> We are angry that our local city council is representing a corporation instead of the citizens that they are supposed to. We're protesting against citizens losing their rights in their own city. No amount of money is worth that.

What rights are they losing?

Representative government in which sufficient time is granted for all with an opinion to speak, a broad community vote on specific decisive issues.

You know, the opposite of a very few deciding without paying attention to the many that stood outside locked doors in the cold.

I like the idea of everyone speaking, but 4 hours of speakers with 3 minutes each should have been more than enough to hear all the important viewpoints.

If they didn't listen, it wasn't for lack of physically hearing the arguments and seeing significant support.

That's one of two things mentioned.

There's the lack of a specific community vote on a large decisive issue affecting the entire town and utility availability and prices for at least a decade.

For small towns such things are over and above the usual day to day of town council business and often warrant a community referendum and some time spent on presenting options.

I think a vote would have been great, yeah. I don't know how difficult that would have been logistically.

But specifically in terms of how much representation they allowed at the meetings, I give them a C.

If there's enough interest to fill 4h of 3m speaking shots, maybe it deserves a direct vote by the people?

> I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.

...what do you think will cause kids to be unable to understand it? They understand things like the Odyssey and the Iliad, Charles Dickens, the Bible/Torah/Quran/Baghvad Gita/etc., Faust, Don Quixote, etc. all of which were written far earlier

Understanding something intellectually is not quite the same as appreciating it viscerally because you have done something similar.

I guess, but kids still go outside and do chores. What do you think kids no longer do that kids in Twain's novels did?

They certainly don't use many of the same words, probably don't sail or float on a river (but how many kids could ever do that). What else? The core elements of friendship, loyalty, cunning, and the base satire are all still relevant and visceral today

I don't believe new copies are censored? I read the book (Huckleberry Finn's not Sawyer's) as a kid in the 2010s and we read the version with slurs as well

Antitrust is completely dead with the current President brazenly taking bribes through his son in law and his sons fake crypto company and scamming his own supporters twice with rug pull memecoins. With that level of disdain for consumers who will ever enforce antitrust?

That's crazy bc in California with super high minimum wage and DD paying a portion of the order and not a minimum wage, the drivers make less than everyone else usually

The above commenter is misinformed (and seemingly harbours some misplaced anger towards drivers as a result). California and BC have similar driver protections which still don't guarantee minimum wage.

The goalposts shifted so hard here I think we're playing rugby instead of football

It's unusual to spend that much even for a small business tax returns except maybe in major cities

According to these benchmarks. It's not there yet

Isn't writing out the example in the beginning that Astra missed basically ensuring that every future model will get this task correct?

I guess my point is these benchmarks unless they are constantly refreshed with new scenarios and not ever having their outcomes written about publicly or available on a public server, will always be prone to being gamed

Your anecdote seems to clash heavily with the results of the benchmark announced in the article. I suppose that is part of the jagged experience of agentic AI

The benchmark announced in the article seems to be around weird edge cases (which are often important) and whether it can prompt the person with relevant information rather than just listening to what they want to do.

Top tier tax professionals can do pretty well on this benchmark (better than agents) but won't hit 100%.

The kind of people spending time preparing oodles of returns would not do very well on this metric, though (especially midway through that pile of returns, as opposed to "think carefully about this trick question").

The OP said it was a complicated return so anyone assuming OPs anecdote is in line with the article is filling the lines in themselves with a lot of assumptions