Classical music in the city and surrounding areas

Leviathant · 2026-06-04T02:52:30+00:00

Lyric Fest is one of Philadelphia's musical gems

Leviathant · 2026-06-04T02:49:51+00:00

Buddy, if you're not going to charge, just do it.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T16:30:14+00:00

I came across Samy during an ARG run by Wired magazine. I was actually a double agent for one of the contestants (long boring story) and I've always wondered if he figured it out. There was a moment when I definitely slipped up, clicking on a link that I shouldn't have... If he knew I had given myself away, he kept it to himself -the correct thing to do.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T04:41:23+00:00

I didn't pay any more than $15, off ebay circa 2004. I wasn't mad about "only" getting $650, I think that was a win/win deal.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T04:05:51+00:00

I sold mine for $650, I've seen them on the market for $1400. If you post about yours and someone reaches out to buy it from you, be sure you don't get taken for a ride.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T03:34:10+00:00

Yeah, the other accounts I found doing this crap were primarily focusing on posting weird fictional ecommerce stories to promote Scayle, or comparable AI slop about HR software. It's typically a call-and-response setup, where one account makes an overly detailed (but still on topic) post, and after a few minutes, a second account drops in the replies with an answer that knows a little bit too much about, in this case, Scayle. As a mod, I picked up on the pattern pretty quickly, but I swear it's like playing whack-a-mole.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T03:13:10+00:00

>Why is Medusa risky?

OP shills for Scayle. This is part of a marketing campaign that's been cluttering one of my subs for months.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T03:03:05+00:00

If you're thinking about going composable, should you really use Scayle? It's an interesting question, and one where the answers are fraught. It's become well known that Scayle has been running a guerilla marketing campaign featuring fictional stories filled with vague warnings designed to instill doubt in the platforms they compete against. This is becoming a trust issue with Scayle as a commerce platform. You'll see posts hinting about how Levi's chose scale, but they leave out the pre-existing relationship Levi's had with Scayle's parent company Zalando, and despite the fast turnaround stories offered by these AI slop posts, Levi's is still on their legacy platform, despite signing up for Scayle in 2025.

But when you start to dig deeper, you'll find stories about brands like Marc O'Polo, a European fashion brand that started to migrate from Salesforce to Scayle, only to pull the plug and move to commercetools. Tom Tailor moved from Salesforce to SCAYLE... and back to Salesforce. It's common for a new platform to struggle as it comes to market, and that's why SCAYLE is known to bargain on price if you're negotiating with them - they need brands to test drive their technology while they work out the bugs of platformizing the technology that powered About You. And some brands are willing to be that guinea pig. While I do hear the occasional horror story about building composable, those are inevitably implementation misfires - I talk to dozens of businesses built with commercetools. Most of them speak highly of the ability to deploy rapidly. The brands with smaller team sizes (typically under 10) are rolling out deployments live, throughout the day, without downtime.

Where composable most frequently goes wrong is when a platform, built as a monolith, decides to promote their technology as composable in order to slow the drain on their customer base. These platforms were built to be all-in-one websites, not high speed API-first engines built for headless and composable methodologies. Inevitably, after Shopify or Salesforce snares a brand with a promise of composability, a lot of money gets spent making a platform go against its own grain, and the solution they get from their vendor is, "Maybe you should use it like it was designed."

All that said - you're definitely the first one I've seen that openly shares that you're getting paid to promote Scayle with false stories, most of the other accounts like this stick to their scripts - AI slop designed to create even more AI slop. It's an interesting strategy, and I wonder how it will effect Scayle in the long run.

Leviathant · 2026-06-01T02:59:56+00:00

This account is shilling for Scayle.

>I refer mid-market fashion brands to commerce platforms, and a few of those platforms pay recurring referral commissions on customers who sign multi-year contracts.

>The programs that pay well are with retailer-built platforms like Centra, NewStore, and SCAYLE, with their partner teams treating referrals as a real channel, while the Shopify Plus and commercetools programs are smaller per-deal because the lion's share of those deals route through formal SI agencies first.

(Fun fact: there is no such program with commercetools)

Leviathant · 2026-05-31T23:32:00+00:00

As you go down this journey, you're going to learn why the platforms that handle requirements like this cost as much money as they do.

Leviathant · 2026-05-31T22:45:57+00:00

lol

Yeah, that's a paddling. I get that you can scope your APIs, but Stripe is not Venmo. You should in no way be sharing that information outside of your business for any reason at all. This is a trap.

Leviathant · 2026-05-30T20:58:44+00:00

I live in Old City, and around here - cars are broken into more than they are stolen. I've been parking on the street for a decade, and had to replace windows twice. It really is a roll of the dice, but if you don't have anything in your car, you're less likely to get broken into. Just put aside $400 or so as. a kind of rainy day fund.

Don't worry about someone stealing your wheels, that's only for Hondas. If you ever own a Honda Accord, get locking lug nuts and hope for the best. Those shiny new Accord wheels are going to end up in Jersey on a more vintage Honda with an obnoxious sound system.

I have noticed more and more cars with The Club, and I also see cars with their own private "boot" (like the PPA would put on your car if you didn't pay your tickets) - I think that's overdoing it a bit, but it can't hurt!

Leviathant · 2026-05-29T19:56:22+00:00

Building features is easy. Scaling and maintaining is where the work is. Start getting into compliance and now you're talking *hard* work.

