Google recently increased storage from 2 TB to 5 TB on their $20 AI plan, while Dropbox is still stuck at 2 or 3 TB for their $12/$20 plans.
They moved from 1 TB to 2 TB in mid-2019, and I wonder if they ever plan to pass on any of the gains from the past seven years of technological advancements, or if those gains are simply being captured on their side while we keep paying the same.
Aside from bad pricing and us wanting to move our data to servers owned by a European company, the thing that that bothered me the most as a (former) paying customer was the constant upsell pushes. Every time I’d log in to the web interface they would show ads in the web interface (including pop up dialogs) to try to move me to another plan.
I’m already paying 20 Euro per month. Leave me alone.
I'm transitioning a lot of my more valuable stuff over from GDrive to Dropbox. It's too easy for something to take out your entire Goog acct and not be able to unlock it, for one. Secondly, their synchronisation is pretty poor and always getting snarled up. Dropbox will let you synchronize across a LAN too without having the other clients wait for it to appear on the cloud. And lastly, if you accidentally delete something off GDrive you are up shit creek. The process for undeleting something (which is a support call) is absolutely horrible. Dropbox at least will give you minimum 30 days to rewind.
are these "technological advancements" in storage in the room with us right now? because I'm looking at today's price per TB and it's higher than it was in 2020
did you calculate it with real inflation adjusted price? not the BS numbers in financial media, FED etc. Since 2020 unlimited printer, inflation is not few %.
I weirdly feel like this is a newer issue. Hadn't had a problem running queries/actions previously up until this past month where it seems I'm constantly get hit with rate limits while not increasing my usage
The default model is Opus 1M context, so autocompact doesn't run as frequently, and that just Devours your session budget if you're not careful. There are some env variables you can (ask claude to) set to lower your max context window and autocompact threshold.
It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do business with this company again, since it could result in being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right). I'm not saying not to do it, but one should keep in mind the potential repercussions.
If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.
Some companies like Activision clearly state in their terms that chargeback means you will be permanently banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and access to all digital "purchases" forever.
They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.
I live in the EU and have read this in the terms for my region.
> they have no legal obligation to follow through and give you what they promised
Yes, they do. Contracts are contracts. They just don't promise you ownership of anything but a revocable license. Like every platform offering DRM protected content.
I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
> I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.
Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out emails 30 and 60 days before.
Of course, there are also some businesses that hope that customers forget that they're subscribed, so that there's breakage.
Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing from me!" and request a chargeback.
Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I’m pretty sure it’s a stripe option I must’ve misclicked.
Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)
I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.
That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!
Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named directly after their product, so that the billing line item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.
That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the economics of the business don't really warrant doing anything about it.
Were you dealing with some other payment processor or bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors? Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.
You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info. Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded to next business day.
Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these things called “public institutions” which were at least notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in the public benefit.
The BBB was one of those — not always perfect, but consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a better place without regard for their own profit.
I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database. There's no righteous comeuppance here.
You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your money back. If you don't, then you issue the chargeback.
> You don’t think it’s funny how the mechanism for taking the money is never broken?
I dunno, sometimes it is.
The most broken I've seen in my favour was a ~$600 purchase where the order flow broke partway through. Customer support was a major pain to get in contact with in order to figure out how to give them my money. When I eventually managed to talk to someone, they advised that maybe their third-party fraud algorithms didn't like my email. I changed my email, the order worked when I placed it again, and I received my product a week later.
Several months later, without any communication from the company, I received a second product in the mail, presumably from the first order that I didn't pay for. Based on how much of a pain it was to contact support the first time, I wasn't about to do so again based on their mistake. To be charitable, I kept the package in my garage for a couple months in case the company contacted me to arrange return shipping. Not hearing from them, I just sold it off.
> Work with a large company who won’t pay your 30 or 45 day invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.
I have had this experience. I don't see how a chargeback would've helped. Typically, you would invoice someone for time you've worked for them, or sometimes you buy a product from one company and invoice another for the expense.
Chargebacks don't help you get a company to pay your invoice. Debt collectors do.
In any case, this is something different from refunding a purchase as a customer, which was the topic at hand.
was giving the benefit of the doubt on the intention of big companies putting no effort in to fix their workflows if it makes them more money to work with you improperly.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
There's a misunderstanding here. I'll make it clearer.
The "Unless you're big cheese" is the company you're doing the charge back against.
If a company, such as Anthropic has too many chargebacks? Visa/MC can ban them from their network. It happens to smaller companies all the time, mostly because it costs Visa/MC + the banks involved to deal with each chargeback, and also, it's typically a sign of fraudulent behaviour.
Visa/MC are not a charity, or are payment processors. They need profit. Take it away by creating all this extra work, chargeback work, and they're not making money any more.
The "big cheese" part is, if you're amazon or google, things can be negotiated at that scale. Maybe they pay a larger settlement fee, whatever. And of course Google Play, or Amazon utterly dwarfs Anthropic CC activity at this point, even though they have a large valuation and potential future ahead.
Still, I have no idea what the background metrics and profit points are for Visa/MC, only that I've seen even medium sized companies have issues with too many chargebacks. And, we've all seen Visa/MC decide they don't like gambling, or porn sites and just drop them. Some of those companies were quite large and had a lot of flow for them.
So I don't think many companies will just use chargebacks as a support mechanism. That is, unless they're just completely incompetent.
Having equity doesn't mean they can buy it, and regardless, that doesn't mean Visa/MC will work for free, or the banks/payment processors. Too many charge backs from an account, and that's the result.
