>"Working" is not the natural state in a complex world! It's a testament to the combined energy and skill of many people that systems are built and kept working well enough for long enough so as to become invisible.
I just have to take issue with this as someone who grew up in a very rural, natural area and was enamored with biology, biological, and ecological systems as a kid (8-12).
The statement that "working" is not the natural state in a complex world? You're showing your ignorance of complex systems.
What of the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground cave and sediment system that stores and filters water over hundreds or thousands of years? It's massively complex and in its natural state it's working but we're draining it.
What about the weather systems in the atmosphere? Could you argue that one of the most complex systems (maybe only second to the ocean current system) on the planet is not "working" in it's natural state? Don't take an anthropomorphic perspective of it working for you. It is a complex system whose natural state is "working". If it breaks down for our purposes at this point, it is due to our combined energy pulling it from it's natural state.
Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.
It's a testament to our combined lack of regard for the true complexity of systems that we consistently build systems that fail in opaque ways, and through our actions destroy long-running complex natural systems that we don't fully understand.
He speaks as if becoming invisible is a matter of transparency, but it functions more like a veil.
Hi! Author here. You're right — but two things to consider here.
First, that quote is referring to human-made systems, not natural ones (as is the rest of the essay!) and I think our views align on whether human systems regularly work.
Second, natural systems (and all complex-enough systems) are always running in some degraded fashion. So what "working" means is ambiguous: they are broken, yet accomplishing the goal. The quote from the essay refers to "working" in the "free of faults" sense, in which I again think our views align.
I would have given up after the first failure, and used a different streaming service. I have zero patience for consumer technology that doesn't work, after spending every work day dealing with enterprise technology that doesn't work.
Completely off topic but the title made me wonder if there’s any subscription service that cancels you if you don’t use it? Not quite usage based billing - plans that cancel (or pause) without use? I can’t think of any - terrible business model of course
In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.
Kagi arguably “pauses” your subscription if you don’t use it in a month. They give you a credit at the end of the month that then applies to the next month, so that people aren’t charged if they aren’t using it.
I can easily see myself failing to catch this type of bug, especially if when you run it locally, the latency on jobs from enqueue to finish is aboue 5ms, whereas it probably fluctuates in production from a few ms to 5 minutes. It probably passed QA when latency was low.
If the desire is to mostly keep this architecture, the flag in the DB for "has a streaming account linked" needs to not be a boolean, and then you could have a third state besides "Ready to link" and "Link": 'Pending unlink' which would cause the UI to ask the user to stand by until the streaming site confirms the unlinking. Mildly inconvenient for the 0.1% of people who need to unlink just to immediately re-link, but better than buggy.
In the spirit of yes, and: how about a subscription similar to a pay as you go phone plan? Pay for the month, and when you don't pay, then you don't get to keep going. After a couple of months, they unsubscribe you, get rid of your account, etc. More often than not, the first thing I do when I sign up for a service is cancel it (after confirming I can use it for the billing period).
I can't imagine the frame of mind the author has to be in to think that there's moral value in not "naming names" of corporations that do things badly, as if they are people who can be offended. Although they also write cringe things like "to the builders <heart emoji>" so perhaps I will just never understand them.
There’s a lot of bleeding heart people like this. They add variety to the world. The downsides being things you mention, but it’s usually more palatable than someone on the other end of the spectrum.
I think it would distract from the points he's making. The article could be misread as a rant about a bad time he had, when it's actually meant to make a specific point about considering async vs sync transactions and what happens when they're combined in the same system.
And I don't believe that only one streaming service and one bank makes such mistakes.
I don't think its for moral value but rather they want to make a general point. For example Netflix couldn't care less if they were named or not named in this blog so what purpose is there to "name and shame" them? Most normal people dont even know what a request is so its not like there is any reputation damage risk here for Netflix and the author can write without any bias and talk about general tech and its shortcomings/quirks.
That is the frame of mind and seems pretty reasonable.
> Here, purely-async makes more sense than purely-sync:
> From a user experience perspective, the user has no need to wait around until the link is severed. They expressed the intent to sever the link, and were told this would be accomplished. Generally, that's sufficient.
That's incorrect I'm afraid. The reason the flow is synchronous for linking is so that the user can consume the service as soon as they link it. Async means they would have to wait, no user wants to wait.
Similarly, cancellation is asynchronous so that the service doesn't stop immediately. This benegits both the service and the bsnk or credit card company since users often do change their minds and resume the service during the "cool-off" period.
tl;dr, the current logic is correct, it just does not work for your use-case, which is understandably frustrating.
> Linking the accounts between the bank and the streaming provider is a synchronous process, for both technical and user experience reasons. For example, it makes sense to get the user access as quickly as possible! "Click here and you're done" feels good, "click here and we'll send you an email in a few minutes" does not.
There is a coffee shop here that has a membership plan (you can roast at the shop it’s cool. Membership = no charge to roast and discounts on beans). It’s monthly and you have to re-up to keep it. It’s great and I’m happy to support them.
[delayed]
>"Working" is not the natural state in a complex world! It's a testament to the combined energy and skill of many people that systems are built and kept working well enough for long enough so as to become invisible.
I just have to take issue with this as someone who grew up in a very rural, natural area and was enamored with biology, biological, and ecological systems as a kid (8-12).
The statement that "working" is not the natural state in a complex world? You're showing your ignorance of complex systems.
What of the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground cave and sediment system that stores and filters water over hundreds or thousands of years? It's massively complex and in its natural state it's working but we're draining it.
What about the weather systems in the atmosphere? Could you argue that one of the most complex systems (maybe only second to the ocean current system) on the planet is not "working" in it's natural state? Don't take an anthropomorphic perspective of it working for you. It is a complex system whose natural state is "working". If it breaks down for our purposes at this point, it is due to our combined energy pulling it from it's natural state.
Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.
It's a testament to our combined lack of regard for the true complexity of systems that we consistently build systems that fail in opaque ways, and through our actions destroy long-running complex natural systems that we don't fully understand.
He speaks as if becoming invisible is a matter of transparency, but it functions more like a veil.
Hi! Author here. You're right — but two things to consider here.
First, that quote is referring to human-made systems, not natural ones (as is the rest of the essay!) and I think our views align on whether human systems regularly work.
Second, natural systems (and all complex-enough systems) are always running in some degraded fashion. So what "working" means is ambiguous: they are broken, yet accomplishing the goal. The quote from the essay refers to "working" in the "free of faults" sense, in which I again think our views align.
> Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.
It has evolved over millions of years. The evolution included billions of variants that didn't work and died before being able to reproduce.
And even then, are you saying everyone's brain is perfect and never needs any external intervention?
I would have given up after the first failure, and used a different streaming service. I have zero patience for consumer technology that doesn't work, after spending every work day dealing with enterprise technology that doesn't work.
Is your stack really that rough?
9900 users have working laptops and 100 have hardware problems.
The laptop repair team's work queue, though? 100% broken laptops.
Yep, large diverse org, something's always broken somewhere.
Completely off topic but the title made me wonder if there’s any subscription service that cancels you if you don’t use it? Not quite usage based billing - plans that cancel (or pause) without use? I can’t think of any - terrible business model of course
> plans that cancel (or pause) without use?
Kagi is one of them.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing
I recall a db service does that too long ago. Although I'm not sure if they changed policy as it's been a while.
In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...
tailscale used to do this for teams ("active user billing"), but recently changed pricing models to be purely seat-based.
they had a whole webinar about it with all sorts of justification, although most of it sounded like mba-isms to me.
Kagi arguably “pauses” your subscription if you don’t use it in a month. They give you a credit at the end of the month that then applies to the next month, so that people aren’t charged if they aren’t using it.
Kagi does something close to that. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#monthly-pla...
Xbox/Microsoft Game Pass actually automatically canceled for me when I hadn't used it.
I’m stealing this idea!
Kagi does this
I can easily see myself failing to catch this type of bug, especially if when you run it locally, the latency on jobs from enqueue to finish is aboue 5ms, whereas it probably fluctuates in production from a few ms to 5 minutes. It probably passed QA when latency was low.
If the desire is to mostly keep this architecture, the flag in the DB for "has a streaming account linked" needs to not be a boolean, and then you could have a third state besides "Ready to link" and "Link": 'Pending unlink' which would cause the UI to ask the user to stand by until the streaming site confirms the unlinking. Mildly inconvenient for the 0.1% of people who need to unlink just to immediately re-link, but better than buggy.
In the spirit of yes, and: how about a subscription similar to a pay as you go phone plan? Pay for the month, and when you don't pay, then you don't get to keep going. After a couple of months, they unsubscribe you, get rid of your account, etc. More often than not, the first thing I do when I sign up for a service is cancel it (after confirming I can use it for the billing period).
For quite a few services you can get the pay-as-you-go experience by getting yourself a gift subscription.
This is one of my favorite things about Mullvad VPN.
I can't imagine the frame of mind the author has to be in to think that there's moral value in not "naming names" of corporations that do things badly, as if they are people who can be offended. Although they also write cringe things like "to the builders <heart emoji>" so perhaps I will just never understand them.
There’s a lot of bleeding heart people like this. They add variety to the world. The downsides being things you mention, but it’s usually more palatable than someone on the other end of the spectrum.
I think it would distract from the points he's making. The article could be misread as a rant about a bad time he had, when it's actually meant to make a specific point about considering async vs sync transactions and what happens when they're combined in the same system.
And I don't believe that only one streaming service and one bank makes such mistakes.
Author here. This! The point isn't to name and shame, but to illustrate a complex failure mode. I too could see myself writing this bug!
I don't think its for moral value but rather they want to make a general point. For example Netflix couldn't care less if they were named or not named in this blog so what purpose is there to "name and shame" them? Most normal people dont even know what a request is so its not like there is any reputation damage risk here for Netflix and the author can write without any bias and talk about general tech and its shortcomings/quirks.
That is the frame of mind and seems pretty reasonable.
The author's LinkedIn style usage of emojis repulsed me and had me closing the article.
> Here, purely-async makes more sense than purely-sync:
> From a user experience perspective, the user has no need to wait around until the link is severed. They expressed the intent to sever the link, and were told this would be accomplished. Generally, that's sufficient.
That's incorrect I'm afraid. The reason the flow is synchronous for linking is so that the user can consume the service as soon as they link it. Async means they would have to wait, no user wants to wait.
Similarly, cancellation is asynchronous so that the service doesn't stop immediately. This benegits both the service and the bsnk or credit card company since users often do change their minds and resume the service during the "cool-off" period.
tl;dr, the current logic is correct, it just does not work for your use-case, which is understandably frustrating.
From the linked article:
> Linking the accounts between the bank and the streaming provider is a synchronous process, for both technical and user experience reasons. For example, it makes sense to get the user access as quickly as possible! "Click here and you're done" feels good, "click here and we'll send you an email in a few minutes" does not.
Self cancellation sounds like a feature to me.
It's not self-cancellation in the way you're interpreting the title :)
...yeah.
What's everyone's favorite torrent site these days? Mine is Bitsearch, it has absolutely everything
There is a coffee shop here that has a membership plan (you can roast at the shop it’s cool. Membership = no charge to roast and discounts on beans). It’s monthly and you have to re-up to keep it. It’s great and I’m happy to support them.