I can't imagine doing something like this anytime soon, but I will probably follow the advice around having AI check the return against all my forms and previous years return before submitting.
Readit Newsseidleroni commented on I Used Claude to File My Taxes for Free kachess.dev/taxes/ai/pers... · Posted by u/gdudeman
Yes, for those under 30 you have no idea how normalized smoking was right thru the 90s. Restaurants reeked of it, bars more so. A ridiculous percent of men smoked.
I have memories of being quite young sitting in a relatives lap at a baseball game while they smoked. Or my coach in little league smoking a pipe in the dugout filled with 11 year olds.
I was explaining this to my elementary school aged kids just a few days ago. We were eating in a restaurant and I told them that when I was their age most restaurants had a smoking and non-smoking section. Of course the smoke did not respect the invisible barrier. The idea that people could just smoke indoors and it was normal really blew their minds.
seidleroni commented on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation sparkfun.com/official-res... · Posted by u/yaleman
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.
I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
seidleroni commented on Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear lend-me-your-ears.specr.n... · Posted by u/vunderba
This is really cool! As someone who has basically no piano training, this is fun! Perhaps there could be some super-easy mode where you actually highlight the keys while you're playing the sounds (in simon mode) to help the super noobs train their ears.
seidleroni commented on AI coding assistants are getting worse? spectrum.ieee.org/ai-codi... · Posted by u/voxadam
Theres too much money, time and infrastructure committed for this to be anything but successful.
Its tougher than a space race or the nuclear bomb race because there are fewer hard tangibles as evidence of success.
I think there is also some FOMO involved. Once people started saying how AI was helping them be more productive, a lot of folks felt that if they didn't do the same, they were lagging behind.
seidleroni commented on The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition newsletter.dancohen.org/a... · Posted by u/speckx
Ask them to mark low confidence words.
interesting... I'll give that a shot
seidleroni commented on The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition newsletter.dancohen.org/a... · Posted by u/speckx
It helps when you can see the confidence of each token, which downloadable weights usually gives you. Then whenever you (your software) detects a low confidence token, run over that section multiple times to generate alternatives, and either go with the highest confidence one, or manually review the suggestions. Easier than having to manually transcribe those parts at least.
Is there any way to do this with the frontier LLM's?
seidleroni commented on Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail the-decoder.com/qwen3-vl-... · Posted by u/thm
My favorite AI feature is to put a YouTube link in Gemini and ask it to summarize. Or even better: put the link of a 20min video "5 ways to" and ask "what are the 5 ways?"
I think Gemini analyzes the transcription.
Can I do the same for free with Qwen3?
I don't believe that it just analyzes the transcription. I asked Gemini to look at the youtube video referenced on the site below and "build" something that duplicates that device. It did a pretty good approximation that it could not have done without going through the full video.
seidleroni commented on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 oneusefulthing.org/p/thre... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
Every time I see an article like this, it's always missing --- but is it any good, is it correct? They always show you the part that is impressive - "it walked the tricky tightrope of figuring out what might be an interesting topic and how to execute it with the data it had - one of the hardest things to teach."
Then it goes on, "After a couple of vague commands (“build it out more, make it better”) I got a 14 page paper." I hear..."I got 14 pages of words". But is it a good paper, that another PhD would think is good? Is it even coherent?
When I see the code these systems generate within a complex system, I think okay, well that's kinda close, but this is wrong and this is a security problem, etc etc. But because I'm not a PhD in these subjects, am I supposed to think, "Well of course the 14 pages on a topic I'm not an expert in are good"?
It just doesn't add up... Things I understand, it looks good at first, but isn't shippable. Things I don't understand must be great?
The author actually discusses the results of the paper. He's not some rando but a Wharton Professor and when he is comparing the results to a grad student, it is with some authority.
"So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student. The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems..."
seidleroni commented on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race nbcnews.com/politics/elec... · Posted by u/jsheard
The sort of people who can set aside a couple tens of thousands of dollars are also the sort of people who probably have good health insurance through their job. Generally, the US's healthcare problems _mostly_ impact low to middle income people, and they usually can't just magic up 30k or so.
100%. I have known a couple of people that did some form of "medical tourism", mostly for expensive dental work. In both cases they did some form of tech contract work as a sole proprietorship and bought their own health insurance (not through a partner). The overlap of people who can save up thousands of dollars for treatment abroad and have poor health insurance is probably not too large.