CosmicShadow

No mention of Alberta or Canada at all??

Hmm, that's good information to have, I had no idea. I just had an MRI appointment that I had completely forgotten about or what it was for I was waiting so long (and obviously not having the issue for anymore). I'll know this for next time and consider it.

As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).

What I don't think most people realize is that for many consumer goods coming from Canada the Americans are not paying the tariffs, Canadians are paying it instead because USPS is not setup to actually collect tariff payments from their own people and refused to do so. When I buy USPS shipping labels for my business that ships to the US, as a Canadian, I have to pay the fucking US tariff out of my own pocket and I have no way to charge my customer other than jacking the fuck out of my price. I lost so much money last year after the tariffs first went into effect and no one (UPS, USPS, US Gov't) knew what to do, how to charge, how to collect, but eventually after a 1.5months I managed to get CUSMA figured out. This 50% tariff is still the same scenario, I'm expected to pay the tariff on behalf of my American customer, so WTF. Oh and I got no refunds from anyone for that first 1.5months of insane costs as I'm not from the US.

I can ship UPS instead and then push the tariff back where it belongs, but nobody wants to pay 4x for shipping and then get another bill afterwards. US Customers already screamed bloody murder about a total $4 duty fee, which anyone in Canada would kill for on an international purchase.

Who cares? It's probably not better than a TV anyone else can afford and why would a billionaire need a folding tv in one of their 24 room homes?

The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.

I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.

Great article, finally something worth reading fully on here. As a serial entrepreneur this definitely hits home and is something I've had to learn the hard way over my 17 years of entrepreneurship. Just because you come across a great opportunity and you have the skills and gusto to make it happen doesn't mean it's a good fit. If you don't give a shit about the idea/problem/market it doesn't matter if you are good at every aspect of the business, it will be a slog and you just won't care and will set yourself up to fail sooner or later.

I think if you are in public, you can't expect to be in private. You can try, but it obviously doesn't always work and we are exposed to all types when out of the house.

So far since continuing coding/debugging with 4.7 it's failed to fix 3 simple bugs after explaining it like 5 times and having a previous working example to look at...hmmmmmm....

She checks them every time she's on her computer, no point in closing them and they are always posting to social media every day, whereas you may get a generic email once a month if they even have a mailing list. Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to both support and help these bands and band members by engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any means, although some of them are still "large" or well known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good traction online. Most people in metal bands still have full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).

Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.

This sounds like a company idea someone just came up with yesterday off the cuff, pitched it, and got money for because of their credentials so no one can really say no to investing in it, despite nothing new or different? What's the service or product and how is it different than every 3rd Show HN?

Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?

Facebook Messenger constantly tells you shit like "Hey, it's been 1 minute since someone messaged you, you better check it out!", Uber Eats is constantly telling me about meal deals even directly after I just ordered food on Uber Eats, and now it's giving me Uber ads implying the only thing stopping me from going out is that I haven't ordered an Uber, despite my history of only using it once a year when out of country and that I JUST ORDERED FOOD TO MY HOUSE!

You can't turn these off without never getting FB Messenger messages or notices of if your food has arrived because no one knows how to ring a fucking doorbell anymore even if the note specifically says to :/

Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.

It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.

Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.

Interesting to see this whole thing shown outside of Astrophotography, sometimes I forget it's the same stuff!

This is really amazing, I've been working with AI generation for months and it's amazing how fast separate tools are coming together into one and are usable on your own local machine.

I've been using Ovi for about a week and it's a blast. Like all AI gen, it's a slot machine and even putting in good inputs might lead to bad outputs, but if you run it enough you'll get something good or usable.

I've definitely made many things that look and sound real with both I2V and T2V, albeit T2V tends to look more like 90s tv quality at times, but that also makes it seem more real. If you use Flux SPRO as the image source you can get some pretty realistic looking videos.

I do have a 5090, so it takes about 4 to 5 minutes to make a 5 second clip.

I also don't bother advertising to Canada anymore as it's just more valuable for me to sell to the US in USD. I've spent a lot of time working on getting shipping as cheap as possible to make it alluring for the US and it currently is cheaper for me to send to California from near Toronto then it is to send something in my own city, let alone anywhere else in Canada. It is getting better here with these new cheap providers like Intelcom, but it's still not worth it when dealing with 10x the people paying me in a currency that's 1.38x mine.

I also sell something that has a max value people would be willing to pay, so if that number is $6, then I'd rather get $6 USD than $6 CAD.

Unfortunately we make custom items. We'd have to move our actual operations to the US to really get ahead of the game, but I don't want the nightmare of having to hire someone and do business from within the US, especially if something goes wrong. Maybe if we were 5-10x the size I could afford it, but not at this moment.

You, good sir, have made the mistake of thinking people can and will read!

We've put warnings for things on every single page, step of the checkout, and emails, and people still complain that things are a surprise, even after checking a box acknowledging the facts :(

The sad fact you learn after shipping 10k+ orders is that you can't prevent issues by preparing and telling people about them. It really sucks and defies all logic.

I sell a niche, handmade product for a living from Canada and 90% of my sales are to the US and this bullshit really fucking sucks. Even our shipping partners don't know what is going on and usually can only fill us in on or after a due date goes past because nobody on either side of the border has any idea what to do or what is actually supposed to happen.

