Notably disputing a credit card charge is completely independent of whether someone owes the debt, the credit card is simply a convenient way for that payment to be handled. What's the point where other collection methods make sense? As an example, if you're consulting for someone and they pay you $x,xxx via card then charge it back, at least in most of the US I believe it's legal for you to do your own collection efforts and contact them repeatedly (this changes if you sell the debt and it's a third party attempting collections).

The thing that's always concerned me with them is questions of "what level of access is required to the system(s) actually hosting my calendar data?" and "if this vendor is compromised, what level of access might an attacker in control of the vendor systems have?" Obviously this will vary by what kind of access controls backends have (e.g. M365, Google Workspace, assorted CRM systems, smaller cloud providers, self-hosted providers, etc.).

Edit: basically, with a lot of these systems, what's expected to be the authoritative data provider/storage?

That plus aggressive avoidance of anything resembling customer service and what sounds like an internal environment that may be moving towards cage matches makes it worth avoiding for anything important.

Once it became clear that they'd shifted from "crappy customer service" to (IMNSHO) "we fetishize the complete absence of customer service" it became dangerous to depend on them. Really, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe someone spams emojis in live chat on a game livestream at the request of the streamer on a personal account, it gets banned for abuse, Google recognizes that it's linked to other services and locks down everything? But that's so unrealistic I'm sure it could never happen.

It's not like they also have the ability to identify links between multiple accounts accessed by the same person and have automated processes that might stomp the associated accounts as well. Why, that would probably require something like allowing poorly-understood automated agents to take actions on their own!

The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.

It does not, however, use a cartoon dog in a room on fire.

As for Soundcloud, the password I had saved for it and a tiny bit of profile information tells me a lot - a manually created password saved into a password manager, probably in 2010 or 2011 and unused after grabbing a single track.

Addresses for services I actually care about also get what's basically peppering, and have all had updates much more recently than the days of Blackberry devices.

The Fresh stores are basically a conventional grocery store, with electronic tags for every item and quirky pricing. They also have "smart carts" with built in weight sensing and multiple cameras so you can basically put open bags in, say "ready to go" then shop by scanning a UPC before placing each item in the cart. Unscanned item? Error. Weight mismatch? Probably an error but I've never tried. The carts are running what looks like a Linux-based UI with some stuff in docker, I grabbed a picture of a shutdown screen on one not too long ago.

I've gotten into the habit of stopping in to wander the aisles and check prices because of it (e.g. I stocked up on a bunch of canned soup when most (but not all) Progresso soups were $0.44 a month or two back, and I picked up some microwavable rice+quinoa pouches for my wife at $0.35 each a couple weeks ago, but the inconsistency and overall not great prices mean it can't be my go-to grocery destination.

I'm sure the one by me will be closing since there's a significantly larger Whole Foods just a few miles away.

On the mechanical side there would certainly be some challenges (having to work within a key that's all the deepest cuts, using something that could push up to "shallowest cut" level without deforming, general structural strength problems) but once you had a viable insertable key portion built you might be able to read a lock based just on the amount of spring resistance at each pin. You could also provide tension while probing for pins under tension. If covert agencies don't already have pretty portable devices like that it's because they don't care enough to create them not because of some true technical problem with doing so.

I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."

2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d0

5/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...

3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...