Recently cancelled something early so I won’t forget, they didn’t send my shipment even though I paid for it. They said I cancelled, tried to work with support but given after a point.
I didn’t, the thing with chargeback they don't do it after one month. At least that’s AMEX. I’m sure there is a fight to make and get it back, but I’d rather work and make money instead of fighting to stupid people and system.
Maybe worth looking into other providers. I've never had issues disputing charges. Granted I dispute maybe 1% of the transactions I make, because I only do it if I legit got scammed. I think paying for a month and not getting a month is a scam.
This is another problem with charge back, EBay is screwing you? Do you want to be black listed from eBay all of your life or lose that $100? Can you dare to chargeback Apple or Google?
The one time I thought it would not work it did. Home depot rental generator that failed to run under load; store manager refused to test the unit under load as it was against store policy. Refused refund and instead gave me a $50 off coupon. I then called Chase, explained the situation and charges reversed on the spot. I took the coupon and bought a nice corded Milwaukee sawzall.
Hertz tried something similar when I was a new immigrant (it was weird and seemed hyper-scammy anyway). Pre-paid for a rental to the airport, show up to get the vehicle. "System says we need to do a secondary ID verification, enter your SSN into the pinpad in front of you"... "System says there's an issue validating your SSN against your DOB" (no shit, because I'm an immigrant whose SSN wasn't issued til I was 28 years old).
Fine, already pulling up a map to Enterprise, "just give me a refund".
"Sorry sir, prepaid rentals are non-refundable".
So you take my money, refuse to give me a car, and want to keep my money? No. Let's talk about chargebacks.
Also a common practice for free trials. Adobe does that if I'm not mistaken.
Love seeing companies worth tens or hundreds of billions acting like they couldn't spare a cent from underhanded shit like that. Scrooge McDuck type of behavior, except he also had some redeeming qualities.
With free trials, I can understand revoking the benefits once the subscription has been canceled. While I can understand the consumer's perspective of not wanting to be billed for future months (say if they forgot to cancel), free trials are intended to attract future customers. If a person signals that they are not going to be a future customer, why should the business offer the free service?
Are they signaling that they're not going to be a future customer? Or are they just signaling that they want to take positive action if they make the decision to subscribe?
And what about signaling in the other direction? Canceling the trial immediately signals that they have no confidence in the product itself to sell you on it, that the company itself believes that if you use their product for another few days, you still won't want to give them any money for it. If the company has so little confidence in their own product then why would I pay for it?
Sorry, but they set their signaling mechanisms so that that signal is worthless. How many people who don't cancel want to signal they are going to be a future customer, as opposed to it being an accident? How many people who do cancel do it to signal they don't want to be a customer, and not because they don't want to be automatically billed? I believe the answer for both is "not many".
I think the companies do it because it benefits them, and because they can.
Apple TV free trials due to new hardware (e.g. new iPhone) is like this too, I just set a reminder on my phone and cancel it one day before they’ll start billing me. The UI for cancelling is also painless.
Somewhat tangential, but I am reminded of a quote about an adjacent problem with analogous flavor from the pen of the venerable G. K. Chesterton...
'It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.'
A nice summary, he would get quite a shock from seeing how advertisement business ended up. I wonder what addendum would he have to the oft-repeated claims of "we're genuinely helping people meet their needs", too.
Reminds me of an anecdote from my middle class town:
Local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf message on their business Facebook:
"It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it."
I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit.
Doubly galling was the fact that there was generally "his n hers" G Wagons parked out front of their business. Doing better than 95% of the community and still pissed that the community wasn't giving them more.
When I actually use a service, it's more work to resubscribe. But money is also tight enough for me that I'm on top of my subscriptions and don't have any I don't need (and when I'm unsure, I set reminders to cancel)
But the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't.
If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than the old cable model. If you're not looking, they can really bleed you out and be much more expensive than the old model.
You can also pay ~$20/month for an online locker that'll pull the torrent for you and serve to your devices, if that's within your philosophical tolerances. People need to get paid, but I do not much care of the enterprise value of media conglomerates and the resulting enshittification. I don't mind paying for Nebula.tv (~$36/year) and PBS Passport (~$60/year), for example, to directly support those media creators, as well as sending creators fiat directly or via Patreon (Coffeezilla and Peter Santenello, for example).
I have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for considering whether or not you need something like Disney+ continuously or if you can rotate between it and other services.
I canceled a Disney Plus subscription recently (after ordering it largely to watch a specific show), because when I purchased their "ad-free" tier, I found that after paying they just replace their generic ads with their own in-house ads, which they then pretend are different from ads because they're "trailers".
Yet another example of a media company making the paid service a worse viewing experience. (For me, the money isn't the point. My time is limited. I'd happily pay more for the handful of things I have both time and desire to watch. But charging me extra for no ads, and then shoving stuff in my brain anyway, is simultaneously both petty and beyond the pale.)
I saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.
> Basically, why try to make Go more like Rust when Rust is right there?
The avg developer moves a lot faster in a GC language. I recently tried making a chatbot in both Rust and Python, and even with some experience in Rust I was much faster in Python.
No doubt a chatbot would be built faster if using a less strict language. It wasn't until I started working on larger Python codebases (written by good programmers) that I went "oh no, now I see how this is not an appropriate language".
Similar to how even smaller problems are better suited for just writing a bash script.
When you can have the whole program basically in your head, you don't need the guardrails that prevent problems. Similar to how it's easy to keep track of object ownership with pointers in a small and simple C program. There's no fixed size after which you can no longer say "there are no dangling pointers in this C program". (but it's probably smaller than the size where Python becomes a problem)
My experience writing TUI in Go and Rust has been much better in Rust. Though to be fair, the Go TUI libraries may have improved a lot by now, since my Go TUI experience is older than me playing with Rust's ratatui.
