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They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.

Do you know how many people 8,500 employees in IT alone is? Google, all of it, has 60,000 engineers

IRS direct file is just not that complex, I promise you, and are you sure it was even built in house vs contracted?


The tax code is complex and Direct File isnt the only IRS digital service. It was built by F18 and USDS. You should inform yourself instead of being hysterical about numbers. If you inform yourself the numbers aren’t so scary.

Already could file free with free tax usa.

Not that impressive.

I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people entirely, or permit families the same type of deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities unless I have a home office for ny own business.


> I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people ...

All amazing ideas (I mean that seriously) but unfortunately not within the IRS's power to make happen.


You know FreeTaxUSA uses Direct File on the backend, right?

> and the same questions keep getting asked over and over.

This is a feature not a bug. The people asking those questions are new blood and accepting and integrating them is how you sustain your community.


Could you make it use Parakeet? That's an offline model that runs very quickly even without a GPU, so you could get much lower latency than using an API.

I love this idea, and originally planned to build it using local models, but to have post-processing (that's where you get correctly spelled names when replying to emails / etc), you need to have a local LLM too.

If you do that, the total pipeline takes too long for the UX to be good (5-10 seconds per transcription instead of <1s). I also had concerns around battery life.

Some day!



Wow, Handy looks really great and super polished. Demo at https://handy.computer/

[I'm using] Handy myself right now. And it's pretty good. I don't have any problems with it, except that I wish that it would slowly roll out the text as you talk instead of waiting to transcribe into the very end. because I like to rant and ramble a little bit and then go back and edit what I've written rather than having to perfectly compose on the first attempt. And that's one of the big advantages, in my opinion, of using a voice to text app is that it would let you ramble and rant and see what you have said and keep making additions and alterations to that. For instance, I'm doing this entire bit using handy in one stream of thought take. And so it's probably gonna be a bit rambly and not very polished, but at the same time it's more representative of a general use case. And I'm talking quite a bit so that I can actually put the system under stress and see how well it responds.

My only issue with it was that it cut off the words [I'm using] at the beginning and obviously it doesn't enter paragraph breaks. It took about 25 seconds to transcribe all of that on a 10th gen i7 laptop processor.

If they could incorporate combination typing out what was said while you're talking it would be pretty perfect.


Installing it on your PC or laptop puts your personal data and ISP subscription at risk, while installing it in a hosted VM yourself requires a bunch of Linux security and networking knowledge or else you'll get pwned pretty much immediately (https://youtu.be/40SnEd1RWUU). So this service is giving you a VM already set up with a security baseline.


Is that what this does? All the link takes us to is an empty website about "Kimi Claw."

The entire crutch of the "Claw" concept is being able to directly reconfigure the VM/Machine to be "your" environment (to a point). A blank VM with nothing configured on it, is as useful as a cardboard bathtub.

Ultimately this link is a terrible intro to whatever this is.


Hm, that YouTube video made me think a bit, sure if you put it all like that, it does feel like a lot of stuff to get right, but whenever I do it, it takes about 30 minutes to lock down the firewall, do some port-scans to verify, punch a VPN through and hide SSH behind it. That way you're already protected from 99.9% of attacks, and then hope that that last tenth of a percent won't stumble upon you, and also that the VPN is secure enough, though I guess if that is breached it's not only you who's fucked. Also you need to look out that Docker doesn't destroy your firewall. I don't know, it doesn't feel like that much work, right? Maybe I'm just blind to it.


What you and I consider routine work, someone who works with mostly Webdev or might consider extremely difficult. There a lot of programmers who have never used a Linux shell, or know much about networking beyond TCP, or used Linux before outside of a uni class 20 years ago.

git rebase can do that easily, I do it all the time when prepping feature branches for submission to the main branch


> git rebase can do that easily

What exact parameters you use for not changing the latter commits? Must be a very new feature, git's whole idea used to be that commits are on top of the previous ones, rewriting one needs rewrite of all the latter ones.


Instead of making a sarcastic response, just state plainly what you mean. This prevents you having to get into dumb arguments that don't mean anything to people who don't already know what you're trying to say.


literally just 'git rebase origin/main' to insert new commits to main into my branch history prior to the commits I made. No rewrites of later commits required if there are no conflicts. You seem to have an extreme misunderstanding of how git works.

Talking about extreme misunderstandings, rebase always rewrites commits, even when there are conflicts. Look at the commit sha's next time you're doing that.

At my workplace we now use Claude Code to parse written specs and source code, search through JIRA, and draft, refine and organize tickets (using the JIRA API via a CLI tool). Way faster than through the UI.

However as you point out we have no program-accessible source of data on who stakeholders, contributors, managers, etc. are and have to write a lot of that ourselves. For a smaller business perhaps one could write all of that down in an accessible way to improve this but for a large dynamic business it seems very difficult.


