Five years ago, I've used common software to do this. I had to take hundreds of pictures of a scene, getting as many angles and details possible. Then when you pass it to the computer. Stitching it all together took well beyond 24 hours.
Now that I had a 3d model of the scene, I had to spend countless hours cleaning it up to make sure it was useable. Maybe in the last 5 years, things have improved.
But this demo used 4 pictures. And apparently, it rendered the final image in seconds. That's what's new.
If I understand it correctly it didn't make a 3d model, though. So you can't extract and reuse the result. Only move around in it and it creates an image for that viewpoint. But no meshes or textures.
When customers picked up their orders from our warehouse, they signed the A4 sized receipt. We made a copy using a photocopier, and kept our copy in a box. Then the following month, we moved the box into a pallet. When the pallet was full of these boxes, we shrink-wrapped it and fork-lifted it into a shelf in the warehouse. After a few years, they had pallets after pallets of receipts.
Customers often called to dispute charges on their credit card, this was an expensive furniture store warehouse. So we would have to dig up those pallets with the fork lift and look for a single signed copy of the receipt to defend the charge. Sometimes, it took days to find. Other times, we never found the copies.
When I took over the warehouse, I installed photoshop on the main computer. IT gave me hell for it. Then I set up a batch job to scan those receipts into 3 parts: Full page, order number section, signature section. I used a .bat file to launch the OCR app that came with the printer and rename the files to include the order number. Now all I had to do at the end of the day, was stack the hundreds of receipt into the printer and watch the computers do my job.
When a customer complained, all I had to do was enter the order number in a dynamic excel sheet and the copy of the receipt was loaded. It took seconds. Everyone in the warehouse called me lazy. But they were happy to continue using my system. Although, the printer/scanner mysteriously broke after I left and they were forced to go back to the manual way.
And that was my first real world programming experience.
And from MANY years working in various businesses, this kind of massive labor-saving and process-saving activities are always wanted, never encouraged, and penalized by more work and no extra pay/bonuses.
And frankly, I love solving business process issues like this. I think it's challenging, fun, and interesting work. But is it monetarily valued? Nope.
You sell the solution as a Windows app that includes a barcode scanner and a barcode on the receipt. You then have an application interface to an Access database or something.
I like broken systems. Especially those that still manage to generate money. We all want to see clean code, written by sane people. But the reality is that it is rare. And when you meet clean code, there is a rigorous process that makes it nearly impossible to add new code/features.
I worked at such place that boasted security on the outside. From within, it was spit and duct tape. I couldn't believe it was a fortune 10. After couple of weeks working on one of the smaller projects, I created a new branch and called it rewrite.
When I had free time, I would rewrite the entire project from scratch. I really hated all the in line mysql connections in side_bar_bottom_new_v2.php. It took me a month to realize that I couldn't rewrite an application that was built over the course of 10 years, in my spare time. Only when I embraced it and took the time to understand how it was built, was I able to turn it into a secure app (messy, but still secure).
Now when I meet dysfunctional systems, I don't get mad. I challenge myself to figuring out what the heck it is doing.
Ah yes, crude indeed. We used to cut a small piece of payer, around an inch. Then fold it into a little square and place it inside that little empty square space on the front of the cassette tape. That's all it took to subvert it.
By the way this worked just as well for audio cassettes tape.
As sidpatil says, that's a write-protect tab. If you bought blank VHS tapes and recorded something you could rip the tab off to stop you or someone else accidentally overwriting, say, your wedding video. Of course, all retail tapes were tab free.
And you could simply use masking tape to bypass it, because it was only designed to stop unintentional overwriting, not intentional overwriting.
I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
>I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
Now that I think about it, I've never gotten a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video rental that was damaged in this manner. This method of property destruction never even crossed my mind. It seems so obvious given how easy it is to disable write protection. Was I just lucky or were people more considerate back then?
Just to clarify, I meant retail tapes I (read: my parents) owned. I never overwrote rented tapes.
I recall rental shops would have rewind machines, but I don't remember them ever checking the content of the tape.
Maybe people were just considerate. Maybe the threat of having a whopping fine when the the next unhappy renter returned and complained about the tape, causing the shop to check the rental history, dissuaded such behaviour.
