Generally, when someone says something like "left wing groups" they mean something with a formal organization.
"Antifa" is less of an organization than even some loose collective like "anonymous"
Are there left-wing agitators? Sure, black bloc and other "direct action" protestors have been around since at least the world trade protests in the 90s.
But to the best of my knowledge there isn't really a formal "antifa" organization to dismantle or anything.
> all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.
As a recent example of this, I was recently curious about how the heart gets the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart. Pumping blood out made sense to me, but the return path was less obvious.
So I asked chatgpt whether the heart sucks in the blood from veins.
It told me that the heart does not suck in the blood, it creates a negative pressure zone that causes the blood to flow into it ... :facepalm:
Sure, my language was non-technical/imprecise, but I bet if I asked a cardiologist about this they would have said something like "That's not the language I would have used, but basically."
I don't know why, but lately I've been getting a lot of cases where these models contradicts themself even within the same response. I'm working out a lot (debating a triathlon) and it told me to swim and do upper body weight lifting on the same day to "avoid working out the same muscle group in the same day". Similarly it told me to run and do leg workouts on the same day.
> i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt
I'm having the exact same reaction. I'm finding they are still more useful than google, even with an error rate close to 70%, but I am quickly learning that you can't trust anything they output and should double check everything.
it seems more looping possible answers, just going back to same bad answers hoping you forgot you gave it. we're training incredibly expensive and eloquent goldfish.
maybe this is the effect of the LLMs interacting with eachother, the dumbing down. gpt-6 will be a markov chain again and gpt-7 will know that f!sh go m00!
While it's true that total net energy is what ultimately matters, the article points out that 99% of the energy that goes towards the lasers is wasted. So it seems like a logical next milestone.
I don't necessarily disagree. However, I do think that people spend a lot of time on things that don't actually matter that much in the grand scheme.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be doing tickets that have been assigned to them or whatever, but I am saying that if people took 30 minutes to step back and look at the big picture objectives more often - or if their managers spent more time clearly communicating such things - they'd stop wasting a lot of time on things that seem important in the very myopic context of the task they just completed.
My takeaway from the article was that "too busy" really means "spending too much time on things that don't actually matter." Or perhaps more concretely, being too inefficient with your time.
Not OP, but I give myself a little reward. Specifically, I "X" out the task on my daily task list. I take this so far as to add items I just completed to my list just so that I can mark them off.
It's stupid, but it works. At least for me. I think it comes down to 2 different types of positive reinforcement:
1. It feels good to mark a task done.
2. It feels good to look at a list of all of the things I did that day, even if they were the size of taking out the trash.
The vast majority of people take the standard deduction, so offering a "here's what we think you owe, but if you disagree feel free to do the full return" form would be a huge efficiency gain.
Your comment seems like a prime case of perfect being the enemy of good.
> The vast majority of people take the standard deduction
Unless they are a homeowner, probably.
Part of the issue is that the US tax code is a lot more complex than most countries. (And the homeowner-targetted deductions are kind of insane and bad policy too).
Still, I don't disagree with the basic premise. They probably know enough to know if itemizing your homeowner-related things would be better for you, and do it that way. You can ask for adjustments, or you could always ignore what they calculate for you and do it all yourself from scratch if you wanted to, a thing I believe you _can_ do in European countries that generally calculate your income taxes for you?
Unless you are a homeowner at an expensive metro. It used to be basically every homeowner, but the changes in 2018 led to a massive reduction of people itemizing. The standard deduction went up a whole lot, and along with it, the deduction for state and local taxes was capped to a relatively low number. So if you owe, say, $200K in your mortgage, chances are that you are going to need non-trivial bonus itemization to get to the cap, when in 2016, that was definitely enough to itemize.
In practice, about half as many people itemize today than they did back in 2016.
"Here is what we think you owe/don't owe. If this isn't what you expect, then click this button to add or subtract deductions. Oh and BTW, we know you owned a home last year so we included that too!" Or, "Hey we noticed you took the standard deduction last year so we assumed based on what info we have that this year might be the same so here is the standard answer!"
Paid mine off in 2008. I have been standard deduction ever since. My taxes take about 30 mins to do with one of the major bits of software. I could go real cheap and just copy the numbers around from year to year and do the math and mail it in. But at this point it is getting more and more silly that the IRS does not just mail us a post card with a link saying 'is this right?'. Pretty much all the ways I make money have a 10 form that they are filing with the IRS. I am fairly sure I am not alone.
