Live data from Hacker News

I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

221–230 of 597 posts

Re: I Received an AI Email

#221

I won't add to the AI debate already well expressed by other commenters but one thing i don't understand is why the author has posted the name of the "spammed" product and a direct link to their blog: consider how much did he helped them having new traffic and potential customers

With limited exceptions*, [sometimes even egregious] factuality trumps self-censorship.

I myself tend to name-and-shame regardless of how it may turn out, whether "positive" or "negative," when I feel compelled to be posting online about a thing I have encountered in my personal life. I think that openness and clearly-evident facts are very important parts of supporting the story that I wish to tell. (And if I did not wish to tell the story, then I would not have done so.)

* But a line must be drawn somewhere.

My own line is this: When I encounter a fucking nazi in real life, I make sure to not propagate whatever it is that this fucking nazi has to say, even if I have a story to write about that fucking nazi. (And we rather unfortunately have plenty of these fucking nazis here in Ohio, so I do get opportunities every now and then to exercise this self-restraint.)

Re: I Received an AI Email

#222

The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount. As for the humans, we went fishing instead.

This is why the internet as we know it is going to be driven into walled gardens. Closed by default.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#223

At some point automated emails will be read by auto reader, then the cycle will be completed. I've actually made an internal company April fools website. Too bad I've never kept a copy but here goes. It's called Proxy Ai. It reads your emails so you don't have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don't FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don't have to. Proxy Ai... So you don't have to…

You could have named this an Electronic Monk!

Quoting from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams):

> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you do. You're being over-literal. "Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.

No, I'm not being over-literal. Here's why: Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone. However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise. So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to s…

> However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.

I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#225
post #187

I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is th…

Very cool! Could you go deeper into your setup? Which email client do you use to view/manage the catch all emails? Did you host the email on Google Gsuite or AWS SES or something else?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#226
post #217
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not allowed to cold call or send any emails without express permission from the recipient this is for austria/germany. It seems that with the gpdr this is now eu wide: https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/

That’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.

They can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent.

The law for that, at least in my country, is very clear: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...

Re: I Received an AI Email

#227
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.

This is what spam always did, why is it different now?

It actually adds some cost to the spammer, so that could be good.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#228
There are laws to mandate unsubscribe links on emails. There should be laws to mandate disclaimers when emails were sent through an automated process.

No one believes the CEO has taken the time to email you with onboarding instructions immediately after signing up anymore. But outreach tactics like this are still quite manipulative.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#229
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error occurred right after granting permissions from my Google account. The permissions were granted but I could never access your application page. I just tried again, now I got an "Error handling OAuth callback" after granting permissions. Signing in again does not work either. (I did remove all of the app's permissions in my Google security settings before, so to Google it looked like the application was reque…

I do see it in the logs now. So weird, as dozens of people successfully signed up without this issue. Have added more logs now again to double down on that specific area where this issue is caused. Maybe another login attempt now will be able to uncover the gap. Thanks for removing the permissions in Google, as that's also key in this debugging. Mind if I send you an email to debug further there?

Quick shoutout to slhck for helping me debug and resolve this issue. Thank you!

tl;dr: Ran into issues because the DB was expecting a profile picture URL from Google auth (string) or NULL, but JavaScript being JavaScript tried to insert "undefined".

Re: I Received an AI Email

#230
post #169
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, do you mean in business to business? Otherwise I don't think you can argue any legitimate interest.

Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often,…

Interesting, In my country that also seems to be illegal, e.g. cold calling can never be a valid reason(without consent).

https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...

Edit:clarified never

Post reply on HN