The Self-Cancelling Subscription

>"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.

I don't have this much patrience, I had a really similar issue, I had a streaming service as an extra perk for somethimg I have- When It stopped working - Something hit me, this isn't a troubleshooting session but twas the call of the seas.....

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 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.

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.

I love stories like this. I loved watching House MD and I always fantasized about writing a script for a drama series about a software company (with a zany, but attractive, cast of characters) that debugged a different problem every week.

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.

Pirating content is so much easier than this

I thought this was going to be about a technique I've been using lately for free trials.

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.

Just want to say that I loved both this and the wifi raining story

Shameless plug slightly related to this pain of subscriptions. I've been cooking https://github.com/gchamon/buzz for a few weeks. It's a replacement for zurg or debridmediamanager. It also serves as an alternate frontend for real debrid so you can load the legal copies of the movies you own using honest trackers.

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.

> 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.

Self cancellation sounds like a feature to me.

The entire article reads as an excellent example why piracy continues to exist.

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 was actually detectable in the calls to the providers if they went as described. The credit card company tells them the perk subscription is active and the streamer says it has been cancelled. ("There was a valid activation of the streaming perk, and a confirmation from the provider" vs "The subscription had been activated, then cancelled in an orderly fashion about 5 minutes later.")

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").

...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.

The author's LinkedIn style usage of emojis repulsed me and had me closing the article.

The fact that a subscription designed to cancel itself is considered innovative tells you everything you need to know about how low the bar is. We've normalized making it hard to leave to the point where 'letting you go' is a feature.