Answer: they don't, they just work them into the ground because they can.
Mainland China also has the 996 schedule for office workers purely as a cargo cult ritual, forcing people to sit at a desk at midnight and pantomime doing work.
You're not wrong, but from what I understand, the issue really comes down to on-site personnel and supervisory staffing.
As for the 996 culture, I agree to some extent. My Chinese friends hated it too. But in China, there's this thing called neijuan (involution / the rolled up scroll).
there are just so many job seekers that people are forced to endure it. What neijuan means here is "Eating one's own flesh" basically knowing that this competition is damaging to everyone involved but doing it anyway.
Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud, (At minimum they implement Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-support... ) and since you did not include screenshots of the messages sent by Stripe support I suspect they were saying something carefully noncommittal and legally compliant to get you to go away, which then got spun into an outraged blog post.
The problem is that, as patio11 once described in detail (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), there are genuine tradeoffs here that people get outraged by the mention of. How many legitimate sales should Stripe block in order to more effectively fight this kind of fraud? Merchants don't want to hear it, and consumers don't either. So financial companies invariably conclude that it's better to raise the question only in careful, indirect ways which could not be misinterpreted as a statement that fraud is good or OK or acceptable.
That's a reasonable argument for general money processing, but it's far weaker when you sell an anti-fraud product and try to get every transaction to give you a cut to use it.
And if they had even a little skin in the game they would care about such low-hanging fruit. You don't want a guy that's insulated from the consequences to be in charge of the [anti-]fraud dial.
That link says the customer's undisputed transactions 4 - 12 months ago with you may establish their disputed transaction was actually legitimate, but the article is about someone who only made disputed purchases within a week or two.
> Stripe obviously records data around friendly fraud
My only nit with Stipe is they don't allow me to delete card details for an ongoing subscription I don't plan to renew and already set it not to renew on the service billing page.
What's your point? Do you think it matters what stripe said? What is something that they could've said that wouldn't have justified the outraged blog post?
The author thinks it matters what Stripe said, since they chose to use it as the title for their blog post. To the extent that it was just meant to be a lament that it's hard to be a small online merchant in an era of strong consumer protections, sure, I sympathize. But they seem to think it's a problem with Stripe that could be fixed if Stripe behaved better.
Stripe has a customer's bank saying "the customer says they didn't make this payment" and you saying "the customer told me they did make this purchase and got the item and they're making fun of me".
They have no way to know if your evidence is real, any more than the bank has a way to know if their customer's evidence is real. Either one (or both) of you could be full of shit.
In that world, what would you like Stripe to do better?
What do they feed into their Radar machine learning system? surely there are lots of signals to use here. I'm not saying take only my word and ban this customer forever.
But they have my record as a merchant (successful charges, chargebacks, disputes etc), they have the payer record as a consumer (payments, chargebacks etc), when a merchant submits a dispute, they provide evidence. I provided evidence from DHL that the product was delivered.
No single piece of data is enough on its own, but Stripe is in a perfect position to use all those pieces to be able to better detect fraud.
According to payment networks, that chargeback was entirely legitimate
That's why it doesn't get fed into any fraud prevention system. Legitimate chargebacks shouldn't be used to prevent transactions.
You are mad that what you claim to be a flagrantly fraudulent chargeback was approved. Who approved that chargeback, because that's where your actual anger should lie. Ban that bank/provider or whatever and move on with your life.
There's no fraud prevention in this. Payment networks purposely side with the customer here, it's a large part of their business. People use credit cards in part because of the safety and security they provide. They aren't going to suddenly abandon that system because you got scammed out of $30. They won't even do it for companies that get scammed out of millions of dollars a year. Ask me how I know.
If you don't like this system, you are free to stop accepting credit cards, and lose all that business. Most merchants are happy to lose money here and there to facilitate their business.
You insist that stripe's antifraud system should be treating this as fraud, but the process that decides what is fraud or not has decided it is not fraud. This should not be automated in any way. No system tries to automate this "problem customer prevention" because it's a million times harder of a problem than just fraud prevention, likely to ban just as many good customers as bad (because of the probabilistic nature of fraud prevention), and not even remotely worth it. Plenty of companies don't even try to fight it, because then at least you save the $20 chargeback fee.
