Ethical Cold Outreach

Code and prose written on val.town Ethical cold outreach Pete Millspaugh Jul 28, 2026 A couple weeks ago, my coworker Charlie got a cold email from a startup with a link to their “personalised” video pitch. I put scare quotes around “personalised” both because that’s literally how they described the video over email and because it turned out to be thoroughly impersonal trickery: the guy in the video was not a person at all. He was synthetic, either fabricated entirely or maybe a clone of the human who created him.