The identity provider is on-device and has to run on phones which don't do hardware attestation.


That’s only for selfies. If they use and id I’m pretty sure it is getting sent to a k-id server.


They can't feasibly do this in the US since many people don't have drivers licenses or passports.


Don't you have to be over 18 to get a credit card in the US? How many wouldn't be able to present a CC or ID?


Age verification requires a document that can be matched to your ID, such as by the photo on your ID card.

Credit cards don't have photos.

> How many Americans wouldn't be able to present a CC or ID?

The number of Americans who don't have a government issued photo ID is estimated around 1%. The number gets larger if you start going by technicalities like having an expired ID that hasn't been renewed yet.

The intersection between the 1% of 18+ Americans who don't have an ID and those who want to fully verify their Discord accounts is probably a very small number.


At least in Australia you absolutely can have a debit card under 18 and it’s extremely common for adults to not have a credit card.


> At least in Australia you absolutely can have a debit card under 18

Same in the UK, but Steam uses credit cards for age verification there and refuses if you provide a debit card instead. Evidently the payment backends can tell credit and debit apart.


When does steam require age verification?

It sometimes asks for my age for viewing a game and I can input any ol' date I want to. It doesn't even flinch if I input a different date every time.

I also don't recall them asking about my age when I was actually underage and paid using a PaySafeCard, but then again they didn't have porn on the platform at that point either.


> When does steam require age verification?

They only enforce it in the "mature sexual content" category, which mainly applies to porn games. For everything else, including the "some sexual content" category, they still just take your word for it.


> Evidently the payment backends can tell credit and debit apart.

Yeah those are parallel systems for reasons that amount to technical debt.


Only to have your own card. You can be an authorized user on a credit card even if you're under 18.


Ah right. That's no use for verification then, unless there's a way for payment gateways to distinguish the primary user from their authorized users.


Those without driver's licenses or passports can get a state ID card instead, if I'm not mistaken. A pain, but an option.


It's actually not a pain. It's the same process as getting a driver's license, minus the test. You go into the DMV and wait in the same lines (at least in California; I have a CA state ID, not a license)


Yeah that’s not true. It’s a lie. And we all know why it’s a lie. Adults in the US with ID is 99%


*Citation needed

> Nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s license. Just under 9%, or 20.76 million people, who are U.S. citizens aged 18 or older do not have a non-expired driver’s license. Another 12% (28.6 million) have a non- expired license, but it does not have both their current address and current name. For these individuals, a mismatched address is the largest issue. Ninety-six percent of those with some discrepancy have a license that does not have their current address, 1.5% have their current address but not their current name, and just over 2% do not have their current address or current name on their license. Additionally, just over 1% of adult U.S. citizens do not have any form of government-issued photo identification, which amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.

From https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20I...


That seems like a good citation, but it supports the 99% number above

> Additionally, just over 1% of adult U.S. citizens do not have any form of government-issued photo identification, which amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.

The rest of the statistic is about driver's licenses specifically, including technicalities like expiration dates and address changes. The online ID check for age verification don't care about the address part anyway, in my experience.

If someone has an expired drivers' license or they changed their name and haven't updated their IDs, they have bigger problems than age-verifying their Discord accounts.


My driver's license was expired for 8 years until last year. I wasn't driving so the pressure to renew it was very low.

I actually only renewed it to get medical care and because renewing the license was only a little more expensive than getting an ID-only card.

It did prevent me from using some porn sites because my state requires ID verification but many sites just ignore the requirement so I just didn't use the sites that required ID.


Somehow they don’t have trouble getting an ID when they want to buy alcohol


It only takes one person with ID buy alcohol for a group.


A lot of people don't drink alcohol.


Also, in a lot of states you don't get IDed for alcohol after about age 35.


It's a sad reminder that I look as old as I am.


wat. the majority of Americans have a DL, ID, or Passport. What a silly thing to say.

For DL alone:

>Data indicates that approximately 84% to 91% of all Americans hold a driver's license, with roughly 237.7 million licensed drivers in the U.S. as of 2023.

Add in an ID and Passport and we are likely closer to 99%


Yep. You basically cannot function in legal society without an ID. If you are an adult and don't have ID you are intentionally trying to live a cloaked life and it won't be very easy.


The evidence has shown that this thinking is flawed - disruption of jobs in an industry causes a slow, wrenching, scarring adjustment process that increases the load on welfare programs and makes quality of life broadly worse: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got...


sure but after 3-5 generations it works out, like with farming and weaving. just gotta wait longer!


If only this was a game of Victoria 3


so ease the robotaxis in now then rather than waiting 30 years.


Look at the problems South Korea is having, where there are not enough young people to support and care for the elderly. Elders face economic hardship and the healthcare system is buckling under load.


and its going to get so so so much worse. Look at this pyramid. https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/


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