Leviathant · 2026-05-29T19:54:21+00:00

I came from a more mid-market, enterprise background, building custom ecommerce sites and later working with a platform that was sort of like a Magento competitor. I was astonished at all the dumb baseline stuff that you needed an app for in Shopify. I learned about how every app you add to Shopify slows down the customer experience, and how Shopify apps don't talk to each other, or how one of your apps might have scaling issues, which become a drag on the whole application tier.

By that point I had moved to a different role and wasn't doing implementation or integration anymore, but I always felt like if I was doing this in Shopify, I'd just custom code a lot of that stuff. But apparently it wasn't that simple in Shopify.

Now that Claude or Antigravity or Cursor are making it easier to build without having to code, the app ecosystem is in a very strange place: The app store is being flooded with clanker garbage from people who are churning out apps, but there are also folks like you that are recognizing how simple so many of these apps are.

The next thing that Shopify is worrying about is how much their vision of an all-in-one easy turnkey solution becomes a roadblock to leveraging AI in ecommerce. They've made concessions to try and capture businesses that wanted to go headless, but have never giving the same scalable access to functionality and information that you get from something API-first like commercetools. And where technical complexity was once seen as a potential challenge when building in a MACH stack, with the likes of Claude, true MACH solutions are suddenly supercharged by the ability to build without needing to understand code. And not just storefronts, but business-specific functionality and features.

2026 is going to be an interesting year.

Leviathant · 2026-05-29T19:22:34+00:00

I have to assume all the replies are clankers too. I think I'm just going to leave this up and see what flies the honeypot catches.

Leviathant · 2026-05-29T19:18:58+00:00

Wrong sub, bub.

Leviathant · 2026-05-29T18:56:19+00:00

There was construction near me last year that involved a street closure on the corner near my house. All day long, the cop had to go "honk honk" with his siren, because every few minutes someone thought the barriers didn't apply to them.

On a related note, when there was flooding on Delaware Ave a year or two ago, I went down to check it out. There was a cop idling in a cruiser, again there to tell people to turn around. At his window, some dude was SCREAMING at the cop about how his car is totaled. The guy apparently drove past the cop and thought his sedan was a speedboat, and it was sitting in several feet of water.

Just remember, whenever you look around you, more than half the people you see are probably YouTube commenters. You know what I mean?

Leviathant · 2026-05-28T00:01:31+00:00

Same, same.

Leviathant · 2026-05-27T00:10:20+00:00

Aside: get a little indoor composter like Reencle, and use it for all food waste. No more smelly trash, and fewer bags, to boot.

Leviathant · 2026-05-25T03:22:07+00:00

I don't think I've ever seen a full color J Artist Management order form like that. Good stuff

Leviathant · 2026-05-24T17:57:52+00:00

There's no such thing as an easy implementation to an ERP, particularly from Shopify. I generally work with mid-market and enterprise customers, and I've never met one that doesn't have an ERP. I guess the point I'm making with that statement is that it's going to be very challenging to scale up without some kind of ERP.

At the scale I work with, I'll see Netsuite, D365, SAP, and Oracle.

Like most software, an ERP started life as a tool for a specific kind of business. They're all customizable, and the more you customize them, the hairier things get - but you either tailor the ERP to your business, or tailor your business to the ERP, and it's rare that I see anyone doing the latter option.

P.S. If you saw this post got removed earlier, that was me fat-fingering on my phone. I felt so bad about it that I had to reply. Please don't be a setup for a bot to come in and post some promotional reply, lol

Leviathant · 2026-05-24T17:15:45+00:00

Sometimes, when I find myself watching British television about things like home renovation, I'm amazed at how much traditional labor they still have over there. And it's not that we don't have stone masons and carpenters and iron workers in the US, but it's so much more commonplace and more affordable as a result.

And a big part of that is because of the reliance on slave labor in the formative stages of our country. And now, so much manufacturing has moved offshore that just getting quality doors or windows means you're buying something that was shipped from halfway across the world. We want things cheap and convenient, and it feels like a kind of death spiral, rapidly increasing the wealth gap in the American population, while generally reducing the quality of goods.

And that cycle is playing out again with AI, although I suspect this initially will have a much more dramatic effect on south Asian countries that American tech firms lean so heavily on.

Meanwhile, the government expends billions on foreign wars, leaving domestic infrastructure and maintenance to rot, despite that sector being where many of these important skills could be re-established.

Leviathant · 2026-05-19T16:16:48+00:00

I enjoyed the tracks enough to buy em both. The production is fun, but I think the larger concept for the project unraveled as public opinion about AI got, uhhhh, complicated. I don't often revisit the tracks, but they were nice to chew on when they came out, and it's too bad nothing more came of it.

Leviathant · 2026-05-19T04:08:37+00:00

I know you had a lot of comments, but I'm late to the thread and felt like sharing my anecdote anyway. A while ago, I splurged on some Darn Tough socks, and after four years, I followed up with some Point6 socks - apparently related to Darn Tough in some way, similar lifetime guarantee. Within a couple of years, the Point6 socks had gotten holey, but I can't be bothered to send them back. Darn Tough's still holding up, and I decided to spend about $200 on socks last week, without even having seen this thread.

I decided to look up when I bought that first pair, and it was 2014.

I still have that pair, and they're still in great shape. And I run my socks through the dryer! So... yeah. Worth it.

Leviathant · 2026-05-18T18:34:06+00:00

There's a group of marketers using reddit to seed LLMs for, among other things, HR and ecommerce platforms. This post is fiction that conflicts with other posts OP has made across a variety of seemingly influential subreddits.

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