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That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.

It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.

I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.

by csbrooks2 hours ago|

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I'm curious, did you end up going back to your accountantant with questions based on that? How did it go?

Now I want to do the same thing.

by intenex2 hours ago|

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Went phenomenally well for me! They were apologetic, changed everything they got wrong and added some forms they missed and filed and I felt simultaneously way more assured about the process and also way more concerned about the glaring errors they missed and probably did also in the past that I just didn't notice lol (they even spelled my name wrong lmao, used my short nickname and missed my middle initial vs my full name despite having filed my taxes correctly last year with my full proper name)

OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao

by BeetleB2 hours ago|

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I always point people to this:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...

I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.

by monitron4 hours ago|

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That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.

Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

by intenex3 hours ago|

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These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do.

As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.

Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.

So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.