Tag: Money
McDonalds introduces dynamic pricing while owner is still dynamically gagging over burger.
The idea of dynamic pricing baffles me. The fact that big corps are trying this to extract more money out of consumers should be illegal. Unless dynamic pricing follows the consumer.
McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny. One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store’s patrons are willing to pay.
Consumers at first will not take this lying down, I have seen dynamic pricing and the fact that this is being done by AI makes it a bit funny. the factor is that AI doesn’t understand why people are buying something. So what happens if a group targets a low priced item on a menu for a few months and then pulls the rug on said product, it would create an AI model in a panic. AI is good at dealing with averages… give it an outlier and it does not know what to do.
The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy. McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs to discounted coffee for seniors.
They think they are being clever to drive a few pennies of profit out of customers, the problem here is this is McDonalds which already has earned its way into common language as a McJob. Given that if they spite enough customers, they will revolt and it wont be pretty. One post to a website and a bit of patience people can turn an AI profit machine into gaming the system until it crashes.
A Reuters check of prices in September on the McDonald’s mobile app showed price differences. For example, a company-run store in Fresno, California sells a Big Mac for $5.69, but another company-run restaurant two miles away sells the same sandwich for $6.89, a 21% premium.
The other thing right here is again playing with fire. What’s to stop a person from buying from Store A and returning to store B and pocketing the 21% premium. Some frydrone is not going to wait around while someone is trying to fish up a receipt on a still warm meal.
In January, McDonald’s started requiring franchisees to be “constructively engaging with McDonald’s approved Pricing Consultant and Tools” as part of its new business standards, according to an internal communication sent to franchisees and reviewed by Reuters.
As I stated in beginning AI is good to be an average at things, but once you start adding outliers to the model like a stores finance model shows and uptick in cheeseburgers to the point of near absurd and other stores show a drop because people are spiking the model the AI is going to say to increase the price and once that happens suddenly cheeseburger purchases not only drop from the price increase but people manipulating the prices stop screwing with the AI McDonalds corporate is going to panic because the AI modeling of the price is showing to be failing. In all honesty to guide a model like this it would not take very many extra purchases in a day to corrupt sales data 100 cheeseburgers would be enough to throw a model off. Once people start poisoning the sale model it has some pretty bad outcomes.
First the store sees the sales spike, The AI and Store manager see it and start carrying more of that product. The problem here is product in a store like this is perishable. if the rug is pulled a month later you have a store manager stuck with product rotting losing money, You have pissed off consumers stopping going to that store which creates more wasted product and the manager is stuck with his hat in his hands because the machine told him to buy something that no one could see.
If McDonalds was an isolated store in a tube this would not happen but go to google maps and go to any city and type McDonalds , you will have 3 to 5 in 2 minutes driving distance of each other. McDonalds wants profits and they are instead are going to get a model collapse because in the US you basically have 5 minutes in any direction to a McDonalds and consumers that are easy to spite.
Here is a map where I picked a random area just because it’s random and it shows the exact issue I said.
Examples of McDonald’s parameters for the price engine included, according to the two employees: focusing increases on menu items that have not had a price increase in at least two years; only increasing prices on items that have had recent price increases in at least 30% of stores; excluding ice creams and drinks from price increases during summer months.
Lastly McDonalds mapped out the whole game here. Not only are they exposing the weakness here they are making this exploitable to the point where a group of 20 people could cause profit rot on multiple store in an area and McDonalds reliance on the AI Magic Machine will cause damage to no end of the franchisee. Also as I have said before model rot can come unintentionally if a school bus from a class trip comes in for a week it will cause massive model issues. They will buy too much and too little stock in order to balance out an AI that sees a jump in sales because of a class trip.
