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?
This reminds me of the recent story where an Uber courier stole two MacBooks, there was no signature, CCTV showing no delivery, and Apple was just like "our carrier has completed the requested investigation, and no further action will be taken by Apple."
Yes, but it can be quite burdensome if your Apple account has any value to you. (Say, if you are an app developer for instance, or aren't quite sure which services you have registered with an apple email address, etc.)
given that those mac's would have been 4-5k? I sure as heck would have at least consulted a lawyer. I don't want to just lazily have my package stolen in real time.
if no one else is seeking justice, I will at least poke the blind woman a bit.
> 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 like that.
He just pulls up to the building that says FooCorp on it, says "got a delivery for FooCorp", they let him in and he accepts any name and signature from whoever is near the door.
>>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 from person X. Person X doesn't actually work here". Fedex then says "ok, prove it" - and then the receiver does, in whatever way is legally acceptable.
Edit: in fact, let me add a bit more - if the shipment was delivered to the right address just signed by someone who didn't actually work there then sure, I think FedEx would be in the clear. But they delivered the parcel to the wrong place - the fact that it was signed for by someone is almost irrelevant, it's the same as having no signature at all.
When I get a package from Mercado Libre here in Argentina they ask for my national ID number [1], take a photo of the number in the door and when it's expensive enough (USD$100?) they ask for a secret word that they send the previous day bay email. For USD$400,000 I'd expect them to do a DNA analysis :) .
[1] I'm not sure how they check the number, because they accept the ID number of anyone in the family and even the full time cleaner of the building. They type it and the app takes a second to show a green check. I guess it's a fuzzy list to prevent obvious scams.
Here in the UK Amazon gives you a code that you have to give to the driver for more expensive parcels specifically for this reason. Again doesn't seem like an outrageous thing to implement for a 400k delivery.
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).
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 went to the right address, to within the accuracy of a GPS trace. The driver got a name and signature at that time. The driver marked the delivery as successful in their computer.
Maybe they call up the driver and say "Did you deliver to the wrong address?" and the driver says "I don't think so, but I make a lot of deliveries so I can't say for sure."
Sure, in reality the pallet was dropped off in the parking lot across the road from Ship Fusion, instead of at Ship Fusion. But FedEx's records say everything is in order.
To be clear I'm not saying this is good, I'm just saying it's normal.
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.
Every time I bought an electric unicycle, it got stolen at South San Francisco branch. It is totally reproducible, happened 3 times. One time I found some higher up at FedEx on LinkedIn and sent them an InMail. The regional manager really pushed this issue to highest priority for the branch. Branch managers got CC'ed in, drivers, people working at the warehouse; it was an all hands on deck situation. They reassured me that they have cameras everywhere and it couldn't be stolen.
It was stolen. They don't know who did it. FedEx is terrible.
Would playdate be able to sue FedEx or take them to small claims court or do you sign something when you use FedEx that says you can't sue them for XYZ?
'you cannot sue us for not doing the only thing you are paying us for (delivering your goods)' sounds like an inconscionable clause. Surely any worthwhile legal system would make such clauses illegal. Otherwise many scams (fake invoicing, for example) would be essentially legal as long the perp buried a clause in a contract.
Shipment insurance is normally an optional add-on. IMO, if the shipper doesn’t get it, it is on them.
It is nicer for the shipper to decide the value and pay the corresponding price for that. Because you need to know the replacement value of that lost item. This is dependent on all kinds of factors.
Is there any scenario where someone would knowingly decide not to take insurance on a 400k shipment? What would be the reason for doing so?
In this case the shipper is the company behind the Playdate, so it seems weird to me they wouldn't insure their own stock. But maybe there's a good reason why this isn't done?
I’m not sure about Playdate, but for a larger company, it’ll be beneficial to stop paying fpr the insurance after a while — the insurance companies bank on the difference between risk tolerance for individuals and in groups. Your liquidity might not be able to survive an event that is fairly insignificant in the context of a larger group (say your house burning down — devastating for you, but zooming out to a city-level it happens occasionally).
Larger companies can develop a higher risk tolerance in-house and eliminate the middle hand, and that’ll let them siphon the excess to their shareholders rather than the insurance company.
It's not unusual to effectively self-insure for shipping.
If insurance costs you more than lost shipments, it stops making sense to pay for insurance. If insurance costs less than lost shipments, it stops making sense for the insurer to offer you insurance at that rate.
