In my childhood in Greece, stinging nettle pie (τσουκνιδόπιτα), a dish much like spinach pie, was a traditional recipe often prepared by grandmothers. Today, younger generations may not even recognize stinging nettle, though it once held a valued place in our culinary heritage.
My Bosnian grandmother used to collect stinging nettles from our garden and make burek with it. I remember that it was even more delicious than her spinach burek.
Similarly in Romania, though it is not a pie, "Mancare de Urzici" some kidn of mash, young nettles are boiled, puréed and cooked into a sort of spinach-like mash. I remember my grandmother preparing this quite often during the warm months.
Sounds a lot like "Stoemp", from Belgium. Spinach and carrot are classic, but any veggie works. Funny how very similar dishes can be found across the world under different names.
I think this is is still somewhat common, though it's definitely a home-only meal. You still find fresh nettles for sale in markets in Bucharest every spring. I for one hate the smell and taste, but my parents and grandma eat some every year.
same in Italy, it was common when I was younger my grandma made fritters with nettles, ground ham, breadcrumbs and eggs and we would eat them cold as a snack in the summer
I recently had a similar experience with Amazon. I bought a pair of AirPods but didn’t like them, so I returned them the next day. Amazon confirmed they’d received the package, but when the estimated refund date passed, I got a message saying they needed more information.
When I contacted customer service, they told me I had to send them a copy of my ID to process the refund. I was really frustrated; I’ve had this account for over 20 years and never had any issues before. I spoke with several representatives, but they all gave me the same response, and a few were even rude and aggressive, something I’d never experienced with Amazon before.
Since I didn’t want to share my ID, I decided to go through my credit card provider (Visa) instead and filed a claim. Visa refunded my money, but shortly after, I got an email from Amazon asking why I’d raised a Section 75 claim (the UK’s credit card protection scheme) and informing me that my account would be closed for fraudulent activity.
I replied with proof that they had received my return and never issued a refund. That was the last I ever heard from them, and the last time I bought anything from Amazon.
Amazon is in a hard spot with this stuff. They have massive problems with refund fraud, where people buy things and returning fake or used items in the box. Asking for ID is one way they try to spot people who are engaged in this activity repeatedly. When you refused to show your ID and did a chargeback, you did the exact same thing actual fraudsters end up doing, and of course they need to fraudulent accounts as otherwise the whole concept of mail-order returns collapses.
You didn't explain why you didn't want to share your ID with Amazon, but it's not an unreasonable request from them as a way to combat fraud.
While understanding their motivation to combat fraud they have a 20-year purchase history and have already established identity through payment methods. This is just lazy and perhaps additional data harvesting.
Amazon got so large they stopped paying attention to the details.
Fraudsters almost certainly gain access to old accounts specifically to "buy" that trust and then farm it for their own uses.
I wonder how much a 20-yr old Amazon account is worth on the grey market. Mine is about that old, and I have – legimately – returned thousands of dollars worth of goods (that were faulty or just didn't work the way I liked) and it is probably very difficult for Amazon to distinguish between my legitimate returns and a hypothetical alternative where I'm a fraudster that just purchased this old account and am laundering broken electronics through the returns system.
How is ID going to help with this in any way? They charge you (bank account/CC) and send you stuff (address), they inspect the return (or rather Should inspect it). What more would they need?
They don't inspect every return - that would make the already ropey economics of allowing returns very unviable - and it's often hard to detect return fraud because the fraudsters are returning an object that's nearly the same as the real thing, just used in ways that maybe aren't obvious given a casual inspection. Or they've raided it for parts and the object looks the same but the internals are gone.
It's not only Amazon that has this problem btw. Lots of online stores do. Return fraud is so prevalent that you should expect to this to become more common. A few bad apples ruin it for the rest of us.
Payment details aren't enough to reliably establish identity in many cases. If fighting this stuff were easy they'd have done it already, they aren't idiots.
So how is buyers ID going to help with Amazon not inspecting returns? Amazon doesnt even mark returns in any way so they dont know where it came from and where it ended up. Hell, they dont even mark/track source of co-mingled inventory!
And crucially - Amazon doesnt do this tracking on purpose so they can have plausible deniability while screwing merchants.
It doesn't help with inspecting returns. It simply adds another hurdle that has resulted in a slightly smaller percent of fewer returns, saving them a significant amount of $$ at scale.
Btw, if Amazon is a fault, where they can't shift the loss onto a seller or third-party, the delays will go on for weeks, if not forever. You have to do a chargeback.
> I’ve had this account for over 20 years and never had any issues before.
"Aged" accounts are a thing you can buy on the black market, as well as hacked accounts of users with long chains of legitimate activity. It's not as strong of an anti-fraud signal as you might think.
Yes but so what? All that proves is the account is aged. It doesn't prove it's not been taken over or sold. People move pretty regularly or order things for friends/family, a change of address doesn't mean anything.
AirPods are very commonly swapped with fakes and returned. It wouldn't surprise me if they added a blanket policy requiring ID for all AirPod refunds no matter what.
Apple products and a few other brands go through a different process for returns at Amazon.
Amazon can't verify everything, but for it's own Fire devices it does check S/Ns. Also Apple has it's own system, they do not mess around. I suggest not buying Apple products from Amazon.
Indeed, that's what khanmigo is using, and they were involved in testing chatgpt before it was released for that purpose, to test/try/improve chatgpt as a tutor (that performs fact checking and doesn't hallucinate).
Research like this has existed for decades. Cerabyte is a new company trying it again. The problem is that you need essentially a large and expensive optical lab to be able to read and write. This means you want to multiplex data carriers even more, and this it eats into bandwidth even more.
This looks incredible! I’ve had an idea simmering in the back of my mind for a while now: creating an audiobook from an ebook for my commute using the voice of a specific audiobook narrator I really enjoy. The concept struck me after coming across the Infinite Conversation project here on HN. Unfortunately, I just haven’t found the time to bring it to life yet. :(
- take an ebook in any language
- AI translates it to German
- AI speaks it using the voice of their fav narrator
- a UI showing the text as it is being read
Now they can read Asimov, Kulansky, Bryson, regardless of whether a translation or audio version exists. :)
What about the copyright issue? You can’t mimic the voice of a narrator without their consent. OpenAI landed in trouble after using Scarlett Johansson’s voice in a demo.
Yeah, by my ear it was pretty clearly not SJ’s voice-likeness, although there were some superficial similarities.
But some people could have mistook it due to some regional accent similarities, though it would be akin to interpretation of any light southern drawl with a similar timbre as being SJ.
lol yeah. That made it look like anything vaguely similar would be an attempt to model SJ, and triggered due diligence by her legal team. Not filing at that point would be de facto precedent that SJ did not lay claim to her voice likeness.
Sounds like SJ has a better legal team that OAI did.
