No specific intent, sorry, though virtual cards are more effective since they can pick any money directly, no action needed on their former customer part.
I state that because MANY do not see little expenses or even if they see they decide that digging and acting for little money it's not worth, as a result many parasitic companies still exists "sold in bundle" of something else, where they give some breadcrumbs to the one who sell them together and few money per many customers makes them profitable anyway.
I actually do have a right, very specifically my statutory right under the UK's "Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation, and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013" which requires that vendors provide clear and timely information about automatic renewals, which I assert educative.io failed to do in this case.
Startup or not, I expect vendors to be compliant with regulations.
One reason I didn't go back and check was that I always turn this off. Of course, I'm fallible and may have made a mistake here, and so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Either way, I encourage people to check.
The other reason is that they didn't send me any kind of email telling me they were going to charge me.
In the UK at least, the vendor needs to show that their process was transparent and fair in order to fulfill their side of the contract. One of the examples specifically called out as unfair is "renewing without sufficient notice".
In this case, they didn't send any kind of email before or after payment.
Absolutely, I'm going through that process at the moment. I posted this in case it helps somebody who doesn't have that protection or has cashflow issues.
The closest I've come to being "blown away" by it was a project where I needed to clone the results of an Excel workbook onto the server, without installing Excel. I started with PHP as my normal language, but it ran into the ground when I had to deal with order of operations, new operators, and cell references.
I'd never really used a Lisp-based language before, but I decided to give Clojure a try, and it was the first time I grokked the value of "the program is the data is the program".
In PHP I had different "things" - operators, functions, scalar variables, class variables - and I needed to think about what was assigned and when. But in Clojure, everything was "data" that I could use to construct bigger pieces of data. Maybe that's obvious to better programmers than me, but my mind was blown.
Yes, I'd be interested to hear that. From initial reports, it sounds like under-investment in QA because of over-confidence in automated QC.
It's an example of a "black swan" or Bertrand Russell's chicken - the same process has worked many times, leading people to make the false conclusion that the risk has become neglible. There's a successful trial period in which the beancounters reduce headcount with no negative consequences. So the trial becomes permanent, people become less careful. And then boom.
They miss that a 1 in 10000 occurence is going to happen eventually, and that "unnecessary expense" which was previously there to mitigate it has now been removed.
I apologize. What I meant was: by this point in time there's a constantly growing pile of evidence that LLMs are highly unreliable, highly opaque reasoners and one shouldn't count blindly on them for critical missions or even non-critical ones.
Yes, good point. Even within React, there's been a big change from class components to functional components and hooks. I imagine LLMs could help with some of that.
I just ported 10k loc of react classes to function components using gpt-4o. The changes are mostly trivial, but would be fairly time consuming and tedious to make. It took me a few hours instead of a few days.
Way to kick a Brit when they're down!
Fortunately, we implemented the EU regulations back in 2013, and haven't yet repealed them so I can chargeback on a normal credit card.