flatbield

The DGI Mini 3 Pro. Looks pretty cool. For that. Frankly you could just buy a separate cheap phone or tablet to use with just that or use an old one you already have. When you buy something to replace it later you could also consider openness and compatibility too.

Also decide what apps that you must have. If you can use the browser version or the progessive webapp version which is just the browser version installed that is probably better. Or if you do not need it on your phone use the browser version on you laptop.

In the end though you will have some of these platforms for network reasons. Mostly things like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Google is not one of them though except for android itself. You also do not have to spend a lot of time contributing to these platforms. Use them when you need to nothing more.

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Well that is the point isn’t it. Companies are not very reliable. The only thing they can be relied on to do is whatever butters their bread and that can change at any time. There is also a PR component and a fact component and they do not always agree.

Proton is really no different. I seem to remember they changed what they said on their website after outing that activist. Presumably to be a little less misleading. Again, I am impressed with Proton but not infinitely impressed.

Security audits do not guarantee security. They are just the best we have. Just as code reviews do not guarantee good and trustworthy code. In the end, we do not know what we do not know. In the end, every system has its weaknesses.

Sure I believe Proton is a reasonable supplier. Even with that Proton for example is on the record of giving out user info to governments. I am sure they did not meet the expectations of that activist.

All security is porous. So there is every reason to believe that Proton or any other org will have a major breach at some point.

Edit: Just think of the LastPass debacle.

I think it depends on how good your Numpy build is. Lot of Numpys are not that well built so Numba seems to help there too in that case.

For a python library to be fast it needs to be compiled for your specific hardware, vectorized, with fast math, and auto parallel. Most are probably not unless you build them youself.

Do this mean that we no longer have to give our connections our phone number? Never liked the phone number requirement.

People use Python a lot as a Matlab, Excel/VBA, or R alternative. That was my use for many years. Some of these are compute focused problems and if the dataset is large enough and the computations complex enough then speed can be an issue.

As far as loading packages and printing. Who cares. These are not computationally intensive and are typically IO bound.

Yes, I hate indentation as structure but I hate tracking brackets even more.

Same for me. I have used Python for most things since the late 1990s. Love Python. Have always hated the poor performance… but in my case mostly it was good enough. When it was not good enough, I wrote C code.

Python is good for problems where time to code is the limiting factor. It sucks for compute bound problems where time to execute is the limiting factor. Most problems in my world are time to code limited but some are not.

Python compute performance has always sucked.

Just remember that an optimized C program will run about 100x faster then a similar Python program in a compute bound problem. So yes Python is slow but often good enough.

Reason you do not need Typescript for Python is that it is a real language. JavaScript was a crap extension language that people have been trying to get around forever with preprocessors…

As far as needing types… One of the big advantages of Python is not needing types. I have used Python for 25 years and never used types or missed them.

What I do occasionally miss is speed. That is a combination of lack of typing and crap implementations and there are various ways around it.

Security is always porous. The article really had no suggestions. They say 2FA but account recovery is often a combination of access to your email account or questions. None of this stuff is particularly secure.

So yes security is an advanced feature usually not provided and normal users do not even try at being secure nor do most systems insist on it.

Edit: Some sites are doing away with passwords and just sending and email with a link to login. Totally not secure but account recovery has long used the same method so it may not be actually reducing security much since there never was much security.

One way to find providers is to go to your states tax site and see who supports your state. This list is often a lot shorter list. The ones I would look at in general sorted by decreasing popularity of their web site last year:

• TurboTax. 52%.
• H&R Block. 31%.
• FreeTaxUSA. 8%.
• TaxAct. 5%.
• TaxSlayer. 2.4%.
• OLT.com. 0.58%.
• 1040.com. 0.26%.

The % numbers are really just relative website popularity of the options I listed at a point in time. As I said before, I favor FreeTaxUSA. Interesting they can import from TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxAct, TaxSlayer, CashApp, and OLT so they must consider those their major competitors. Also note that I believe the same company that is behind FreeTaxUSA also markets under TaxHawk and Express1040.com.

TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer tend to be the high end products in decreasing popularity and price. The first three tend to be somewhat similar pricing, and TaxSlayer a bit cheaper. FreeTaxUSA, OLT, and 1040.com tend to be the lower end offerings again in order of decreasing web site popularity though not always decreasing price. FreeTaxUSA appears to be the low end market leader.

I have not used all of these but I have used FreeTaxUSA and TaxAct. Both were fine. We finally ditched TaxAct a few years ago due to rising prices and their stupid tiered pricing plans. FreeTaxUSA is just so much simpler then many of the other providers because it comes without most the marketing BS and it has a good price/value ratio.

Others, feel free to comment and make any corrections to what I have said.

Like others said FreeTaxUSA. We use it and like it.

Just know one downside is that it does not do direct imports from financial firms or other data sources. You have to enter the data. Otherwise for individual taxes, it is pretty complete. It also does not do Form 1041 returns which is for Trusts and Estates as separate entities, that is under their own EINs. Most people do not need that.

Edit: Looks like this year a few imports have been added. One seems to be W-2 from PDF. The other is last year returns from some common other tax return providers. Not tried any of these. They already imported their own last year data.

Not saying I like it. I actually have email running in my VPS. Pain to setup but did not have delivery problems but I only use it in limited ways.

Reason I did not switch to this for general use is mail is too core and it needs to be something my wife can maintain if needed. Plus I would have had to have several VPSes in multiple data centers to guarantee 100% uptime and segment security. Plus auditing, patching, and upgrade work load.

For now we use the mail accounts provided by my small ISP but at some point we will probably move to hosted domain mail. Maybe Fastmail or something similar as the provider.

My point is that it is not correct that only gmail works.

Self hosting is a different consideration. It is a lot of work and fairly costly to get correctly setup and a real pain to maintain. There is very little reason to do it too as there are many providers that can host your domain mail. Proton Mail and Fastmail are two such examples.

Over blown. I have never used Goggle or Microsoft mail and my email works just fine.

Yes Numba is the way. Well that or fully optimized, vectorized, and parallelized C.