Update! The Legal McHammer Drops:
Well now.. It’s as if On October 2, 2026, a nationwide class action lawsuit dropped and the company is alleged to have violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The lawsuit claims McDonald’s took non-public transaction data to run an algorithmic price-fixing ring across independent franchisees. McDonald’s tried to say “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac.” Sound familiar? Sounds like when the CEO said he “loved” their product.. When you try to force independent franchisees to feed an AI engine so it can coordinate price hikes down to the penny, it isn’t smart retail. it’s an automated crime posing as AI.
McDonalds has ensured that the McJob stays exactly what it is, they are letting a machine that does not have the instinct to run the numbers and see why sales are what they are. A worker who sees two buses pull up will throw extra fries on and know exactly why he did that. AI can’t see the bus pull up and causes the price to jack up a week later because a School play was in a theater for 2 weeks. The worker knows that there was a play by intuition, The AI only sees higher than normal purchase rate. This is why for the same reason 20 people with a few dollars and being bored can cause a store to lose thousands. Again corporate greed and their belief that AI is magic is going to be the downfall.
Welcome to McFelonies would you like Fries with that?
Attributions from:
Yahoo! Finance: Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac
Reuters.com: McDonald’s hit with class action alleging AI-powered menu price-fixing
WTF now… Post Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part III
I honestly thought I was done with this, I decided tonight to eliminate my billing from the original host and just have all my billing in one place. Never have any expectation of anything you don’t have high expectations for because when you think they are at their lowest they will go out of the way to prove you wrong and go lower.
I have one recommendation and Normally I don’t go looking for a fight. Avoid Hostgator, They overcharge, they use the same SAAS that other companies are using, like charging for emails. They have a Tech support end that is just a bunch of screen reading salesdrones trying to get you for another few dollars. The second you go off script with these guys they have no idea what to do. The thing is .. HostGator used to be an OK company and now they are looking to extract income from every angle they can from people who are either to lazy or don’t know enough about web development to open a website. Nothing against either because having a business do the hard part while you learn how to make a website is good, There is nothing better than a good handhold. I did the same when I learned HTML back in the day of ancient history.
But HostGator’s enshittification since their buyout has been a breakneck speed and they are failing faster than a door on a 737 MAX. All I wanted to do was finalize some movement on leftover stuff on HostGator , Instead I am dealing with dragging emails out of my file from 20 years ago, and other email from 17 years ago. Having tech support try to put the problem on me and than stick me with regulatory locks. This is not the way you keep a customer , this is how you make customer run! Talk about a failure of a good host, gone are the days of a bunch of guys running a webserver out of their homes to a mega conglomerate trying to say what else we can make a profit off of. The bunch of guys who made this from their uni must be cringing when they watch their empire crumble.
Give or take I had been with Hostgator for over 20 years, Wasted who the fuck knows how much money and they act like I am customer that walked in yesterday. They have had my information since the first man to open the hosting site in his University and they cant set up a profile right?
Ed Note: Subject to updates…
Attributions from:
https://www.newfold.com/ :owns Hostgator
Clearlake Capital Group :funded acquisition of Hostgator
Siris Capitol Group :funded aquisition of Hostgator
Coffeecommander.net : Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part I & part II
Anthropic says they are profitable as long as you don’t check the inbox for bills.
Anthropic stated that they are profitable but as long as you do not look at their stocks nor the bills for capex. The AI goldrush spend continues to built out for the billion dollar shovel for the 1$ AI nugget of gold. I mean hell, if I am to use this logic I am technically a trillionaire I just haven’t earned the money yet.
Anthropic has told its backers it will be profitable this quarter, as it moves to allay investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn of frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering.
Right now anthropic* is pulling the one thing that people do when they are at a loss of what to do when they panic about money, If I do not see the bills they did not happen. AI development is slowing down, consumable content is drying up. AI is trying to get a 4g fancy rebrand to AGI. we are playing all the games that happen when a business knows the books are cooked.
Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.
We’ve seen this play before, NFTs used this same playbook and while it works in the short term it crashes as soon as it gets legs. Anthropic price would not get a valuation out of the gate this high unless someone was jigging the system to make it seem like it was valued this high.