It's unclear how large their retail business is, which is why I mentioned that, and that's where you see most CC payments. Companies with any serious usage are going to pay via wire or bill payment via banks directly. McDonalds, for example, likely has a larger daily spend on cards.
More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.)
Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
> More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
Depends on the specific relationship between the parties and the nature of the lawsuit.
If I sue Walmart, the only grocer in my town, for mislabelling the weight of their ground beef, we (as a society/government) probably shouldn't allow Walmart to retaliate by banning me from their stores.
I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think?
As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc.
Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.)
That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!
I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number?
If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.
It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.
IPs are notoriously unreliable for identity pinning, particularly in this age of CGNAT.
If they can’t or don’t want cc numbers (makes sense considering how painful PCI guidelines are anyway) does that mean they need to rely on more tools from the processors or user accounts maintained by the merchant themselves?
CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
That doesn't seem to be more than an order of magnitude off between available numbers and issued cards - a cursory search says there are over a billion credit cards in circulation in the US alone.
I think you're confusing the available number space per BIN (often used for a single card product) with the number of available numbers per network.
Visa and Mastercard each have 14 digits worth of permutations to play with, excluding the first and last digits. That's one hundred trillion numbers.
Assuming 8 billion people in the world, each person can hold 12,500 of either Visa or Mastercard before a collision happens. (As above, the number space is smaller because of how BINs are issued, but that's still plenty.)
Except the banks have "helpfully" provided a service to merchants to tell them, "this card has expired, here is the new number to charge" (or expiry/CVV).
I remember getting into an argument with a bank teller about me wanting to block/dispute transactions and how they kept approving transactions. "But you have an agreement with the gym..." That's between me and the gym, not for you to facilitate on their behalf.
Obnoxiously that doesn't cover all the edge cases for consumers. Payments from my watch recently started failing with a generic "declined" error. After calling my bank I worked out that my credit card had been replaced some months ago in advance of a recent expiry - I updated my phone wallet at the time, but my watch's wallet didn't give any indication that it was trying to use an expired card.
It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly.
All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback).
It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse).
Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens.
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I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could.
So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did.
The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business.
That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored.
---
Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem.
The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood.
You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags!
Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.
In 2018 I made a reservation with Tesla for a Powerwall by "paying" 500 EUR. After being ignored for months (someone was supposed to contact us regarding the installation), we started asking for the money back. Didn't hear anything. Started sending an email once a year, in 2025 they finally replied asking for bank account details to send back the money.
I think this may be a purposeful tactic. It’s like raising investor money from people who get no shares for their money. These reservations are just scammy.
In the past few years, I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades. What are they going to enshittify now? What are they going to drop support for now?
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?
> I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades.
I've been going the other way on Linux.
I used to think it might be wise to postpone updates if you were traveling, especially using a rolling distro. Today, I would be quite confident running the updates 10 minutes before leaving.
Granted, this is also because I'm more confident than ever that I could fix most breakages, and worst case the smartphone is there, but I've also not seen big breakages for years.
I have a somewhat opposite experience. I also use a rolling distro, and in the past six months, I've seen wine break, and I've also seen Citrix Workspace break due to a dependency problem (perhaps Mesa?). Granted, these two cases are somewhat unusual because Citrix Workspace is closed source and the software I'm running with wine is also closed source. I rarely experience breakages of open source software other than GNOME extensions.
Yep. I run NixOS unstable-small on my ThinkPad and there is rarely breakage in daily updates. If it ever happens while on the go, I can just boot into a previous generation. The immutable OSTree/bootc distros are similar, as well as openSUSE, which uses btrfs snapshots on updates.
Because it just searches Google and HN is indexed regularly, nothing really noteworthy. If you copy paste the same quote into Google you get the same thing.
Even modern low-end GPUs should have more than enough fill rate for high-res textures. The texture quality setting in games is usually not affecting performance at all until VRAM runs out.
Part of that is that the texture detail scales to the point where on a low end card at low resolutions you aren’t seeing any difference between high and low detail textures.
Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.
8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.
I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM. My point being that 8GB of RAM, not VRAM, would not be sufficient.
I'm talking about RAM. Otherwise I would've written VRAM. I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM.
Sorry, no. You're wrong. It's extremely optimized. I get 60-100 FPS on a 3060. It's ridiculously optimized. If you're having issues, it's particular to your system for some reason.
I remember 2042 being significantly worse when it launched. I've also played almost every other AAA launch of recent years from Elden Ring to Borderlands 4. They all run worse than BF6, even now.
No final decision, but possibly not. Given Apple are dropping support for x86 Macs next year, it's unlikely to be something we could support for the long term.
Are there any desktop apps that support Fastmail's label implementation? Also, a Fastmail web app bundled in Electron would still be MUCH faster than Thunderbird with its bundled Mozilla components.
Evolution added some nifty features lately (Markdown integration). And allows to use Client-Side-Decoration annd classic menus - usability wise awesome. Thunderbird got this year a complete redesign.
I loved ME1 and was disappointed by ME2 because I loved ME1 so much. I devoured the lore, every codex entry, and even the long elevator rides where you had to listen to news reports about your earlier actions. The world-building was so much better, and all of this was reduced to a minimum in ME2.
ME1 was an epic space RPG with action elements, while ME2 was an action game built around a collection of crew side stories with lighter RPG elements.
They moved from 1 TB to 2 TB in mid-2019, and I wonder if they ever plan to pass on any of the gains from the past seven years of technological advancements, or if those gains are simply being captured on their side while we keep paying the same.