Here's the stupidity: USPS doesn't know who is supposed to collect the tariffs...hmm it's the person in the US who bought the product, and you collect money from them, like UPS and FedEx do all the time. It's going to your own government, how do they not understand? I know it's unrealistic for mail carriers to be able to do that en-masse now, but I'm not sure why they think Canada Post should be collecting tariffs, they don't have employees that deliver mail...IN THE US! So we can't ship with Canada Post to the US now as they'll just send it back. Canada Post can also strike again at any moment, but that's another story.

So the current advice is for us to now ship our products as Delivery Duty Paid or DDP, which means I'm supposed to pay the tariff that the buyer should be paying all because USPS doesn't know how to collect the money to give to their government. I'm getting double boned.

Oh yeah, I also have to pay an extra $2 per shipment to a broker now in addition to the tariffs, which nobody really has any clarity what they will be yet and there doesn't seem to be a good source saying if the items I sell are CUSMA or not.

It's one hell of a mess for sure, and especially damaging when you sell low ticket items on volume. I'm going to have to jack my shipping, which will hurt as our shipping is already more expensive than what someone would normally pay from someone within the US.

Once we can ship Delivery Duty Unpaid or DDU we will expect 4 out 5 customers to send angry emails asking what these "Hidden fees" are as we don't expect anyone to realize they actually need to pay tariffs and then we get stuck on the defensive side educating people what tariffs are and who caused them and who is supposed to pay them, which is not great for business, sanity or time :/

One was with Topaz Video, the other was with SeedVR2.

Wan2.1 was great, but Wan2.2 is really awesome! Here's some samples I made locally with my 5090:

- https://imgur.com/a/VeTn4Ej

- https://imgur.com/a/CujxVX3

Those were both Image to Video and then I upscaled them to 4k. I made the images using Flux Dev Krea.

Took about 3-4 minutes per video to generate and another 2-3 to upscale. Images took 20-40s to generate.

I already had to go through so many hoops to sign up for a teams account for 5 separate accounts for myself, I wonder if this will be any better or not. At least if one account starts getting dumb or somehow runs out of context, I can just switch, but if something goes wrong and your $200 account exponentially loses context, then you are stuck waiting. Anyone have any idea of the actual differences?

I feel your frustration, only 100 times over as nearly every title on HN is missing the: ...in the US

The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors. It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before, there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.

But the value is still there. I see ads in it that I never click (they are garbage and never change and made for Americans, which I am not), if I do click a link, I've got adblockers on, and every single site is pretty much an advertising company already. I still get the latest tidbits I want in a small package. Most of the time I don't even need to click anything, I just get context to the latest memes or the summary of news I don't need to actually click into.

Digg is the only daily email I actually get with some sort of news or missed memes and I enjoy it. People make fun of me for still using Digg, but it's just short enough to keep me up on what's the latest and 4 of the biggest news points. I never really hit the site. Curious to see how it improves or changes!

Yep, I have 2 accounts I use because I kept hitting limits. I was going to do the Teams to get the 5x window, but I got instantly banned when clicking the teams button on a new account, so I ended up sticking with 2 separate accounts. It's a bit of a pain, but I'm used to it. My other account has since been unbanned, but I haven't needed it lately as I finished most of my coding.

The point of an experience is totally about the experience, it's why I don't even take my phone out to take pictures or videos at a show. People get hung up thinking this is about "proving" you were at a show, they even get surprisingly angry in comments about this on my ads, but it's totally not the point.

This has nothing to do with the actual concert experience or proof, it has to do with your tradition of collecting ticket stubs that you can go back to for that nostalgia bump and/or to keep track of every event you went to. It's about having a jar/box/album of memories.

If you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly someone takes away your ability to add to your collection, you are going to get pissed off, and trust me, people definitely do.

Sure you can do anything else to collect, but the power of a streak/tradition/collection is real. It drove me to create this entire business because looking at a printed email or post-it note just made me mad instead of nostalgic.

Going through my binder and remembering that I saw Nine Inch Nails at a 1000 person venue is awesome, or when we saw Sabaton with 40 people and the singer just came into the audience to put his arm around me while singing, and it's not like I'm going to stop going to 10-30 concerts a year for the rest of my life, so more cool things will happen, memories will need to be preserved and it's nice to have them all fit into one album instead of anything else. I've got tickets for shows I've forgotten I've even seen, but it's in there with the mix which is handy. Forgotten venues, crazy low prices, "holy shit this massive band opened for these guys back then???".

Some people see tickets as trash and clutter, that's fine, for others it's a precious memento, despite how useless, wasteful, or unnecessary it is. I've got room for junk in my house that's meaningful for me, so it doesn't bother me to have, quite the opposite.

Well if you've got a pile of ticket stubs that you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly you can't keep that tradition alive, it kind of ticks you off. Sure you can start adding printed photos or something else, but it ruins your consistent collection and/or your streak.

I specifically have a ticket stub binder and seeing blank spots, or print outs or post it notes just made me mad instead of nostalgic. I can't shove tour posters or tshirts in there, so this was the solution for me. I have over 200 band tshirts, but I don't buy one at every show.

Never discount the power of a streak or continuing a tradition or collection. I just talked to a guy the other day whose jar of ticket stubs is his prized collection, even if he never opens it to reflect. Some people go to one concert every few years, others go to shows and games every week.