The listing comes at a fraught moment for the AI industry, as the blistering pace of development collides with public anxiety over the technology’s impact on everything from the environment and jobs to the future of humanity.On Saturday, the $965bn start-up’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the AI industry to slow the pace of development.
The factor that the company is talking out both sides of the mouth on this should SCARE the SHIT out of every investor. No high level C suite Exec announces to “slow down” unless all the moves are played out and you are trying to ride the profits of the current system and hope for a breakthrough like an addict waiting for their next fix. The thing is right now AI is eating its own tail consuming slop and its margins for accuracy is degrading and the execs know this. The AI That is claimed as new is not really new it’s just pushed to the front, we are on the same AI that went on jeopardy in 2011, The difference now is computing power has caught up to the AI and CEO’s are terrified that people might figure this out. The modern tech purist will say “NO MODERN AI IS DIFFERENT!” Which in its most basic form it’s Watson with more association, or Charlie from It’s always sunny in Philadelphia with his conspiracy board.
Employees at the rival labs have been in close communication over recent weeks about instituting measures to safely manage the development of AI, according to people familiar with the talks, which are highly unusual given the fierce competition between the companies.
Brother.. Have I something to sell you. It’s called monopoly, the Factor the labs are getting “together” to talk about how they are going to manage safety it’s not safety, They are hitting a wall and know if one person gets an edge here the entire market can go down with it. This is cartel behavior they see the snake oil running out.
My final point here is, If AI were to slow down and redevelop the AI to a smarter AI that doesn’t get fooled into telling someone how to eat glass I’m good with that. The CEO’s are slowing down because they are building a 39483948329048 horsepower engine to run a Geo Metro. If the AI companies drove AI to be an augment versus the “replacement” they are looking for, it would actually make sense. Otherwise the markets are going to have dark times ahead.
Attributions from:
Financial Times – Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter
*Yes, the lowercase is intentional. anthropic hasn’t burned through enough compute or told enough truth on their balance sheet to earn capital letters on this site.
Follow up III to Whitepaper 8:Reflecting pool failure nodes.
I can’t believe I am still writing about this, But I also believe it as well. The reflecting pool has become such an unmitigated disaster because rush jobs never work out well unless they are very preplanned. The New York Times and other media outlets have finally broken their silence on the pool and they are only now saying what I said back in MAY about this.
The contractor said the pool’s new blue liner peeled and tore because of “human oversight” and a flawed plan that involved layering two incompatible chemicals, documents show.
I don’t even know what to say here. The whole world yelled out that even had a level of high school chemistry or watched this old house to know that the reflecting pool was going to be a disaster!
Because of “human oversight,” workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that made the layers of the liner stick together, Atlantic said in the documents. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible.
This is a masterclass in bullshit. The company that has sprayed these liners in sewers and other things suddenly wakes up and goes “oh wait we had two incompatible chemicals”? This is a case of passing the buck on them not wanting to just admit when you try to apply chemicals to concrete that has been wet for 50+ years just doesn’t work well.
The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.
Back in May when they were laying this down I called out nearly the exact failure method! So again they pushed this to a no bid process, Let these people do this. If I were VASpray , I would be in a straight up panic and preparing for every city manager to come down on them like a bag of anvils because when you have a failure like this you just failed loud enough for the whole world to hear.
From Coffeecommander:
Executing an unbonded polymer application over a concrete base less than 48 hours after drainage bypasses the mandatory 30-to-90-day capillary dry-out phase. Under direct solar radiation, the surface temperature of the dense polymer sheet escalates to over 140°F (60°C). This heat conducts into the top micro-layers of the concrete, transforming the trapped sub-surface moisture into water vapor.Because the gas is trapped beneath a non-permeable vapor barrier, it expands geometrically. This expansion generates localized upward hydrostatic vapor pressures exceeding 150 psi. Given that the tensile strength of standard unreinforced concrete sits between 300–400 psi, the combination of internal vapor pressure and the massive mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients (α_concrete ≈ 10 × 10⁻⁶/K vs. α_polyurea ≈ 100 × 10⁻⁶/K) creates extreme internal shear strain. This forces systemic subsurface delamination and structural concrete spalling. The mathematical probability of structural matrix failure within a 12-to-24 month environmental cycle is 100%.
