Ian M Rountree
@ianmrountree.com
240 followers 180 following 180 posts
Copywriter, fiction writer, spreadsheet enthusiast. Executive Director @ LITE Winnipeg www.ianmrountree.com
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Reposted by Ian M Rountree
ianmrountree.com
From The Stone Circle: Navar said he'd DM but never showed up, so Grantes did it. Everyone else is a murder hobo, especially Flynn.

Ril wants to metagame and optimize, but he wants to fit in more, so he ungas the most bunga out of all of them.
ianmrountree.com
From Empyrean Sword: Cal decided to DM because he has nothing but time to prepare and is bored.

Grev looks like the meta gamer but is actually party mom. Rook is the lone murder hobo. Laiet just rolls dice and everyone tells her the result was good even if it's a nat 1 because that's fun too.
cometkins.bsky.social
Your characters are playing in a DnD campaign! Who’s DMing, who’s one second from murder hoboing, who’s having to be party mom, and who’s making sure there’s enough snacks? #WritingPrompt
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
ramiismail.com
One of the wildest issues AI creates is that it makes people who shouldn't do things they don't understand, do those exact things believing they understand.
cait.bsky.social
guy in a legal advice reddit wants to know how to get out of paying google the money he owes them after vibe coding one of his apps into running 40 times a second for several days straight, but says it's not his fault bc they should have stopped him by making it harder to use
r/LegalAdviceUK u/ShavedAp3 • 3d
Join
Google want to charge me 7 k for API access what can I do as they are denying appeals
Debt & Money
Hi there and thanks for reading.
I tried to keep this brief and just ended up rambling on trying to get as much in as possible so here is my edited hopefully a lot smaller problem.
Google are charging me 7k for a mistake that I told them about within a day, the bill went from about £45 to 16k in a day! when I asked for help I was told "dont worry well reset it as a one off, you'll need to put measures in place and ill guide you through those after you agree" So i did he then said "I will monitor it for a further 24 - 48 hours and then tell you how to put the measures in place. " Less than 24 hours later the bill was now 23k and I found out how to stop it myself. Then came the long back and forth to get it reset.
Fast forward 5 months they have finally given me a 20k credit but with VAT the total bill at the time of the credit was 27k
The 20k would have cleared the costs at the time of making them aware they claim its both our responsibilities to monitor costs I feel I did that by contacting them as soon as I saw the irregularity.
I asked them to reconsider they said no the appeal has said that is their final offer so 1 now owe 7k.
Is there anything I can do here from a legal standpoint. I don't have 7k I barely have £45.
Thanks for reading I am in England if it helps. Intentional or not, OP used either 36k (16 + 20) or 43k (16 + 27) of API credit. Obviously what API it is matters, but with google maps, 16k would equate to ten million pulls. Or two hundred thousand Gemini 2.5 calls with 1000 token input and 5k token output.
Those aren't numbers that something running correctly should run up for any average person or company. So either google screwed up something (which is unlikely that it would only happen to one person in the entire network) or OP has some app or something which isn't running properly and is sending too much to the API.
Edit: It was OP's app, polling google maps nearly 40 times a second for days.

tom_watts • 3d
According to other posts he ended up polling Google maps direction API 2300 times per minute for a few days. Looks like a combination of OP not knowing coding and asking ChatGPT to do it for him, and potentially Google's backend doing something weird in interpreting the janky code.
•••
146 ShavedAp3 OP • 3d
Even if that was the case and it wasn't the sign up process doesn't have the documentation I refer to.
Funnily enough though asking an LLM to help me find it still took some digging after it did.
If you work in the field im sure its easy but those just tinkering or learning not so much.
If google didnt want people like me using it they could make it far harder to do so, they could have hard limits in place for sole users to prevent stuff like this and so many other things.
Should they well clearly they don't think so and no doubt you agree that doesn't make it the right opinion it just makes it yours.
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ianmrountree.com
Duty comes in different ways. Grev is dutiful to his father's legacy; his twin more so to the House's actual place in their home nation.

The elder brothers? Ambitious enough to leave the House behind, for different reasons.
ianmrountree.com
Grevault has a twin, who shows in in the first book. He also has two elder brothers, -neither of whom- show up in books 1 or 2 (if I follow the current plan), but a cousin does.

