Putting fewer buttons on a controller just means that all the necessary features are in a menu or require several clicks which mean that you have to know what state the receiver is in and if it's lagging. Which is all much worse than if there was a button per feature.
(The usual problem with remotes happens to be that they tend to have buttons that nobody has ever used or wanted and which don't even do anything. And there's still menus and state. And the one button that has to be pushed for every feature is the one that dies first.)
I realize this is a joke, but honestly, I wouldn't mind if US federal government grant funding policy was targeted towards promoting strongly typed programming languages. It's actually bad if your programming language allows a string to identify as an int!
Things that need work necessarily cost money. Someone doing the work for free is not inherently sustainable. Profits motivate work to get done all on its own. Profits by definition is money over and above expenses. So it creates a perpetual sustainable mechanism. Competition motivates quality and efficient pricing (eventually).
Lobbying corrupts this a bit. However they are not lobbying to suppress private competitors only government-run competition that has no profit motive or competition. When the government runs it we still pay for it, except now people who don’t use it also pay. Also wealthy people pay a disproportionate share as compared to their use due to progressive income tax.
In theory anyone can start a company if they have a better or more efficient product or offering and get the profits instead.
The usual argument is that taxes are already paying for the collection of data and calculation of amount, so why can't we just use the figure already calculated by default? This is most true for W2 employees without any uncommon circumstances, but there would seem to be a lot of people covered under that.
It's a political challenge, not a technical one. There are constituencies that reap concentrated benefits from the current system (e.g., tax-filing services) while imposing disperse costs on everyone else. Also, there are those who believe that the IRS is out to get them, so filing your own taxes is more trustworthy than going with a government-issued pre-filled default. And that going through the motions makes the pain of paying taxes more salient, so you're more likely to complain about it.
If you look at it as a practical or technical challenge, you're addressing the wrong question.
The 18F team was doing remarkable work devoid of all profit motives, before it was gutted by this admin. Americans are missing out on a lot of QoL improvements based purely on the false belief that private is always better than public. In France, they're rolling out a new system where your taxes are filed fully automatically, and you get a PDF in your emails with a one page recap, telling you to only contact the admin if you feel like something is wrong with the recap.
Your take is the classic economist's "it works in practice, but does it work in theory?". Obviously tax filing works better when it's maintained by the government. You're severly underestimating the harmfulness of profiteering monopolies lobbying against any improvements and buying out the competition. Also, look at DOGE, with all the ruckus they made they just couldn't find that many inefficiencies. And for such "simple" software projects as a tax-filing platform, I just don't buy that private is better than public.
> However they are not lobbying to suppress private competitors only government-run competition that has no profit motive or competition.
But there is a profit (or rather income generation) motive: taxation is what funds the government. Parceling this work to a private 3rd party means paying a bunch of salaries that are much higher than what government employees get paid, generating profit for the company that gets taken out of the tax revenue, which increases the cost of the service for end users or the government receiving income.
Some politicians argue that government is inept and wasteful, and sponsoring no-nonsense projects that reduce middlemen in this process interferes with that narrative. If you got into office screaming that the government is your enemy, you’re not going to support projects that make it easier for citizens to interact with the government.
I'm worried all that cheap easily accessible LLM capacity will be serving us ads if we're lucky and subtly pushing us to use brands that pay money if we're not.
If AI says don't buy a subaru it's not worth the money, then Subaru pays attention and they are willing to pay money to get a better rec. Same for Univerisites. Students who see phrases like "If the degree is from brown flush it down" (ok hyperbole, but still) are going to pick different schools.
I think people have more memetic immunity than you're giving them credit for. We're in the early days, people don't fully understand how to treat ChatGPT's outputs.
Soon enough, asking an LLM a question and blindly trusting the answer will be seen as ridiculous, like getting all your news from Fox News or Jacobin, or reading ads on websites. Human beings can eventually tell when they're being manipulated, and they just... won't be.
We've already seen how this works. Grok gets pushed to insert some wackjob conservative talking point, and then devolves into a mess of contradictions as soon as it has to rationalize it. Maybe it's possible to train an LLM to actually manipulate a person towards a specific outcome, but I do not think it will ever be easy or subtle.
You mention Fox News and people knowing when they're manipulated and I struggle to see how that squares with the current reality of Fox News being the most popular news network and rising populism that very much relies on manipulation.
It’s a tried and true method of Silicon Valley VCs. Produce something as a loss leader. Build a moat. Then extract rent. Not only can you stop having to produce anything of value, you can even degrade your product and people won’t be able to leave thanks to lock-in.
We wonder why the US has lost or losing competitiveness with China in most industries. Their government has focused on public investment and public ownership of natural monopolies, preventing rent extraction and keeping the costs of living lower. That means employers don’t have to pay workers as much so their businesses can be more competitive. Contrast with the US whose working class is parasitized by various forms of rent extraction - land, housing, medicine, subscription models, etc. US employers effectively finance these inefficiencies. It’s almost like the US wants to fall behind.