Or, maybe people respected the institution. I used to really like video stores as they offered affordable access to entertainment and were just nice places to visit.
An advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains functional.
My brother was the first driver employed in a brand new amazon warehouse. He shook hands with the manager and came home to tell us the good news. He was hired! His start date of the following week was rescheduled many times. In fact, it went from August to November.
The rest was a like landing in an island all by yourself. Nothing works, no one can help you, and you are on your own. Sometimes, he would just sit in the truck for a moment, holding his head together not knowing what to do. That was until the cameras were installed in the truck for them slackers.
The only way he managed to survive there was out the generosity of random old time drivers that he met on the street. They gave him the ropes, shared private WhatsApp group where they coordinate and help each other with tips and tricks.
Here is what you can do. Take an episode from The Simpsons in 2005, then take one that was released this year. Listen.
In the 2005 audio, the silent parts have grains. Both the sound effect and voice are almost at the same level. You don't spend your time constantly lowering and increasing the volume as music, sfx, and voice alternate.
Now in 2021, (or more like 2018 the last time I watched), it almost feels like the voice is on a different track. Unless you wear earphones, you will be smashing the volume button up and down from scene to scene.
With headphones, it sounds disconnected. You can feel the voice actors standing there in that empty soundproof room. The quality of the recording is so flawless that maybe you need studio monitors to hear. The home sound system doesn't cut it anymore.
Anecdata (only because I don't have access to the data anymore). Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe. In fact, when the friction is so low, the customer is likely to start the subscription back.
I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe.
I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud check in the background). Many times you get a response back from the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later.
When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers won't come back.
Speaking to this myself - I was blown away by Masterclass letting me do this, after I forgot it would renew. I responded to their "hey you've been charged" email with something like "I forgot about this and didn't mean to renew". In perhaps ten minutes I had a cancelation notice and refund.
Way more likely to get their stuff again. Bonus points for not sending the bill from some faceless "no reply" address.
For what it’s worth: I’ve been considering trying out Masterclass because their content seem great, but worried that something will come up and I’ll be locked into a yearly contract or something, so I never tried.
I think it really depends on what you want to get out of it. There's content that is just a treat and fun to watch, but the idea of it being a "class" is rather disingenuous. Like, are you really going to become a composer after watching 6 hours of content? Or a rock climber?
But the stuff that is set up where you can have a chance at succeeding by practicing what you are seeing really does work. I was gifted a subscription and because of it watched the Thomas Keller series of cooking. I had never cooked before, but I have tried just about every recipe of the series a few times over, and no joke I've been able to produce truly REALLY fine dining experiences at home. Those lessons, for instance, are super didactic, build cooking up from first principles, show you all the steps, etc. It is fascinating content.
And then, for instance, watching some of the other stuff, like rock climbing, for example, can also just be fun. So, all in all, I think depending on what your profile is and what your expectations of it are it can actually be worth it.
If Masterclass were scummy with their cancellation policy, OP would not be able to see for themselves. A frictionless policy allows people to experiment with services. My wife and I subscribe to one streaming service at a time because of that.
I had a great experience with Audible. I switched from Audible UK to Audible US but forgot to cancel the former. After six months I noticed I had 6 credits I didn't want. I sent one short e-mail explaining what happened and within 15-30 minutes I got a response that said they'll refund everything.
I’m glad you had a good experience, but IMO the way Audible works is a mess of dark patterns to begin with. If you stop paying for one month you loose all your credits, so when I’m not reading as much I end up in a bind where I can’t cancel, but if I don’t cancel I get deeper in a hole.
You can pause a subscription, but only once every couple years and only for 90 days, and the option is hidden.
I will say that maybe they’ve updated things, because I went to cancel and it said “you have x amount of credits, would you like to pause for y time in order to keep them”. In no way was it hidden. I hate the credit system and the fact that they go away, but pausing was encouraged
Once I unsubscribed from Audible I started receiving email every 1-2 weeks with 60-70% discounts for couple of months. So I’ve been subscribing/unsubscribing to keep getting nice discount
A “you’re about to be charged” email would be friendlier and give the customer a feeling of more control. That’s what we do. (We of course will also refund the charge if you email us after it happens.)
