It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread.
I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
But they were backed up to Ethereum, but Ethereum might be declared a security, so they'll be gone too!
At least I've also got them on XRP.
Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product.
Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping.
Actions have consequences though and AMZN is now the last place I look when shopping for things since shopping there is somewhere between visiting Mariupol and the South Bronx in the 1970s. It is a matter of time before I pay my last recurring bill of any kind to them.
You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-web-purchased pre-aged accounts, to the point that Amazon would just have to ignore "reported listings" as a signal anyway.
...if they could do that, why would you need to be able to report listings? They'd just block the bad ones automatically.
(Actually, it's probably a supply problem more than a demand problem — there probably aren't enough people willing and able to work as moderators on the entire Earth, to manually review the number of complaints that would be generated here. It would cost them orders of magnitude less to just hire people to manually review all changes made to product listings! ...which they still won't do, because that's still apparently too high a cost to bear.)
I never see senseless product listings on Ebay. For that matter, I get Ebay shipments from Japan faster than AMZN gets me packages from a warehouse in the next state. People selling animals and farm stuff on craiglist sometimes struggle to spell words like ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ but once more the listings make sense.
Do you believe that this is because Ebay knows something that Amazon doesn't know? I personally think Ebay just doesn't drive the kind of sales volume — or have the particular expected sale+logistics lifecycle (immediate payment to enable immediate shipment of locally-warehoused goods through Prime, etc) — that makes these particular scammers interested in exploiting it.
Also, as you're describing this more, I'm increasingly confused, because I don't think I've ever seen an Amazon store listing that is truly "senseless" in the way you're describing. Maybe it's just that I've only ever visited Amazon's Canadian storefront, and these particular attackers aren't active on there; but while I see lots of AliExpress-dropshipped product listings, lots of page grooming, etc., but never a completely-senseless listing. I believe you that they exist; but can you link an example?
My experience couldn't be further from that.
When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted".
I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.
I got told I was insane for backing up github. I clone all our github repos daily, zip them up and stuff them in S3
For example, in addition to the copy on GitHub whoever pushed last should have a completely current copy. And everyone else working with the repo should have something pretty current.
Our company has thousands of repos, some of them years old.
240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade.
If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution.
Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism.
The author is either lying about the photo library size to garner sympathy, or has a gargantuan psychological issue to address.
Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count.
There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY
If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved.
I'm fairly good at being annoyed enough to work around this but most people out there can't handle things like that easily and Amazon knows it.
I'm a "high hitter" customer. I have prime and spend a hell of a lot of money with amazon every year so they tend to do what you ask eventually. But if you're a new customer or low value one your customer experience will be very very different. I know several people buying 1-5 things a year who have been told to piss off.
The opening hours of the place were a PITA, so after two attempts I called up Amazon and complained about this. Sure enough, they sent the package again without trying anything funny.
Last November, my Logitech mouse's scroll wheel started acting funny. Tried to check on Amazon the warranty situation, the docs said: take it up with the manufacturer (note: the mouse was sold by Amazon, wasn't a marketplace item). This was like two weeks before the 2-year warranty was up.
So, I headed on over to Logitech. Man, their site sucks. My mouse was a "gaming" model, so it wasn't directly clear where I should seek help. I end up with some support guy who was obviously doing something else in parallel, judging by the time between replies. Went through the usual checklist (is it on / did you try unplugging and plugging it back again?). Never mind that before getting on the chat, I had to fill up a form with the exact same questions, up to and including the serial number, which is the first thing the chat person asked for. Half an hour later, he asked the killer question: where did you buy it? Amazon. Oh, take it up with them, then.
Went back to Amazon, opened a new "other" case. Less than two minutes later, I was on the phone with someone from Amazon, asking me point-blank whether I wanted them to try to fix it or reimburse me. Said the latter, and he asked me to be sure to send it within 30 days.
Guess where I bought my next Logitech mouse?
So yeah, Amazon's retail support experience is still top-notch in my book, at least on this side of the pond. This was for an account without prime support that doesn't do a lot of business with them.
Sure, Amazon could have said "yeah, call us" instead of saying that I should see the manufacturer, and it would have saved me half an hour.
But I was quite disappointed with Logitech's reaction.
I've had an issue with a bag and when I took it up to one of their stores for repairs, they just took it in for repairs for free without any question asked whatsoever. Not even where or when I'd bought the item (I didn't buy it from their name-stores, but from some generic department store). Didn't ask to see any receipt. Just "It'll take around a week. Can you leave it now?"
Note that this wasn't some fancy boutique bag or brand, it was barely pricier than the mouse.
Since I'm complaining about Logitech, I should name the brand with great service: Le Tanneur, a French leather goods company.
It's just a coincidence that when it comes to retail, the cheap option (just ship another one out) also works well for the customer. At scale, shipping duplicate items, even expensive ones still works out cheaper than well-trained, competent, well-treated and well-paid humans.
This one on the other hand requires engineering time (can't be resolved by a bot or monkey pressing a "ship another item" button) which isn't cheap and unless they have legal liability, it's cheaper to just stonewall or even ban this customer forever and lose their business.