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The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced

Technology
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  • 66 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    6 Aufrufe
    M
    FYI- insurance company data breaches impact more than just customers. I had my identity stolen a few years ago because a small car insurance company I've never heard of was able to buy data on me from my state's government to build a potential customer profile, and then they got hacked. I would assume Aflac has data on just about everyone in the US.
  • 311 Stimmen
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    18 Aufrufe
    S
    Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.
  • 78 Stimmen
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    7 Aufrufe
    U
    Obligatory Knowledge Fight Reference: [https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/1044-june-2-2025](In this installment, Dan and Jordan discuss a strange day on Alex's show where he spends a fair amount of time trying to dissuade his listeners from getting too suspicious about Palantir.)
  • Building a slow web

    Technology technology
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    175 Stimmen
    37 Beiträge
    26 Aufrufe
    I
    Realistically, you don't need security, NAT alone is enough since the packets have nowhere to go without port forwarding. But IF you really want to build front end security here is my plan. ISP bridge -> WAN port of openwrt capable router with DSA supported switch (that is almost all of them) Set all ports of the switch to VLAN mirroring mode bridge WAN and LAN sides Fail2Ban IP block list in the bridge LAN PORT 1 toward -> OpenWRT running inside Proxmox LXC (NAT lives here) -> top of rack switch LAN PORT 2 toward -> Snort IDS LAN PORT 3 toward -> combined honeypot and traffic analyzer Port 2&3 detect malicious internet hosts and add them to the block list (and then multiple other openwrt LXCs running many many VPN ports as alternative gateways, I switch LAN host's internet address by changing their default gateway) I run no internal VLAN, all one LAN because convenience is more important than security in my case.
  • 461 Stimmen
    89 Beiträge
    32 Aufrufe
    M
    It dissolves into salt water. Except it doesn't dissolve, this is not the term they should be using, you can't just dry out the water and get the plastic back. It breaks down into other things. I'm pretty sure an ocean full of dissolved plastic would be a way worse ecological disaster than the current microplastic problem... I've seen like 3-4 articles about this now and they all use the term dissolve and it's pissing me off.
  • X launches E2E encrypted Chat

    Technology technology
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    10 Stimmen
    55 Beiträge
    17 Aufrufe
    F
    So you do have evidence? Where is it?
  • New Supermaterial: As Strong As Steel And As Light As Styrofoam

    Technology technology
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    60 Stimmen
    21 Beiträge
    22 Aufrufe
    D
    I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.
  • 4 Stimmen
    2 Beiträge
    6 Aufrufe
    M
    Epic is a piece of shit company. The only reason they are fighting this fight with Apple is because they want some of Apple’s platform fees for themselves. Period. The fact that they managed to convince a bunch of simpletons that they are somehow Robin Hood coming to free them from the tyrant (who was actually protecting all those users all along) is laughable. Apple created the platform, Apple managed it, curated it, and controlled it. That gives them the right to profit from it. You might dislike that but — guess what? Nobody forced you to buy it. Buy Android if Fortnight is so important to you. Seriously. Please. We won’t miss you. Epic thinks they have a right to profit from Apple’s platform and not pay them for all the work they did to get it to be over 1 billion users. That is simply wrong. They should build their own platform and their own App Store and convince 1 billion people to use it. The reason they aren’t doing that is because they know they will never be as successful as Apple has been.