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.
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.
Are they really either of those two things? Natural systems have no "goal", they just are. If they change, they change. If they stay the same, they stay the same. Because there is no goal, there is no "broken". It is only we who assign some sort of meaning to them and characterize them as "working", either because they meet our needs, or just because we are inherently impressed by complex systems.
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?
> 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?
Over geologic timespans, this is all just temporary thermodynamics. We will not always receive the same amount of energy over the sun. It will vary dramatically as the sun moves through its solar lifecycle.
Everything evolved around these dynamics in their current metastable states. Lots of optimization flux ebbing and flowing around the larger gradients and salients. All subject to perturbation such as asteroids and atmospheric carbon and solar death.
Life on earth has existed a third the age of the universe. That's a long time. Complex life has less than 600 million years left, and that's an upper bound estimate.
> Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.
If you move around enough. If you vegetate on the couch all day, it's not.
We evolved biology that works under the conditions we evolved under. Through us into new conditions and you stretch the behaviors of these systems.
We evolved under the gas energy exchange of our gravity well. Put us into a different environment and everything breaks. Give us little pocket dopamine rectangles and suddenly we stop reproducing.
The laptop repair team's work queue, though? 100% broken laptops.
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...
I know it's not exactly a subscription service though where they were making money from me whether I used the service or not. It was just surprising to me that someone felt the need to develop a cancel user purging system at all.
edit: and obviously reactivates after activity
they had a whole webinar about it with all sorts of justification, although most of it sounded like mba-isms to me.
Not exactly a subscription since it's a stored-balance system, but still.
I even started collecting true stories of software bugs, like the time a county court system decided to send out 10x the number of jury summons and caused a major traffic jam.
That's what I loved about Apple controlling their App Store subscriptions. All subscriptions keep working through the billing period and there isn't really anything an app can do about it. It also gave me an easy centralized place to view and cancel subscriptions.
And I don't believe that only one streaming service and one bank makes such mistakes.
That is the frame of mind and seems pretty reasonable.
And it goes like this, I sign up for the free trial and immediately cancel it, so I don't forget. It will still let me have the free trial until the end of the time specified.
And then if I do decide to keep it, the worst thing that happens is it just stops working at the end of the free trial and then I go ahead and re-enable it.
Says me a ton of money and anger from forgetting to cancel a free trial.
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.
You don't even have to do that if you don't want to. There are so many good piracy streaming sites which are on par, if not better, with commercial ones.
Then enshittification hit the forever-forking streaming services.
So it's often been back to the high seas, matey... hell, I even buy CDs, now (it's easier for rarer stuff, and then remains forever mine).
Full disclosure, I haven't written a single line of code there, but it's been refactored and improved a lot, so it isn't your average vibecoded project, it's been brought up with agentic engineering and countless hours of manual testing.
But it wasn't? TFA is describing a technical issue that kept cancelling a subscription. This is not a "we've noticed that you haven't been using the service and paused billing" situation.
> 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.
I.e.: https://xkcd.com/488/
Once you have the .mkv on your local computer system, then only actual hardware failures will prevent you from watching it whenever, wherever, and for as many times as you want to do so.
This is perfectly in line with the actual async problem, but differs from what they put in the summary ("Support on both sides saw an orderly activation followed by an orderly cancellation, with no errors").
What's everyone's favorite torrent site these days? Mine is Bitsearch, it has absolutely everything
