I keep getting packages in the mail that are addressed to me, but not things I ordered. Lawnmower parts, plumbing hardware, a grill cover, a magnetron (!), etc.
One had an amazon slip in it, but most of them have come through ebay. I reported the one to amazon and the rest to ebay (I gave them the USPS tracking numbers since I didn't know the order numbers), and also contacted a couple of the sellers who were businesses with public contact info. The sellers I reached both said they would send me return labels, but neither has yet.
I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is. Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match?
On ebay people will create fake purchases in order to get a 100% rating and then scam people since people are being far more judicial about who they're buying from.
Just a recent example I had.
I was looking for a new camera. Finally settled in on a Fuji X-T3. The prices on legit camera places like B&H, Andorama and MPB were running around $800 for an excellent condition body. It went down from there in price. Found a body on ebay for $790. Right price, albeit a bit less and for a silver body. There has been an increase in demand for the silver body since Fuji announced they will no longer make them. Most silver bodies have been pushed up over $800 for even a decent condition body.
After kind of going back and forth over whether I wanted to make the purchase, the seller messaged me with an offer of $750. I was leaning on purchasing, but just as an experiment, I sent Claude the link to the auction and asked if it saw any red flags.
Claude pointed out it was a fairly new account within the last few months. Yes, it had 100% seller rating, but they only had six sales with zero user feedback. They also were not accepting returns. For a $700+ purchase, this was too many red flags and I ended up getting something off of MPB instead.
I believe this is the scam. Set up two accounts. Sell one account to another account with a fake user and address. In this case, your address. Ship useless stuff to fake account, boost your rating in order to ease people's anxiety over ordering from someone with less than 100% seller rating. If the person getting the useless junk emails you, say you'll send a return label, then never do it.
As a "photography is a cheaper hobby than a boat person" I am semi-shocked you even considered it for only about 6ish percent off...
Even Amazon sellers where there is a better return policy will happily try to pass nonfunctional stuff as working and hope nobody notices till after the return period.
(And that, actually happened on a 500$ used a6000. Looked like it worked gr8 till you tried to take a picture)
Many sellers will cut whatever corners they can to get a lower price point, as that's what purchasers look for. The one that stands out to me is shipping, sure go for for cheap shipping on a trivial cost item, but I question doing the same when you're buying something expensive and not consider spending some proportion of the price on a better courier/service tier to have more certainty the item will get to you and in good condition, assuming the seller doesn't bake-in the cost of upgraded courier.
I opened all of the packages already, so it's too late to send them back. (I get enough things in the mail that I did order, that I pretty much have to open it to know it's something I didn't order.)
I hadn’t heard of brushing, but you might also be a bystander for a different common eBay scam. Seller sells to Buyer, but ships something different to another address with the same zip code. I think eBay may have since fixed part of this, but the deal was that all the tracking info would show that the seller shipped and delivered something of the right approximate weight to the buyer (because USPS would only share/confirm info accurate to zip code level).
The thing that makes it less likely is that the buyer and seller had multiple transactions together which is uncommon for eBay. And also if the stuff you got was expensive. Maybe buyer really just put the wrong address and neither side can do much to get the item back once delivered?
I got hit with that exact scam recently as a buyer, and I can tell you eBay has not figured out how to mitigate it yet. I purchased an expensive item from the seller. He sent some token thing to a different address in my city in the same zip code and provided me (and eBay) the tracking info. Item was delivered, and all eBay knows is "item sent to zip code X was delivered" so it was marked as delivered. I submitted a dispute, which was pretty much instantly closed with "Seller provided proof of delivery." I contacted UPS who happily provided me the actual address the package was delivered to. I escalated through eBay's support channel and offered to prove that the delivery was not to my address but they didn't care or want to know the actual delivery address. Finally, after a few days, eBay got back to me with a form letter saying I would be refunded because the seller's item was "lost in the mail," which was total bullshit, but at this point I didn't care since I got my money back, but the scammer probably kept the money too, so I guess eBay is eating these costs.
Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month, and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send it to you.)
Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil scrapers is behind us.
That is a fair observation, especially since my default Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller lightweight models.
Fullstory offers privacy-preserving session replay and analytics for websites and mobile apps. Our session replays are nothing short of magical, and the combination with our automatic analytics creates eye-opening insights.
Atlanta, US engineering roles (semi-onsite, requiring 1 day per week in office):
For US roles, you can expect regular raises & bonuses, equity, and benefits including: health insurance, 401k matching (Vanguard), annual learning stipend, unlimited PTO, parental leave, and more. I take about 4-5 weeks vacation a year, in addition to ~3 weeks worth of company holidays (federal holidays + the week of Christmas to New Years.)
Folks in other countries can also expect a strong benefits package, but I'm not as versed on the details.
Additionally, you get a 5-week sabbatical after 5 years of employment - I took mine about a year ago, and it was fantastic.
To apply, please submit your info on the website, and our recruiting team will get in touch with you. If you have questions, feel free to reply here or contact me directly. (I'm an engineer on the iOS team, but I'll do my best to answer questions.)
Fullstory offers privacy-preserving session replay and analytics for websites and mobile apps. Our session replays are nothing short of magical - they look almost like a video of the user's screen (with private details redacted) - and the combination with analytics creates eye-opening insights.
Our current engineering roles are all semi-onsite in Atlanta, USA (1 day per week in office):
We have additional roles for sales, consulting, product design, product management, and customer support open in Atlanta, Seattle, London, and Czechia as well as some Remote (US) options. See the full list at https://www.fullstory.com/careers?utm_source=092xpqyAkV
For US roles, you can expect regular raises & bonuses, equity, and benefits including: health insurance, 401k matching (Vanguard), annual learning stipend, unlimited PTO, parental leave, and more. I take about 4-5 weeks vacation a year, in addition to ~3 weeks worth of company holidays (federal holidays + the week of Christmas to New Years.)
Folks in other countries can also expect a strong benefits package, but I'm not as versed on the details.
Additionally, you get a 5-week sabbatical after 5 years of employment - I took mine about a year ago, and it was fantastic.
To apply, please submit your info on the website, and our recruiting team will get in touch with you. If you have questions, feel free to reply here or contact me directly. (I'm an engineer on the iOS team, but I'll do my best to answer questions.)
Fullstory provides privacy-preserving session replay and analytics for websites and mobile apps. Our session replays are nothing short of magical - they look almost like a video of the user's screen (with private details redacted) - and the combination with analytics creates eye-opening insights.
We have additional engineering and product design roles open in Colombia and Czechia as well as other roles in product management, sales, HR, support, and solutions in the US and UK. See the full list at https://www.fullstory.com/careers?ashby_jid=bce3fcba-6b80-43...
For US roles, you can expect regular raises & bonuses, equity, and benefits including: health insurance, 401k matching (Vanguard), annual learning stipend, unlimited PTO, parental leave, and more. I take about 4-5 weeks vacation a year, in addition to ~3 weeks worth of company holidays (federal holidays + the week of Christmas to New Years.)
Folks in other countries can also expect a strong benefits package, but I'm not as versed on the details.
Additionally, you get a 5-week sabbatical after 5 years of employment - I took mine about a year ago, and it was fantastic.
To apply, please submit your info on the website, and our recruiting team will get in touch with you. If you have questions, feel free to reply here or contact me directly. (I'm an engineer on the iOS team, but I'll do my best to answer questions.)
Try disabling your adblocker or allowlisting www.fullstory.com. We're more privacy-preserving than most analytics software and we don't have anything to do with advertising, but some adblockers still group us in with "trackers" and block us by default.
The moto g100 is a good example of a midrange phone with decent specs, including video output. It launched at $400, and can be bought for around $200 these days.
