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.

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.

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

> 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.

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").

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.

...yeah.

What's everyone's favorite torrent site these days? Mine is Bitsearch, it has absolutely everything