I use Free File Fillable Forms to prepare my taxes. It can be a bit tricky to make sure all the correct forms are completed and the calculations are correct, so that is the exact approach I take. It's a pain in the butt to essentially do my taxes twice, but I'm willing to go through that if it means I'm not giving money to the tax prep industry.
I'm in the same boat as OP. I've used keybr and https://monkeytype.com/, and while doing the exercises, I get pretty close to the speed and accuracy I had using a standard keyboard and qwerty, but I get much worse on both fronts when typing in the real world.
Have you added back in capitals/punctuation symbols? keybr defaults to only lower case words, but there are some options worth enabling to bring speed up:
From the preferences:
- Unlock a next key only when the previous keys are also above the target speed. (This will force you to practice keys that are problematic in context, it's frustrating but very helpful for reinforcement learning. For example, I struggle with B, C, V on my split because I don't use the “correct” fingers for those keys on a standard keyboard.)
- Add capital letters
- Add punctuation characters
- Add words to lessons (move it to the max)
Regarding getting much worse in the real world; IMO this isn't discussed enough. When you're relearning muscle memory, it's a very different beast to copy what you see (focused only on where your fingers are) as opposed to focusing on your thought and your fingers just “go there”. I, too, have found my speed plummet at first; at some point I decided to just go cold turkey and suffer being rather slow – trading it for eventual mastery.
In my case, because I was such a phenomenally sloppy typist, sometimes what felt slow was likely just as quick as a result of making fewer mistakes on the new split layout where my behaviour was forced to be better.
Yep, I've adjusted the settings, and that has definitely helped. When it comes to real world typing, it feels like I'm using a ridiculous amount of brain power to get the word out of my head and onto the keys.
Well, I don't see these sites as a complete solution. They're a way to get you from zero to "I can actually manage to write something, even if it's a bit awkward and slow". Once you cross that threshold, you make the switch and you learn by doing until you improve to an acceptable level.
I just did this last week, mostly using Claude Code. I live close to a major airport and wanted to be alerted when interesting planes are flying overhead. The PWA Claude Code spit out is exactly what I was hoping for, and adding an AR overlay was really trivial.
It's amazing and in some ways frightening that I had an interesting problem, and within a couple hours I had a fully functional app that completely solved it.
Can you cite a source for this? There's no question that they're vastly more complex, but I would think that modern car manufacturing is far more exacting (and efficient) than in the past.
If you're saying that older cars are more repairable, I'm happy to agree with you, even without a source to back up that claim.
An easily visible one is air intakes. Many manufacturers have shifted to plastic. Peteo-engineering has advanced a lot, but they will still get brittle and break.
Interior wise, you can look at things like fabric durability-- lower deniers can be cheaper, but will wear sooner. Springs/foam in seats are another example, but this will vary across manufacturers, models and trims.
This isn't exclusive to financial engineering manufacturers like Stellantis or Nissan, either. Toyota has had issues with simple things like rust proofing (whether intentional or not) on 1st generation Tacomas leading to massive recalls and things like plastic timing guides prone to wearing out. Ford with the wet clutches having belts submersed in oil.
German cars needing body off access for rear timing chain maintenance at 80k miles. Water cooled alternators (really, VW?). All types of "why?" if you follow cars once they are 3+ years old.
It seems like there are a lot of regressions that probably result from cost cutting, while others may exist to simply drive service revenue.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency assumes the typical car is driven 15,000 miles (24,000 km) per year. According to the New York Times, in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km). Due in part to manufacturing improvements, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, in 2012 the typical car was estimated to last for 200,000 miles (320,000 km) with the average car in 2024 lasting 160,545 miles according to the website Junk Car Reaper.
I think you're talking about apples and oranges, as parent appeared to be cataloguing recent design defects. Which are pretty common too.
That'll influence the average reliability minimally, unless you were unlucky enough to buy one of those models.
Personally, why I'd rather get something at 120k mileage w/ 250k+ max examples on the road by that calendar date. You'll know whether they designed a lemon.
