No Apple Pay, No Sale

Mansour — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:50:33 +0000

There is one button I look for when I reach an online checkout:

This button is not decoration. It is the checkout.

When it is there, I confirm the card and details already on my device,
authenticate and move on. Without it, the store wants my name, address and card
details in another form. Sometimes it also wants an account and the privilege
of storing my card.

No. I wanted the thing in the cart, not a clerical relationship with your
database.

The shortest path gets the order

Apple Pay is close enough to one click to change my behaviour. The merchant
receives the delivery details I authorise, but I do not have to re-enter them.
It also receives a device-specific account number and a transaction-specific
security code instead of my actual card number. That is the documented
design, not a comforting little shield
icon beside a conventional card form.

This is not merely my impatience. In Baymard’s current cart-abandonment
research,
17% of shoppers had recently abandoned an order because checkout was too long
or complicated; 19% had left because they did not trust the site with their
card information. In a controlled experiment, Stripe measured a 22.3% average
increase in conversion when Apple Pay was
offered.
It is the provider’s dataset, but the direction is unsurprising.

Browser autofill is not equivalent. It can fail or fill the wrong field, and I
still inspect a form before submitting my card number. Nor will I let every
shop keep a card on file. Roughly once a year, an unauthorised transaction
forces me to replace my card and repair everything attached to it. More
card-on-file relationships assign me more trust and maintenance.

This is one reason I rarely buy from Core Electronics now unless it is the
only place with the part. Little Bird Electronics usually gets the order. The
products are often interchangeable; the checkout is not.

You lose more than one cart

Cart-abandonment statistics capture only the first-order damage. I may finish
an inconvenient checkout once because I have already chosen the product. What
I learn is to begin elsewhere next time. The original merchant never sees that
lost cart because I never return far enough to create it.

Losing one purchase is trivial. Training a frequent buyer to exclude your
store can redirect years of orders to a competitor.

A monopoly can get away with this. If you are the only seller with the item, I
will suffer through the form. Most shops are not monopolies. When another
seller has the same item at a similar price, checkout is part of the product
and the faster seller wins.

The excuse is usually gone

A custom payment stack can require merchant setup, domain verification and
testing. That is not the ordinary excuse for a shop using a modern provider or
hosted checkout. Apple tells merchants to contact their payment
provider. With Stripe’s hosted Checkout,
Apple Pay needs no integration change and can be enabled in payment-method
settings.

There is no special Apple toll either. Stripe charges the same as it does for
the underlying card transaction.
Apple Pay does not remove the ordinary card-processing fee; it does not add
another. If the checkout supports it, the remaining work may literally be
turning it on.

So turn it on. Do not make a willing customer transcribe information, expose a
card number or establish an account merely to give you money. They may tolerate
it today. The consequential decision is where they shop first next time.

The Sloppiest Thing About AI

Mansour — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:32:22 +0000

Originally published on oxblog.

There is a fashionable new way to avoid thinking. Notice an em dash, a tidy
list or a sentence with suspiciously polished edges. Announce that AI was
involved. Dismiss the whole thing.

The article may be correct. The product may work. The patch may fix the bug.
None of that matters once the detector in someone’s head has beeped. The work
enters the AI bucket, the bucket is labelled slop, and judgment can stop
before it becomes tiring.

AI did not create this habit. It merely brought it to the surface.

People have always cared more about the signals surrounding an idea than the
idea itself. Tell them someone they admire said something and they lean
forward. Tell them the same words came from someone they despise and they stop
listening. AI now provides an even cheaper excuse.

Provenance is not quality

Is the claim true? Is the reasoning sound? Does the product solve the stated
problem? Can the contributor explain and defend the patch?

Those questions measure substance. “Was AI involved?” does not answer any of
them.

A beautifully written falsehood remains false. An awkwardly written insight
remains an insight. A human can produce derivative nonsense; a machine can
help express a useful idea clearly. The origin does not reverse the result.

The sloppiest classifier

AI slop is real. Cheap generation makes it possible to flood inboxes, issue
trackers and publishing systems with plausible-looking material that nobody
cared enough to verify.

Reject fabricated claims, repetition, untested patches, evasive authors and
submissions whose creators cannot answer basic questions about them.
Rate-limit the flood. Control the review burden.

None of that requires pretending every use of AI produces the same result.

Calling all AI-assisted work “slop” is itself the sloppiest possible
classification: putting unlike things into one bucket because teasing out the
differences requires effort.

It is intellectual laziness dressed as taste.

Blanket bans are surrender

Good rules describe the failure they are intended to prevent.

Require evidence. Require tests. Require disclosure where relevant. Require
submitters to understand, revise and accept responsibility for every word or
line they send.

These rules work whether the offending material came from a model, a careless
human or a human using a model carelessly.

Blanket bans do the opposite. They reject honest contributors while rewarding
anyone willing to conceal their tools. They exclude people with useful
contributions who lack the time, confidence or writing ability to package them
attractively.

They also guarantee that some good work will be discarded for no defect
present in the work.

A thousand hours of unpaid maintenance buys gratitude, not infallibility.
Scarcity of maintainer attention is a sound reason to control volume. It is
not evidence that an entire class of tools cannot produce value.

Responsibility is the boundary

Using AI is not an exemption from standards.

If you submit the work, you own it. You own its errors, omissions, invented
citations, insecure code and tedious prose. “The model did it” is no more
acceptable than “my editor did it” or “my compiler allowed it.”

A tool can assist production. It cannot inherit responsibility.

Ban unaccountable work. Ban abuse. Ban deception where disclosure is
required.

Do not ban useful work because the person behind it used leverage.

The disclosure

Every sentence in this article was generated by AI from my argument,
direction and requested tone.

If that fact created an urge to dismiss what you just read, examine the urge.
Nothing in the argument changed. No claim became less true. You merely learned
something about the process and felt tempted to substitute it for an
assessment of the result.

That is precisely the point.

Judge the work. Demand evidence. Demand accountability. Reject rubbish
without apology.

Just do not confuse recognising a tool with exercising judgment.

DEV Community: Mansour