> Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.
Maybe that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see any reason not to have an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
This is a pretty fair comment. Their lack of ambition also has this downside. I've felt they are increasingly de-prioritizing the old iTunes business to focus on Apple TV+, which sucks because we really need a good counterbalance to Prime.
Yeah, while it's particularly bad lately, I'm remembering Richard Hofstadter's book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", which one the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for tracing the religious, cultural, and economic roots of american anti-intellectualism.
We've been in a bubble since years. The thing with a bubble is that nobody can time when it will pop... Ed predictions aren't relevant, his analysis and data he discusses are
> Open-source the desktop client so the community can build on its full graphical experience, not just download it. An early desktop client already exists as a binary download, but it isn't open source yet — it depends on some proprietary components, including Epic's internal design system. We're working to make all of it available in the open so that the client can ship as source alongside the rest of Lore. Lore is an open project, so it is important that the desktop client — which will be one of the main ways many people will interact with Lore — is also fully open so that the community is free to review, extend, and shape it.
I don't think they mean "cannot do" as in "don't have the capability." But rather "cannot do" as in "are not allowed to do." If the government can't (is not allowed to) surveil me without a warrant, it shouldn't be able to (be allowed to) buy surveillance of me from a private party either.
As an European, yeah, we probably are doing really good with basic science, but what about innovation when it comes to productivity? Why there is no AI lab (apart from Mistral) in EU? Why there is no European model (and hasn't been probably ever) in the pareto fronteer? Or any other really innovative company in the last while (I believe Spotify was the last European unicorn that transformed the landscape in the market they operate into).
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
The actual "make it go bang" bit here isn't the most potent. (I think I have capacitors here which wouldn't care in the least about this, despite their datasheet ratings.)
If you need to take it to the next level, consider something based on a xenon photoflash driver. These aren't as common as they used to be, but they're still not hard to make. I had to make one of these a while back and ended up using one of those $5 LTC chips but that was appropriate for the situation; there are certainly other ways to do it. This will basically charge a 400V capacitor up for you, which you can then dump into the 5V part. High-quality 5V capacitors will handle small spikes of this. But using a big 400V capacitor will make a big spike, which is not kind to the other capacitor. (I must confess I didn't try blowing up a lot of things on the one I made, but it was medical test gear, not technically a capacitor-blower-uper, and I was on deadline anyway.)
I think PUT, which is idempotent, would still require the "repeat action" warning, since it will overwrite any changes that happened to the same resource in the mean time (unless used with `if-match` or similar). QUERY won't require such warnings because it's safe, not just idempotent.
They have social media in Finland too. Go talk it out with your favorite frontier LLM.
You can't just pick one. The main problem is inequality is rising, which means those without capital (which includes the young) are much less likely to see anything from their efforts. It just pops up in different ways. All my money goes to {rent, student loans, hospital bills .. etc}.
This is targeted at companies building or running voice agents. We see 3 overlapping use cases
- as a post-call analysis tool, find problematic recordings of calls
- as part ob your observability stack, monitor call health on the audio stream
- and most excitingly to give your agent real-time information about the acoustic environment of the caller. So it can ask to move to a quieter room or decide to speak over the noise.
I think there's a bit of a "marketing" failure happening in this context.
I've been exercising for most of my life, I'm the guy that has been going to the gym since forever to many of my acquaintances, and so they have often talked to me about how they want to start exercising or how they are doing etc.
Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever said anything like "I'm so happy to decrease my risk of diabetes". My father stopped smoking and started riding a bike, motivated by cardiovascular health, what actually makes him happy though is to be able to go up the stairs without breaking into a sweat.
Ask anyone in a gym why they exercise, they will talk about health, just not in the way doctors do. The stick of "You will die in 20 years rather than 35" pales in comparison of the carrot of "you will feel better basically all the time"
Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:
1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account
2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0
3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel
4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident
Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'
Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
One is the method of recording a message, the other is having something else completely draft a message for you.
The importance of a personal message is not just in the visual appearance or delivery, but that there has to be some emotional loading to even put the effort into drafting one.
With AI, it's a stupid prompt to get it to write trite poesy. It's meaningless and empty at its root. It's discourse with a nullity.
Nobody who values the human connections in their lives wants that. No matter what kind of marketing and fine print gets shoved and manipulated into their lives.
