“send cold emails with enriched context”

What’s the difference between cold and spam?

Nailed it. I constantly get “cold emails” that were clearly written by an AI that read 2-3 pages on my web site, my LinkedIn bio, and something else on my social media. They all follow the same formula: try to break they ice with something funny about somewhere I took a photo recently, then segue into what I do for work, then offer to help me do it better - usually by offering leads or CRM improvements.

It’s such an obviously repetitive recipe that someone must have published as an example somewhere, and now lots of people (or bots) are trying to follow it, all mining for gold that doesn’t exist.

I often get cold emails from people interested in my very specific hobby (see website in profile). These are desired and fun.

Mind, they are not written by LLMs. I would consider that spam, outside of very limited circumstances (maybe a non-english speaker using an LLM for translation).

I have no desire to get either so functionally nothing.

most cold emails end up spam, only a small fraction end up being useful. My cold email strategy respects google's limits are very personal and mostly not for selling.

Why I mentioned this here: Everyone knows about cold emailing, this is one of the ways I describe the personalisation and integration. It does, slack, discord, and practically works with anything that has an api key.

The name.

You either need to quit or keep your head down, I can’t tell which.

If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

Doesn’t matter whether ‘the problem’ is the employer, the employee, both, or neither. They’re a bad fit for each other.

I don't think so? It's very common in both large companies and small startups where pragmatism has a higher priority than so called elegance or whatever you call it the "artisan" feel. It's varying shades of "perfect is the enemy of good", where different cultures and business environments dictate how much a manager is going to tolerate your proposed refactoring. At least that's what I got from the parent lost.

> If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

This really depends on whether they are paying you decently. The number of people I've met who found a nice corner in FAANG, and decided to keep their head down and collect a steady paycheque... One may find one can swallow a lot of engineering pride for a recurring six figures

And that’s not to say anything about personal situations. Family obligations, immigration requirements, etc.

Especially in the current job market, “find a new job and quit” is going to cost you so much time and effort and for many people it will still be a lateral move in terms of company quality in regards to engineering practices. It’s hard to make these kinds of deep company discoveries until you’re in the thick of it but by then it’s too late.

Personally, I’m advocating for change where I can and not taking it personally when the manager says no. I put in enough effort not to get paged in the middle of the night which is generally plenty for management. It helps that I don’t work in a super strict business environment.

There’s more to life outside of work as well so if you can silo that bit of your life and enjoy things outside of working hours and you’re content, so be it.

Keep your head down, while you look for alternatives. No need to pre-emptively quit, if you can coast and collect a paycheck.

Bin packing is theoretically NP Hard but practically solved all the time on real world datasets.

Yeah but NP Hard bin packing doesn't usually include situations where a flat screen TV squished on top of pallets comes sliding out of the truck when you go to unload...

Breakage results.

This sounds like a constraint I model in my bin packing optimization routine.

Pro-tip - the older it is, the more likely it is to be good.

This sounds like a broken culture to me. Teams shouldn't tolerate it... it is both harmful and contagious.

A lot of organizations right now are dealing with the "Claude says..." problem.

It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't.

AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.

LLM editing should be done to produce deterministic output.

That is, the LLM should produce a diff, and the user should accept the diff. It seems like a bad pattern to just tell the LLM to edit any long document without that sort of visibility. Same goes for prose as for code.

I always thought it was a little weird that LLMs aren't sophisticated enough to surgically edit files as needed.

For example, if there is a code block that needs to be wrapped within another function call, it'll rewrite the entire function call and you'll just have to pray that the re-written code block wasn't subtly changed.

I _think_ so far it hasn't introduced any changes....

You can just look at the diff when you do a pull request, no prayer needed, and if you want it to be “surgical” in that way, your prompt (and agents.md) can be specific.

You can also unit test the function to better assure behavior didn’t change.

Indeed, that's what I do. I inspect the diff, though if it's an indentation change the entire block will be marked changed.

Still not an excuse to not read every line of course...

Unit tests give me the confidence that at least those tested logic paths are unaffected.

Sometimes with older codebases one cannot assume the paths have adequate test coverage.

Many diff tools, such as delta (https://github.com/dandavison/delta) and the ones built into VS Code and IDEs by JetBrains, can configured to highlight changes within each line (by word) and ignore changes to whitespace. Those features save me a lot of time when I review diffs that include indentation changes or variable renames.

This gets skipped because continual approvals break up user flow so we let LLMs make a few hundred line diffs then a user does a bulk review, and can just revert all/partially. It's naieve to assume user will review every LOC in every instance.

I’m fine with bulk review, it just has to get reviewed before a merge. You don’t need to review the LLM output as you work except as it aids you to work.

eBay already had warehousing ops, I assume larger than tcgplayer’s.

Last year, eBay shut down tcgplayer’s only fulfillment facility in Rochester, NY and switched to using eBay’s facility in Kentucky.

That wasn't about size, it was a labor play. The NY workers were negotiating for unionization for 500 days because of unfair conditions and low pay.

I would have projected the same outcome though.

Quality of TCGDirect operations, from an enduser perspective, took a nosedive with the move and never recovered.

I am familiar with all the particulars, check my HN profile ;)

INDEED! Congrats on your recent successes and I really like your product!

As a seller and as a buyer.

For my marketplace, I was friends with someone who could make it look like not a ghost town for the supply (an established game store with lots of trading cards in stock). Then, we struggled to get more sellers. Then, we found channels to get selllers, which were basically software systems we could build integrations with. The integrations de-risked the proposition for sellers enough to get more traction. Eventually, if you have growing volume, the supplyside just starts coming on its own mostly, and you focus on retaining sellers and growing buyers.

For your marketplace, you could bring the supply-side by Fedexing stuff when you don't have a carrier. You'll have to lose money on the initial shipment, until you can route the jobs to the supplyside. This assumes you think the typical use case for this isn't smuggling.

The amount of jobs may be low enough at first that you can be like "You said Cairo to London, that will be $N." Then, if you can fill the job manually by finding someone somehow, then you add them to the platform and they do the job. If not, you send a prepaid mailing package with a Fedex label to the recipient and they ship it easily, and you subsidize it so it seems like a great deal to them.

Limiting geography seems like a good approach too.

You could argue that compute was a decisive factor in World War II even (used in code breaking and designing nuclear weapons).