Yeah that would be great. I seriously don't understand how a company with this much money doesn't have some of the more basic ux implemented to make it a really great app. Blows my mind.
I used the IRS free fillable forms this year and it was much easier than I expected, including contractor, investment income, and foreign income declarations.
We don't have one. Are you talking about Direct File? The Trump admin killed it, though it was successfully nerfed from the start anyway by the Intuit and H&R Block lobbyists -- you couldn't even itemize deductions, or have 1099 income.
If your taxes were that simple, you didn't need software, you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes.
Note: If you're just taking the piss because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company.
Oh, we do have another 'free' filing method for those with income below a certain level, which the lobbyists made sure would be handled by those same private companies. They are allowed to obfuscate and hide it, so when you search for it, you will probably end up on their main, paid product. Kind of the identical story with how our credit reports work (annualcreditreport dot com being the site the CRAs really don't want you to find)
FreeTaxUSA is pretty close. I live in a no tax state so it is completely free. I think state tax is $15.
Hate to sound like a shill, but they've been great. I have a more complicated return than most, but not everyone, and it handles it all(multi-state, capital gains/losses and rollovers, depreciations, etc).
The only thing I wish they'd change is the name. It sounds scammy.
I actually have started agreeing to their probably mostly BS Deluxe/Audit Defense just because I felt guilty about using it for free so long.
> I have a more complicated return than most, but not everyone, and it handles it all (multi-state, capital gains/losses and rollovers, depreciations, etc)
Most people have W-2/1099 and some real estate deductions. Not hard to beat that in complexity.
Try AMT, controlled foreign corporations, nested K-1s, and 1040X prior year amendments with $100k-$1 million+ pending refunds.
> you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes.
Shouldn't the correct way to file simple taxes be to just accept (sign) a value? Why is any arithmetic needed at all? Doesn't the tax authority know the numbers (What you earned, how much you paid in taxes) and they could figure out what you owe automatically?
I've just "accepted" or "signed" my tax return (not in the US obviously) for at least the last 15 years so I might underestimate some complexity here. The key idea behind it though is that nearly all deductions are automatically and unambiguously applied, already when the cost is charged in most cases. So they're always already done when I file my taxes. And the key to that is making sure the tax law is written with this in mind.
I suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS.
“I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and recheck it when connecting on an international to domestic flight coming into the US: so there is a clear moment when you personally carried your luggage over a line, so if there’s material that wasn’t allowed to come over that line, you’re attached to it when it happened.)
Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.
It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.
I've actually had this discussion quite a few times (for someone in a field not at all related to taxes)
Where it gets "complicated" (aka no longer a "one click sign and verify") is when you start adding things that are "nonstandard" - "standard" meaning single w2, standardized deduction, etc. According to Intuit[0] as well as other research[1], only ~40% of US taxpayers follow this format.
This is compared to the 87.7% of surveyed tax administrations[2] (which does include the US) that have the infrastructure to pre-populate basic wage and salary data. The difference is that in countries like Denmark or Sweden, that simple data represents near-100% of what is needed for the vast majority of citizens.
So for example, even if the US might know exactly how much you made on a 1099 (which is freelance, independent contractor, etc), they wouldn't know your expenses.
Oftentimes though, even if you do have these more complicated returns your W2 (which is the "simple" part) can at least be auto-filled. It's just the rest of the stuff the government doesn't necessarily know about.
(note: I'm by no means a tax expert and may be misinterpreting this data)
> If you're just taking the piss because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company.
I feel we’re all complicit in this. Lobbying as they have only works when elected officials disregard their constituents interests. Elected officials whose constituents continue to keep in power.
We as a people need to quit with this attitude and own our part in the stupidity our entire nation has embodied in recent history.
Businesses lobbying for their interests is exactly what they should be doing and exactly what everyone should expect them to do. Elected officials and the democratic process are supposed to be the check and fix. Start by placing blame more appropriately where it’s due.
> Businesses lobbying for their interests is exactly what they should be doing and exactly what everyone should expect them to do. Elected officials and the democratic process are supposed to be the check and fix.
That would be nice. I fear the modern system, with Citizens United, SuperPACs etc. seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of that concept though. Especially with the FPTP system preventing third parties. Someone in one of the two parties will win, they're both in the thrall of lobbyists, and even if there was one not taking that money (I think that's becoming more and more rare) the money firehose makes a substantial difference in elections. Hard to see how "we" can do a lot about this. I hate it, but I don't see it changing. And it seems like astroturfing will be easier in future elections than ever before - Now a few million dollars from a billionaire or even from foreign adversaries will be able to generate 'overwhelming groundswells' of completely synthetic public opinion on platforms like TikTok. To me, the result will be an acceleration of the tilt toward buying elections vs. convincing people of your ideas organically.
Unfortunately I tend to agree with you. But, at least we're actually talking about the real problem instead of pointing the finger at Inuit and their lobbyists.
Does it just make it easier to get in a position you want or does it give you more natural looking positions as well or any other benefits? It's pretty fun to play with!
It means that you can lock the end point to a position and figure out the rest of the pose.
Imagine a character walking with forward kinematics. Every time you move the characters hips , you’d have to rotate the leg joints and make sure the foot doesn’t slide. Remember virtual characters don’t have friction.
IK lets you lock the foot in a spot so you can animate the body above it without having to spend time matching the foot position.
In a real world, this is like if you tried to put your hand on a door handle while jumping up and down. It’s easier to keep position when you hold the handle than if you were to just touch it.
It also means you can move the point and the rest of the joints adjust. Want to make your model walk? Just figure out the foot motion and the rest of the details are calculated based on joint range of motion and limb length.
