Why are you getting downvoted? Why is Lemmy defending rich corporations and not consumers??

You opened dry pasta in a dry room and got less than the advertised amount. If there’s residual moisture in the factory that evaporates, that is their problem, not ours. Yes it’s a small variation, but that reasoning works both ways: they should include a few extra strands to make sure the consumer gets the right amount.

Americans pay more in taxes towards healthcare than any other country, and then pay for private healthcare on top of that.

How is it “functionally” walled? How is it far from “anyone can simply download and run”? It literally is just that. Anyone can download anything and run any unsigned code. I am baffled by the fact that all the people correcting you are getting downvoted.

As an American who moved to Canada, there are similarities but Canada is still one million times better than the US.

The CRA (Canadian IRS) allows digital access to all tax info. Whatever software or service you use, just log into your CRA account and everything auto-fills. Done in a few minutes. My US taxes have never taken less than an hour, and often multiple hours if there’s anything remotely complicated.

Can’t follow directions?

What is this, tax advice from Stack Overflow? I don’t understand why people like you don’t save your criticism for the system, instead of at the people using the system.

Yes, the system is fucked up… because the instructions are intentionally designed to be complicated to follow. I don’t know a single person stupid enough to waste their time doing their own taxes by following the directions on the IRS documentation. Horrible advice. Not even professional tax accountants do that.

The IRS free tax-filing service is in limited trial in a few states, eligible only to simple returns within limited income ranges. Most people, including 1099 people like OP, can’t use it.

Your response is tone deaf. The American tax code is intentionally complicated to protect tax filing companies and to allow the rich to take advantage of loop holes. I can’t believe how housebroken some people are that they defend the shitty tax system instead of sharing in OP’s anger.

In most existing TCG, artificial scarcity is a meta-mechanic of the game. For many, that’s part of the fun of the “collecting“. It’s fun to collect rare cards because they’re in limited supply.

That said, I think there could be, in theory, an open source way to have artificial scarcity and the fun of collecting. Maybe have a nonprofit that sells official printed cards at cost?

That’s good to know. Though I wish people I knew, both apple and android, would switch to Signal instead.

The problem is that, in the US and Canada, android users don’t tend to use those apps en masse. The vast majority use SMS.

Criticism is not a scarce quantity to be preserved. It spreads, like a fire. Take literally any social movement, like #metoo or BLM. People don’t suppress smaller stories to “save” criticism for bigger stories. The small stories add up. Right now, the F150 is one of the best selling cars in the US. The average American is no where close to criticizing it. But everyone already makes fun of the cyber truck. We can use that.

“Let’s not criticize this dangerous truck design because we should save our criticism!” is the worst way to get people to criticize dangerous truck design.

“I don’t like x but it can’t be worse than y” is a construction which serves to minimize how bad something is. Instead, let’s scrutinize both: “This cyber truck is ridiculously dangerous. While we’re at it, let’s also regulate the 4 feet tall wall of grill on other trucks.”

Your wording makes it sound like the existence of even more dangerous trucks somehow excuses this dangerous truck. Both the 4 ft wall and the sharp metal blade edges are dangerous and irresponsible designs.

I agree with you. I feel like there is too often a “throw the book at them!” reaction to every wrong or mistake, maybe especially in the US. Which explains the hyper punitive justice system and the highest prison population in the world.

I was addressing your strong claim that they can’t do anything about it. I see no technical or theoretical reason to believe that. Give it at least a week.

Seems simple enough to guard against to me. Fact is, if a human can easily detect a pattern, a machine can very likely be made to detect the same pattern. Pattern matching is precisely what NNs are good at. Once the pattern is detected (I.e. being asked to repeat something forever), safeguards can be initiated (like not passing the prompt to the language model or increasing the probability of predicting a stop token early).

Why is Consumer Reports considered a rag?

Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.

I’m in favour of more regulation of big corporations, especially for financial services, so I’m not ready to dismiss this move as “complete nonsense”.

Apple/Google Pay is an additional intermediary that allows you to pay for things on your devices using your credit card. They charge fees over and above the credit cards, and have power over their respective digital platforms — for example, where and when you can easily use the service.

Now you might counter that they both happen to be pretty fair about that. They haven’t been using their power to unfairly exclude merchants or credit cards, and maybe their fees are fair. I don’t personally know. But the fact that they have the power to not be fair is evidence to me that there is something to be regulated there, independent of regulation of credit card companies.

Am I the only one experiencing little 1-2 second jitters? It’s as if it skips where an ad should be. I still don’t see an ad though.

Outside of the US, almost everywhere in the developed world, there is a big bike revolution happening. Paris, London, Montreal, etc. have massively expanded their bike networks.