Yeah, I thought about it when I first saw the coin cut into pieces - https://www.pirateglossary.com/glossary/pieces-of-eight

But then why didn't they cut it into 10 pieces - https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/40600/40610/pie_01-10a_40610.htm ?

God damn it! I did not bother to check the treasury. Thank you for catching mistake - I will correct it.

I knew there will be something to hunt minor units.

Did not know that. Will update the article. Thank you!

displaying as a decimal is nondestructive, whereas doing math with a decimal is asking for trouble

Lived through something like this after USSR collapsed and before Hryvnya was introduced. Boy I remember the bread cost - 10,000,000 :D

How's the inflation now with Milei's changes? I know charts show its at a 10 year low but reality could feel different.

Thanks for the info! But did you guys thought about fractional commodities those days? Or was it clear that it is going away?

haha, true.

Thing is - I'm not a English speaker. But I chat a lot with Claude/ChatGPT - i feel like I'm picking the style from them unintentionally.

Import-only is the lazy way. :) If you want, GnuCash also has features to support manually entering each transaction as it occurs.

Then GnuCash has features to match up financial institutions data exports against your transaction splits, see the discrepancies, and then reconcile against their PDF statements.

It's a way of life, but you always know what money you have, where. Although that sounds like something for wealthy people, I'd say it's actually more important the less money you have.

Well, there is legislation before Committee to mandate open APIs that any accredited institution can use. As a consumer you will not be eligible, but you will be allowed to pay some third-party to pull your data from your bank and save it in their database, after which maybe they might allow you to download it in their proprietary format should they choose.

Me, I use plain-text accounting (hledger) that automatically imports the CSVs from my bank and categorizes transactions automatically, and I wrote some quick scripts using Python to import the PDFs from my brokerages and paystubs. It's not automated pulls but I only have a handful of accounts so it's really not a pain to manually pull statements once a month and run the import scripts. It takes me longer to reconcile everything to the penny then it does to do the imports, and it's a whale of a lot faster than manually entering through GNUCash. Plus, it's plain text so all you need is vim, git, and the command line.

Agree. I wish banks have their APIs open. It's 2026 and we have OIDC.

But I used to actually pull the CSV once a week and feed it to GnuCash. It's pretty good at auto-categorization.

Also I simplified my finances to only a couple of checking accounts and only one credit account (for car rentals).

I'm using self-hosted Sure.am and also using SimpleFin to connect to Canadian banks. It works, but barely, since it effectively scrapes with no real API access. I have to login daily to update 2-FA on various accounts, and have suffered account lockouts a couple of times, due to "suspicious activity".

But it still beats downloading multiple exports from the bank and importing it manually...

I simplified to just 2 accounts and I enter them manually twice a week. I keep a detailed budget so it helps to do it that frequently.

I think English is not the first language of the author ("we are counting fingers and thumbs"?).

There's also a `Surprisingly written by a human :)` at the bottom.

> Surprisingly written by a human :)

Article ends with this

I think its not.

I strongly disagree. I found the whole article interesting and enlightening – I certainly wasn't aware of the topic before, and I'm glad it was posted on HN.

Furthermore, it didn't feel LLM-generated to me. Quirky, yes; nothing wrong with that.

Curious what made you think it's AI slop?

Thanks for idea. I think I'll do another more techy article on this.