Given that my previous thread-starter spawned a bit of an interesting
discussion on AI... and given that I also managed to get a working
combination of Postfix and Dovecot /using/ Anthropic Claude, I thought
this might be worth sharing...
The success of getting Claude to diagnose my mail server config errors
were enough to prompt me to "take a punt" and on Tuesday I attempted to
subscribe the Claude's "Pro" service for a 1-year subscription... That's
£200 up-front [£16.67 monthly], /just/ sufficiently better than the
£20/month pay-as-you go to make it worth it.
That's where the fun started.
Logged in to their web site from my desktop [Mint 21.3/Cinnamon, running
Firefox 150.0.2] and I could get as far as the "Submit" option on the
payment page and but further, getting only "Your card was declined" as
an error message.
My NoScript plugin told me that Anthropic use Stripe as their payment
processing platform, but that all seemed fine. Maybe it was a browser
issue? I tried:-
Firefox on Mint Linux
Firefox on Windows 11
Edge on Windows 11
Safari on iOS
No joy... so probably not the browser. Checked my DNS Sink logs
[Technitium] and nothing their either.
Called my bank, who told me that they could not see any payment requests
being presented against my card.
Hmm...
This is where things went *really* weird. Anthropic has an "AI
Assistant", "Fin" [no humans, obviously] on subscriber support... and it
is possibly the /worst /AI assistant I've ever dealt with. Which is
saying something. Eventually, I managed to figure out the correct
permutation of responses to trick it in to asking, "Would you like me to
pass this to a human agent so that they can take a look?"
Why yes, I believe I would.
In under 60 seconds I had an email in my in-box and a promise that,
/"We'll pick up your ticket soon"... /
Yesterday - 24 hours later and with no sign of a response from
Anthropic, I went looking to see if anyone else had hit and overcome
this issue. Yes, /lots/ of people have had this problem. The handful of
solutions I tried didn't work for me. Then I hit on a bit of a weird
idea - what if I download and install the Anthropic thick client for
Windows, log in with my registered email address and get to the "free"
service... but then use the /app/ to upgrade to Pro?
Less than 5 minutes later I had the app downloaded, installed and I was
subscribed to Pro.
Still no idea why the app worked [it looks like a thick client that
talks HTML to a web interface on the back end] when a browser did not.
Still no idea why /an AI Company/ has the most awful model running
/subscription support. /You would think that if there was any feature
they would want to work, it would be the one to bring in revenue.
Apparently not.
But the final laugh?
A Google search for "desktop client for Anthropic Claude for Linux"
quickly revealed that Anthropic don't produce one. Then a footnote to
say that, good news, the community does
<
https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian>.
Four quick shell commands later and I am up and running with the Windows
client on Mint. To the best of my abilities to work such things out,
this Debian/Ubuntu/Mint package for the client looks like the Windows
binary with a wrapper that means you don't need to host WINE to get it
to work... and it functions /flawlessly. /Snappier, perhaps, than on the
same machine in W11 mode.
Really odd to see that Anthropic's tuned subscription-support AI does
such a shoddy job [can't diagnose web site errors, can't view the Stripe
workflow on the back end to help diagnose issues, gets in a loop and
suggests checking things it has already asked before] when the rag-tag
open source community delivered such a clean effective package by
themselves.
There's a lesson in there somewhere...
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