Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.

If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.

Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.

It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.

Mostly coz of everything else about GCP

It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.

Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.

Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.

We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.

That makes good sense

> was within a few months of an expiring warranty

A few months inside or a few months outside?

Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.

They are if your goal is to burn their GPU time but instead of hundred requests a second you're busy solving captchas

For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.

Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!

Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"

(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)

Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1

hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.

If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!

I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)

You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol

Just saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict.

Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard.

And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....

^ This.

I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.

In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].

It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.

From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.

No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.

I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.

They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?

Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.

With an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy.

It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.

Well about 4 weeks ago I was mostly running small models. Some of my favorites were deepseek r1 8b and qwen 3.5 9b. Those are more or less good for boiler plate super fast responses(what I cared about most).

Now I am still trying out all the models that dropped this month. I am running qwen 3.6 35 a3b on a 16gb vram rtx 4060 ti.

I wish I sprung for a 24gb vram card but I never thought the price difference would matter. It seems like it does and I bet in the future there will be more models at this size because this is crazy.

It's not as good as opus if you are doing completely hands off programming but it's completely fine for me. I mostly use it for auto complete or templating a class. Other people are using it for agentic workflows with success.

Check out /r/localllama for more experiences. My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.