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.
I asked ChatGPT to decode a Diameter header in Java (RFC 6733 Section 3).
It supplied this :
// Parse the Diameter header
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(message);
int version = buffer.get() & 0xff;
int flags = buffer.get() & 0xff;
int length = buffer.getShort() & 0xffff;
First problem, it's version, length, flags. Second problem, length is 24 bits, not 16. Third, 24 bits unsigned won't fit in a Java int (which is signed). Then there is the extra masking, which isn't a bug but is (I'm reasonably sure) unnecessary.
That's 3 sneaky bugs in 4 lines of code, and it didn't even try to parse the rest of the header.
I'm impressed that it produces _anything_, but it's dangerous to trust.
ChatGPT is as reliable a source as any friend in a pub after 3 beers. It is definite in its answer, convincing with its phrasing and more than likely misremembering something it overheard on the radio while driving to work.
When I tried re-prompting, it produced more complicated, just as incorrect code.
Same here. Worked on a lazy list in js for mobile. The component had a nasty array lookup every scroll event. I asked chatgpt if it could optimize the lookup algorithm. I suggested me to implement a binary search solution including the code itself. It worked immediately. I would have taken me probably a day to come up with something similar.
I also asked chatgpt to minimize my code including all method names , variables etc. Unfortunately the output of chatgpt is limited to x characters. 200kb of text isnt possible. But it is able to minimize. You can even ask to uglify the code by using animal names or street names in London.
ChatGPT struggled to tell me how to pin the bottom of a div to the bottom of its parent when scrolling (like a chat window does). It gave me the first thing that I tried (which is wrong). Eventually I figured it out, then confronted ChatGPT about it and it insisted on the wrong answer, and blithely dismissed the correct answer.
I've been trying to get ChatGPT to solve pretty basic calculus questions and it is often either totally wrong or wrong in some tiny detail. I got into an argument over dimensional analysis a few weeks ago where it felt like it was gaslighting me.
In the same way as building bridges and math are the same thing. There is some overlap, but not much for the every day tasks. If you want to build something completely new and unprecedented, you will need a lot more math, but still it will only get you so far
Can you use ChatGPT without a phone number yet? I thought about signing up a while ago but don't see a reason they need my phone number. Popular VOIP numbers don't work either.
I've been using it and Google in parallel and have find it generally helpful, but I've had multiple instances where ChatGPT completely made up new library functions. Same for others I've talked to.
I've found that if you give it pairs of "Why..." questions it'll happily argue both sides of the coin ("Why is X better than Y", "Why is Y better than X"). But in giving me justifications, it gives me fodder for further traditional searches. I don't trust it to give me a correct answer, but I do trust it to define the problem space a bit.
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.
The closest comparison would be Reddit powermods who ban users from hundreds of the most active subreddits because the user: a) posted in a subreddit they don't like (this is often automated); or b) did or said something the moderator didn't like.
Emperor Elon, First of his Name, Savior of Twitter, Defender of Freedom merely desires the respect and adoration he deserves. If some ungrateful blue check freeloaders disagree they may experience his evenhanded judgment and wrath.
The "reddit mod" the comment you're responding to would be one in charge of a particular subreddit, not of the entire network (the latter would be an "admin" in reddit parlance).
A quick perusal of https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/ should be sufficient to understand that subreddit mods indeed do go on power trips of capricious banning, including for the grievous sin of mentioning a competing subreddit.
Many of the popular subs will retroactively ban users for posting in other subs.
I was banned from a fair amount of subs because I had a trivial argument with a mod in one sub. IIRC it was literally an "argument" about humidity being worse than dry heat, lol.
Seeing this repeated on twitter, even if its for a day, is alarming.
I remember there was one point when Facebook was blocking links to minds.com.
However, that was quickly explained away as automated spam filter false positive when it was publicized. So even if it happened before, I can't think of any case other than Twitter right now when it was so open and explicit.
> I don't buy into all the freedom of speech rhetoric he has been spewing.
I think what you meant was you didn't buy into it, and this is proving your point of view.
He's gone from freedom of speech absolutionist to defining the limits of freedom of speech by whether you discuss social interactions on other websites.
It isn't as simple as a one-dimensional scale between freedom of speech absolutism and not, and the fact that so many people seem to believe this makes me think that people don't have a basic grasp of ethics, nor an ethical framework to make decisions on.
> He's gone from freedom of speech absolutionist to defining the limits of freedom of speech by whether you discuss social interactions on other websites.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. This is only a small bit of his capricious rules. Earlier this week it was publicly available information about flights, now it's even indirect mentions of social media competition, what happens next week if he decides that no one should talk about other electric cars? It would be entirely in character for his actions to date. Users now have to anticipate that there is going to be a day where the rules change in such a way they earn a retroactive ban. That's not freedom of speech, that's just a tyrant who hasn't come for YOUR speech yet. I don't know why anyone would stay invested in this platform.
If there was any sort of real framework in place there would be a set list in place instead of a flood of randomly generated rules that are just "whatever is ticking Elon off today", and there wouldn't be popularity contests to see if content gets restored.
Not only that, but users will need to check out Musk’s account in the morning to be sure they know the new rules for the day, as there is no tolerance for slip ups.
Lol by this reasoning any possible moderation decision is consistent with freedom of speech. Dude came in guns blazing on team “any legal speech will be allowed” and is at this point banning all references to perfectly legal competitors.
My post is downvoted, and I agree with the replies, so I think I've been misunderstood. I'm saying he has rowed back on free speech absolutism (which I personally don't agree with anyway), to limits on free speech. And those limits are arbitrary and not based on any ethical (or other!) framework.
As I said in another reply, I think a far simpler explanation is that the "freedom of speech absolutist" thing was total BS from the start. Other than describing himself that way, nothing about Elon suggests he's actually a big fan of free speech as a general principle.
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.
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?