It has a Snapdragon 870, 8gb RAM, 128gb storage, a microSD slot, headphones jack, and a big enough battery to last 2 days. It's a little chunky, and it's not waterproof, but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
Motorola, of course, has already abandoned it. But it still gets up-to-date Android via Lineage OS and other community made ROMs.
How did they abandon it? It release october last year according to google.
>but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
I get that, but none of this answers my question of why people should use that to a TV, instead of a PC, other than to flex? It really isn't more practical, nor saving you money and you're still limited to the apps of android ecosystem rather than the windows/linux one.
As for why anyone should do it, I'm not really arguing that anyone should. I was just trying to point out that it's more affordable than you might think. (Although it can't beat the deal you got on your laptop.)
I think it might make sense if you already have a laptop dock with a screen and a keyboard at home and at school/work, and your needs were fairly lightweight, and you really valued portability. Or as you suggested, it could just serve as a backup device in case your main laptop gets broken or whatever.
Yeah, fair enough. I actually really like the recent trend of Android manufacturers committing to 7 years of software updates, because yeah, community ROMs really aren't for everyone.
My point was more that there are affordable options if you're inclined to do a bit of tinkering.
I'm a big fan of Revanced, but I haven't heard of Morphie - do you have a link for it? (I tried searching, but all I'm coming up with are cosmetics, chargers, and an IRC app.)
Edit: found it: https://morphe.software/ - looks like it's sort of an offshoot of ReVanced that only supports Youtube at the moment.
And, for those who weren't aware of ReVanced, see https://revanced.app/ - it was originally just a tweaked version of the YouTube app called Vanced (an "advanced" YouTube app, but without the "ad"s ;) - but now it's a tool that can patch a bunch of different apps.
The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:
>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
I'm guessing that the author is comparing it to their their M1 MacBook Pro, which has soldered in RAM and an Apple proprietary SSD, that is much more difficult to replace than a standard one.
Many laptops do still have replaceable RAM and SSDs, but it's not a sure thing these days.
Yeah, I agree with this. I find it simpler to just carry a couple of usb-c to whatever hub/adapters for when I need to a port my framework doesn't have built in.
The expansion cards seem pretty gimmicky to me. You're replacing a hub with... a bunch of hubs with one port on it. I know it opens up to some third party modules (this one seems particularly cool: https://github.com/LeoDJ/FW-EC-DongleHiderPlus) but for the most part you are getting less connectivity than other laptops. You don't even get an audio jack without taking up one of your expansion slots (edit: on the Framework 16. 13 includes it).
If the expansion slots were larger then they could have maybe facilitated something like getting 2 usb-a ports in exchange for the one USB-C which feels like an actual thing to consider. As it is, it just doesn't feel like you're gaining anything. If you're carrying any additional expansion cards with you you lose the only advantage it has over buying a hub, which can turn that one usb-c slot into multiple usb-a ports, ethernet, hdmi, audio, sd card reader, etc.
My FW13 has two USB-C ports so I can charge from either side and have one free while it's charging, and then USB-A on one side and MicroSD on the other.
That covers all of my frequent needs. (My main monitor has usb-c input, and I have a couple of inexpensive adapters/hubs for HDMI, DP, Ethernet, etc. - all of which are used infrequently.)
I was a little concerned before buying it, and four is probably the minimum number of ports I could be happy with. But in practice I've been very satisfied with my port selection, and if you do need more ports, there's always the FW16.
Folks have done it in the community forum, and it works fine for basic data. It gets tricky when you want to support charging, because then you need multiple voltage levels and the circuitry to convert between them. Apparently video is hard to do also.
One had an amazon slip in it, but most of them have come through ebay. I reported the one to amazon and the rest to ebay (I gave them the USPS tracking numbers since I didn't know the order numbers), and also contacted a couple of the sellers who were businesses with public contact info. The sellers I reached both said they would send me return labels, but neither has yet.
I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is. Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match?
reply