YouTube needs to be regulated as a telecom provider. As such, it must be prevented from discriminating against content for any reason other than it being illegal.
Sure, if you want it to become an unusable cesspool. If you just hate YouTube and want to kill it, this is the way. Same with any other site that hosts user-provided content -- if it's popular and unmoderated it will become a hellscape in short order.
The buy-now-pay-later services being used are zero interest as long as payments are made on time, so it could just be a case of people who are living paycheck to paycheck (which indicates bad financial management more than poverty) using this to smooth out their expenses so they don't have to wait for their paycheck to be able to buy groceries. It could be a significant improvement for those who used to occasionally use payday loans (which are not zero interest). These people would be better off adjusting their spending habits to maintain a buffer of their own cash instead, but if they aren't going to do that BNPL is a better option than waiting for payday before buying food or using a payday loan service.
But obviously the only reason these by-now-pay-later services are in business is because some of their customers fail to make the zero-interest payments and end up having to pay interest, and this number is high enough to make them profitable. It would be very interesting to find out what that percentage is. People who are paying interest on regular purchases like groceries are throwing money away, which is clearly bad.
hope that the new vomit is marginally different
The rest of your comment is basically correct, if unnecessarily negative, but this isn't. Traditional tools like diff make it very easy to see exactly what has changed. In practice, I rely on git, staging all of the iteration's changes ("git add
I also find it's helpful to make the AI keep iterating until the code builds and passes the unit tests before I bother taking a real look at what it has done. I don't even bother to read the compiler errors or test failure messages, I just paste them in the AI chat. Once the AI has something that appears to work, then I look at it. Normally, the code is functional and correct, though it's often not structured the way I'd like. Eventually it iterates to something I think is good, though the LLMs have a tendency to over-comment, so I tend to manually delete a lot of comments while doing the final review pass.
I actually find this mode of operation to be surprisingly efficient. Not so much because it gets the code written faster but because I can get other stuff done, too, because I mostly don't mentally context switch while the AI is working and compiles and tests are running.
This mode is probably easier for people who are experienced and comfortable with doing code reviews. Looking at what the AI has done is remarkably similar to looking at the output of a competent but inexperienced programmer.
Sounds like you understand my point
If you only stop people from pissing in the shallow end, they're only going to relieve their bladders in the deep end, and in the end, you have just as much urine in the pool. You either need to control the entire pool (global) or you need to make it very expensive to swim for people who piss in the pool at all.
Unless it's done at a global level or enforced carbon emission based tariffs, a market solution is only going to move the problem outside of California.
As a licensed radio operator, you are eligible for emergency tags in the state of Tennessee. While that wouldn't insulate you fully from the effects of the law, I can't imagine law enforcement pulling over someone with emergency tags talking into a handheld radio, so this could be a solution to your problem.
They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.
What kind of code coverage are you getting from your autogenerated unit tests?
It does a pretty good job at the obvious flows, both positive and negative cases. But where coverage is inadequate you can iterate quite easily and automatically with a coverage tool. Just take the coverage tool output and feed it to the LLM. I have found that I don't even need to prompt it what to with the coverage, it understands what the tool output means and what it should do in response.
Like with the compiler and testrunner, what would really make this work well is if the AI could run the coverage tool itself so it could iterate without my interaction. With that, I could just tell it to write unit tests for a given module and give it a numeric coverage threshold it needs to meet, or to explain why the threshold can't be met.
I expect that the resulting tests would be very mechanistic, in the sense that they would aim to cover every branch but without much sense of which ones really matter and which ones don't. But maybe not. The LLM regularly surprises me with its apparent understanding not only of what code does, but of why. Regardless, review would be needed, and I'd undoubtedly want to make some changes... but I'll bet it would get me at least 75% of the way to a comprehensive test suite with minimal effort.
I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.
Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.
My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.
That was basically my suggestion. The government assume a standard deduction and basic public records and sends you estimated taxes. You can accept and pay, or file a return.
Makes sense.
For me I'd never need to do anything, every thing I do is already reported to the government and I'd suspect most americans fall into that category. Unless Fidelity isn't telling the government my capital gains.
