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.
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.
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.
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.
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.