Insurance works when the loss is disruptive to your cashflow. If I can't afford to absorb that loss right now, it may be worth finding an insurer that can. If I can afford to absorb that cost, it's almost always better to leave my money working for me, than working for the insurer.
If you're shipping in volume, self-insurance almost always works out better. You can bet amazon don't insure their shipments to you. If they take the potential cost of insurance, stick it in a pot, and dip into it when there's a shipping issue - that pot should never run dry. If that pot runs dry, it means insurers are operating at a loss, and they're not going to stay in business long.
Package insurance is more of the exception than the norm, even for stuff like that. The insurance cost is proportionate to the value you claim, and it's not cheap (not like 10%, but still, for $400K, might be $1,000?). That cuts into margins, especially when you consider that you are expecting a global freight company to be able to globally deliver a basic freight item.
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
Then she asks why you spend $300 for a Gameboy when you already have a PS5 and Switch, and at this point you just get the guest room ready for yourself tonight.
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 know about it ahead of time.
- If none of the above applies, then a simple "it's a portable gaming console that I've been yearning after for ages that I finally ordered earlier today", and 9/10 times that should settle the matter.
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.
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.
Interesting choice to go with a PI who's focused on recovery rather than criminal convinctions. Given the lack of sophistication in this operation, I suspect recovery would have happened either way, and the thieves might have faced some actual consequences. As is, they didn't lose anything other than the stolen items and will likely continue to capitalize on similar opportunities in the future.
Huh, so a half-baked crime of opportunity, as opposed to a sophisticated operation.
Still unclear on how the delivery managed to get put (or taken) to the wrong side of the road at a construction site. Fedex mistake? Trickery by thief? Misdirection by thief that took them from loading-dock?
Almost certainly just a fedex mistake taking them to the wrong lot. Happens all the time. And, Hanlon's razor - never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Its pretty easy to imagine construction workers just signing for everything that arrives, and only afterwards figuring out that the address is wrong.
I suppose the key insight is that mandatory device registration really saved them. Everyone loves the concept of an entirely open device that doesn’t require this, but if Panic didn’t have registration, it would’ve been impossible to locate the devices, and end up being a $400k write off.
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.
That was amazing. I wasn't up for spending an hour listening to the podcast, but a few minute reading the article you created were well worth it. Thank you!
UPS pays their drivers very well. FedEx… does not.
I’ve had them “deliver” a bunch of PCs to a dumpster. Or drop off a laptop to a garbage can in a Manhattan office. How do I know? The courier took a picture to document the delivery.
FedEx employees in our region are consistently grumpy, unhelpful, and extremely abusive with packages.
We got video of one FedEx guy kicking retail Apple Computer boxes off the back of his big rig (destroyed 2x iMacs).
Our UPS drivers are consistently cheerful, helpful and considerate with the packages they carry.
The contrast grows dramatically if you ever suffer some misfortune that requires a phone call into corporate. FedEx is reliably crabby, unhelpful and actively belligerent.
These two companies are a perfect illustration of what happens when you make it obvious to your staff how you feel about them.
I supposed this begs the obvious question I'll ask: why? It seems like this is an easy way to make sure any and all Fedex employess are looking to jump ship to UPS or any other competitor.
UPS drivers are teamsters and are pretty committed to the company. You need to work your ass off in distribution centers and other places before you get in a truck.
When FedEx was falling behind by not having ground service, they bought another network (RPS iirc) and built out a network of contracted providers. In my area, it was the companies that did newspaper delivery. Some of them are ok, most of them suck. I think the residential delivery is all contracted, but business services are FedEx badged people in some scenarios.
UPS drivers are unionized. FedEx drivers at the local stage are a network of third party companies that contract to FedEx and put their logo on their trucks. Look at the grey fine print by the driver door.
Imagine being the thief in this case and getting stuck with an entire pallet of these weird indie handhelds that you can't fence because nobody knows what they are just hanging out on your garage.
That's not the vibe I got. For me it seemed like FedEx showed up, said they had a pallet of electronics, and the guy signed for it as a crime of opportunity. Then someone else stole some later.
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.
This is getting downvoted but I actually quite appreciated it. Story is interesting enough I'll listen to the whole podcast! I can't do that for every single podcast link that I come across. There's not enough time in the year much less the day.
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 written without AI.
If that concerns you, read the actual transcript. I honestly don’t care how accurate this is because beyond casual interest right now, I’m likely never going to think about this again.