I've also found that traversing a third-party codebase in Python is extremely frustrating and requires lots of manual work (with PyCharm) whereas with Rust, it's just 'Go to definition/implementation' every time from the IDE (RustRover). The strong typing is a huge plus when trying to understand code you didn't write (and I'm not talking LLM-generated).
Only in the old "move fast and break things" sense. RAII augmented with modern borrow checking is not really any syntactically heavier than GC, and the underlying semantics of memory allocations and lifecycles is something that you need to be aware of for good design. There are some exceptions (problems that must be modeled with general reference graphs, where the "lifecycle" becomes indeterminate and GC is thus essential) but they'll be quite clear anyway.
> Only in the old "move fast and break things" sense
No, definitely not only in that sense. GC is a boon to productivity no matter how you slice it, for projects of all sizes.
I think the idea that this is not the case, perhaps stems from the fact that Rust specifically has a better type system than Java specifically, so that becomes the default comparison. But not every GC language is Java. They don't all have lax type systems where you have to tiptoe around nulls. Many are quite strict and are definitely not "move fast and break things" type if languages.
There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
I'm not a big fan of eating, so yes please? Even if I then want to indulge in something tasty every now and then, the option to just 'top up' without actually eating is hugely attractive.
You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn't make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
All of these things still require interaction with other people? If you remove all the others you also don't get to enjoy the things that you claim to enjoy by yourself
Being able to hike the mountains without the equipment that others have tried/tested/packaged/sold is not possible either.
Imagine that you're traveling space and you get stuck on an empty planet, that's the logical conclusion of "removing the need for human connection"
I feel like this just further reinforces the point - that need for social connection is a weakness.
I love my husband dearly, and I’d morn him if he vanished, but it wouldn’t make my life hard to live by any means - I lived just fine before him, and I’ll live just fine after him. I didn’t marry him because I needed somebody, I married him because I wanted him. I love him and I’m lucky to have him, but I also love myself and am lucky to be me - and as I said, that was true before I met him, and it’ll be true after he’s gone.
I don’t need someone else to make my worthwhile, or to make my life worth living - I am sufficient. He’s a (much welcomed and deeply appreciated) bonus.
What you’re describing sounds like romanticizing mental illness to me.
> every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way
This is so relatable. I remember trying to set up an LLM gateway back in 2023. There were at least 3 different teams that blocked our rollout for months until they worked through their backlog. "We're blocking you, but you’ll have to chase and nag us for us to even consider unblocking you"
At the end of all that waiting, nothing changed. Each of those teams wrote a document saying they had a look and were presumably just happy to be involved somehow?
One of the lessons in that book is that the main reasons things in IT are slow isn't because tickets take a long time to complete, but that they spend a long time waiting in a queue. The busier a resource is, the longer the queue gets, eventually leading to ~2% of the ticket's time spent with somebody doing actual work on it. The rest is just the ticket waiting for somebody to get through the backlog, do their part and then push the rest into somebody else's backlog, which is just as long.
I'm surprised FAANGs don't have that part figured out yet.
To be fair, the alternative is them having to maintain and continuously check N services that various devs deployed because it felt appropriate in the moment, and then there is a 50/50 chance the service will just sit there unused and introduce new vulnerability vectors.
I do know the feeling you're talking about though, and probably a better balance is somewhere in the middle. Just wanted to add that the solution probably isn't "Let devs deploy their own services without review", just as the solution probably also isn't "Stop devs for 6 months to deploy services they need".
The trick is to make the class of pre-approved service types as wide as possible, and make the tools to build them correctly the default. That minimises the number of things that need review in the first place.
Yes providing paved paths that let people build quickly without approvals is really important, while also having inspection to find things that are potential issues.
From my experience, it depends on how you frame your "service" to the reviewers. Obviously 2023 was the very early stage of LLMs, where the security aspects were quite murky at best. They (reviewers) probably did not had any runbook or review criteria at that time.
If you had advertised this as a "regular service which happens to use LLM for some specific functions" and the "output is rigorously validated and logged", I am pretty sure you would get a green-light.
This is because their concern is data-privacy and security. Not because they care or the company actually cares, but because fines of non-compliance are quite high and have greater visibility if things go wrong.
I want to do some improvements on my house. So I take out a home equity loan. Oops! Actually since my house is worth $500K more than when I bought it, now I have to pay $100K to the government since the gain is now realized by using the asset as collateral!
You get points for effective use of rhetoric, but it's more of a solvable challenge and not a deal breaker.
The goal of a borrowing tax would be to prevent someone with a a $200 mil stock portfolio living off the "buy, borrow, die" strategy and not home equity loans on mere middle class millionaires.
Capital gains, for example, on a primary residence already have an exclusion of a certain amount. There's no reason a borrowing tax can't kick in only after one has let's say 10mil in assets or securities.
Heck, you could even exempt primary residences regardless of value, so you should be fine
I mean most taxes like this have an 'above X amount' clause. Such as the gains you get taxed on when selling your home. California it's $500K in gains if you are married so extrapolating that your scenario would be covered.
@rayiner Do you understand that justifying his 5 month detention without due process means you are justifying your own 5 month detention without due process?
He is getting due process. He admitted to a federal court that he came to the US in 2009 under a Visa Waiver Program, which is limited to 90 days: https://www.universalhub.com/files/attachments/2026/culleton... ("Culleton concedes he is removable under the VWP. Reply 10.").
By contrast, I'm a naturalized citizen. My dad came here on a valid H visa because he's an expert in public health and a U.S. company wanted to hire someone with his qualifications.
If you ever need to use the service again just re-subscribe (and re-cancel)
In fact, what is stopping you from cancelling all your subscriptions right now? You can always buy back in when you like
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