rbultje

That sounds nice in theory, but it seems obvious to me there is a major discrepancy between who is burdened with this responsibility, and who benefits from the result. Given many of these contributors are unpaid volunteers, maybe the infrastructure provider needs to secure FFmpeg in another way, for example by restricting codecs or by running it in a container?

> Lets see AI take the AV2 spec and Dav1d code and try to make a working high performance AV2 decoder.

That sounds like one of these high-risk, high-reward things that are great for people / projects / companies who have nothing to lose, but is not a great baseline strategy for an established market player. AV2 is here with support from aomedia and its members. AV2 will be used, and we need a production-grade decoder regardless of where AI is at, so it makes much more conservative business sense to use established approaches (language: c/asm, devteam: ffmpeg/dav1d) as a starting point. While that's happening, we can dabble in AI and other risky stuff and see if it helps. If so, great, and if not, nothing lost.

dav2d author here - the 5x number is just where we currently are, it's not the theoretical limit. We're hopeful that a significant amount of the increase we observe in dav2d relative to dav1d is in math code, which should be easier to optimize using hand-written assembly or other algorithmic optimizations. If that holds true, the practical slowdown once everything has been optimized may be substantially less, possibly 2x.

I try but it feels like whack-a-mole to me.

> Can't they be deducted the same way as accountants or other functions?

No.

It didn't become law (no 60 votes in senate), after Schumer sat on it for 6 (!) months. And there were earlier attempts to fix this, for example at the end of 2022 using budget/reconciliation - like what the Reps are doing here; but that was blocked by progressives because of "bad optics".

If the issue is with general tax compliance of large multinationals, then congress should have done something about that. This tax rule has hit small software businesses particularly badly, so much so that it'll practically strengthen the quasi-monopoly of established players.

LLCs pay 37%, not 21%. Plus state plus local. This can reach 50% in high-tax areas like CA or NY.

One of the reasons small businesses have been hit so hard with this is because for then (when incorporated as LLCs), their tax rate is 37% + state + local. I live in NYC and my LLC has a combined tax rate of 50%.

The opposite of what you're saying is "perfection is the enemy of progress", so let's move past them. I'm asking for more than "this is not the way". What is the way? How will we do this? This is critical, and we've failed to do anything since early 2022. Democrats are clearly not at all interested. My (Dem) congressman responded directly to my enquiry with "fixing section174 just wouldn't be good optics". I agree republicans can't be taken very seriously either if OB3 is the highest of highs. But we all want this fixed. So: how?

> We'll correct the ills of the 2017 administration in time

How? We have - at times - had democrats in charge since 2017 and they did nothing to resolve this either. We appear to be waiting for flying pigs.

> This isn't changing if it is taxed or not.

This is untrue. The rule is not about taxation, but deductions/expenses. If your expenses cover most revenue, you owe little in taxes. With this rule, a particular type of expense (software engineering salaries) is no longer deductible from revenue to calculate taxable income over which taxes are owed. So you might previously owe no taxes, but now you do. The deduction might carry over to the next few years and eventually (after 6 years) you will reach the same point - assuming your salaries don't go up and your business doesn't grow. The remainder in deductions will be returned after the business stops employing software engineers. I'm not sure why anyone would want the tax code to incentivize a business outcome that all of us would consider failure.

You're confusing corporate vs personal taxes. The salaries businesses pay are meant to be deductible business expenses. The business only pays taxes over the profit after these expenses are deducted from their revenue. The person receiving the salary still owes personal taxes over the income.

We don't talk about this enough. International R&D is not offshoring of call-centers to India. International R&D is the IP for the next generation of global communication standards being owned by US-based or foreign corporations, because international (e.g. Canadian, European) standards experts/developers become un-affordable for US-based corporations and are forced to work for our "adversaries" instead. Crazy.

The way this is "fixed" right now, every five years we need another round of republican government to make things great again. If only enough democrats cared to fix this.