If you have a problem customer who is more trouble than they are worth, YOU ban them. This customer might have never scammed any other merchant, and those merchants don't want to lose good business because you are nettled over getting scammed.
Yeah I totally get what you’re saying. It’s true. Still find it frustrating as a tiny merchant because it’s just too easy to get scammed and the system seems skewed against you.
> Plenty of companies don't even try to fight it, because then at least you save the $20 chargeback fee.
That’s sad in my opinion. It shouldn’t be the norm. Stripe support encouraged me to file a dispute and submit evidence but next time I prob won’t bother.
I personally find it disappointing that Stripe is in a position to do something about it but prefers the status quo that clearly allows such fraud to continue.
Based on the quote you provided, the CSR was very specific that what they don't use is merchant-provided evidence. They didn't say they don't leverage information about chargebacks or other disputes.
Happy to share their responses verbatim. It was a rather long back-n-forth. Here's a snippet from the latest email, which I think makes it clear that they do not use the evidence I provided:
I can assure you that I will take note of your feedback and pass it to our team. Your point about post-transaction abuse detection is valid - while Stripe has robust network-level fraud detection, there does appear to be a gap in utilizing merchant-provided evidence of confirmed fraud to protect the broader merchant ecosystem. This type of feedback from merchants who have direct evidence is valuable for improving these systems.
Yes most of the communication felt rather LLM assisted or generated. Though to be fair Stripe from my experience always had emphatic support and well written responses. In a way they probably set the gold standard that AI support now mimics.
Keep in mind that $275 today is the same as $140 in January 2000. Tech gadgets used to be far more expensive, both in real terms and as a percentage of average income.
Depending on how you convert synapse count to parameters, the brain also has something like a thousand trillion parameters. In that light it's pretty darn surprising that an artificial neural network can produce anything like coherent text.
Maybe the brain is more akin to a network of networks and the actual reasoning part is not all that large? There are lots of areas dedicated exclusively to processing input and controlling subsystems. I can imagine a future where large artificial networks work in a similar way, with multiple smaller ones connected to each other.
It indeed is. We now have models less than 100M params producing pretty coherent, and somewhat relevant text to give input. That is indeed impressive.
I believe the answer lies in how "quickly" (and how?) we are able to learn, and then generalize those learnings as well. As of now, these models need millions (at least) examples to learn, and are still not capable of generalizing the learnings to other domains. Human brains hardly need a few, and then, they generalize those pretty well.
With little what I know of Voyager, the beautiful machine has broke all previous estimates. And thus hoping it will last until we have another such machine overtake the distance before this one goes into total shutdown
Unfortunately the lifetime of the plutonium RTG is very very predictable (due to the half life of the isotope they use). They are constantly shutting down parts of the probe exactly because the RTG is providing less and less power, and at some point it won't even be enough to heat the probe and run the computers.
Around 2030–2036, the power will likely drop below the level needed to run even a single instrument. At that point, Voyager 1 will officially "die" as a scientific mission.
But Voyager will keep going forever.
Because there is no air resistance or friction in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 doesn't need "fuel" to keep moving. According to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Since there's nothing out there to stop it, it will continue its journey long after its systems go dark.
In 40,000 years: It will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor.
In 300,000 years: It might pass near the star Sirius.
The Long Haul: It is expected to orbit the center of our Milky Way galaxy indefinitely, potentially for billions of years, carrying the "Golden Record" as a final message from humanity.
Fun Fact: If Voyager 1 were to hit a pebble-sized object at its current speed, it would be catastrophic. Fortunately, space is so incredibly empty that the odds of it hitting anything larger than a dust grain for the next several billion years are nearly zero
Am still keeping my hopes up, scientists will make it wake up once every 6 months and just ping home saying it’s alive. I’ll still call it very much alive, even without science equipments running.
Fun trivia (well, perhaps not fun) in the second paragraph: "the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which was retrieved in 1990 after spending 68 months in LEO"
Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.
>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
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