rpgwaiter (u/rpgwaiter)

rpgwaiter commented on IRS Direct File github.com/IRS-Public/dir... · Posted by u/nerevarthelame

I know a number of people who are now using https://www.freetaxusa.com/ to file their taxes for free, but I've been hesitant to. Does anyone know offhand if they're actually trustworthy?

rpgwaiter · 9 months ago

I’ve used them the past 3 years for my taxes, great experience and never had a single issue for what that’s worth

They don’t spam my email and phone unlike Intuit (even after I deleted my account)

rpgwaiter commented on A New Headache for Honest Students: Proving They Didn't Use A.I nytimes.com/2025/05/17/st... · Posted by u/ripe

djoldman · 10 months ago

This is just the story that keeps on getting written and won't go away.

Yes, students are going to cheat, they always have. If you are a college professor and you don't want to reward cheaters, make large percentages of a student's grade come from in person tests with no electronics allowed. Simple.

Tell the students up front at the beginning of the course. They're almost surely 18 year olds at least and legal adults.

What a college shouldn't do is outsource "detection" (much less in-source it), which is impossible to accomplish at an adequately low False Positive rate.

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

I’m not sure what the solution is here. Personally, in-person college is a non-starter for a number of health reasons. Online classes was a huge boon to people like me, I never would have been able to get a degree otherwise.

I know I’m in a small minority, and this wouldn’t apply to a large number of courses where online classes don’t make sense, but I don’t think the solution is exclusion.

rpgwaiter commented on Gender characteristics of service robots can influence customer decisions psu.edu/news/health-and-h... · Posted by u/gnabgib

blahaj · 10 months ago

> Service robots depicted in the study were the same except for the use of gray or pink colors to portray male or female genders, respectively. After receiving a menu recommendation, participants then rated the robot’s persuasiveness.

So they found out that different colors have an effect on how persuasive people perceive robots to be? And then they just claim that this is due to genders they associate to the colors? Their metric of a self reported sense of power also seems dubious to me.

This looks like junk science to me.

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

Also how is gray a male color? If anything I’d say gray is non-binary.

rpgwaiter commented on Jury orders NSO to pay $167M for hacking WhatsApp users arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/Bender

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

I wonder what percentage of that $167M will go to the ~1400 victims of this hack (that we know about)

rpgwaiter commented on An appeal to companies doing AI soatok.blog/2025/05/04/te... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dangus · 10 months ago

I actually think that many of the concerns the author doesn’t have are the more concerning ones and some of the concerns they do have are more likely to be not much of a big deal.

The privacy concern I find to be particularly overstated. This is an identical concern to ones that have existed before AI ever entered the fray. Anytime you send data to a system that someone else controls you run those exact same risks. I also think there’s an overstated fear that an app focused on private data (something similar to Signal) would just add some kind of AI functionality one day out of the blue and suddenly ship your data off to a hive mind.

Any app that is willing to cross that line already has done so (e.g., Facebook).

It also seems to be technologically simple to perform a lot of AI tasks without compromising privacy. E.g., chips with local-first AI computational ability are reaching consumer level devices. Even the much-maligned Windows Recall feature specifically emphasizes how it never sends information to Microsoft servers nor processes data in the cloud.

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

The risk isn’t that Signal itself will add AI features, it’s more that it will be built-in to your OS that’s running Signal (Apple Intelligence, Windows Recall, etc). These types watch everything you do on-device by default and learn a ton from your E2EE messages regardless of the intentions of the Signal devs.

rpgwaiter commented on You sent the message, but did you write it? davidduncan.substack.com/... · Posted by u/ano-ther

dotslashmain · 10 months ago

Some people (like the author) are going to seriously overthink this at first, and then we'll get used to it.

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

Idk why you’d want to get used to it. I’m very lucky to have a job that doesn’t mandate AI use, and as far as I can tell I haven’t been hit by any work AI emails. My social media bubble on Mastodon is extremely anti-AI, I pretty much never have to deal with slop.

On the rare occasion I see some GPT garbage, I either block the sender, or if I know a human is involved I explain how insulting it is and let them know they’re one slop message away from blocked.

Getting used to it is a surefire way to make your communication experience much worse.

rpgwaiter commented on Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year techcrunch.com/2025/04/29... · Posted by u/GeekyBear

bcye · 10 months ago

- email address is just the one associated with the Google account, it sucks if you started the application on your personal google account, but you can still change it

- you need a payment profile to pay the account fee + verify your identity, the last part is probably very important for anti-spam

- I can understand that legal name + country can be considered doxxing, but I think it's highly relevant information for users

Of course these requirements could be relaxed for low-risk applications (i.e. no INTERNET permission), but I think it's understandable there is so few of them nowadays that it is not a priority.

rpgwaiter · 10 months ago

In what way is knowing the full legal name of a developer relevant to end users? I work in the App Store analytics space and even I have never once thought “I wonder what the full legal name and address of the app developer is. I’d love to drive to their place physically or mail a letter 1800s style to discuss their app”

The most I’d ever wonder about is maybe their country of origin.

rpgwaiter commented on Finding Things the Government Might Know About You nytimes.com/2025/04/16/in... · Posted by u/anticorporate

rpgwaiter · a year ago

“People on the left think this is good because it makes giving social services easier”

Source? I’d like to meet a single person that feels this way. People on the left in my experience would much rather just give money directly to people, UBI-style. Adding stipulations and verification and administration costs so much money that could just be cash in people’s pockets.

Like, the whole idea of food stamps is that “these poor people are too stupid or deviant to spend money on the ‘correct’ products and services. Daddy government knows best and will restrict the benefits to processed cold food at approved chain supermarkets and gas stations”

rpgwaiter commented on The tools I love are made by awful people ankursethi.com/blog/the-t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

nradov · a year ago

We're all awful people, every one of us. Some are better at hiding it than others.

rpgwaiter · a year ago

Sounds like projection to me

rpgwaiter commented on U.S. citizen in Arizona detained by immigration officials for 10 days news.azpm.org/p/news-arti... · Posted by u/klipt

runjake · a year ago

Not to lessen your point, because I 100% agree, but I'd like to point out that you could swap a couple words in your statements to make the same point about the Democrats:

- Small government: cut things we don't like (e.g. military), and spend more on things we do like (e.g. social programs)

- Personal freedoms: more freedoms for things we like (e.g. LGBTQ), remove freedoms for things we don't (e.g. guns)

rpgwaiter · a year ago

Since when has either party ever cut military spending? I wish Dems were as cool as you say.