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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

#191

Post by avree »

VariousPrograms wrote: post #26
mactavish88 wrote: post #3

The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.

I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.” When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though. I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work is…

Gemini is a pretty bad choice for an LLM. Most people using it are doing so because Google bundled it for free with a couple things, not for its quality.

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

#193

Post by steezeburger »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #74
steezeburger wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?

most are limited to a simple 1040

That hasn't been my experience. freetaxusa has been pretty great honestly.

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

#194

Post by boston_clone »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #188
boston_clone wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, the alternative is being able to file for free. Turbotax lobbied for decades to make sure you have to pay.

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

#195

Post by eru »

true_religion wrote: post #150
zknill wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.

I don’t think it’s AI. AI would at least keep the article body consistent with the title even if it had to bend over backward and hallucinate new facts.

That would maybe be true, if AI wrote both the title and the body of the article.

In human practice, some hack usually writes the body, but the editor decides the title. And that can happen after the article is written or before.

I don't think they would change that workflow, even if the writer, or both writer and editor, were replaced with a AI.

So yours was a good observation, but it's rather weak evidence.

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

#196

Post by conductr »

xp84 wrote: post #187
conductr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

Unfortunately I tend to agree with you. But, at least we're actually talking about the real problem instead of pointing the finger at Inuit and their lobbyists.

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

#197

Post by aiisjustanif »

woobar wrote: post #174
nly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still blows my mind that Americans have to do this. In the UK almost nobody needs to "file their takes" and if you do you just do it online without the need for software.

Would you prefer to pay $100 for software, or a 50% marginal tax on a meager £100K?

Depends on what I get for it and it is close to NYC and San Francisco it the 100 to 200k range. I do agree though that it is too high.

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

#198

Post by rcpt »

eastof wrote: post #127
rcpt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US every Republican takes the Grover Norquist pledge to always make taxes as salient and as unpleasant as possible. The idea being that it will make voters more anti tax

I wish this were true but they get paid by taxes. Besides, there are few things more unpleasant than having your hard earned money taken away from you, regardless of how it happens. I don't think it takes fancy paperwork to make people oppose it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpa...

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

#199

Post by gamblor956 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #92
gamblor956 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations. Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that th…

There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you fil…

Those are deterministic choices...

Deterministic means that the results are not random, not that they are known at the time of the initial choice.

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

#200

Post by flomo »

danaris wrote: post #183
flomo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.

All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.

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