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.
I remember about 10 years ago I switched our billing / subscription code from paypal to braintree. Braintree was better than paypal but that wasnt saying much. Then paypal bought Braintree and started fucking around with it, asking for conference calls because they wanted us off one of their old flows so they could get us on webhooks that preformed worse and were a pain to implement.
Anyway we switched to stripe. Don't love stripe and they take a big cut but I hate paypal.
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.
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