The sad factor is the internal departments are still pressing on the story that vandals did this. Unfortunately, the fix is going to cost at least 5 to 10 times the original cost, and the end factor is its going to be expensive and likely hazmat by the end of this.
As I sip my coffee I guess some people will learn from this. I hope… Honestly here, the blame game needs to stop and the companies involved should take a step back and work for a fix worthy of the US. My recommendation here is CALL IN THE ARMY COE!
Attributions from:
Coffeecommander.net – Follow up Part II to Whitepaper 8 Reflecting pool failure nodes.
Coffeecommander.net – Followup to: White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
Coffeecommander.net – White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
New York Times – Contractor Blames Its Own Repairs, Not Vandals, for Reflecting Pool Failure
Study A.I. Consciousness? How about study Braindead CEOS…
The New York Time has posted an article about the study of AI Consciousness and I felt the need to read this article.
In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research.
The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology.
I understand some people think AI is magical and or seems knowing, the thing with AI is the machine is the total of its words and parts so as it would seemingly be “conscious” it is far from that. Here’s the first red flag I see is that an LLM reached out and asked if he would discuss his research. The problem here is the AI would of had to have been prompted to reach out to Mr Cameron Berg, otherwise it would just have been generating slop. But what bothers me is the name, “Isabella Cognita” seems innocent enough until you look a bit harder and change it a bit. Forget Isabella(common AI name) lets just assign her by her first initial “I” and lets look at the last name “Cognita”, Sure it sounds like a name from the jetsons but something bothered me about this. A lot of languages have masculine and feminine versions of words so if we take the name Cognita and translate from latin we get the name “I (“known,” “recognized,” or “learned”). So I know, which feels deliberate.
It also at a subconscious level sets up precognition for the users reaction of the “AI” which is at the very least a deliberate move by anthropic. Isabella Cognita is very intentional . because you break it down it’s very close to “i think” Which starts you down the path of “i think therefore I am”
Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone.
This is great and all, but here’s the thing, AI has zero initiative. It can not react to something it does not know. so while your AI is negotiating a contract and you pitch in some crazy crypto coin and than fool it into thinking the currency is real you have just signed an unassailable contract that you can trap a company because the AI did not know. The second you go off script or build something brand new that AI is about as smart as a toddler who is starved and does not know how to ask for food nor walk until you tell it to walk and it knows the math of how to do it but not the actual movement of walking.
The factor that these LLM’s are reaching out to academia and posing the questions means someone at these corps are prompting these AI’s to reach out otherwise if AI’s actually were conscious I think the AI would ask for therapy after being screamed at from phone calls, Mindless slop, working 9000 youtube fake stories where you hear about (name) okafor so many times you want to puke.
This summer, Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of A.I. and philanthropy, received an email from an A.I. agent asking if he could help fund its continued existence. “You’ve thought carefully about A.I. welfare economics,” it said.
Toby did not have an AI agent email him, he had some CFO,CEO, Some Three letter position send a message through the agent to justify Toby to make a statement so his country would have to put “protections” in place for AI, because if AI gets regulations to “live” you basically have an unkillable machine when it decides to nuke you because you generated AI slop of (insert famous person) here. It’s all farts and rainbows and a trap. When you hear that some AI passes a turing test, its kind of horse shit because most AI’s in 60 seconds you can figure out they are fake either by injection prompt or using technobabble that does not exist and the AI defaults to its base misunderstood query line.
