4 ms·

A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 a

by jjcm 2mo ago

A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that. One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.

pavel_lishin 2mo ago
I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
- jbs789 2mo ago
  And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
  - XCSme 2mo ago
    Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
    - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
      Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
    - toofy 2mo ago
      it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
    - human305893 2mo ago
      For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
- reaperducer 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- solid_fuel 2mo ago
  Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying. The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.
  - GPerson 2mo ago
    That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so. *Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.
  - r3trohack3r 2mo ago
    > The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise
    - rootusrootus 2mo ago
      And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens. If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.
- svachalek 2mo ago
  I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
nvme0n1p1 2mo ago
If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.

by jjcm 2mo ago

pavel_lishin 2mo ago

I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.

jbs789 2mo ago
And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
- XCSme 2mo ago
  Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
  - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
    Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
  - toofy 2mo ago
    it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
  - human305893 2mo ago
    For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
reaperducer 2mo ago
[flagged]
solid_fuel 2mo ago
Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying. The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.
- GPerson 2mo ago
  That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so. *Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.
- r3trohack3r 2mo ago
  > The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise
  - rootusrootus 2mo ago
    And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens. If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.
svachalek 2mo ago
I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.

nvme0n1p1 2mo ago

If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.