deno

Yes that was my criticism exactly, but US LLC by default has no corporate tax (unless you opt-in for some reason) while still having limited liability. It's why it's so unique.

There's no other country in the world that has anything like that.

People don't realize how insanely business friendly US is compared to rest of the world.

You're right I got ahead of myself a bit there.

Yes, you need to pay personal income tax in your tax resident country but that's much easier than formalized bookkeeping and corporate income tax (assuming your LLC is DE which is the default). Also for other taxes like VAT you have to register for and pay those regardless of where your company is registered.

US LLC has no formal bookkeeping requirements but you still need to report distributions and contributions to IRS annually (via fax or certified letter), submit annual statements to your state (but those are just hey I'm still alive not financial statements, they are even free in some states like Montana) and maintain registered agent but that's like $50/year. It's crazy just how easy it is.

The digital part is just about what your business can realistically do without it having local or at least EU based presence in some form.

For once you'll have issues with dealing with local businesses and EU marketplaces rather than government.

For example eBay account is basically impossible without having US address and resident VPN. And you'll constantly worry about getting banned, which is already a worry even if you are legitimate local based business since they too big to have to care about customer support like most big corps.

If you're just selling software or something like that it's much easier. The more you go into physical goods or services realm the more hurdles you will have. You can't hire people for example without having a branch or similar. Same for real estate or some equipment like cars.

Also for some services every local business you invoice will potentially have tax withholding to deal with. This is in particular a problem in Poland which has the strictest tax withholding regulations.

If you actually sell intra-EU and deal with multiple currencies 200€/m would be cheap. I'd expect no less than 1000€/m.

You need to do double entry bookkeeping and prepare annual financial statements for all of those you've mentioned including UK.

In addition, you cannot register LTD in Ireland yourself, the Company's secretary must be a different person. So either you are now in business with a friend or you pay someone.

For any other member country you also run into a language barrier.

Polish "Sp. z o.o." has ~1150€ (5000 PLN) minimal capital requirement.

Registering entity with corporation tax requirement in any other country also means you would need to defend its tax residency (practically impossible if you don't actually do business there) or you have to pay corporation tax in the country you are actually operating in. It's doable but now you are dealing with two different tax authorities and potentially pay taxes in different currency and you can't have books in multiple currencies so get to have lots of fun.

It's much easier to just register US LLC instead at this point. However if you want to do anything physical not digital you end up having to register and do taxes in your resident country anyway. But you can avoid corporation tax at least and keep limited liability.

It is enforceable and the financial punishment is severe. There's no US’s LLC equivalent in EU, you basically only have C-Corp/Inc. equivalents (much more expensive to start and operate, both because of accounting and corporation income tax), so most small sellers in EU end up fully liable with their own wealth for the ridiculous up to 200,000€ penalties.

Chinese sellers don’t care, sure, but if you live in EU you do care.

That said while the financial penalties are in practice still not common they are chilling nevertheless.

However, EU is also now starting marketplace level enforcement, so in practice even those Chinese sellers will not be able to sell anything without registration.

Except you don’t have min threshold requirements for neither PPWR nor WEEE, it's before you can sell anything. And you need to register, hire an authorized agent and get contract (which always has minimal amount rather than per-kg pricing) with local recycling company in each member state.

Also you have Streamlined Sales Tax Registration System (SSTRS) for actual registration in US which covers 24 states.

I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop so every country has its own system and registration.

If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.

Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.

And EU does it with VAT-OSS scheme which was also separate in each country before. There's just no will to do this with EPR because there's too much money and lobbying power in the recycling cartel.

If you actually sell electronics you also need to register for electronic recycling (WEEE or equivalent) in each member state you sell to and the costs are even greater than PPWR costs alone. Probably 5x more at least.

This has nothing to do with EPR. The €3 for packages from China is a fixed processing fee on top of potential tariffs.

They got rid of the de minimis €150 limit for tariffs and added fees on top.

There was also €25 VAT de minimis limit but that’s also no longer the case since some time.

I think it's limited to US or at least EU is excluded.

I don't berate or insult the models. If you treat your computer like this you might get into habit of it with people as well.

You made the model cry :(

The point of this was supposed to be "model tool use competency" not baseline over-eagerness.

Unless I'm missing something I think to a large degree you're just comparing system prompts.

If I add "Research the question extensively" to your prompt at the end I get the correct answer from Haiku and Sonnet Med on first try and I've reproduced the original prompt not returning the answer.

Unfortunately every other run now gets your gist in results.

Yes, you need 3f+1, so 4 for f=1, 7 for f=2.

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/byz.pdf

But what if the third bookkeeper is malicious? You need at least four bookkeepers to achieve byzantine fault tolerance with f=1.

This would be hallucination rate and neither of those models excels in this area and in fact Grok does, or at least prior version.

This isn't tool usage competency, it's tool quality and/or luck. Regular web search is not good for grounding if you want accurate results. You can ask the model to make a tool for getting bus schedules and then use it only then you are comparing apples to apples in this case.

This likely comes down to how it accessed the bus schedules (i.e. web search tool) and not intelligence.

You need to add the actual bus schedule to context somehow (research agent, custom tool or just dump in prompt) and even the simpler modern models will be able to do the planning.

Don't assume it's only depression, check your testosterone levels etc., probably best to just get an endocrinologist consultation.

If you're tired and don't have energy you'll also feel depressed but that doesn't automatically mean you feel tired solely because of depression.

Imagine you created a torrent (and/or magnet link) with a file and then stopped seeding after some time. If it was popular it will probably live on, if not then eventually it disappears.

Don’t bring your sensitive data to airports.

I don’t want to get into specifics because ultimately it just comes down to the logical argument that just because a strategy is not by itself successful against all possible threats it doesn’t mean it’s worthless. By this logic you wouldn’t lock your front doors.

This is not relevant to memory encryption, after all the police could just plant any false evidence. You use video camera/CCTV and other evidence gathering to document such illegal police action.

Suing after the fact is a valid strategy and in free countries this would allow you to exclude illegally obtained evidence or evidence lacking proper chain of custody.

law in question: https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2017/act/11/section/7/en...

and recent Supreme Court decision that upheld its constitutionality:

https://www.algoodbody.com/insights-publications/password-pr...

Unless you live in North Korea, China, Russia, UK, France, Australia or Ireland it’s still illegal to coerce or force someone to give up their personal keys or passwords, so this feature is still useful against some law-bound adversaries in free countries.

You acknowledge your test is fundamentally flawed but then still use it for the basis of your conclusion. It’s worse not better that you were aware of this.

If the email is DKIM signed it could be easily proven

It still takes the same mindset and skills to use AI productively and effectively as regular programming. The productivity boost only applies if you know what you’re doing and can actually steer the agent carefully.

Vibecoding hits a glass ceiling very quickly and this will not be solved incrementally. Besides, if the agent could work autonomously to that degree then it would no longer need any prompting at all and we’re living in a very different world. On the other hand that would make the debt actually meaningless, so I guess that is 'a' solution.