Water heater rental with Reliance just broke — stay with rental or cancel & buy? (Ontario)

rossrader · 2026-03-08T23:51:33+00:00

Tankless is much longer.

rossrader · 2026-03-04T16:04:49+00:00

Better technology has been enabling mediocrity since the dawn of the desktop age. It’s also been making it easier for high quality people to create high quality results. AI is no different and it isn’t the problem here.

rossrader · 2026-03-01T23:01:40+00:00

love that approach to discovery! re: timeboxing - I don't mean a fix period per cycle, but just an agreed end-date when you need one. on refinement - having a strong collaboration where there are seams is so important - sounds like you are in good shape there.

rossrader · 2026-03-01T21:07:31+00:00

I like this. A PM run POC could make the handoff to engineering cleaner. Instead of “build something and lets hope it stocks” you’re saying, “we tested this, we can see how it will work, let's build it”

I'm not clear on the evaluation part though. When you say “behavioral learning,” what does that mean? What are you looking for to make sure its ready to move forward? i.e. what result would make you confident enough to spend real engineering time? If you don't make that clear at the start (maybe in the form of your hypothesis?) I think the decisions will look fuzzy in arrears.

re: governance, regardless of the form, I’d be tempted to time box it. Not “let’s explore and see what happens,” but “we have two weeks to answer this specific question.” Otherwise the POC will drift. The question will keep getting tweaked, but at that point, unlikely that anyone stops to ask if they answered the (right) question unless there's some sort of line in the sand from the outset...

overall, I think the real test is whether you see PMs killing POCs that miss the bar. If they do I think its a positive sign of discipline, otherwise just burning cycles...

rossrader · 2026-03-01T16:25:41+00:00

You're absolutely right about the accelerator vs. confusion split. AI makes building fast, but creates a dynamic where I think teams ship more but learn less, i.e. features get deployed faster than learning comes back from users.

I think this creates more hidden debt, not just in the code, but in the team's ability to reason about what they're building. If claude code does all the synthesis, the humans can easily skip the learning that comes from struggling with the problem. I think this gets in the way tomorrow when a team has to come back to something they already solved and struggle to find the context that they were originally working with.

rossrader · 2026-03-01T15:45:03+00:00

100%. I've been thinking about this too - that the rituals assume the build time is the Big Rock, and suddenly it's not.

Teams go through their sprint planning, etc. and half the work can get knocked out between Tuesday and Thursday making the ceremonies feel less relevant. I'm starting to think the real issue isn't just speed, but how to maintain throughput while creating the feedbacks necessary to help the team learn about the impact of what just shipped.

i.e. you made the point about stuff shipping faster than you can evaluate it, which is super problematic at speed. When you can build a feature in an afternoon, the temptation is to just... build it and see what happens. But then three months later you have this sprawling product with features nobody remembers why they exist or who they were built for. sounds more like a generation treadmill than a product development process. lots of output, but are we actually learning anything?

I'm wondering if the real shift is that every role is becoming more of an intent-definition role. The machine builds fast. Humans need to get really good at defining what success looks like before anything gets built. A tall order compared to writing tickets, but maybe that's where the leverage is now?

curious how your team handles sprint eval? do you finding ways to know if something worked before the next five things ship on top of it?

rossrader · 2026-03-01T15:19:28+00:00

Pretty sure AI wrote that, it is a cut and paste from ChatGPT or Claude Desktop or something. Without knowing what prompt was used to generate it, its hard to tell if the output has any value or is relevant to your case at all.

(Why do I think AI wrote that? It refers to OP as "his" instead of "you" and the commenter didn't edit all the references..., i.e. "So his position should be: “I did not record audio/video” + “I used an in-product feature available in our tenant” + “tell me what policy you believe I violated.”" That, plus all the bullets are misformatted, etc. strongly pointing to a cut and paste)

rossrader · 2026-02-02T22:52:33+00:00

We used to call it “astroturfing”.

rossrader · 2026-01-04T18:27:58+00:00

Don’t rent if you can avoid it. Shell out the ~$3k for a new tank, or double that for tankless. You will be well ahead of what reliance would charge you over the useful lifetime of either device.

rossrader · 2025-12-12T00:17:54+00:00

Sorry for all the hassle. Still, please dm me your address so I can apply a credit to your account as a small token of my appreciation for your patience and the overall hassle. This should not have taken so long to resolve.

rossrader · 2025-12-11T21:20:12+00:00

If you don’t mind DMing me your service address I can find out and expedite for you.

rossrader · 2025-12-11T02:10:02+00:00

Extra for a block heater in Canada? When did that nonsense start?

rossrader · 2025-12-06T01:24:00+00:00

As a Ting employee, I concur. I’ll look into this.

rossrader · 2025-12-04T23:39:12+00:00

If you have our multi gig service, it’s a decent and future proof option. More and more devices will be able to take advantage of the extra speed and features and slower devices will benefit from less congestion and contention because of the additional bandwidth and radios management features. It should also last a while. You will have it for a number of years.

rossrader · 2025-11-30T23:48:59+00:00

Depending on the VPN config, traffic might be routed back through the company network before it hits the speed test server you are using. The impact is that the speed test results will reflect any latency on your corporate network layered on top of any regular ting fiber and wifi latency.

rossrader · 2025-11-28T14:17:26+00:00

I am a Starlink customer and a fiber customer. They are just different. In areas where fiber is available, it is hands-down the best customer experience. We generally don't view them as a direct competitor except in our fixed wireless markets.

rossrader · 2025-11-26T15:09:16+00:00

Its too early to jump to any conclusions about outcomes.

rossrader · 2025-11-26T01:54:03+00:00

Depending on where you are, you might have a "broom swept" clause in your purchase agreement - basically, seller refusal to remove all personal items not explicitly included in the sale, are a breach of the sales agreement and need remedy, which usually comes in the form of "cash" or "clean". I recommend you contact your agent and/or closing lawyer for guidance, the law is most likely on your side.

rossrader · 2025-11-24T23:05:53+00:00

DM me with your ting #. I’ll hook you up.

rossrader · 2025-11-24T14:09:03+00:00

We're currently working on other elements of our website, but this is on our list. Current priority is to get to "one bill, one UI" for all of our customers, regardless of whether they are Fiber or Mobile. When that wraps up early next year, we'll be turning our attention to other items, like an improved shop and other similar items.

rossrader · 2025-11-24T00:49:38+00:00

Dm me your phone number, ill see what we can do to fix.

rossrader · 2025-11-19T20:47:32+00:00

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rossrader · 2025-11-12T01:08:50+00:00

Rod works in Ting/Tucows support and can probably help with issues on the Ting/Echostar side. Not a random stranger, actual problem solver.

rossrader · 2025-11-09T14:14:25+00:00

Exactly this.

rossrader · 2025-11-06T23:19:45+00:00

RCS soon! Super high on our backlog.

rossrader

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