gdulli

I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.

We already know the explanation. It's fundamental to their business model and continued existence to automate everything, false positives be damned, and they don't care about all the people who roll snake eyes on a given day. Because everyone just stays and keeps using them.

It's far more concerning that so many people are incapable of understanding the reality of it.

And the sad part is that it could be such a cool technology it had come about in an earlier time, before consumers and labor lost all their power. It's the combination of the era and the technology that's going to be bad for people more so than just the technology.

For me it's that Xbox has a Plex app. I'm not willing to use Android TV devices or connect my TV to the internet.

And the switch will continue, it won't be a one-time event. Like how the price of Netflix etc. keeps going up periodically.

If people's dependence on their streaming service keeps them captive, just wait until people have gone 5 years without doing real work.

All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be?

The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.

Perhaps most of what sucks right now is downstream from the advent of the technology and business model that allows companies to scale their users to the point where it's impossible to handle their customer service needs with actual people. Automation of human judgment isn't getting better, just cheaper and more convenient for the operator who's insulated from its failures anyway.

I thought the main benefit of Prime was guaranteed fast shipping, since free shipping can still be had without Prime. So the shipping has gotten worse while the price gets raised to subsidize the production of Citadel?

Human creativity is not only not being rewarded, but people are increasingly talking like consuming too few tokens is something that's actively used against them.

He's trying to virtue signal based on an understanding of young people's values that's so unsophisticated that he thinks throwing them the word "immigrant" will get them on his side. And they're obviously smart enough to see through it.

> What is the use case for the average non-technical person?

"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."

What could a movement to directly punish advertisers look like? Ones who pass a certain threshold of ruining the venue they're sponsoring or generally worsen a community, online or off. Why do they get a pass, no matter how far they encroach on ruining environments and institutions?

Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial.

You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.

2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.

We have an invention that aims to replace labor and employers want nothing more than to replace labor. It's silly to pretend that AI isn't responsible. But you're right that an incompetent administration is piling on with additional factors.

Giving it busywork that you don't have the time or wherewithal to check carefully sounds like a disaster. Rather than introduce content that will be partially wrong and cause confusion if it's ever read, I'd consume the credits and send the output to /dev/null.

They've solved that problem by baking a surveillance infrastructure into the system. The personalized home screen (boosted by a crippled browse interface) decides what they want you to watch.

Why would someone want all their net worth in real estate properties rather than diversify with other investments, which if they wanted to could also still include the real estate sector?

That's like wondering if enough people discovering local media streaming will disrupt commercial streaming services. It's not going to happen. Most people are not ambitious and will let themselves be controlled by the services of least resistance.

And you can't take comfort in knowing that you, personally, will remain in control of your own computing. The majority will let the range and direction of their thoughts and output be determined by the will of the tech giant whose AI they adopt. And that will shape society.

You can get a baby monkey to nurse from a fake wire mannequin mother but it doesn't make sense to say the mannequin has what a real monkey has. Not in a sense that's meaningful for defining monkeyhood.

Right, I noped out of this article when I realized it felt like a guy making up a whole population he could do some elevated punching down at to offset some ostensible self deprecation. What a chore.

If software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program.

Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.

It's like an invention that allowed anyone anywhere to sell chicken mcnuggets with no startup costs. Too many people love it, try stopping it. We automated listicles etc. and now we're going to be drowning in them.

> High-performing teams have always managed technical debt intentionally.

The ability to generate code has seemingly transposed what people think of as a "high-performing team" from one that produces quality to one that produces quantity. With the short term gains obviously increasing long term technical debt.

I'm confused, is the age verification to keep young people out or the groomers out?

Who'd use Roblox legitimately if not for the underage? Its pretty terrible.

I've never been to Germany but for what it's worth when I hear "how many r's are in strawberry?" I'd never think of anything but 3. (I am human.) Asking how many r's are in the longest run of r's in strawberry is a whole different question and I don't know why somebody would assume that more complicated one.

A side effect of Reddit/Twitter/etc having captured most of the population/eternal September might be that a web directory has become feasible again. Ignore social media, ignore AI, ignore paywalled sites. What's left and high enough quality might be manageable to maintain a directory for.

Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.

Law enforcement, from the same industry that brought you targeted ads recommending refrigerators because you just bought a refrigerator.

They want fingerprinting to work for everyone because the more effective it is, the higher the value of the ad inventory they sell.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.