I love that idea. Can you imagine we had a standard around this? For example: Monthly payments - notification could go out >24 hours before the transaction will occur.
There is this common perception of companies as if they are entirely rational organizations, and every policy that we don’t like exists because it is profitable and benefits the company at the expense of the customer. But sometimes bad policies are just bad, they benefit no one, and they exist for dumb reasons. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies.
An opposite statement can be said with the same amount of authority though: There is a common perception that companies only create policies we don't like through accidents and unforeseeable outcomes, not by specifically crafting policies to benefit the company. But sometimes bad policies are malicious and designed to maximize profits, even at the expense of long-term profits and customer retention. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies.
As someone that has worked (briefly) for a company that operated in this fashion (and being a partial owner of one that the CEO tried to shift to this model...we got the board together and fired him), it is not an accidentally bad policy. It is actively discussed as a way to squeeze out an extra pay cycle (and often more) of payments. In recorded meetings or audited channels (such as email) or even PR releases, you are guided to discuss it as a "personal touch with the customer" and to help "lost customers" resolve the issues rather than cancel. You even try to convince your employees/engineers that is the reason. But when it is face-to-face conversations, the discussions are around the dollars and squeezing out as many pay cycles as you can. I know I was being a bit cheeky with my first paragraph, but this is definitely not one of those "whoops, we didn't think this through" kind of policies. If it were, the policy would have changed without the FTC or laws being needed.
2. This makes us more money in the end, that's why it's so pervasive.
3. It's difficult to correlate "making more money in the end" with our cancellation policy, so we make a measurement or otherwise tell ourselves a story consistent with (2), even though (2)'s conclusion doesn't truly follow.
This reminds me of topics in government policy, psychology, etc.
Also, a single rule about what monetizes best may not apply to all companies (pissing off high dollar investment clients over something like that?), so they may mostly all be optimizing it even if there are different choices.
You’ve only really stated though that these policies are deliberate, which I think few people would have thought otherwise, not that they’re necessarily the best policies there can be. The question is if they’re actually better for the bottom line than the alternative (given the timeframe that the people who make and influence these decisions care about). Is ”squeezing out an extra pay cycle” or two possible missing the forest for the trees, if customers who were happy with the cancellation process are more likely to return, proselytize for you and so on? Not saying that’s the case, very open to being influenced either way if anyone has data to share.
OK, fair enough. I still read it in the context of the thread's original thesis, that frictionless cancellations increase customer satisfaction, and thus retention and profit in the long run. And I still don't see the comment they directly responded to saying that the policies aren't deliberate, only that they "exist for dumb reasons" and "benefit no one", which could still arguably be true if the alternative is both more profitable and serves people better.
But I hear you - taken more in isolation, and with better faith on my part, the comment makes sense. I'm still curious about actual data though.
I think “companies” have run out of the “benefit of the doubt” as far as I’m concerned. Using the web has become a pain not because companies don’t care about UX, but because they think popup X will increase profits — and it often does.
Certainly there’s a good amount of ignorance in every company, but many choices are purposeful.
I think they often benefit one specific person in the company, who happens to be the decision maker, and don't hurt the overall company obviously enough that anyone stops them.
The third option of hurts the customer and company is also extremely frequent. This can be as low level as developers choosing tools to pad their resume, systematic based on internal metrics, or even very high level internal politics based on which policy ends up making someone or some group look good.
One option supports customers who don't need your service/product _right now_ and the other doesn't.
It's incredibly naive to think that customers are one-and-done for any service. Value is related to context, they may move out of it and back in and your service will make sense again (unless you add costs through shitty unsub. friction that is...)
It's also the difference between an endorsement and a warning to potential referrals. You're not just burning off this one customer, you're hurting your chances with everyone they know.
I always treat my customers/clients the way I would want to be treated, and it always seems to work out for the best. I've also given refunds to some customers without them asking for it first because I value their satisfaction more than I value a few dollars. There's no way to know for sure, but I suspect treating customers like this (like humans) increases retention and well-being, and not only for them, but for me (and my company) as well. It's called the golden rule for a reason. :)
I had a problem with a large appliance. Guy came and looked at it and recommended a course of action that was free and I took it. The problem came back after a month. When he found out his advice didn’t hold, he came immediately to perform a repair because, as he put it, he didn’t want his reputation to be damaged in my eyes.
