What seems to be getting lost is that the acquirer, not the payment network, sets the Merchant Discount Rate. The acquirer is also the merchant’s direct payments provider.

Yet the acquirers seem to be always absent from these lawsuits.

It seems like many of these prosecutors/plaintiffs just want to go after the largest organizations in a given industry, almost irrespective of their culpability. It seems to me that most 'consumer protection' lawsuits seem to be more focused on obtaining publicity for the lawyers than actually doing anything useful, but getting a few settlements from larger organizations is a lot easier than actually going after wrong-doers, so it is a somewhat sensible strategy if the goal is to 'win' as much money as possible.

But isn't most of the fees a result of the interchange rate, set by visa? The fact that stripe or whatever charges a fee on top, which contributes to the overall rate hardly seems relevant, unless you think all the payment processors are colluding to set their markups higher.

It has been awhile since I dealt with credit card networks, but the parent comment confuses me as well. Before, most of the fees go to the issuer, the network takes about the same as the acquirer (roughly):

Network gets swipe fees, and a percentage of the interchange Issuers get majority of interchange, and carrying interest and fees Acquirer gets the markup plus whatever admin/maintenance fees

Here's what I found for a reference: https://cmspi.com/back-to-basics-card-network-models-and-glo... which tracks with my experience.

I'm open to be corrected though.

I don't think payment processors like Stripe are colluding, they just have a difficult task. Card and bank payments are very complicated and regulation-heavy. I do get the feeling that credit cards and banks are colluding.

Let's use Stripe as an example, there fee is 2.9% + 30 cents.

That 30 cents - is what's often ignored but makes up a disproportionate amount of the fee.

On a $30 transaction, paying 30 cents is equivalent to a 1% fee.

So Stripe on a $30 transaction is effectively 3.9% in fees (on a $30 transaction).

Interchange (which goes to the issuer), would only be approx 1.75% (of the 3.9% fee charged by Stripe).

> but makes up a disproportionate amount of the fee.

Trying to understand what you mean by disproportionate here. Are the majority of transactions well under $10?

Let's work from the inside out. "Portion", that's a part of something, pro- portion means by, as, of, toward. The -ate make it an adjective, the dis- reverses the meaning.

So it is not based on a portion of the fee (a percentage of it). Disproportionate.

This is bad because it systematically penalizes small transactions, which a proportionate fee does not do.

Can you explain more as to why T&C don’t allow for this.

I varies a lot depending on the vendor. Usually its against the terms if you're reselling rather than making calls on someone else' behalf.

My company is doing something similar but being a bit more careful about the providers we work with.

“Fractional” seems to be the modern-day buzzword for a 1099 contractor.

(and your experience will all depend upon the contractor)

> I raised an issue on the tracker

I thought OpenBSD / OpenSSH operate without a tracker and it’s all email distro based.

OpenSSH uses Bugzilla:

* https://www.openssh.org/report.html

The title is a bit misleading because one might imply that Gleam no longer compiles to something Erlang can use (not true).

From the article:

> Over the last few months Giacomo Cavalieri has entirely rewritten Gleam's Erlang code generator that has an entirely different design, and most notably, outputs a different format. Previously Gleam generated Erlang source code, now it generates Erlang abstract forms.

The title says it no longer compiles to Erlang source. That's true, it now compiles to an IR of the Erlang compiler.

I thought JetBrains is a private/bootstrapped company.

Where are these financials coming from?

F1 are effectively prototype cars.

Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.

Yep, the chassis, PU, and aero are all updated almost constantly, with major upgrades a few time per season.

Williams even rolled out completely new chassis (with full homologation/crash) mid-season this year because the first design couldn't come down to minimum weight.

UI/UX

Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.

But ChatGPT already has the same UI UX.

It isn’t though.

Muse is:

- a single thread

- has avatars that you can name

- has approval cards

Now dots is similar in concept but that only launched a few days ago and Muse launched a month ago.

It does not at all. ChatGPT is trying to be an everything app and it’s extremely convoluted by this point and hard for most people to make sense of, especially if you’re not in tech.

That's strange because they still have a billion users. So they're all using it somehow even without being in tech. The core UX is still a chatbot.

OpenAI does now with Dots but it’s still desktop only so they flubbed the ease of use that has made Muse and Grok such growth engines.

Not true, I use OpenAI's Dot on my phone all the time. It might need to be set up first on Desktop or web?

It’s also not free.

> I’m using the term “harness” broadly to mean all the infra, interfaces, context, and state that surround a stateless LLM

When the definition is that broad, aren’t you effectively already defining what SaaS is today.

Especially when you include interfaces in that definition.

I think there is some value in imagining what happens when all the process knowledge is actually documented and systemized into LLM inputs.

Yeah, this is a ridiculous piece. “What if we redefined elephant to mean cat, now my living room will be the Serengeti!”

Isn’t there selection bias though …

because if someone feels physically well enough to go to Burning Man, then the probability of them dying in the next week is near zero in comparison to the national average (which includes individuals hospitalized, terminally ill, etc).