His family being so split up is a plot point. He and his twin are the ones dutiful to their House; the others, less so.
cometkins.bsky.social
Does your MC have any siblings? Are they part of the story? What are they like? #WritingPrompt
ianmrountree.com
Ask a chef who loves their craft if they'd rather be whisking up dry-powder smoothies, because it solves nutrition.

Ask a model kit builder why they don't just buy figurines, despite that being a different hobby entirely.

That's how "Wouldn't you rather have the plagiarism machine do it" sounds.
faineg.bsky.social
there’s this weird idea a lot of people seem to have about how all of us writers and artists must secretly want to use AI and are merely resisting temptation for ethical reasons, and like, no, it’s not hard for me to resist drinking the bowl of Piss With Glass In It actually
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
dieworkwear.bsky.social
“A second inflatable frog has now been spotted wiggling through Portland.”
Marco Rubio whispers into Donald Trump's ear.
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
anildash.com
I get why TechCrunch would write it this way, but I largely disagree with this framing. The broad conversation here is about power, respect, control and whether the voices of the vulnerable are taken seriously. This is the story of a leader and a team showing that they don’t get that.
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
jordanjamboree.bsky.social
Happy 30th anniversary to treatment resistant depression
catsuka.bsky.social
Happy 30th anniversary to Evangelion (first aired on October 4, 1995).
ianmrountree.com
Worship changes over time. Before (the event), there was a pantheistic approach, with a panoply of cults and churches and household gods systems.

After, -only- the creator, or its first child the god of order, are worshipped in a more "usual" congregational style.
ianmrountree.com
The creator is a visible, tangible *thing* - a gas giant planet the world co-orbits with. It's easily visible.

The pantheon, before (an event) was embodied as the gas giant's moons. One, the goddess of magic, was slain and became rings around the creator, hiding the other gods within her remains.
cometkins.bsky.social
Are there any gods and/or pantheons in your book/wip? What are they like? What role do they play in the world? How are they worshiped? #WritingPrompt
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
leena.reuben.games
increasingly convinced preventing americans from getting their little packages is the thing that will take this government down
adamrose.bsky.social
How bad are tariffs going?

I paid for $32 of shaving cream from Canada. Unique stuff I’ve used for years, nothing like it in US. Small family business.

UPS guy came to my door today with box and said I have to pay additional $120 before he can hand it to me.

That makes it 5x more expensive!!! 🤯
Screenshot of message from UPS:

Hi Adam,
All import fees must be paid prior to delivery.
Save time - prepay online for your FREIGHTCOM shipment. If import fees are not paid before delivery, an additional surcharge will be applied.
Total Amount Due
119.20 USD
Additional charges may have been applied based on recent tariff policy changes.
Pay Now ›
ianmrountree.com
ITT: This site's CEO explains why they won't ban someone whose sole use for this site is building a system of harassment.
jay.bsky.team
Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their mind.
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
spice8rack.bsky.social
Imagine being the CEO of a company that solely exists, & attracts investment, because a critical mass of people abandoned your competitor over bigotry. Now imagine crashing out publicly & asserting your userbase has no value to you because you don't want to eject a specific & named bigot.
jay.bsky.team
Are you paying us? Where?
ianmrountree.com
This made me go and reread my (glowing and, sadly, pretentious as hell) review of Average is Over from *ten years ago* and remove it from my website.
laurajedeed.bsky.social
I'm sorry: "if I wish to see a virgin on-screen"?
My Favorite Actress Is Not Human
Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That’s because she’s AI.

A picture of some AI girl standing on an AI landscape with an AI monster behind her. I'm gonna be so real: she looks about 14

By Tyler Cowen
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
salome.bsky.social
AI as wage depression tool is a very useful and compelling framing
bcmerchant.bsky.social
Hagen is the author of a great short book, Why We Fear AI, which argues, among other things, that AI should not be viewed as a productivity tool, but a *wage depression* tool.

www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai
Why We Fear AI — Common Notions Press
Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than the technology of the future.
www.commonnotions.org
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
acollierastro.bsky.social
This is an advertisement. They are so out of money lol.
wsj.com
Exclusive: OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator, which creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear.
OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out
Executives at the startup notified talent agencies and studios over the last week.
on.wsj.com
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
Reposted by Ian M Rountree
mguariglia.bsky.social
I spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