preinheimer

The number of large companies that practice this "you're too small for us to care about your complicated question, even if it's billing related" system is too large.

I dunno, we're using a recurring billing provider. There's a lot of times reading the source would have been more productive than talking to support.

40% of people with student loans didn't graduate. Lots of those people probably aren't the "smartest and most privileged" you're thinking about.

This video "What everyone gets wrong about student loans" really taught me a lot of things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzY-b2Vj9Ug

What about prioritizing paying the people who made the content these models are using without consent?

I think there’s also the whole “the people with the wrist bands -want- them to work” part. Which is super helpful.

Yes, you could hide your band under your hand, now it’s not glowing like everyone else’s… congrats you feel left out.

So many parts of the financial system only work because there’s take-backsies.

Taking back a wire transfer seems to basically involve someone at your bank phoning a friend, and it all works in the end.

A lot of smart people discover their fully redundant architecture has a single point of failure during an outage.

AWS has had a fair number of large profile outages and service degradation, including a few that crossed zones, even though that "can't happen".

I don't own an EV.

When I hear about Tesla and the Supercharger network what I hear about most is how easy it was to plan long trips. A road trip on gas is easy, there's a gas station in every town with a few thousand people, fast EV chargers aren't yet as common. So if your routing system understood its range, and where the charging stations where it was pretty seamless. Much better than the stuff from other EV makers.

Less often I'd hear about the chargers working more often. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/electric-cars-are-doome...

Not related to title, but I'm most excited about "Usage-based billing upgrade".

Their offerings for recurring billing have been lacking for a long time. I'd love to drop the recurring provider we've currently got on top of Stripe, and just use Stripe.

We ended up on Chargebee because we needed fractional unit billing. While there we've also discovered that they apply rounding at different times for different documents. So when a quote is promoted to an invoice the total changes. That was a frustrating few months trying to explain to support what the problem was for them to tag it #wontfix.

I think there's another side to this. There's weather, and there's "It's winter".

I don't think it's reasonable for airlines to expect to maintain the same number of departures that worked in the nice summer months through the winter. Runways will need to be cleared, planes will need to be de-iced.

They could keep extra planes and staff around ready to replace an incoming flight if it's delayed (clearly easier for carriers with fewer types of aircraft). Heck just staff seem like they would be handy as the flight crew hit their service limits.

But there's no financial incentive to do that if "weather" (despite happening every winter) is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I don’t know that you’re being fair. Their name is “namecheap”. It’s hard to lean in on anything premium when “cheap” is in your name.

I mean stripe seems to be doing fine with an even more generic name.

Securities Fraud?

(With apologies to Matt Levine)

As a Canadian this was pretty embarrassing.

I loved splunk when I worked somewhere a VC was paying the bill.

For my own project I could never really understand which of their various offerings was the one I needed, let alone could afford.

That said, watching someone really good with splunk use it is like music. It’s beautiful.

The coloring page that should have shown my son and daughter sitting on a bench that looked like a bear waving magic wands… turned my son into a girl with Princess Leia hair, and my daughter into a anthropomorphized bear, no wands.

Fun, but it’s no longer a special memory. There’s so little tying the source and result.

If the software doesn’t report that it suspects it’s in a vm at test taking time, but instead records data for later analysis the test taker is leaving themselves open for a lot of problems months down the road.

This has serious William Gibson cyberpunk vibes to me.

Specific problems I've had as a firefox user:

- I can't pay municipal license fees (Site says "Use Chrome")

- I can't use the Vendor management portal for $largePopularTechCompany type company for my small business ("We support Chrome")

- Xero my small business accounting software just doesn't work properly ("Use Chrome")

Something I appreciated from The Economist was this bit

> It seemed legitimate to her (an impression aided by the fact that its co-founder, Ruja Ignatova, had addressed a conference organised by The Economist)

Admitting their own role in this saga was nice.

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months.

Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about.

So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they wouldn’t fix it. So the safety guys had something to find, and they were going to pay to fix it anyways.

Every modern slot machine I’ve used will show you exactly that information. It’s somewhere in a help menu.

It’s not at all comprehensible, imagine boilerplate TOS from a big company, with a third year statistics course mixed in. But it’s there.

Yeah, most outgoing sales people these days reach out using gmail. No unsubscribe links in any of them.

Big cloud providers have good IPv6 support. The long tail is terrible. We work with ~200 different hosting providers, half of them have no IPv6 support at all, another ~15% it only works occasionally and they clearly don't monitor it.

There's also a fair number of still popular libraries and frameworks that don't handle IPv6 well. Maybe not in their latest release, but in their more popular older ones.

Hugops to the team working on it.

The biggest incidents have the best post mortems.

1. The local library at least paid for those books. Which is more than the creators of the current AI generation can say[1].

2. You can't train people exclusively on books. If you asked someone to explain a concept they learned in those books, sure that knowledge will help, but their response will also affected by every moment in their life so far. They're bringing other unique things to their response.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/arts/sarah-silverman-laws...

I don't think something being hard, should mean it just doesn't have to happen. "It's too hard to figure out whose work we used, so we just won't?" I also think it's unfortunate that writers, bloggers, photographers, etc. who have seen no financial compensation for their work will watch it go on to enrich a company with a billion dollar valuation.

It costs $0.091 per copy to "cover" a song in the USA, you get this by securing a "mechanical license" and that rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Board[1]. I don't see why there can't be a similar way forward here.

[1] https://www.crb.gov/rate/

They lost me with the GNU explanation.

I would like this, if somehow the people giving you the things were required to do it for free. Because without that, it just looks like writing a blank check to fraudsters.

It doesn't matter if insurance companies aren't required to pay for it. People will max out credit cards, borrow from friends, and mortgage their house. All for something that could sit anywhere on the continuum of: does nothing to kills you immediately. Probably with a side of "did this rather than something that would have actually worked".

For more pings check out: https://wondernetwork.com/pings

I believe that’s the source he’s using.