benmorris

I already knew what telescope this was before I clicked the link. I've had one for a few years now. It's an awesome tool that has improved over time. You can leave it out all night now if you want and program a schedule.

This sucks, but really the value of the $20 plan has been insane. I routinely get weeks of work out of the weekly limit, so yeah I'll just move up plans if needed.

That's the public data. I can tell you I've worked in this industry for 20+ years and run probably one of the biggest sites in this space selling boat graphics. The most popular name is actually "Aquaholic" ;-)

I'm testing it in my business. I'm in a unique position of running a business totally unrelated to software dev, handled customer service personally for 15+ years. I developed a AI backed live chat app first a little over a year ago. It has handled ~6,000 chats since then so I have a ton of valuable data on what does and doesn't work (spoiler alert, it works really well).

I'm taking that information and building a voice version. I'm taking a lot of time to make sure the phone version works naturally and that is can address most common things people call in about. Just like my chat version, GPT 4o was barely good enough to do what I needed. Since GPT 5 and on it has been more than adequate. I expect the same thing over time with voice, Open AI is going to release the GPT-live to the API which is a noticeable improvement.

Some people are just offended at the idea of talking to an AI chatbot voice or phone, no matter how good it is. I don't know how good this Kinney Drugs bot was, but it's very easy to make something that works but ends up being very frustrating for customers.

I'm not sure how this is a good thing. There are already very limited options to accept payments online, consolidating two of the major ones is not a great thing.

Braintree was a legit competitor, last time I checked they won't even onboard you if you don't have an established business grossing over 100k/yr.

On Aug 27th 2025, Braintree (owned by PayPal) introduced a policy that forces merchants to accept pre-arbitrations for disputes under $1,000:

https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/articles/risk-and-sec...

I’ve been a PayPal/Braintree merchant for over 10 years, and this feels like a pretty big shift in risk.

For anyone not deep into disputes:

- A customer files a chargeback. - The merchant can submit evidence and may win that first round. - The customer can then file a second dispute, which goes into pre-arbitration. The merchant can again submit evidence and, historically, sometimes win.

If either side pushes further, it goes to arbitration, where there’s usually a few-hundred-dollar fee for the losing side.

Under this new policy, for transactions under $1,000, Braintree will automatically accept the pre-arbitration in favor of the customer. There’s no second chance to present your side as the merchant; the dispute is simply closed and refunded to the cardholder.

Practically, this means:

- A customer can lose the first dispute, - Immediately escalate, - And automatically win the pre-arbitration if the transaction is under $1,000.

I’ve already had multiple cases where bad-faith customers was awarded the full amount at pre-arbitration solely because of this rule. At that point, the only remaining recourse is to pursue the customer directly (legal action, collections, etc.), which is usually not realistic for sub-$1k orders.

For anyone running ecommerce on Braintree, this effectively creates a “free second shot” at a dispute for customers under $1k, with the merchant guaranteed to lose the second round by policy.

Has anyone else run into this yet?

I used this about 2 months ago going from MySql 5.7->8.0 Really awesome feature.

Entirely predictable train wreck in the making. The vision based transition from the start has been a complete mess for years now. Here is a short summary for those that don't understand.

- Mobile Eye dumps Tesla in AP1 days forcing them to develop their own vision based auto pilot aka AP2 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile... For those that aren't aware it took years for it to work nearly as well as AP1. - Tesla removes rain senor in favor of vision based detection in AP2 cars as well. To this day vision based rain sensing is one of the worst features of the car. It is laughably bad in certain scenarios (night). - Early 2021 Tesla removes radar in favor of vision based cruise control and Traffic aware cruise control. Again, the product was rushed out due to supply shortages in an unfinished state. Still to this day the speed limit and distance settings are not on parity with radar enable cars. Vision based cars still deal with frequent phantom braking (just google it). Surprise surprise this one was so bad radar is coming back in hardware 4.

I've AP1,2, and 3 cars now and we were forced to sell our 2021 Y over issue #3 the phantom braking in the vision based system. I've heard it has gotten better but this parking sensor business is just more of the same from Tesla. Another one that is flying under the radar with HW4, Tesla is removing the ambient outdoor temperature sensor. This is right up there with the rain sensor. I can't tell you how many times I've been traveling through a weather system or going up and down elevation it's nice to know the actual temperature, not something fed from an API.

This still doesn't add up. The new HW4 Model 3 "highland" doesn't have more cameras. Notably there is a no front bumper camera. It also have one LESS camera in the windshield. The HW4 board DOES have space for more cameras though.

I'm thankful to have a very low percentage of chargebacks for the amount of transactions I process.

However,the process sucks. These days if a customer wants they can essentially get whatever they buy for free. I've gone down the rabbit hole several times leading up to arbitration and given up. In most cases it is a few hundred $ so it just isn't worth the fight. I 'win' the first round most of the time, the issue becomes if there is a second dispute for the same transaction, that is when it becomes nearly impossible to win without more compelling evidence.

