Hi! Author here. You're right — but two things to consider here.

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.

> Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.

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?

"Working" here means "operating according to specification or intent", not just "operating". Natural systems have no specification or intent.

Nature as we experience it now took millions of years to get to this point. The "working" state we have now is a result of a great many things coming together into a - for us humans - local minima that just happens to support life as it exists. And yet for humans in particular, things still don't work that well per se. There are generic diseases, mutations, etc that we have found varying ways to offset artificially. We - and all other animals - also get old, which is just short for all systems breaking down over time. Maybe all that can be considered "working" at a macro level, but it sucks at the micro.

I guess this is the distinction between a complex system and a complicated system.

I didn't read the article, but I read your response and it feels a bit heavy handed.

> 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.

[dead]

Is your stack really that rough?

Well said xD

> plans that cancel (or pause) without use?

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.

In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...

Kagi arguably “pauses” your subscription if you don’t use it in a month. They give you a credit at the end of the month that then applies to the next month, so that people aren’t charged if they aren’t using it.

Slack. Deactivates a seat after 28 days of inactivity. A really good practice.

edit: and obviously reactivates after activity

Uber dropped me and closed my account. They gave me warning, but I was fine with it and took no action to prevent them from doing it. The email said something about being based on no activity.

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.

Uruky [1] (a Kagi alternative, but simpler and EU-based) does this in a more intentional way: You can only pay once for a period of time (one, three, six, or twelve months), there is no subscription! If, after that period, you want to keep using it, you have to pay again.

This was mainly done for privacy reasons, so less data needs to be stored in the account (it also only uses a randomly-generated account number, like Mullvad), but honestly, we don't want people paying that don't use the service.

And you're right, it makes "making money" much harder, but also, feels more honest.

[1]: https://uruky.com

Kagi does something close to that. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#monthly-pla...

tailscale used to do this for teams ("active user billing"), but recently changed pricing models to be purely seat-based.

they had a whole webinar about it with all sorts of justification, although most of it sounded like mba-isms to me.

We take a slightly different approach for https://pico.sh -- no automatic subscription, but we charge for an entire year. It's great for us because each sub is a year and if someone truly isn't using our services then it'll quietly drift into the background for the end-user.

Tarsnap has you put money into a stored balance, and when that balance goes to zero (and after a grace period), they delete your backups.

Not exactly a subscription since it's a stored-balance system, but still.

Morning brew (the email newsletter) iirc would unsubscribe you if you didn't open their email for a while. Not a paid sub though

Xbox/Microsoft Game Pass actually automatically canceled for me when I hadn't used it.

netflix did this. I didn't use streaming for a (long) time, they turned it off. Kudos.

I’m stealing this idea!

Kagi does this

This is one of my favorite things about Mullvad VPN.

Uruky [1] (a simpler and EU-based Kagi alternative) does this! You only pay once for a period of time (one, three, six, or twelve months), and there is no subscription! If, after that period, you want to keep using it, you have to pay again.

[1]: https://uruky.com

> 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).

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.

I used to use one-off "virtual" credit card numbers for this kind of thing. My bank (MBNA, at the time) let me set a balance limit and / or expiration date. It was exceedingly handy, so the feature was axed when Chase acquired them.

For quite a few services you can get the pay-as-you-go experience by getting yourself a gift subscription.

I think it would distract from the points he's making. The article could be misread as a rant about a bad time he had, when it's actually meant to make a specific point about considering async vs sync transactions and what happens when they're combined in the same system.

And I don't believe that only one streaming service and one bank makes such mistakes.

There’s a lot of bleeding heart people like this. They add variety to the world. The downsides being things you mention, but it’s usually more palatable than someone on the other end of the spectrum.

Sometimes they're worried about getting sued.

I don't think its for moral value but rather they want to make a general point. For example Netflix couldn't care less if they were named or not named in this blog so what purpose is there to "name and shame" them? Most normal people dont even know what a request is so its not like there is any reputation damage risk here for Netflix and the author can write without any bias and talk about general tech and its shortcomings/quirks.

That is the frame of mind and seems pretty reasonable.

Seriously, download a few containers from docker, make some quick config changes, and now you have a comparable experience to these subscription services

I parked the boat, myself, for about a decade.

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).

Unfortunately that immediately terminates access for some subscriptions, such as Apple Music. :-(