Every February we see a big spike in retailers running sneaker launches on EQL to coincide with the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend. This year, the festivities kicked off a little earlier than normal, courtesy of Jordan Brand, who have been getting serious about getting back their mojo and dropping some serious heat in the process. This year marks 40 years since a talented rookie by the name of Michael Jordan wore his signature shoes at the 1985 All-Star Dunk Contest in a colorway that is now firmly ingrained in sneaker culture lore. To mark the occasion, Jordan Brand recreated the shoe in what they say is the closest to OG spec ever. Sneakerheads have been anticipating the drop for months and the demand was predictably crazy.
At first, everything appeared to be going smoothly. Thousands of entries were rolling in, bots were being neutralized, winners were being picked and notified, but as we started notifying non-winners that they’d missed out, things got weird.
We started seeing reports of people being told that they had won and lost in the same email… the Schrödinger’s cat of bug reports. What on earth was going on??
Now, we’re accustomed to a baseline level of crazy – it comes with the territory of running some of the hottest product launches on the internet. Having a 24/7 support team who can bring calm to the chaos is big reason why brands work with EQL. But even for us, this one felt odd.
Fans wer
10 Comments
ramses0
The worst is they're effectively legitimizing spam/phishing. The simplest one is:
"Your Netflix account is on hold, and you need to update your payment details to avoid closure. NOTE: Update your payment details with Netflix. here"
Umm: FROM: buildingcounter@crgov.com
…and as the article states: no indication that it's an AI summary, and all "technical" details (eg: the email from address, the url it links to) are suppressed by default.
canistel
Ah, one more reason to access e-mail through Thunderbird then…
CapsAdmin
I don't know how these things are deployed, but I imagine they are using sub billion parameter count models?
It doesn't make sense to use high parameter count ones at least due to costs.
But then I feel there is a disconnect in adopting AI. We are accustomed to chatgpt, claude, etc being really good at following instructions and summarize content, but in reality those are too expensive to host, so we end up with really dumb ai being integrated everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong here? I know a fair bit about the landscape of local ai models for personal use, but I'm not sure how this is done when you need to summarize a billion emails a day.
pavel_lishin
> Worse, they were putting an untrustworthy AI summary in the exact place that users expect to see an email subject, with no mention of it being AI-generated
This seems like one of the greater sins here. Why in the world would you ever replace the actual subject that people have been expecting to see in that location for older than I've been alive?
JimDabell
Aside from the AI angle, there’s actually another way this weird bug can manifest.
If you’re following best practices and sending plaintext alternatives with your HTML email, then some mail clients will use the plaintext for the summary snippet and render the HTML when you open the email. So if a developer copies the success templates to the failure templates but only updates the HTML and forgets to update the plaintext alternative, then you will see this exact behaviour. It’s also pretty tricky to catch when manually testing because not all mail clients act this way.
extr
Same thing happens with Apple Intelligence. You might join a waitlist for dinner reservations and get a text that says you'll be notified when your table is available. And then the summary will say something like "Your table is available"!
I'm the kind of person who is posting on HN about AI – I know this stuff isn't perfect and take AI summaries with the appropriate grains of salt. But I have to imagine it's insanely confusing/frustrating for a pretty sizable fraction of people.
samstave
[dead]
everyone
That article was confusing af for me.. It's about "sneakers" meaning the type of shoe!???
djohnston
> As an on-call engineer, this is the point when you start questioning your life choices. You know that the issue is affecting thousands of users, but the offending phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in EQL’s codebase, aside from some very old launches several years ago.
Dark days indeed.
iambateman
This is because a VP knows that if they roll the feature back, they have to admit to everyone that they were overzealous and take the PR hit. Besides, it works great 99% of the time and most people don’t really care.
Consumer UX with LLM’s is proving to be way harder than a lot of people thought.