Experience is so so valuable right now. We can guide these agents super well, but I do fear for the juniors as you said. I would like to think I'd use the agents to dive deeper and learn faster. It was pretty rough piecing together solutions from Stack Overflow, various irc channels, Reddit, etc. But also, I cheated on my homework in college and didn't really review the answers, so not sure. Though I pursued programming out of interest and not just to complete a degree. Maybe it would have been different. In any case, I'm glad I came into the LLM era with a lot of experience and failures already.
I don't think "cheating" is the right way to frame it.
A junior has managers pushing them to do more, faster. You review the code but do you really understand it the same as if you struggled through it? Do you ever build the muscle memory of what works and what doesn't?
It is the thought process that builds skills. I've seen some projects trying to be deliberate about learning from the agent as it writes to code - but I'm not sure there is a substitute for struggling and learning by doing.
I think this is one of the key takes right now. I too have similar experience.
Which way is it going to go?
i) “Seniors” also get superseded by even more capable models that can do all of the things which currently require experience.
ii) Linguistics become the new higher order abstraction (English is the new high-level programming language) _but_ there are different / orthogonal ways of approaching software development than the way we do things now — which “juniors” become more adept at more quickly.
There's also iii) people realize that if the LLM needs that much babysitting, it doesn't actually add value. So they don't use it very much because it is too limited as a tool.
I think traditional coding experience will be a lot more valuable in 5-10 years, given the apparent inverse relationship between that and LLM usage, and the number of people who seem to already be heavily reliant on LLMs today.
The next killer app on the scale of today's LLMs could be an LLM (or call it whatever) that can un-spaghettify the reams of code that are currently being generated by LLMs.
When the chainsaw fails the juniors, they're going to be adding wood chippers and stump grinders. The seniors are going to be out there chipping artisanal wood blocks with a hatchet. You don't need a lot of history to see who you really need to be worried about.
Metrics, profilers, architecture! Use AI to get back to basics! Wanna prove a technique is better? Use AI to make a benchmark! Learn by experimentation! That is my advice to juniors. At the end of the day AI is writing code and there may be 10 different ways to run something. Only one is the fastest in any given use case.
But the point is that LLMs giving you 10x the potential code output doesn't have to mean 10x the code committed. It can also be "let's look at all three possible implementations in more detail and decide which is really the best fit for our situation, and commit that one."
That's still 2-3x the velocity, but you get a better result because you went deeper on the paths-not-taken when designing.
I think it's just the wrong metric to optimize for _first_. It's not generally a bad metric to keep tabs on though. Make it work, make it right, make it fast? Or something like that.
Yeah I totally agree! I also think people should still be reading as much code as they can. That's always been true imo. It is just hard to keep up with it now because of how much code an LLM can generate for $20/month. I do think we'll move to higher abstractions of course. We won't have to understand code as much as how the systems and components are architected. It would also be nice to use our new efficiency to return to producing truly optimized and fast software.
> 2. we will think of verification loop more - tasks will be chosen that have more ability to be easily verified
> 4. spec driven development will become more common
I do believe both of these, recently someone created an rar open source alternative for all its version using LLM agents because of that specs and in some sense verification/easy debug (or compile time) aspect.
On the other hand, I was making a GUI application (a rough scratchpad app) in Odin and there were so many bugs that I had to explain it and even then it was like lottery or just about unpredictable would be the better word as it would fix one thing and break another or just not fix it.
At the end of the day for GUI apps, it just doesn't have any way of testing them that greatly perhaps. There are many GUI things which I feel like LLM's are still underwhelming in, especially if you wish to create a GUI in say any niche language.
It can do that but the workflow is so bad that it might just not be worth it. i do wonder if GUI development becomes the one thing that AI can't do and their software development jobs are safe.
I was just scrolling upwork randomly and I saw tons of flutter & wordpress jobs.
I've had pretty good luck with using playwright mcp to test web front ends. I think LLMs can totally test GUIs. Either via vision and computer control or via reading the GUI node tree (e.g. DOM) used by whatever you built the GUI with.
I enjoy using and orchestrating agents a lot to build software, but have never really had the desire to replace my writing with LLMs. I don't write a whole whole lot, so maybe I just don't have enough writing to do to make it appealing, but my emails, blog posts, comments, whatever are the last thing I want to automate. Not only because it's less personal, but because I'm so tired of reading AI cruft myself. So much more text in tickets than there needs to be, for example.
And how are people forgetting to code by using LLMs? Do they just mean they forgot the syntax of a particular language? Or forgot how to architect features or how the development lifecycle works?
I've mostly used LLMs to build more complex things that would have been a lot to manage previously, or to build something completely new and learn how it works. I feel like I've only become a better engineer (and programmer too) because of LLMs.
Later rebranded as Mirai. I remember playing with a pirated copy of Nichimen Mirai somewhere in 2001 (I think), it looked weirdly Ediacaran in the Cambrian explosion of the late 90s.
So you're saying that the Xerox workstation didn't have inline 3d graphics rendering capabilities? And in fact this isn't an instance of UNIX trying to catch up to Xerox workstations' REPL from yester-decade?
that's a poorly chosen counter-complaint. before SGI, symbolics owned the market for 3d graphics. this was a world where you could also just do (create-window), see the window, and get back a handle you could use to draw in it. starting with X10 afterwards for me was like drowning in mud.
I'm actually not sure what you're saying. Are you implying inline 2d graphics are the same as inline 3d graphics? That's what the subtitle of Ratty was about. And that's not what was shown in original comment's video. Why does it matter if it was from 2013? It wasn't showing off the same thing as Ratty.
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/the-new-psp-web-bro...
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