I worked for blobcity as a freelancer 5 years ago, in May 2015. I worked for maybe a week or 10 days. Never got paid, they stopped replying back. Emails, whatsapp I messaged them for weeks.
1. I’m glad this is the most upvoted comment in order to provide visibility and
2. I’m glad the founder wants to make it right apparently by having the alleged freelancer send details to rectify
but the the fact that the founder doesn’t immediately refute that this occurred and only wants to now potentially make it right by having the freelancer send his details over to get paid is very troubling for me. I hope this comes out as a false allegation but if not I wouldn’t want to support this at all.
Imagine if they did immediately refute that this occurred. Wouldn't you be more suspicious of the defensiveness?
A: five years ago you made a pretty bad mistake that hurt me personally.
B: I must have let my priorities slip, and it sounds like in my oversight I hurt you personally. Reach out with more details and we can make this right.
or
A: five years ago you made a pretty bad mistake that hurt me personally.
saying a metaphorical “fuck you, I can’t pay you for the work you did for my business” by ignoring OPs alleged many emails and correspondence to get compensated is just as bad if not worse than a literal “fuck you, I can’t pay you” imo, but I’m also one that appreciates honesty and not sketchiness or being ghosted even if the outcome is not in my favor.
So, I just checked. We have easily engaged upwards of 500 freelancers over the last 8 years. Not possible to personally keep track. If something has slipped by, would like to know and rectify.
The problem is though that it didn’t just “slip by” if OP tried to contact you/your team through various channels (email, whatsapp) for weeks as he says. This was either a complete mistake (ie OP didn’t do work for you) or a purposeful, coordinated effort to prevent paying OP (and I imagine others).
Your character is at stake here and again, a sleezy ghosting for years is almost certainly worse I assume for most people than a phone call, email, whatever to tell someone you unfortunately just can’t afford to pay them right now but will as soon as you can. That’s the biggest issue here.
> Your character is at stake here and again, a sleezy ghosting for years is almost certainly worse I assume for most people that a phone call, email, whatever to tell someone you unfortunately just can’t afford to pay them right now but will as soon as you can. That’s the biggest issue here.
Why would you assume for there to be no proper conclusion? It is not like running away from the truth helps anyone. Is it not obvious that anyone would inform of payment delays, non-payment against dissatisfactory services, etc? What’s there to gain by not informing? It is not like these things don’t happen, because they do happen. Often more times than you did like.
I would like to take this claim at face value and just assume it to be true that a payment was not made. If its a troll, it would be a really sad one. Going forward under this assumption, the freelancer certainly thinks that he/she should have got paid for the services delivered. This is where a communication gap could exist. I highly doubt we have not properly closed an engagement. It is more likely it was closed against the interest of the freelancer, and the freelancer won’t take NO for an answer, and is now making a claim under an incorrect pretex.
What would you advise as the best course of action in such a scenario?
> Why would you assume there is no proper conclusion
I wouldn’t and am not. It’s your responsibility to confirm one way or the other.
If this is a case of a disgruntled freelancer who isn’t getting more than what he/she wants even under a contractual and agreed upon arrangement, then I’ll gladly retract from my former concerns and sincerely apologize for my personal issues towards the matter.
But if this is almost literally anything else where the freelancer did work and wasn’t compensated under the terms of a contractual agreement, I will hold up my concern and maintain my disdain towards the matter.
I am Sanket and I’m the founder of BlobCity (cloud.blobcity.com). We’re building the largest repository of data science models, with a one-click execution made possible. We call it the A.I. Cloud.
Data Science models, today are scattered, and as an engineer and architect of systems, I’ve personally experienced, there is a lot of time spent on trying out the right models, versioning, collaboration and execution. Not everything works alongside everything. We’ve now made this achievable by running a cloud infrastructure where you can not only explore the DS projects, but also run it on the cloud with 1-click. Collaborate with your fellow team mates and work together on a ready Jupyter ecosystem together.
Here are some key things to know:
• Explore and run, 1000+ GitHub projects on the cloud
• Unlimited open source Cloudbooks for free
• We have spent time and effort to curate the top projects that our team and existing users nominated for and tried to keep the UX clean and easy to use. Suggest any that you’d want to see in here, a one-click deployment worthy project.
