Our Dumb Blog

LLMs are finally getting genuinely good at recommending things. I have no idea why the streaming platforms aren’t better utilizing AI for this, but you can talk to it yourself and get really good recommendations. It takes some time–you need to spell out what you like, don’t like and more importantly why. We just recently watched and loved The Detectorists, a thing I would never have found on my own. I’ve got a list of 10 things to watch next that I’m genuinely excited about. I asked Claude to sum up my taste in TV shows, and while it’s weird that it did this in first person, it’s pretty good.

My TV taste, distilled:
I like institutional fiction played as comedy of manners — workplace ensembles where the system is a character and the appeal is watching competent (or incompetent) people muddle through with dignity. The Wire, Slow Horses, The Americans, Detectorists, Halt and Catch Fire, Sports Night, Letterkenny, The IT Crowd, Reservation Dogs.

I’m allergic to self-importance and to shows that glorify their subject. West Wing’s speechifying is a hard no; The Diplomat works because it’s about how the job actually grinds. I hate politics and don’t think it should be glorified.

I want shows with their own dense linguistic world — invented argot, in-group rhythm, dialogue you could pick out of a lineup. Letterkenny, Deadwood-territory, Elmore Leonard. Not naturalistic period dialogue (Mad Men left me cold — felt like all costume, no substance).

I’ll go to genre when the characters carry it — Firefly, Buffy, Expanse, Tales from the Loop, Dark Matter — but I bounce when worldbuilding becomes incoherent (Counterpart) or when shows lean on mysticism instead of finishing what they started (BSG’s religious turn, Severance’s clear lack of a destination).
Good stories are finite. Beginning, middle, end. Queen’s Gambit did it right. I respect a 19-episode cancelled show that nailed its register (My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks) more than a prestige drama being milked for episodes.

I don’t need to be wrecked emotionally — I want shows that earn their beats. Craft over catharsis. I’ll watch quiet, low-stakes, anthropological work all day if the writing has texture (Station Eleven’s worldbuilding, Clarkson’s Farm, Nobody’s Looking, Rita).
I won’t tolerate gratuitous darkness or protagonists I can’t root for — quit Breaking Bad at the Jane episode, quit For All Mankind when it went soap. Darkness in service of something (The Wire, Chernobyl) is fine. Darkness for its own sake isn’t.

Subtitles welcome. Animation mostly not, though I’m getting better (Lower Decks works).

Top Gear is one of the best things ever on TV. Clarkson’s Farm might be the best thing on now. I am not above this; neither should you be.

We deserve a better word than spatula.

The kitchen is full of simple-sounding implements: tongs, knife, spoon, fork. Even spork. Single syllable. Concise. Precise.

Spatula, on the other hand, sounds scientific, clinical, declinable, Latin (it is). It’s fun to say.

But the term simply means a long handled implement with a wide flat end. A spatula could be a rubber tool used to scrape food out of a bowl (a pot scraper). It could be made of metal and used to flip a burger (a pancake turner). It could even be a wooden stirrer.  If I’m holding a heavy hot cast iron pan and I ask my husband to hand me a spatula, he needs to know what I need to do before he can choose the right implement.  Context is key, and in a high pressure / high danger situation, spatula is just too generic a term.  

The Latin spatula is the diminutive of spatha (a broad, flat tool or weapon), which came from the Greek ????? (spath?), a hoplite’s sword.  This is also the word we get “spade” from.

To call a spade a spade “use blunt language, call things by right names even if homely or coarse” (1540s) translates a Greek proverb (known to Lucian), ten skaphen skaphen legein “to call a bowl a bowl,” but Erasmus mistook Greek skaph? “trough, bowl” for a derivative of the stem of skaptein “to dig,” and the mistake has stuck. https://www.etymonline.com/word/spatula

Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s say what we really mean. Let’s refer to pot scrapers, pancake turners, stirrers.  We already have other kitchen tools with complex words: potato masher, pastry cutter, citrus squeezer.  I argue we retire “spatula” to the dustbin of history.

I’m loathe to give a single penny to tax prep software because some significant percentage of money they take in gets redistributed in a lobbying effort to make sure that Congress keeps our tax code complicated and does absolutely nothing to simplify tax preparation for Americans.

