing it will work for sure. That loop continues until the market is 100% intervened, and at that point it requires such a enormous structure of power and control that makes it difficult to fight it (clientelist networks, repressive states, etc).

weli··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
It is not carrying a lot of weight. Macroeconomics are different from microeconomics. On a micro scale agents have enough weight on the system where a specific action might break a model. On a macro scale each individual agent's action carries less weight and therefore the system becomes predictable.

On a micro scale it is possible, and sometimes favorable, to intervene. On a macro scale to intervene economically becomes impossible due to the economic calculation problem. It is widely accepted in modern economics that the unit of maximum extent where economical intervention is possible is a business/company/enterprise. Or in sociological terms the maximum unit is the family. Anything broader than that and the compound effect of the economic calculation problem becomes apparent and inefficiencies accumulate. Autonomous decentralized mechanisms (like a free market) are the only solution to it, but not the most optimal.

weli··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
The free market tends to equilibrium yes. That indeed is a novel realization.
weli··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
I don't know if you are being sarcastic. But no, it's not an "utopia" by any means and the free market still has many pitfalls and problems that I described. However, is the best system we have to coordinate the production, distribution and purchasing of services and goods on a mass scale.
weli··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
Mises never claimed that the free market produced the most optimal solutions at a given moment. In fact Mises explicitly stated many times that the free market does indeed incur in semi-frequent self-corrections, speculations and manipulations by the agents.

What Mises proposition was - in essence - is that an autonomous market with enough agents participating in it will reach an optimal Nash equilibrium where both offer and demand are balanced. Only an external disruption (interventionism, new technologies, production methods, influx or efflux of agents in the market) can break the Nash equilibrium momentarily and that leads to either the offer or the demand being favored.

weli··on C# in Unity 2026: Writing more modern code
A lot of game devs are terrible programmers. A friend of mine 10 years ago asked me for help with his Unity project. He is not a tech savvy person but we both took programming in high school, enough for him to make small games with a lot of tutorials and stack overflow.

His codebase was horrible, a lot of logic that I would have already though of abstracting away. For example saving dialogs on json files and the conditions for that dialog to trigger for that NPC as some sort of finite state machine that can be represented with a series of sequential flags. He had a single file that was about 15k lines full of `if (condition && condition) || (condition && condition)` statements. He didn't seem to see the issue, it just worked.

That's when I understood some people just care about game development and doing cool stuff and don't care at all about programming, good practices or structured code. And that's perfectly fine.

weli··on Cursor 3
Stop fucking my shit up please
weli··on New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds
I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.

I gladly am in Germany and companies are more scared of implementing dark patterns here for canceling products. When I was in the US I dreaded cancelling services because I knew they would make me jump around several hoops and even sometimes require contacting customer support.

weli··on VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
Is this using haiku as a kernel or is it a complete re-implementation of BeOs/Haiku API's? I can't tell by their website or github.
weli··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
The incentives to hack the XOne were few. Easy sideloading. No exclusives. Not a great performance per dollar ratio either. It is the opposite of Nintendo consoles if you think about it, and nintendo consoles are notorious for having a really quick homebrew scene.
weli··on Give Django your time and money, not your tokens
Beggars can't be choosers. I decide how and what I want to donate. If I see a cool project and I want to change something (in what I think) is an improvement, I'll clone it, have CC investigate the codebase and do the change I want, test it and if it works nicely I'll open a PR explaining why I think this is a good change.

If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.

weli··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I don't think the cheap light sensor would have a fast enough polling rate for that. And if you increase the polling rate I will just put a phosphorescent sticker that absorbs and reflects the light coming out of the led with a good enough afterglow that the photoresistor will still pick up as some value and still allow for recording.

Also what is the implication here? If you cover the hole accidentally for one microsecond do you invalidate the whole recording? Does it need to be covered for more than one second, two seconds, ten?

All of that for what? So that in 2 years we can have chinese off-brand clones for 50 dollars that offer no security mechanisms anyways?

We all need to understand this is the new normal, being able to be recorded anywhere anytime. Just like you can get punched in the street anywhere anytime. We only act on things that can be proven to have caused you prejudice in court.

weli··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
> The privacy led light could just turn off for a couple of milliseconds (or less) while the light sensor performs its check.

True but then that would mean a blinking led light instead of a constant turned on led light, which is a different product requirement from what it currently does.

weli··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
Still works like that.

The glasses have in the same hole a led light and a small light sensor (similar to the ones used in monitors to set up auto-brightness).

On start recording the glasses check if the light sensor is above a certain threshold, if it is then it starts recording and turns on the led light.

So, if you start recording and then cover the hole, it keeps recording because the check only happens on start. Even if they wanted to fix this by making the light sensor do a constant check it wouldn't work as the privacy led light indicator is triggering the same sensor, which is a terrible design choice.

And to disable the light is as easy as using a small drill bit and breaking either the light sensor module or the led light. They can detect if it's been tampered with and they put a giant notice saying the privacy light is not working but they still let you record anyways lol.

weli··on If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?
I agree so much
weli··on Show HN: Codex Linux Self-Installer
The script doesn’t self-update unless you actually want it to via an explicit flag.

It doesn’t have any features other than installing the latest release from the codex GitHub repo and updating it, and I don’t want it to have more features than that. This is not meant to replace any codex installation via a package manager, if you have a package manager where codex is available then by all means install it through that.

weli··on The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)
Maybe its the tism but I also read that sentence as neutral. You expected very little and you got very little. Why would that be positive or negative? Maybe it should be positive because you got what you were expecting? But I would call getting what you expect something neutral, if you expected little and got a lot then that would be positive. If you expected a lot and got little then its negative. But if you expected little and got little the most clear outcome is that its a neutral statement. Am I missing something?
weli··on Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows
The problem is that people who are depressed often don't have the energy to change their lifestyle to start exercise, which requires significant effort.

That's why psychiatrists will suggest antidepressants or Electroconvulsive therapy (in extreme cases of depression) because clients are unable to help themselves.

weli··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.

Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.

Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".

weli··on Vouch
I'm glad that you are lucky enough to never have had to choose between filling your gas tank or eating. It's sadly the state many people live in.
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