Search by text assumes that I'm looking for something specific. But it would be great if we could sort results by github stars, for people that are just window shopping. It would also be great if projects could be assigned topics that users could then use to filter results.
I checked out your 1000+ GitHub projects I could explore. I clicked on the "Run" button. Immediately prompted to create an account. Immediately closed the tab.
Interesting. Were you trying to "Run" just to see if "Run" works, or were you interested in executing a specific repository?
Basically we allow users to make their own personal editable copies of the Cloudbook. When you "Run", it is first replicating the Cloudbook into your account and then running. You can edit the code in your copy without affecting the main Cloudbook. Free unlimited CPU, RAM & Storage gets included with every Cloudbook for you to make continuous edits and perform repeat runs, including long running run operations.
Not sure how we can achieve this without a registration. Do you have something in mind?
I was kinda half expecting a few demos to just run without having to create an account to prove the value of your platform. If I have to create an account to figure that out, I’m not going to and I’m going to go explore another product. Once your value prop is apparent, I’m sure people will have no problem signing up. I just didn’t see that before being nagged to create one.
That's a brilliant suggestion. We are making a change to allow all public Cloudbooks to be run in guest mode (without registration) for 30 mins. The Cloudbook will auto shutdown in 30 mins to prevent any misuse. Would this be enough to assess the value prop?
On related topic, what would you consider a good value proposition? Meaning what are the things you would expect out of BlobCity for you to become a registered and loyal member?
I suggest you put some info right at the top to explain what Blob City is. Like a headline/call to action: "one-click execution of the largest repository of data science models"
Nice to see another player in the crowded hosted Jupyter notebooks space!
Still very far from smooth (<10) click experience.
The workflow took a while to get started:
Manually create account (no external auth option such as Github?) -> verify account -> create notebook -> set pw for notebook -> run notebook
I did all that only to find that no required libraries are there.... not even Pandas?
By comparision Google Colab onboarding is much smoother and you know you are getting a working Tensorflow, Pandas, Plotly etc out the box. Sure you pay the privacy tax to Google for this smoothness.
My biases:
- I've installed and maintain Littlest Jupyter Hub instance for teammates at my organization.
- I teach using local Anaconda installation.
- I use myBinder and Google Colab.
If I did not have a smooth experience I would imagine someone starting out would have a harder time.
At the very least you should curate the packages so they run out of the box, without fiddling with requirements.txt, yaml, pip install, conda etc.
Since you are an active user of myBinder and Colab, I am tempted to ask. What are those features we can add that will make you let go of myBinder and Colab?
I believe I forgot to mention. BlobCity A.I. Cloud is not just for discovering and running GitHub repos. You can create and run your own Jupyter Notebooks on our Cloud. We call these Cloudbooks, and Cloudbooks come with unlimited compute, RAM, Storage & GPU. Yes that is right. It is truly unlimited :)
You can create your own Cloudbooks and use our unlimited infra for your next AI experiment.
If your code & data is open, our infra is free for you. If your code & data is private, then plans start at just $25/m. GPU's are available on the $75/m and $150/m plan. Do give it a try for your next AI / Data Science project.
That must be the closest I've seen to a self refuting claim on here in a long time. Would love to hear more about how you do either the truly unlimited part or the free part practically.
Its free for sure, and comes with unlimited runtime. CPU & RAM will be limited by normal hardware capabilities of a single server. Storage is unlimited. Some of our free servers run up to 1TB RAM and 64 cores of compute power. This is extremely large unless you are analysing images from the Hubble telescope.
Please do give it a try. Only condition, your code & data must be open source if you want it on the free plan. Else you can take a paid plan. Unlimited part remains the same, but it won’t be free for private use.
Not really my space so all I have to offer is a super minor nitpick. On iPhone the hamburger doesn’t do anything when I click on it in landscape or portrait. Best of luck with your project!
Innovative solutions, innovative business model, quick response to change, clear thought process, great results. Enjoyed working with the team as client.
We missed saving the GitHub stars in the search index, and need to re-index all over again. Until then, here are the top 10 most starred Data Science projects on GitHub that you can now run for free on BlobCity.