Add: undersized Tacoma rear leaf springs, multiple manufacturers' head gaskets, a few early aluminum engines (? from memory)
There are many other considerations, too. Years ago I scraped Craigslist and Autotrader, grouping cars by generation/make/model/drivetrain to be able to predict longevity based on quantity for sale versus original sales figures. If a model sold 100k per year for 10 years and only 3 were for sale in year 13, that isn't a great sign. Cheap cars will tend to have cheap owners who are more likely to skimp on maintenance, typically leading to more accrued issues and a shorter lifespan for the vehicle. Some cars are just poorly engineered, and the markets are relatively efficient in pricing resale value. The definition of "high mileage" is going to vary by who you ask. Domestics 150k, German 80k, Japanese 200k, Korean 100k. These are subjective averages (some cars like Theta engines, Darts, even late model GM 6.2s have engine failures <40k), based on when they start disappearing due to repairs being more than the vehicle is worth, but based on what I saw then and kind of observe still.
Leaning on those prior mentioned product mixes, keep in mind that Japanese manufacturers weren't in the American market 60 years ago, so market mix would be wildly different. (Multiple 400k+ mi Toyotas in my family, along with 60 year old GMs, but with aftermarket or rebuilt engines.) The cost of vehicles (and repairs) relative to prevailing wages will impact the repair vs replace balance. Trade publications like Cox/NADA/Adesa/etc. are always cited by financial blogs when mentioning consumer spending/state of economy by average age of cars on the road. Why cars get junked or totaled has shifted drastically, too. Steel bumpers were easy to replace, modern bumper covers with styrofoam backing and aluminum crumple zones, not so much. Tolerances is a vague term in that veiled PR piece on that wiki article. Machining has improved. Tech like direct injection and improved lubrication (synthetics) have done much more in terms of efficiency and longevity. In a lot of cases, manufacturers try to get more and more horsepower from the same displacement by pushing tighter engine tolerances (crank/main bearings, pistons/rings, valvetrain) and things like higher compression ratios and revs, leading to more heat and earlier failure. So while you have better initial engineering, you are closer to the point of failure. For another example, interference engines will grenade themselves if you ignore timing belt maintenance, but in the meantime, you get more horsepower by getting more air into the cylinders.
A v6 Camry or Accord is going to be have more hp, be faster,more reliable at same age, be quieter and get 3x the mpg than nearly any muscle car of the past.
Unfortunately it seems that many Americans prefer giant vehicles that place more emphasis on their size (and status) than materially important factors like reliability engineering or fuel economy.
Obviously these are ancedotal examples, they can be confirmed by wasting hours reading about cars and watching mechanic review videos from people who work on them daily (I am partial to the CarCareNut on YT).
Efficient manufacturing means exactly building stuff as cheaply as you can get away with.
There's a reason why roman architecture is still standing: it is massively overbuilt, the very opposite of efficient (they also used to make the architect stand under his own arches as they removed the temporary support, that could have contributed to the overbuilding).
Is it? Every city in Roman empire had temples and forum. Where are they still standing? Maybe half a dozen survived, like pantheon in Rome or temple in Nimes, but it's extremely rare. Maybe they weren't overbuilt at all?
It seems like you both are looking at different definitions of built well. One pertaining to how well the car will perform over its lifetime. The other describing the build process. Not necessarily exclusionary, but different.
I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine, playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every iteration of that request I could think of and I was never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and other times it would say it was playing, but it would never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or YT Music.
I love Shortcat but it's too slow to be usable on my i5-based MacBook Pro. I have been using Wooshy instead, but I'll be checking out mouseless after seeing it mentioned here.
Strange, I use it on the same setup and have no issues. I imagine you already know that the delay of the overlays can be reduced and eliminated in the settings. I recently nuked and paved that machine, though, and everything feels like it's running faster than before.
I'm not familiar with Wooshy, so I'll have to check that out. Shortcat doesn't receive updates and for years there has been an indication that it would move from beta to licensed software (which I would happily pay for!), so I live in constant fear that it's on the road to abandonware.
Good to know Shortcat is capable of working well on my laptop! I'll have to mess around with it. I think I have tinkered with the delay, so thanks for the tip on that. Wooshy is alright, but I think I prefer the hint-based approach to selecting a target.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZuJivIwV8o
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