A quarter of the price of American glasses btw, so if you can read hiragana I definitely recommend getting them here. (The newer prescription-issuing machine requires literacy where the older one didn’t, IIRC. To the brief concern of staff.).

Me (in Japanese): I’d like these two 件 (classifier for counting) glasses please. Staff: These two 個 sir?.Me: Oh apologies this isn’t my first language and I do e-commerce a bit. Staff: What. Me: Well glasses are also an SKU returned by a database query and so that’s 2件. S: TIL.

(A staff engineer who experienced it in their own family could diagram out why and then immediately decide that anything, anything at all, would be better than pushing that boulder up a hill on behalf of a very small number of users. “Only millions.”).

(You’d think that AppAmaGooBookSoft would get better at this class of issues over time, but anecdotally it seems to be getting worse, downstream of increasing internal fragmentation which is downstream of global GDPR envy.).

Ruriko: *twenty minutes of fruitless button pushing*.Me: OK try calling yourself from Lillian’s tablet. Ruriko: *does so, it works*.Ruriko: How does what I just did actually cause that to be possible?.Me: *weighs whether being right or staying married is the better path* Dunno!.

Ruriko: What the actual eff. Me: Don’t worry I will fix this. Ruriko: Google says to XYZ. Me: Google’s AI has hallucinated that solution, which will not work, even if you find and push buttons as described in it. My solution will work with some probability. Ruriko: What the eff.

Ruriko: *several hour unsuccessful adventure in getting kids to be able to call her from their tablets*.Me: Oh honey this is an Amazon org thing. Ruriko: How is this an org thing?.Me: The API boundary is not the real boundary here. You’re caught between two international offices.

(I’m off in Japan on vacation for next month but we’ve got episodes pre-recorded. Hat tip to Sammy for organizing guests and myself to knuckle down prior to vacation. But from your perspective don’t rely on me being up during US work day to tweet every Thursday.).

As always the best way to get it is through your podcast reader of choice, but website is also an option:.

In case you missed the usual Thursday release: the most recent episode of Complex Systems featured Jennifer Li of A16Z on AI infra.

. not exactly the type of unprofessional or unethical behavior that would counsel immediate referral to a higher authority, right?. And yet. git commit -m "Our users are idiots; reference A/B test 3414". makes it seem like a closer call.

And so if a human tax preparer made it part of his standard patter to hit Ctrl-P and then stare *theatrically* at the first page of the 1040, pause in thought for a few seconds, and then say "Yep, I think we're just about done. How does it look to you?", that would be. .

You, the unsophisticated consumer, may not ask the same questions that a sophisticated professional would ask. We don't expect you to. You also might respond to elements of professional mien which are not strictly rational but which are extremely understandable.

"How do you feel about this in tax software morally/aesthetically?". I feel a bit conflicted, because one thing a professional should do as part of tax preparation is give you, the unsophisticated consumer, the piece of mind that your taxes are being handled appropriately.

200X: It's compiling. 2025: My assistant is still working on that; of course I'm tweeting right now.

I wonder to what degree we'll see this in AI?. Thought occasioned by watching Claude Opus grind through a transcript at a speed which is a) obviously inhuman if you've ever edited anything and b) still slow enough that you can read words as they stream in.

A thing which has long been part of tax software product management is inserting artificial delays between data input, calculation, and displaying the forms to the user. This is to convince the user that the computer is thinking Oh So Hard on their behalf.

… some combination of that interaction plus the facts on the paperwork caused the “Oh shoot he *actually is* a salaryman.”.

As (almost) always for this story format this was not verbatim the dialogue, but preserves the general shape of it. In particular there was a hard to translate 20 seconds where I said The Wrong Word, she reacted like it was the wrong word, I apologized for imprecision, and….

Bank: Wait wait so you’re a salaryman. Me: Yes. Bank: And you are presently in America for the convenience of your employer. Me: Yes. Bank: After which point you will of course return to Japan. Me: You’ve got it. Bank: Oh I am so sorry for misunderstanding obviously we can do it.