Whining about having to pay income taxes by themselves. Could also be that many are self employed.

I don’t think it’s enforced by law. Only federal tax. Maybe different in different states? Anyway, Americans are always whining about it, so I figured it was national/federal.

In theory, it’s not the most economically efficient. We want people to work, and taxing labor decreases the incentive to work. However, there isn’t any viable alternative given the current circumstances. Labor creates all value in society and you can’t easily hide labor off shore (though I guess that’s what happened with globalization and China).

One should understand that income tax should be a tax on the consumption of labor (just as a tariff is a tax paid by the importer/consumer). Right-wing politicians have made the employee pay the income tax (to decrease acceptance of the system), but it should always be the employer that pays the tax.

If we start to call income tax “labor VAT” or something similar, that will probably solve a lot of misunderstandings.

Making the employer pay the tax before the money reach the employee solves quite a lot. I understand that’s not the practice in the US.

Because the political and economical situation is extreme.

It’s the language of GNU. And a scheme. That’s also why you would choose Haunt. It’s probably not for you.

https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

If you’re into GNU/Guile Scheme, there is also Haunt: https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html

My only advice is that you stick to one model and give it some time. You need to “learn” your model. I will probably never go back. I had huge issues with getting good results from Google and my subjective experience is that this is far better. However, I do still use conventional search engines as a complement. It’s not all or nothing.

This is the one I use: https://docs.mistral.ai/capabilities/agents/

Just tell the modell to do web searches in the system prompt.

All providers should have something similar. With a user friendly UI.

If you code your own agent and utilize an API or run a model locally, you can of course do even more. There are many tools if you want to do RAG on your own local data.

Because it’s useful. Have you tried? But the LLM has to be able to use conventional search engines as well. I tell my LLM agent to prioritize certain kinds of websites and present a compressed answer with references. Usually works way better than a standard Google search (which only produce AI generated junk results anyway).

You can get very good answers or search results by utilizing RAG.

Russia. MS-13 is nothing in comparison. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Russia supports MS-13 as part of their hybrid warfare. That’s how they work.

Understand that Russia has largely been able to put US to its knees through hybrid methods that utilize and enhance the negative effects of american arrogance, neoliberal dogmatism and the war on drugs. Trump is the final stage before the empire comes down. It’s probably too late to turn the ship around by now. China + EU is already the facto world leaders and the US is doing everything to destroy itself and there is no real political and economical self-awareness among people with power.

The US should have started to decrease inequality, stop the war on drugs and enforced (sane) tariffs and migration policies 15 years ago. The EU has the same problems, but there isn’t the same level of inequality and political extremism and fundamentalism, which makes me believe that the EU will survive as a western democracy and relevant world player, but the US will not.

Maybe give Doom Emacs a try? Anyway, I thing we can put IDE/Editor in the subjective quality bucket.

Ok, I agree about music apps and Google Maps.

Isn’t Intellij largely open source? What does premium offer over the community edition? More content and support? Anyway, I find this one subjective. I would argue that Emacs, VS Code and Neovim are at least as good (much better if you work with many different programming languages and/or require extra control).

Seems you don’t know how to configure your editor/IDE. There is nothing in a “Jetbrains IDE” which you cannot also get in Neovim, Emacs or VS Code. Using only FOSS plugins. Or what functionality are you thinking of?

The facto standard is not an objective quality.

I mean the best big tech “products” are FOSS as well. But I guess it depends on which definition of FOSS that you use.

Usually, nowadays, proprietary software is built on 95% FOSS and then you maybe have a thin layer with your own stuff (which will become FOSS in a year or two when there’s someting better that can replace your own hack). The rest is content and marketing.

Proprietary software which doesn’t have an objectively better FOSS counterpart (that I can come up with right now):

1. Nvidia GPU stack. But ROCm and IPEX-LLM will probably catch up in a year or two (both are mainly FOSS).
2. Some videogames that still use their proprietary engines. Though they are certainly not good because of their in-house engine, rather the opposite. I.e. they are good because of content, not software.

Many people bring up proprietary CAD and graphics software. Though I suspect that’s a more subjective opinion. My experience is that proprietary CAD apps and the Adobe suite are buggy as hell. My experience is also that the people who use these softwares have learned how to cope with the legacy crap and they refuse to learn new and better ways.

I had to integrate Photoshop into a project a few years ago. The whole software just smelled huge legacy bad quality code base. Buggy as hell. But good marketing and/or user lockin I guess.

I don’t consider anything from Apple to be good in an objective way. Unless you count social status symbols as an objective quality. I do consider price to be an objective quality though.

The only good things that has come out of Microsoft are open source. VS Code, dotnet core and Lean. Same goes for Google.

A more relevant question: What proprietary software is better than its FOSS counterpart?

Because I can’t come up with any.

Because the political right doesn’t actually like functional markets.

I don’t drive a BMW, so yes.

Yes.