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Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

podcast.play.date

91–100 of 106 posts

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#91
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't surprising at all if you have every had an interaction with Fedex.

FWIW, I've had really good interactions with FedEx for the most part. Including for Apple hardware, where I had a FedEx driver pull into the end of my long driveway, wait 5 seconds and then leave. They marked the signature-required MacBook Air as "undeliverable, nobody home", while I was in fact home and waiting for the delivery. Called the local FedEx hub and they sent the driver back to me.

Sounds like you had a pretty bad experience with FedEx then.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN tells personal stories all the time. I think they just wanted to tell a little joke about how suspicious the word "PlayDate" sounds out of context. I don't think it's so egregious to warrant the 3rd degree. If anything, the overscrutinizing on an innocent story feels more reddit-esque to me.

Its actually 100% true! It happened no more than a minute before I made the post. I am nowhere near funny enough to make that stuff up :D

I found it cute. I'm sorry some people are so cynical.

I put it as simple as this: what is the maximum harm I have for believing this story vs just chucking and moving on? I see zero risk so trying to join this odd callout fake culture is more disruptive than leaving it be.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#93
post #45

I summarized the transcript into an article: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/1e1254bf207c4d98862e040136... Not sure if it helps anyone else, but for me it made the story a lot easier to grasp. I wrote most of it by hand, using an LLM just for a rough outline which I then manually rewrote line by line, streamlined, removed hallucinations, double-checked all quotes, reordered and added images and links.

Honestly original article is way more interesting and nuanced. I'm afraid LLM version is too short and while technically correct definitely feels like dry list of random facts from transcription.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where to put it though. > Thanks so much for alledgedly listening > please don’t alledgedly steal our Playdates. > please don’t steal our alledged Playdates. > Because we will alledgedly find you.

Allegedly because we will find you.

Allegedly because we will allegedly find allegedly you.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#95
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's AI generated, how do I know if it's accurate? It could be making up the whole thing.

That's why you should combine AI and manual work. AI is great to get a rough template for a story, or to rephrase sentences. Take a look at the revision history of my summary (linked elsewhere in this thread). In the end I had to replace all the quotes and rewrite half of the paragraphs to make sure everything's factually correct, but the end result still has much better tone and phrasing than anything I could've wri…

Your summary is fine. That's different from what the OP of this thread posted.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've ordered expensive things from Amazon to my office in the US and they did the whole code ritual... the driver just dumped it at the door and ran. It's all for show.

Over here I was definitely told by Amazon drivers that unless they type in the code it won't mark the parcel as delivered. The same with GPS trace - unless they are within ~100m of the destination it won't let them actually mark it as delivered. Maybe your driver didn't care about having missing parcels at the end of the day, but the system is strict about it(again, over here, maybe Amazon US is different).

It must be, because I got the "delivered" message and found it sitting outside our door on the floor.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If a driver is delivering a pallet to the FooCorp warehouse, he doesn't get given a copy of the FooCorp org chart, or get an example signature to compare against the signature they're given, or get given a map or a secret password or anything like that. Obviously. But if there is 400 grand on the line, you'd think someone would actually check(when the claim is made). The receiver would say "you have a signature fro…

Better controlled delivery services presumably exist for things like delivering cash to banks, drugs to pharmacies and suchlike. Hell, there are food delivery companies where the customer gets a secret code they have to give to the driver. As far as FedEx is concerned, though? They were not contracted to get any specific name or signature. They were contracted to deliver to a certain address. The GPS says the driver…

If you look at the map, Shipfusion is 4350 North 5th Street, North Las Vegas. The Circle K is literally next door, on the intersection of North 5th Street and East Craig Road. See https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wz6iNaViGf3ToM1U6.

I think what happened here is that the FedEx driver was in such a hurry to drop off that he saw a bunch of people apparently outside Shipfusion, stopped and said 'Hey, delivery for you', rather than going and finding the proper entrance to the loading dock. And to be fair, that's the corner with the company logo on it - looking at Google Streetview I can't see a logo at the back of the building where the loading dock is!

And to be even more fair to the driver, they are often given utterly unrealistic amounts of time to drive to the next drop, or to complete the drop. They can only complete their rounds by cutting corners.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#98
post #57

I wanted to buy a playdate when they first came out, but unfortunately they weren't shipping to my country. Now they do, so I just placed an order 15 mins ago and my partner just received a call from the bank to verify that it wasn't a fraudulent transaction. She just asked me - what is this "play date" you just sent $300 to? Oh dear. :D

This comment fells too reddit esque for me, as if it's crafted to solicit upvotes or "facebook up, hit your lawyer and delete the gym" style comments. - Why is your partner getting the call from the bank when you placed the order? - If it's a shared account, why would you not forewarn your partner about this transaction? If I'm about to buy pay for something big from our joint account, I sure as hell let my partner k…

It's not that serious.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#99
post #93
post #45

I summarized the transcript into an article: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/1e1254bf207c4d98862e040136... Not sure if it helps anyone else, but for me it made the story a lot easier to grasp. I wrote most of it by hand, using an LLM just for a rough outline which I then manually rewrote line by line, streamlined, removed hallucinations, double-checked all quotes, reordered and added images and links.

Honestly original article is way more interesting and nuanced. I'm afraid LLM version is too short and while technically correct definitely feels like dry list of random facts from transcription.

> original article is way more interesting and nuanced

Oh I don't disagree in the slightest, after all it's basically an interview full of personal experiences and anecdotes.

But HN already has a problem with people commenting without reading the article, even if that article is relatively short. With an hour-long podcast episode or a transcript stuffed with filler words and partial sentences it's even worse.

> I'm afraid LLM version is too short and while technically correct definitely feels like dry list of random facts from transcription

Well, the LLM summary was a lot more thrilling and entertaining than my version. Sadly, it was also wrong and full of hallucinations.

Re: Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds

#100

The thing that surprised me the most about it is that FedEx didn't just pay them the 400k for lost shipment. They had all the proof that it was lost, all that Fedex had was a signature of someone who doesn't even work at their fulfilment centre. Even after their "higher ups" got involved all that FedEx could do was "huh, sucks to be you I guess?" Does freight shipment not have insurance? What's going on here?

> all that Fedex had was a signature of someone who doesn't even work at their fulfilment centre. [...] What's going on here? Basically a lot of global logistics runs on trust. If a driver is delivering a pallet to the FooCorp warehouse, he doesn't get given a copy of the FooCorp org chart, or get an example signature to compare against the signature they're given, or get given a map or a secret password or anything…

The article you're commenting on mentions that FedEx didn't deliver the pallets of handhelds to the warehouse, but instead left them at an unrelated construction site next door. This is clearly FedEx's fault, they didn't even deliver to the correct address.
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