He offered what he thought was best. When that wasn’t it, he wasted no time getting to the next step. I tipped him more than I otherwise would because his concern over getting it right seemed genuine, and I care more about that than I do getting it right the first time without really caring one way or the other.
> Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe.
I mean, that's pretty tautological: unsatisfied customers who become not-customers, aren't part of your metric any more! The lower the barrier-to-exit is for your customers, the more survivorship bias there will be in any customer-satisfaction metrics you're trying to track.
When there's zero friction to quitting (incl. a high availability of alternatives to switch to), any time someone doesn't like your company, they'll just churn, and you'll never hear about it. So you'll think everything is great—despite the churn, customer numbers are growing, and all your non-churning customers love you!—even while there's this huge shadow-population of customers who resent your service for one reason or another, but who took that resentment right out the door with them, never bringing it to you to address.
(Not saying this is a bad way to do things, precisely; just that you have to be aware that it's the siutation you've put yourself in, especially when interpreting customer-success metrics.)
An interesting corollary to that effect, though, is that organizations that are effectively impossible to leave (e.g. utilities) will get a "true measure" of satisfaction, with no survivorship bias. If there's "marketing science" to be done on customer satisfaction, utilities are probably a great "spherical cow" simplified environment to study it in.
That's incorrect. A customer who unsubscribes is still a customer and is counted towards CSAT scores. Note, that for many services you can make purchases without being a subscriber.
Also, modern helpdesks are a lot like Mailchimp. As in they handle customer service from many different companies and can track customers across services and score them.
I wish more companies would get this. I don't continuously subscribe to Netflix or NowTV but knowing that I can unsubscribe with a couple of click is one of the reasons I'm happy to sign up from.ti!e to.time for something specific. If I feel li!e signing up is a.risk, I do t do it.
A good friend of mine has been working on low resources NLP for a couple years now. A few months ago, he joined Mila Quebec AI Institute under Yoshua Bengio. Where it is hard to find transcribed audio, regular audio is just as hard to come by... Until you start mining all those forwarded audios on WhatsApp.
I used to get mad every time my mom would forward a 30 minutes audio that she knows I would delete before opening. And I used to delete them all. Now, I download the audio. Label the language it is in, and add it to my friends shared training data folder.
The governor's stance is just posture. "We take these matters seriously".
It reminds me of that time, a few years after I was out of college and into a job. My professor contacted me to demo my class project to her students. To give them an idea of what they can do with web development. Her assistant told me that they couldn't figure out how to run it.
Of course, I took a day off from work, opened back up my school project, fixed the annoying bug. The web page required IIS to run so I could make Ajax requests. I decided to hardcode the data in json instead. So I went to school to present my project.
The professor was double clicking the file and it wasn't displaying properly. I inserted my USB stick, and ran it from there instead. The coral reef restaurant website appeared on the big screen. I explained that I had to make some changes so it would work locally. Before, I was using a web server.
"Web server?" she shouted. "You are not allowed to use a web server. So you guys cheated!"
At first, I thought she was just kidding. I explained that Chapter 12 specifically asks to boot up IIS in order to make use of Ajax. During my time, the rest of the class stopped at chapter 10. I completed the entire book because I was just in love with learning JavaScript. So unless you get to chapter 12, you don't learn about Ajax.
"I'll have to report you. They board might revoke your grade. Not just you but all your group."
You can only imagine how pale I became. But I understood what was happening. She had tried to run the project multiple times and failed. She couldn't debug it or figure out the issue. To save face in front of the class, she accused me of having cheated. This is the exact thing the Missourians officials are doing.
No, at the end of the day my grades were not revokes. Plus I had dropped out of college and was working in the field for a few couple years already. But it goes to show you the length people would go just to save face.
Now that I had a 3d model of the scene, I had to spend countless hours cleaning it up to make sure it was useable. Maybe in the last 5 years, things have improved.
But this demo used 4 pictures. And apparently, it rendered the final image in seconds. That's what's new.