"1) it is highly scalable and you can easily send out thousands of emails per day, 2) it’s a fairly “democratic” form of outreach where you can achieve great outcomes with good offers sent to the right people, and 3) there’s no platform risk."
From a European citizen point of view, this framing ignores a very real constraint: GDPR.
In the EU, sending marketing emails is not just a growth tactic, it is regulated personal data processing. In most cases, you need prior, explicit consent before sending promotional emails. “We found your email online” or “legitimate interest” is usually not enough for cold outreach aimed at sales.
The risks are not theoretical:
Administrative fines that can reach up to 20M EUR or 4 percent of global annual turnover.
Orders to stop processing, which can immediately kill an outbound pipeline.
Domain and IP blacklisting by European ISPs and email providers.
Blocking or delisting of websites and services in the EU market after regulator or court decisions.
Complaints to Data Protection Authorities by a single recipient are enough to trigger investigations.
So there is very much platform and regulatory risk, at least if you want access to the European market. Email is scalable, yes, but in Europe it scales legal exposure just as fast if consent, proof of consent, opt-out mechanisms, and transparency obligations are not handled correctly.
This is why many EU companies invest heavily in permission based lists, double opt-in, and strict compliance processes. Growth without compliance is not “no risk”, it is deferred risk.
Scaling outreach is tricky when privacy rules change the ground under you. You could look at mailsai to help manage opt outs, consent tracking, and basic compliance steps so nothing slips. It makes outreach steadier, especially when dealing with EU contacts.
For the love of all that is holy and all that isn't, do not get your legal advice from ChatGPT. Reposting that advice as though it was your own writing, such that unattentive readers might not recognise that the legal advice was coming from ChatGPT and might mistake it as coming from someone who has any idea what they're talking about, is even worse.
> Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.
Could you provide supporting evidence for your statement?
The comparison with calculators overlooks several key developments.
LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.
Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.
>Can't wait they also get rid of these "destination fees" billed by nearly all hotels in NYC.
That's not going to happen. Such fees (at least in the US, AFAICT) are in most cities.
Besides, hotels are for tourists. And a tourist's job is to spend as much money as the city can get them to cough up. And that's true of every city/destination.
No, chat is not asynchronous. It's a dialoge, it is synchronous.
If you want people to write "Hello, my problem is xxx" just close your chat box and ask for emails.
Moreover there are studies showing that if people socialize and get to know each other a bit before working together, there are more chances to collaborate and to reduce conflicts.
Is it a hobby for passing time? For pleasure? For the beauty of the code?
Could be. But most of the time, you develop in order for the software to perfom a task someone needs.
And that should be your first focus: to develop something that brings value for its user, and develop it as efficiently as possible.
After all, what's the point of a software if nobody uses it?
So no, your job is not to create great software, your job is to bring value to users.
In my career, I've mostly seen the developers pleasuring themselves with overengineering, bloating code with features nobody needs, and writing lines to anticipate future developments that never came. Rather than the opposite.
So I think the challenge is to remain minimalistic, that's hard, and that's what the original post is about.
Unfortunately there is no correct approach since both sloppy and overengineered codebases backfire.
What helps me find balance is following the philosophy of
1. Make it work
2. Make it right
3. Make it fast