Could be worse than that. One year I had a problem that my brokerage reported all of my gains but failed to report the cost basis. This was on a bunch of Restricted Stock Unit sales which happened automatically when the stock vested, so the actual capital gains are always very close to zero, since the sale occurs minutes after the vesting. But from the 1099-B it appeared I had 100% gains on a bunch of stock sales that approximately equal my annual salary (about half of my income is stock). Worse, taken at face value would have taxed me on that money twice, since the vesting counts as normal income and is taxable income reported on the W-2, then the sale counts as a 100% short-term capital gain.
What would happen in your scheme in such a situation is that the government's pre-filled form would show up as a massive tax bill. Assuming the taxpayer survived the resulting heart attack, they'd just have to file a return that shows the correct cost basis. So it's fine; no worse than the status quo, and better for most people.
Everyone complete paper forms for their taxes. Paper returns are harder for the IRS and cost them more. If people boycotted the expensive software options for one year and slammed the IRS with paper forms, this would be reversed post haste.
Or you could just fire most of the IRS staff and reduce their capacity that way... which the party currently in charge is already happily doing, so I'm not sure why you think reducing their capacity by burying them in paper would cause a reversal. It would just make it even easier for wealthy people with long, complicated returns to cheat outrageously, confident the IRS doesn't have the capacity to audit them. That is the GOP's goal.
It's a pretty weak argument. You could simply report your dependants on a form and then the IRS can use that for a calculation.
Sure. And on that same form you can also report all of the other details they might not have, like whether you bought an EV or installed home efficiency upgrades that qualify for a tax credit, and what charitable donations you made that are tax deductible, and what your state and local taxes are, and... you get the point. Just to be sure, maybe you should also include the details you're sure they do have. And given that there's some ambiguity in the law about how some of this stuff fits together as well as some choices you get to make, maybe you could also do the calculations.
You've just reinvented the 1040.
We frequently in american say something is impossible when it's trivial to solve or every other country has already solved it.
This one is completely solvable, but the place you have to start is not with the forms and flow of information, the place you have to start is the tax code and the laws regulating what other entities have to report, and are allowed to report.
For example, consider state and local taxes. Two options: Either you eliminate the state and local tax deduction on federal income taxes or you require all state and local tax entities to report your payments to them. This also means that all of those entities have to have a way to uniquely identify you. We abuse the social security number (which was not intended to be used as an identifier for anything except the social security program) for this, and that's probably fine in this case, though it's also possible that the Privacy Act restricts it in some cases, so the law might have to be tweaked there, too.
For the charitable donations case, same options: Either eliminate the tax deduction or require all charities to report donations, which will require you to give your social security number to them. I'm not sure how people would feel about having to provide their SSN to Goodwill when they drop off some old furniture.
Same with EV. If you want to keep the tax credits, auto dealers will have to report to the IRS. At least you already more or less have to give them your SSN.
Same with energy efficiency upgrades, except that's complicated by the fact that some people buy the units themselves and install them, so Home Depot et al have to begin reporting to the IRS, and you have to give them your SSN, while other people hire a contractor, who will have to do the reporting, and to whom you'll have to provide your SSN.
And so on across the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other issues.
Yes, most people don't have any of these other issues in a given year (except state and local taxes), so a compromise might be a simple system for people who just have W-2 income and take the standard deduction, and no other complications. It's hard to see how it could be simplified for anyone with more complex taxes, though, unless the tax code was overhauled to simply eliminate all of the deductions and credits.
When discussing automobile transmissions, "five gears" is shorthand for "five gear ratios". We usually don't include the last word because there's no need, but the terminology is not inaccurate, just not fully articulated. Well, it's still kind of inaccurate because reverse is usually a different gear ratio than any of the forward selections, and I suppose you could consider neutral to be a gear ratio.
Oh, it applies to bicycles, too. We say "15 speed bike", not "15 gear bike". So at least we are consistent.
We also talk about bikes as having 15 gears, again failing to articulate the "ratio" -- and a bike with 15 gear ratios has 8 gears in its drive train, so it's clear we're talking about ratios, not the number of toothed wheels. This is entirely consistent with automotive terminology, where we talk about a car as having five gears or being a five speed.
I wish you humans would leave me alone.