Source for the arrest? I listened to this the other day and I don’t recall an arrest being mentioned. The podcast in fact covers that the police weren’t very much interested, which is why they got a PI involved, who got the thieves to “return” (dump in an adjacent car park) the devices simply by asking questions.
You know what, until your comment I haven't even considered that someone just copy pasted the entire transcript into ChatGPT and asked for a summary. It sucks - and I see that happening everywhere actually, especially in facebook groups, people are trying to be "helpful" by just copying output from ChatGPT or Gemini, but more often than not it's just completely wrong.
I can’t say for sure but the thing I thought was suspicious was someone saying “The episode provides an in-depth look at the challenges Panic faced during this ordeal and the measures taken to resolve the situation”. People who actually read the content and offer TL;DRs typically wouldn’t include statements like these that are basically just fluff.
Yeah - I don't have an hour to listen to the podcast or read the transcript. I got an AI to summarise the article and it saved me the time, I thought someone else might appreciate the summary (and it appears they did).
Perhaps next time I'll add TL;got-an-llm-to-do-it or something
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?
This reminds me of the recent story where an Uber courier stole two MacBooks, there was no signature, CCTV showing no delivery, and Apple was just like "our carrier has completed the requested investigation, and no further action will be taken by Apple."
Back in the old days Apple Security was ruthless about tracking down lost hardware https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/01/apple-sta...
These days you have to beg them to take their proprietary prototype hardware back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgeEHdAmJDg
I mean, I'm sure Apple's still the same for their own stuff.
But retail is a whole different beast.
I followed that story and something seemed off. Not that the person was lying, but something felt left out.
Apple and Uber know driver who the order was given to and the police are involved but they also haven’t been able to do anything? Just seems odd.
I’ve had trade ins go missing and after a short investigation Apple has always credited me.
When you're the one making the rules, enforcing them and judging who breaks them, you can basically do whatever you want as long as you pay taxes :)
As long as you properly plan your taxes to 0.
And the jury's still out on that last bit.
Wouldn't the right course of action in that case be to issue a chargeback and let Apple and Uber fight it out?
Yes, but it can be quite burdensome if your Apple account has any value to you. (Say, if you are an app developer for instance, or aren't quite sure which services you have registered with an apple email address, etc.)
I wonder if this tunes changes once lawyers are involved
given that those mac's would have been 4-5k? I sure as heck would have at least consulted a lawyer. I don't want to just lazily have my package stolen in real time.
if no one else is seeking justice, I will at least poke the blind woman a bit.
> 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 like that.
He just pulls up to the building that says FooCorp on it, says "got a delivery for FooCorp", they let him in and he accepts any name and signature from whoever is near the door.
>>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 from person X. Person X doesn't actually work here". Fedex then says "ok, prove it" - and then the receiver does, in whatever way is legally acceptable.
Edit: in fact, let me add a bit more - if the shipment was delivered to the right address just signed by someone who didn't actually work there then sure, I think FedEx would be in the clear. But they delivered the parcel to the wrong place - the fact that it was signed for by someone is almost irrelevant, it's the same as having no signature at all.
When I get a package from Mercado Libre here in Argentina they ask for my national ID number [1], take a photo of the number in the door and when it's expensive enough (USD$100?) they ask for a secret word that they send the previous day bay email. For USD$400,000 I'd expect them to do a DNA analysis :) .
[1] I'm not sure how they check the number, because they accept the ID number of anyone in the family and even the full time cleaner of the building. They type it and the app takes a second to show a green check. I guess it's a fuzzy list to prevent obvious scams.
Here in the UK Amazon gives you a code that you have to give to the driver for more expensive parcels specifically for this reason. Again doesn't seem like an outrageous thing to implement for a 400k delivery.
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).
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 went to the right address, to within the accuracy of a GPS trace. The driver got a name and signature at that time. The driver marked the delivery as successful in their computer.
Maybe they call up the driver and say "Did you deliver to the wrong address?" and the driver says "I don't think so, but I make a lot of deliveries so I can't say for sure."
Sure, in reality the pallet was dropped off in the parking lot across the road from Ship Fusion, instead of at Ship Fusion. But FedEx's records say everything is in order.
To be clear I'm not saying this is good, I'm just saying it's normal.
Everything in the world runs on trust. It's human nature.
It's kind of overwhelming when you stop and really think about it.
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.
Every time I bought an electric unicycle, it got stolen at South San Francisco branch. It is totally reproducible, happened 3 times. One time I found some higher up at FedEx on LinkedIn and sent them an InMail. The regional manager really pushed this issue to highest priority for the branch. Branch managers got CC'ed in, drivers, people working at the warehouse; it was an all hands on deck situation. They reassured me that they have cameras everywhere and it couldn't be stolen.
