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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

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Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#181

Post by WorldMaker »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #149

In the long term Intuit is probably a $0 because you don't need TurboTax to file a UBI report.

Depends on how good Intuit's lobbyists are at complicating any attempt at getting a UBI legislated.

One of the concepts often used to describe/"sell" a UBI is that a UBI may be thought of as changing the tax code to provide larger rebates and/or the government doing cash advance "loans" on a person's tax rebates so that people can make use of the time value of money. Those perspectives make a UBI easier to sell to legislators ("it's just a stranger tax code with some new accounting tricks"), but unfortunately also give plenty of room to tax code lobbyists to complicate and corrupt a UBI.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#183

Post by danaris »

flomo wrote: post #123
danaris wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a technical reason.

Calls to tech support are by accounting defintion. So that makes it easy to draw the line somewhere, and cut off groups of negative-value customers. Its 2026 and times are tough baby.

I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".

But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#185

Post by xp84 »

sokoloff wrote: post #153
alkonaut wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes. Shouldn't the correct way to file simple taxes be to just accept (sign) a value? Why is any arithmetic needed at all? Doesn't the tax authority know the numbers (What you earned, how much you paid in taxes) and they could figure out what you owe automatically? I've just "accepted" or "signed" my tax return (not in the US obviously) fo…

I suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS. “I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and r…

Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.

It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#186

Post by ffsm8 »

grep_name wrote: post #173
Citizen_Lame wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because most of the LLM output is associated with low effort spam, and they are not wrong. You keep fighting for LLM rights, lol.

^ this comment was written by an llm. See the problem?

People usually make the determination by reading at least part of the text and then find multiple smoking guns / llm-isms

The comment you responded to did not have those.

Fwiw, the article we're commenting on was likely not LLM written. The sentence structure is too convoluted, no LLM would've generated it like that - unless very carefully prompted ... But at that point it's no longer pure AI slop (imo).

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#187

Post by xp84 »

conductr wrote: post #121
xp84 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have one. Are you talking about Direct File? The Trump admin killed it, though it was successfully nerfed from the start anyway by the Intuit and H&R Block lobbyists -- you couldn't even itemize deductions, or have 1099 income. If your taxes were that simple, you didn't need software, you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes. Note: If you're just taking the piss becaus…

> If you're just taking the piss because every other country has a government method to submit your taxes, yup, we're dumb, thanks mostly to that shitty company. I feel we’re all complicit in this. Lobbying as they have only works when elected officials disregard their constituents interests. Elected officials whose constituents continue to keep in power. We as a people need to quit with this attitude and own our par…

> Businesses lobbying for their interests is exactly what they should be doing and exactly what everyone should expect them to do. Elected officials and the democratic process are supposed to be the check and fix.

That would be nice. I fear the modern system, with Citizens United, SuperPACs etc. seems to have been the final nail in the coffin of that concept though. Especially with the FPTP system preventing third parties. Someone in one of the two parties will win, they're both in the thrall of lobbyists, and even if there was one not taking that money (I think that's becoming more and more rare) the money firehose makes a substantial difference in elections. Hard to see how "we" can do a lot about this. I hate it, but I don't see it changing. And it seems like astroturfing will be easier in future elections than ever before - Now a few million dollars from a billionaire or even from foreign adversaries will be able to generate 'overwhelming groundswells' of completely synthetic public opinion on platforms like TikTok. To me, the result will be an acceleration of the tilt toward buying elections vs. convincing people of your ideas organically.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#188

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

boston_clone wrote: post #55
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

Stop being a "happy customer". We shouldn't be paying in the first place. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

The alternative is a CPA/accountant, which would be annoying and time-consuming

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#189

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

bni wrote: post #78

As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.

1) Because in the US your employer doesn't withhold tax at the correct rate - they withhold tax at whatever rate you tell them to (this is just a down payment). Places like banks don't withhold taxes at all. So, the US system forces everyone to file taxes (as long as your income is over some very minimal level).

2) Because in the US once your finances get remotely complex, filing taxes is a horrible experience, so most people are willing to either pay for someone else to do it for them, or for software like TurboTax to help do it themselves.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#190

Post by kaikai »

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #135
nerdsniper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place > These things are knowable There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined. Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions. Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and a…

What's a SCOTUS?

Supreme Court of the US
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