Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Most menus are fixed paper with back lighting not changing displays, most of the places that have the new displays added them at the same time as the touch screen stations.
The menu is 6 foot across, above the counter where you order, glowing, with pictures of each item and number next to it. Even someone who couldn’t read could order food using the normal system.
I’ve literally ordered by signing a number with my fingers to indicate the item I wanted in a country where I don’t speak the language at a fast food franchise I’d never been to before.
I prefer just saying “can I get a medium #2 combo, please.” And being done with it.
I suspect that even if they were abandoning future plans for AI drive through ordering, they wouldn’t say they were. Saying you’re not doing anything with AI might actually hurt a companies share price right now.
Them existing and Google being able to enforce people turn them on, and consistently blocking everyone who doesn’t, is a whole other problem that is a lot more complex.
The tech exist but enforcing that people use it is another matter. They cannot even properly paywall Picture in Picture and background play on IOS.
It’s not practically feasible because people will find ways around it. The app can require an eye tracking features to be turned on, but people will go to the browser site. If they get the people making a browser to integrate it, then people will use another browser. They’d have to block access on any mobile browser that doesn’t enforce it, and that’s a futile effort.
At least on IOS, they tried to lock Picture in Picture and background play behind a paywall, but that only worked in the app, and both features still work for the mobile site with a bit of fussing. Just because they implement restrictions and features doesn’t mean they can actually get them to work enough that people won’t glitch around them.
I mean, it’s technically feasible, just not practically feasible, like flying cars.
See, I have no doubt they would if they could, but i doubt such things are actually feasible.
Like right now I just refresh the page to skip ads on my phone.
Because they’re playing a role, an actor so to speak, they’re not presenting their own personal opinions. They’re vocalizing and embodying the output of a series of complex internal mechanism, it’s a slow moving self optimizing system beyond the comprehension of any individual working with in the system.
Much like AI’s it often outputs stupid shit.
Leadership at these companies is personally compensated based on how quickly the company grows. They’re trying to maximize growth of the company by absorbing demand from the higher end, but in the process of doing so they end up pricing out the low end of the market, leaving low end consumers under served. They’re growing, they’re leadership is getting compensated better than ever, but now it’s difficult to find affordable places to eat out.
Theoretically what is supposed to happen in such a situation is new companies come in to take advantage of the gap left, but that’s not really happening because investment is all being focused on higher return opportunities. The low end stuff is still profitable and has potential for growth, but it’s not profitable/growing enough to attract investment over stuff that is perceived to be growing more aggressively.
Imagine if they replaced the crash screen with a fake automatic update.
most of the bitcoin being spent on electricity and hardware gets exchanged for actual currency before it is spent. And most of the luxury goods sales are gimmicks and limited time.
And there is a huge amount of criminal activity with bitcoin still, they just mainly use it to launder money now as the transactions are impractically slow and costly for anything but particularly large trades.
The vast majority of the crypto world failed to understand one key concept, money is not the value for which goods/services are exchanged, it is the value by which they are exchanged. People do not have a use or value for money beyond what it can be exchanged for, if no one is willing to exchange for it, it has no value.
Crypto only had value as a currency if people would accept it for goods or services, and the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services. The value beyond that was purely based on a speculative ideological assumption that people would abandon the traditional banking system for a new system that they couldn’t buy anything with.
What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.
To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.
My favorite are people out here advocating for battery/hydrogen buses and trains, like we have overhead/third-rail electrification! IT IS A SOLVED TECHNOLOGY! It is older than internal combustion engines, for pete’s sake!
The term environmentalist has so much stupid baggage tied to it.
I’m tired of having to share labels with people who refuse to do anything other than small superficial personal choices. Folks who will baulk at the suggestion of a carbon tax, their energy bills going up, more nuclear plants being built near them or, subsidies and infrastructure for low income people who are seriously hurt by such changes.
This is a systemic problem that requires systemic changes that will fundamentally alter things we take for granted right now. It’s going to suck and it’s going to be hard, there is no easy simple way out.
Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.