It was stolen. They don't know who did it. FedEx is terrible.
Would playdate be able to sue FedEx or take them to small claims court or do you sign something when you use FedEx that says you can't sue them for XYZ?
'you cannot sue us for not doing the only thing you are paying us for (delivering your goods)' sounds like an inconscionable clause. Surely any worthwhile legal system would make such clauses illegal. Otherwise many scams (fake invoicing, for example) would be essentially legal as long the perp buried a clause in a contract.
$400k is quite a bit more than they typically let you pursue in small claims court :)
In this economy? Don't worry just give it 20 years ;)
Shipment insurance is normally an optional add-on. IMO, if the shipper doesn’t get it, it is on them.
It is nicer for the shipper to decide the value and pay the corresponding price for that. Because you need to know the replacement value of that lost item. This is dependent on all kinds of factors.
Is there any scenario where someone would knowingly decide not to take insurance on a 400k shipment? What would be the reason for doing so?
In this case the shipper is the company behind the Playdate, so it seems weird to me they wouldn't insure their own stock. But maybe there's a good reason why this isn't done?
I’m not sure about Playdate, but for a larger company, it’ll be beneficial to stop paying fpr the insurance after a while — the insurance companies bank on the difference between risk tolerance for individuals and in groups. Your liquidity might not be able to survive an event that is fairly insignificant in the context of a larger group (say your house burning down — devastating for you, but zooming out to a city-level it happens occasionally).
Larger companies can develop a higher risk tolerance in-house and eliminate the middle hand, and that’ll let them siphon the excess to their shareholders rather than the insurance company.
It's not unusual to effectively self-insure for shipping.
If insurance costs you more than lost shipments, it stops making sense to pay for insurance. If insurance costs less than lost shipments, it stops making sense for the insurer to offer you insurance at that rate.
Insurance works when the loss is disruptive to your cashflow. If I can't afford to absorb that loss right now, it may be worth finding an insurer that can. If I can afford to absorb that cost, it's almost always better to leave my money working for me, than working for the insurer.
If you're shipping in volume, self-insurance almost always works out better. You can bet amazon don't insure their shipments to you. If they take the potential cost of insurance, stick it in a pot, and dip into it when there's a shipping issue - that pot should never run dry. If that pot runs dry, it means insurers are operating at a loss, and they're not going to stay in business long.
Package insurance is more of the exception than the norm, even for stuff like that. The insurance cost is proportionate to the value you claim, and it's not cheap (not like 10%, but still, for $400K, might be $1,000?). That cuts into margins, especially when you consider that you are expecting a global freight company to be able to globally deliver a basic freight item.
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
Then you say "it's a handheld gaming device" and the matter is settled.
Then she asks why you spend $300 for a Gameboy when you already have a PS5 and Switch, and at this point you just get the guest room ready for yourself tonight.
Then you spend days on end winding the crank, endlessly ..
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 know about it ahead of time. - If none of the above applies, then a simple "it's a portable gaming console that I've been yearning after for ages that I finally ordered earlier today", and 9/10 times that should settle the matter.
It does feel very reddit-esque the comment, because it seems a tad like an interesting yarn to farm attention without having content of substance.
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.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Playdates
Interesting choice to go with a PI who's focused on recovery rather than criminal convinctions. Given the lack of sophistication in this operation, I suspect recovery would have happened either way, and the thieves might have faced some actual consequences. As is, they didn't lose anything other than the stolen items and will likely continue to capitalize on similar opportunities in the future.
Huh, so a half-baked crime of opportunity, as opposed to a sophisticated operation.
Still unclear on how the delivery managed to get put (or taken) to the wrong side of the road at a construction site. Fedex mistake? Trickery by thief? Misdirection by thief that took them from loading-dock?
Almost certainly just a fedex mistake taking them to the wrong lot. Happens all the time. And, Hanlon's razor - never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Its pretty easy to imagine construction workers just signing for everything that arrives, and only afterwards figuring out that the address is wrong.
I suppose the key insight is that mandatory device registration really saved them. Everyone loves the concept of an entirely open device that doesn’t require this, but if Panic didn’t have registration, it would’ve been impossible to locate the devices, and end up being a $400k write off.
Love this quote in particular:
> Thanks so much for listening, and please don’t steal our Playdates. Because we will find you.
