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TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

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Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#31

Post by thibaut_barrere »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #23
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of TinyLetter, this is what happened to me: I didn't receive any email notifications before the shutdown (I verified multiple times). I reached out to Mailchimp and they deleted everything ( https://x.com/thibaut_barrere/status/1771931157564727468 ). Am I responsible for backups ultimately? Absolutely. Will I trust Mailchimp in the future for my own projects? Not very likely.

Wonder if they really don’t have any retention at all. Maybe it would magically become available if they got a letter from a lawyer.

Yes, some form of organisational soft-delete is more than likely.

> We're afraid the TinyLetter data is no longer available

could perfectly mean: the backups we keep for one year are encrypted in case of legal trouble, but we require a legal action internally before them to be worth reaching out.

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#32

Post by anonzzzies »

dvt wrote: post #6
j16sdiz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from the "How to contribute?" section in readme. Personally, I found it unbelievable. The author think contribute should change the prompt instead of the code.. To my best knowledge, these kind of code generation are non deterministic. This make it impossible to audit for correctness.

I think code generation is, generally speaking, pretty awful, but contributing to an LLM prompt is kind of an interesting evolution of software design. With that said, I don't really think it saves a lot of time (the author's Youtube videos[1] are literally like 10+ hours of messing with prompts and copy-pasting code), whereas the product in itself isn't particularly complicated. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?…

If you cannot program then maybe it helps?

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#35

Post by newaccount74 »

Tomte wrote: post #26
portaouflop wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah so all Legal disputes around AI are completely shut and closed cases? I think it’s rather we have a very small number of reference cases from the past, but since things changed dramatically since then everything is still up in the air

No, just the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed, until the laws are changed. Many other questions are debated. Always fun to see the „AI is special, no rules apply“ crowd.

> the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed

That's just a small part of the question. Some of the questions we still need answers for are:

1) If ChatGPT produces an answer that is very similar to something it was trained on, can you use that answer? Or do you need a license from the original author? If you do need a license, how do you figure out if an answer is close enough to some original work to require a license? How much effort can we expect a user of an LLM to put into searching for original sources? If you can't identify sources, can you use an LLM at all?

2) Is it even allowed to train an LLM on data without asking for permission?

3) Is prompting an LLM a creative act? Is ChatGPT just a tool like a typewriter? If you type a poem on a typewriter, no sane person would consider the typewriter the copyright holder. So shouldn't we consider the person prompting the LLM the author?

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#36

Post by anonzzzies »

khold_stare wrote: post #9
dvt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think code generation is, generally speaking, pretty awful, but contributing to an LLM prompt is kind of an interesting evolution of software design. With that said, I don't really think it saves a lot of time (the author's Youtube videos[1] are literally like 10+ hours of messing with prompts and copy-pasting code), whereas the product in itself isn't particularly complicated. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?…

And the code is godawful. Just look at this mess for internationalization: https://github.com/i365dev/LetterDrop/blob/main/app%2Fsrc%2F... . The code is unmaintainable by a human - there is a ton of unnecessary duplication, a gigantic html string instead of something like tsx, etc etc. I don't know how the OP can trust this output - I certainly don't.

I am in a (large) project currently that has been running since 2016; it has 100k+ files like this. The team (I am there to write a code quality report ;) of humans has 0 problems maintaining it. This weird ‘all code must be pristine’ attitude on HN is interesting; I do a lot of these types of code audits and more than 80% of mission critical code I encounter at large companies / institutions is like this or worse and is happily maintained by humans. Take some Spring projects started somewhere in the 2000s with the original team gone: I see 10000s of lines added in jsps files because it was faster/easier to do than actually understanding the structure and properly writing the classes etc.

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#37

Post by pembrook »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #21
nojs wrote: post #11

> This isn't the first time I've faced such an issue, whenever this happens, I lose all my subscribers That does not strike me as believable - do you really not have the list elsewhere, and does every provider who shuts down not give you the option to get your list out?

In the case of TinyLetter, this is what happened to me: I didn't receive any email notifications before the shutdown (I verified multiple times). I reached out to Mailchimp and they deleted everything ( https://x.com/thibaut_barrere/status/1771931157564727468 ). Am I responsible for backups ultimately? Absolutely. Will I trust Mailchimp in the future for my own projects? Not very likely.

It sounds like you weren’t sending very frequently, if you logged in anytime over those 5 months there was a banner letting you know it was getting shut down.

If it makes you feel better, deliverability people will tell you a list that’s been sitting with no sends for a year or more quickly becomes worthless due to list rot (abandoned emails, expired domains, job switchers, people who forgot you exist and will mark spam/unsub, etc).

When you send to an old untouched list, it can tank your domain rep in Gmail since the algo sees tons of bounces/unsubscribes/negative signals. They basically assume you’re a spammer. So it probably would have been a PITA to warm that list again anyways. It’s shitty that gmail incentivizes bulk senders to be annoying and send a lot, but it is what it is.

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#38

Post by ankit219 »

This is remarkable. If things like these could be AI generated (or even tweaked) to fit a use case, that kind of spells doom for bloated Saas products. Would be amazing to see the progress along this vector.

You may want to look at https://github.com/knadh/listmonk for how to handle heavier loads. This is also a nice project used by Zerodha in India to send millions of newsletters on a daily basis.

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#39

Post by Tomte »

newaccount74 wrote: post #35
Tomte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed, until the laws are changed. Many other questions are debated. Always fun to see the „AI is special, no rules apply“ crowd.

> the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed That's just a small part of the question. Some of the questions we still need answers for are: 1) If ChatGPT produces an answer that is very similar to something it was trained on, can you use that answer? Or do you need a license from the original author? If you do need a license, how do you figure out if an answer is close enough to so…

Those questions are all interesting in themselves, but utterly irrelevant here.

The first one asks if someone else than the „prompter“ should have copyright.

The second one asks about other people‘s copyright.

The third one is answered by case law, including the Monkey Selfie case. The wildlife photography setup is very much comparable to your typewriter there.

Re: TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop

#40

Post by mrunkel »

Tomte wrote: post #19
lelandfe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts will be pleased as punch to hear it is that easy /s

The courts have repeatedly ruled on this. Well-known case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

That doesn't say what you think it does.

Quoting the judgement: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention"

Clearly, the machine in question is responding to human prompts. The LLM didn't create this program on its own.

So I think these are still open issues.

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