Haven't verified it but former congressman Adam kinzinger claimed Canada did just that. It took over 1000 rounds and 4 hours to accomplish.

Yep, provided as much detail as possible with code samples. Pretty much as if you were emailing someone for help.

ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions.

I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things.

- solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging.

- refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern

- simplified a complex nested logic in c# with citations

- scaffolded a MySQL create table statement upon providing several c# classes. Again saved me the tedious steps of typing them out.

More and more I'm finding myself just going to ChatGPT for answers I would otherwise find on stack overflow or search engines. In that respect I think bing would be dumb not to provide code based answers.

Granted they haven't been perfect but many times what I find on stack overflow isn't perfect either.

This week though after a back and forth with ChatGPT I was able to solve a pretty complex issue with some pixi.js code after no relevant help from Google. Likely saving hours of work.

If it isn't obvious this is the new norm for Twitter. Elon is making up the rules as he goes and ruling like a pissed off insecure reddit mod. I don't buy into all the freedom of speech rhetoric he has been spewing. This is about control and fueling his ego.

It is a real shame because I wanted to continue using Twitter like I always have, but I don't think that will be possible.

I'm not sure why anyone expected twitter not to be run like another of his other companies. This freedom of speech play will always be secondary to Elon's whims.

Not really, in court filings there are text messages with him pretty clearly discussing his rationale.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison...

What an epic debacle. Since hangouts has been phased out there isn't even a way to one click video call someone anymore in google chat, it is a hacky meet link. There was a time when I used hangouts for everything, video, SMS, and chat. I could even do all of that from my desktop PC. Google needs to get it together and offer a comparable solution to iMessage.

Windows has become a complete UI disaster. I feel like Windows 7 was the last cohesive UI. The control panel is a great example. I'm not sure how it could possibly be more of a train wreck. Settings are in seemingly random locations split between the new and old style control panels. The deeper you get into dialogs it is like stepping back in time. Printers or network adapters you end up jumping back and forth to find the correct setting.

If I was starting from scratch I would probably use an micro ORM like dapper or in my case I have experience with Petapoco.

There are so many "gotchas" to using EF that I'm not sure if was worth using to begin with (for a complex project at least). 8 years into developing and maintaining a huge ecommerce platform built on EF I think if I started over I would probably not use EF.

We had a Gen 1 Volt for nearly two years. A greatly underrated car in my opinion. No maintenance issues at all, it just worked like it was supposed to. Frankly people are scared of them, we sold ours locally and everyone that looked at it was obsessed with the battery and everything to do with the hybrid features. Our car had a few years left on the GM hybrid component warranty even! It was difficult for people to understand even though the car had 45k miles on it the engine did not (it ran probably 20% of our use). Over the 2 years we owned it we averaged about 75mpg.

I've used Sendy for years and haven't found this to be true at all.

It is tied to their session ID / shopping cart. They are free to modify the cart and it recalculates the discount.

Online design products like signs, lettering, and digital graphics.

I encourage people to save their order confirmation email which contains a secure URL back to the website which has their original order and links to reorder the same items. Simple and effective. I've used this method for about 8 years.

I've experimented with this. It is difficult to measure if I'm giving away money unnecessarily or completing a sale I'd otherwise miss. Good point though.

I removed all registration and login components during checkout. Most people have an auto complete setup on their browser now and most of my sales are first time customers. Granted I have a small subset of return customers that ask for it, but I know from years past introducing registration opens up a whole set of barriers to the checkout process. Order confirmation pages are essentially a page they can return to at any point in the future without logging in.

I also removed the coupon code box completely from checkout. I used to get bombarded with requests for discount codes and people not getting their codes to work. In reality the way I used codes were in email promotions. I switched to instant redeeming clickable codes in emails and removed it all the boxes on the site. I also know it was a significant factor in checkout flow because I could google "mybrand.com " into google and google instantly starting adding in "mybrand.com coupon codes" "mybrand.com promo codes". People see the coupon code box and immediately head to Google to search for codes.

PayPal Express checkout is still a huge choice for customers. They can choose express checkout or standard checkout flow. Many people use it (30-40%). It removes the need to enter their address as well.

Rich brought to light recently how much of a mess the used Tesla experience (no longer CPO) is as well. There are two more videos, the situation is resolved after many months and Tesla execs intervening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgMTx_xFezM&t=4s

Wife and I were seriously considering a used Model S but there is no chance we'd go through what he did to buy a used car.

Even a plugin electric hybrid would be a big in my opinion (30-60 mile range). We have owned a Volt now for over a year and it has been great. Since owning it we average 75 mpg. My wife can nearly drive to work and back on all electric.

I have an F-150, a ~50 mile range hybrid would cover nearly all of my driving.