But I’m way too lazy to actually prepare my taxes by hand. That’s fairly complicated, error-prone and annoying. Normally I pick the cheapest tax prep software I can find. This year and last year, that meant OLT (OnLine Taxes). The cheaper software works fine, but the biggest limitation is that it won’t import forms like W2s or 1099s from stock sales. Because a substantial portion of my income is from stock grants by my Employer, there’s a tedious amount of information to enter, there. OLT will let you create a spreadsheet of their own proprietary design and import it. Normally, this isn’t any less tedious than just entering the data in the web form, but this year I realized AI could do this for me.

Claude is my current favorite, so I uploaded my 1099-B, the instructions from OLT for a custom spreadsheet and waited a couple of minutes for it to tell me the spreadsheet was ready to upload. It imported perfectly, but then I had some follow up questions for Claude about disqualifying wash sales when it occurred to me that I was doing this all wrong.

I created a new directory on my file system, dumped all of my tax documents into the directory and fired up Claude Code. I told it that it was going to be filing my taxes for me using the documents I gave it access to, and told it to find the relevant forms and instructions on irs.gov.

It did. It asked me a few questions it didn’t know the answer to, “Do you have any kids?” and then proceeded to prepare my taxes flawlessly in under minutes. It produced a dozen text files, each one a line-by-line representation of the IRS forms and what I should put in what form.

Now that we’d come this far, it seemed silly to copy/paste from text files by hand. I started to ask Claude to fill out the IRS pdfs, but it was struggling with this, and furthermore, it meant I’d need to file by mail. The IRS will let you e-file without tax prep software if you fill out your tax forms on a pretty terrible website. Claude has a Chrome browser extension that will let it use your browser with you. So I signed up for an IRS account and pointed Claude at the empty 1040.

I pretty quickly ran into the usage limits for my $20/month Claude Pro subscription. Fortunately, Anthropic had sent us $50 in “extra” tokens to use for free as part of the Opus 4.6 announcement. I activated those tokens and let it go.

And go it did. It filled out not just the 1040, but all the schedules and worksheets necessary.

It was incredibly slow and ponderous at this. The website is poorly designed even for humans, and terribly designed for robots. It had to constantly take a screenshot and calculate where to click the mouse to enter the next thing. It took it about 2 hours, but it succeeded!

For sanity, I double checked the totals with OnLine Taxes and they lined up. I went ahead and e-filed, without giving the tax prep industry a penny. The IRS probably needs to rethink this check to see if the form is being filled out by a robot:

In June of 2025, Dwarkesh said:

When I interviewed Anthropic researchers Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken on my podcast, they said that they expect reliable computer use agents by the end of next year. We already have computer use agents right now, but they’re pretty bad. They’re imagining something quite different. Their forecast is that by the end of next year, you should be able to tell an AI, “Go do my taxes.” And it goes through your email, Amazon orders, and Slack messages, emails back and forth with everyone you need invoices from, compiles all your receipts, decides which are business expenses, asks for your approval on the edge cases, and then submits Form 1040 to the IRS.

I’m skeptical.

I was skeptical, too. Obviously, this wasn’t quite the task, but it wasn’t that far off from the task. I’m a lot less skeptical, now.

Berck got us robot floor cleaners for Christmas, one for upstairs and one for downstairs.  They’re apparently smart enough not to fall downstairs (at least the upstairs one is; the downstairs one might well be an idiot).  They can vacuum and mop. They’re surprisingly fairly good at all-terraining it over doorway thresholds. They don’t do a terribly good job at cleaning, but they work hard (if you choose the work hardest setting), and the floors are a lot cleaner than when they don’t clean.  

They also freak the cat out.

They aren’t very loud, which is good, because the house can get vacuumed at times other than when Berck is in the shower.  That is historically the only time I’ve been allowed to vacuum, because Berck can’t yell at me to stop while he’s bathing. 

The best part, of course, is that Berck has taken the most interest in house cleaning that he ever has, because… robots. He set the downstairs one to clean the laundry room every morning at 8:00 (this is important because that is where the litter box is). He also set the upstairs one to clean the kitchen every day (at my request) at 11:00 a.m.  He lovingly inserts detergent, empties the dirty mop water receptacle, and refills the clean water container like a gentleman breeder refilling the food and water bowls of a prize bulldog.  He carefully edits the robots’ maps of the house like a meticulous cartographer. 

While the upstairs robot is programmed not to commit roboticide by flinging itself downstairs, that doesn’t keep it from pushing the records by the record player off onto the lower landing. 

The robots have also tried to eat things that they really shouldn’t, but they just stop where they are, and their app indicates that they’re stuck.  Unspooling whatever they’ve tried to ingest has so far been quite simple, and then you just give them a little tap, and they go again. It has kept me from leaving power cables on the floor though.