benmorris

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.

Having bought and sold quite a few houses now I can say I won't go down the FSBO route anymore. I successfully bought my first house this way, but selling it was a train wreck. Not fun dealing with selling your own home at all. I eventually listed it with a realtor and sold it a few weeks later.

Later in life though spending larger amounts of money on a home I would always recommend finding a good realtor. Someone friends/family can recommend. There are just hundreds(if not thousands) of pitfalls to buying or selling a home.

On a different note I did have the opportunity to build several data driven local realtor sites a few years ago. They were deceptively simple looking on the surface, I mean all you do is sort and filter house results right? The process of syncing to the RETS system proved to be really clunky and complex. Imagine building a site on top of a database you have to query to discover the tables, fields, and datatypes, and oh by the way it could CHANGE SCHEMA at any time. If your broker was part of multiple MLS (Multiple Listing Services) then you could have to deal with completely different structured DBs. I handled these issues by building a normalized table for listings I could map the data into. MLS data was pulled into a 1:1 mapping table of the same name upon querying the schema. I had to build a Sql Script generator to create the tables. It was very frustrating dealing with schema updates.

The whole process was interesting to me though as to how your listing data is handled when you list a house for sale and how others can gain access to it. Long story short you have to pay to play. Zillow for example is paying (or should be) to access your for sale listing data once entered in the a regional MLS. This is likely several thousand a year conservatively (per MLS). This gains them the right to access the data, however, many times these agreements are 20-30 page legal documents. My first time seeing one of these was extremely uneasy (I nearly didn't sign it). Again fascinating in the case of Zillow I know for a fact they are violating this agreement in our particular region when they hold onto listing data and images past the duration of a listing (sold or removed). They simply just keep it indefinitely it appears. On the other hand keeping up with 100+ MLS agreements across the US would be impossible as well.

I had a "plan" but it was still a leap of faith, leaving a 8-5 steady job with no income. My enabling factor was a good amount of savings and low debt. I had around 1 year of comfortable living to figure it all out.

Staying at my last job wasn't an option so I'd have a different job for sure, but not satisfied with what I was doing with my time. I find running a business and developing my own products much more rewarding. 7 years later I don't have any regrets although running a business is a whole new set of challenges.

Assuming Microsoft ends .net framework at 4.8 that effectively ends new features. Although older code will keep working for the most part isolated that isn't the real issue. For example I ran into an issue last year where we had to retarget all of our .net 3.5 projects to at least 4.5 to support tls 1.2. Had that upgrade path not been available we would basically have had no other option but move to a new platform. Even though bug fixes can happen older code will effectively rot with time as other things improve.

We've had 2 children in the last 4 years and this concept was foreign to me. Our 2nd child we were billed for an out of network anesthesiologist at an in network hospital. Several thousand dollars in total, I called the insurance after reading online a bit about it. Eventually they said they would "resubmit" the claim for reconsideration. A few weeks later we got an EOB showing we didn't have to pay any of it. The whole experience we shocking to me, I can't imagine dealing with this sort of thing on a regular basis.

Even worse is receiving bills from various providers up to a year later. How are these people still in business?