Since Trump's tax changes very few people itemize - it is very difficult to get about the standard deduction. The average person doesn't even have enough income (the standard deduction is about a third the average income, the odds that someone at that wage level is spending enough on deductible things is small, there are too many non-deductable things they also need to buy).
Of course it depends on where you live - in San Francisco if you can afford a house at all you have enough interest to deduct it (especially at today's rates), but other areas have more sane housing prices and lower incomes.
I think you can still easily reach if you, say, tithe 5 or 10% of your (post-tax even!) income (to a church or other 501-c-3) and have a mortgage and pay property taxes in a major metropolitan area. (Also if you're single the standard deduction is half married filing jointly.) (I didn't realize the personal exemption is gone now too!!)
But a quick google says... according to the IRS in 2022, 139.2 out of 154.3 million tax returns took the standard deduction, which is indeed around 90%. (Looks like up from 87% in 2020 maybe). So, true, defintiely most people, but still 10% not.
It looks like maybe pre recent Trump standard deduction changes (which were phased in), as many as 30% of filers itemized. (Still a minority to be sure).
I wonder if charities have seen a big hit in donations, if the itemized deductions people are no longer taking were an incentive.
The cash donations on top of the standard deductions phased out this year. This year, as far as I could tell, only way to deduct cash donations was itemizing.\
> Your comment seems like a prime case of perfect being the enemy of good.
Which makes sense in a lot of spheres where's there's obligations on both sides. Unfortunately, if myself and the IRS come a disagreement about my filings, I can end up in jail or at the very least deal with an expensive criminal prosecution. If the IRS is wrong, then there's effectively no penalty for them.
The government wants it both ways. People understandably have some apprehension about this.
> Unfortunately, if myself and the IRS come a disagreement about my filings, I can end up in jail or at the very least deal with an expensive criminal prosecution.
I think there's a huge gap between facing an audit in most circumstances and those two outcomes...
I wasn't arguing for or against any system. Just wondering how it could work when the government doesn't know about a significant amount of my deductions and I ended up itemizing last year.
> The vast majority of people take the standard deduction, so offering a "here's what we think you owe, but if you disagree feel free to do the full return" form would be a huge efficiency gain.
> Your comment seems like a prime case of perfect being the enemy of good.
And the comments advocating for automatic tax filing seem to be ignoring Chesterton's fence. They seem to be viewing it solely through the lens of revenue collection. However, IIRC, for better or worse, one of the big levers the US government uses to influence individual behavior is incentives implemented via tax policy. It stands to reason that mechanism would stop working if individuals could avoid interacting with the tax rules.
People care about what they're paying in taxes whether they're manually punching in the numbers or not. For most people, you just put the numbers in the right places when filing taxes, and don't consider the policy implications or causes at that moment, because it makes no difference at that point. You consider those effects when voting.
Removing manual filing won't stop people from voting on tax policy.
I know I'm likely better off with the standard deduction, but I still have to check both ways to know for sure that's the case for me. So standard deduction never actually saves me time even though post Trump tax reform I generally take it.
But surely, you're on the cusp of itemizing. Or have dramatically changing circumstances year to year. Otherwise, you're just wasting time.
FWIW, we are in the "on the cusp" boat. Another year or two and our mortgage interest vs principle equation will put us in the standard deduction range. And short of massive changes to either tax law or our income, we'll remain there.
Last year I had lots of investments that I hadn’t previously. This year I sold a home. Next year, I’m planning to get married. The year after that, a new home?
Maybe these are “drastic” changes but they aren’t unusual across the population. Not planning on kids, so that means I’ll have fewer changes than most. But the person I plan to marry has significant changes to income based on commission so I’ll probably be doing taxes this way for a long time!
The only time "tests in a separate repo" makes sense to me is if they are truly cross-functional end to end tests that exercise several systems.
Those tests should be as small as possible to verify that everything is still wired together correctly.
Everything else should be either unit tests or narrow integration tests between a small handful of components. And as you said, they should live in the repository of the software they test.
I'm not saying that there aren't potential problems, but warmer water coming off of power plants in Florida has acted as a bit of a manatee sanctuary. So it's not a guaranteed bad thing.
It's actually a bit of a problem now that the power plants are starting to shut down.
I would say that any sense of sane immigration reform is completely unrealistic right now.
By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"
"Antifa" is less of an organization than even some loose collective like "anonymous"
Are there left-wing agitators? Sure, black bloc and other "direct action" protestors have been around since at least the world trade protests in the 90s.
But to the best of my knowledge there isn't really a formal "antifa" organization to dismantle or anything.