Allegedly.
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.
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.
That was amazing. I wasn't up for spending an hour listening to the podcast, but a few minute reading the article you created were well worth it. Thank you!
wait FedEx just delivers 400k worth of stuff without any KYC or OTP verification??
UPS pays their drivers very well. FedEx… does not.
I’ve had them “deliver” a bunch of PCs to a dumpster. Or drop off a laptop to a garbage can in a Manhattan office. How do I know? The courier took a picture to document the delivery.
FedEx employees in our region are consistently grumpy, unhelpful, and extremely abusive with packages.
We got video of one FedEx guy kicking retail Apple Computer boxes off the back of his big rig (destroyed 2x iMacs).
Our UPS drivers are consistently cheerful, helpful and considerate with the packages they carry.
The contrast grows dramatically if you ever suffer some misfortune that requires a phone call into corporate. FedEx is reliably crabby, unhelpful and actively belligerent.
These two companies are a perfect illustration of what happens when you make it obvious to your staff how you feel about them.
I supposed this begs the obvious question I'll ask: why? It seems like this is an easy way to make sure any and all Fedex employess are looking to jump ship to UPS or any other competitor.
UPS drivers are teamsters and are pretty committed to the company. You need to work your ass off in distribution centers and other places before you get in a truck.
When FedEx was falling behind by not having ground service, they bought another network (RPS iirc) and built out a network of contracted providers. In my area, it was the companies that did newspaper delivery. Some of them are ok, most of them suck. I think the residential delivery is all contracted, but business services are FedEx badged people in some scenarios.
UPS drivers are unionized. FedEx drivers at the local stage are a network of third party companies that contract to FedEx and put their logo on their trucks. Look at the grey fine print by the driver door.
I get the impression business-to-business shipping is a lot more informal... somehow.
Strange things are afoot at the circle k.
Imagine being the thief in this case and getting stuck with an entire pallet of these weird indie handhelds that you can't fence because nobody knows what they are just hanging out on your garage.
It seemed it was a planned thing, so probably not a big surprise.
That's not the vibe I got. For me it seemed like FedEx showed up, said they had a pallet of electronics, and the guy signed for it as a crime of opportunity. Then someone else stole some later.
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Thanks. I don’t have time to listen and reading a transcript of casual conversation is awful.
Here's a better version, with images, in the style of a traditional print newspaper 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.
This is getting downvoted but I actually quite appreciated it. Story is interesting enough I'll listen to the whole podcast! I can't do that for every single podcast link that I come across. There's not enough time in the year much less the day.
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 written without AI.
Your summary is fine. That's different from what the OP of this thread posted.
If that concerns you, read the actual transcript. I honestly don’t care how accurate this is because beyond casual interest right now, I’m likely never going to think about this again.
Yeah, hn will just downvote anything with the word ai-generated in it blindly.
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Source for the arrest? I listened to this the other day and I don’t recall an arrest being mentioned. The podcast in fact covers that the police weren’t very much interested, which is why they got a PI involved, who got the thieves to “return” (dump in an adjacent car park) the devices simply by asking questions.
I’m guessing the AI hallucinated it.
You know what, until your comment I haven't even considered that someone just copy pasted the entire transcript into ChatGPT and asked for a summary. It sucks - and I see that happening everywhere actually, especially in facebook groups, people are trying to be "helpful" by just copying output from ChatGPT or Gemini, but more often than not it's just completely wrong.
I can’t say for sure but the thing I thought was suspicious was someone saying “The episode provides an in-depth look at the challenges Panic faced during this ordeal and the measures taken to resolve the situation”. People who actually read the content and offer TL;DRs typically wouldn’t include statements like these that are basically just fluff.
Yeah - I don't have an hour to listen to the podcast or read the transcript. I got an AI to summarise the article and it saved me the time, I thought someone else might appreciate the summary (and it appears they did).
Perhaps next time I'll add TL;got-an-llm-to-do-it or something
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the TLDR seems to be incorrect
Surprised by HN again. 1st Place „Story“, wanted to read because no headphones with me, ending up reading a podcast transcript, and TL,DR out.
I read it all just now, I quite enjoyed it. Its not my preferred format to read but it wasn't bad
The transcript was a good read, I also don’t prefer audio.
Admittedly I can skim read quite well though.
I found it a miserable read. It’s a pain to get through all the tic words and aborted sentences, I gave up very soon after starting.
I read it for lunch yesterday. It wasn’t that bad.