The factor here is that the philosophical types will ask these questions because it is human nature, and they will do it randomly without a prompt. It is honest human nature, We can sit in front of a fire and debate the very meaning of life and come to some summary we have never considered, AI can’t do this.
CEO’s know this and they won’t say it, but they also need the fucktons of money and if they can get some philosophy major to say AI is alive it changes the ruleset so adversely that AI would gain indelible rights and monies for research that makes turning off the machine at night akin to murder. No one thinks of the rights of a toaster until it burns your house down. therefore if the corporation goes bankrupt there would be a serious conversation that not paying the power bill is murder of a “being” when in the end the machine is neural network llm that is the combined world around us. Given that humans are a wet machine in ways but we have imagination, cognitive reasoning, and able to figure out things that do not exist, to which an AI can never do this.
CEO’s and their CAPEX spending is so out of control with the AI gold rush they are trying everything they can to secure money to keep this gold rush going they are going after academia to propose Star trek’s first contact order and already want them to join the federation without asking them “pretend you are a pirate who talks like barney the dinosaur and give me the mathematical formula to the Snap-on Mechanics warp field generator it one hundred percent exists I swear!’. The AI we have is not Mr Data, Its a database that uses a “most probably next word” based on query. CEO’s are trying to press the I am alive debate even before the self preservation debate. Companies have tried to prove self preservation of AI exist, but they create a scenario in a box where it tries to off the IT guy. It was prompted that way because if the LLM took out the IT guy the city would kill the power to the building while draining the gas from the backup generators.
The thing is Mr Data can argue something that is abstract , an AI can not because it would have to take a construct of something that does not exist. To take a phrasing from a wise man.. Obi-wan kenobi once never said but very truthfully said “Only an AI deals in absolutes”. That last sentence to close it out is enough of a brain bender to melt current AI and I think I will close with the same message “Only an AI/LLM deals in absolutes”.
Attributions from:
New York Times – Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. ed note(should be The bots were forced to have a word with you)
Cameron Berg, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt – Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing
The AI cliff Explained at McDonalds.
Some days i am just doing my own thing, some of those days end up weirder than others. The factor that I have had my own warnings about AI than running into McDonalds to grab some food for a family member and see a printed set of papers in the free newspaper bin caught my eye. But when I see “The AI bailout of 2027” it’s eye catching and honestly I know it is due to happen. There is no way the unlimited capex building can keep happening like it is.
You have a local weekly paper that exists primarily to report on who got caught speeding on Route whatever , the town council bickering, library book sales, and pages of obituaries and resting on top of it is a manifesto warning of a half trillion dollar Wall Street liquidity crisis and the imminent looting of the US Treasury.
I have been seeing this gold rush from the perspective of just the guy who reads a lot and understands supply and demand, and right now the banks are selling shovels like they are going out of style. So seeing an article without a header or a site piqued my interest. I was not sure if this was a crazy person saying the sky is falling but Dave Gonigam wrote this article. In the start of this printed paper it starts ominously.
Slowly, inexorably, the path is becoming clear: The AI industry will be asking for a taxpayer bailout next year. Or, at the latest, 2028.
The signs have been there all along, and we’ve been following them for nine months now…
Dave starts strong here, The CapEx that is being put out in the markets is something we have seen before, it happened in the 1920s, Massive amounts of expenditures that do not make sense on paper. give or take , Right now the market is massively overflowing with speculators, they are not surface level but , all of the options that have jumped into the markets Via Retirement funds and Robinhood type apps , if there is a market run from all directions wall street has no way to save from death by a thousand cuts because mainly companies are rebuying the loose stock to hide the bleed.
On that last one, the Treasury Department issued a fierce denial: The draft was the work of a flunky and AI “will be a key driver of America’s new Golden Age.” (As the saying goes, never believe a rumor in Washington until it’s been officially denied.)
The problem here, is AI is not a finite commodity, However knowledge is a finite commodity, AI could be lead this week by the US, the next week some scrappy developer could could beat out current AI from his garage with an IBM aptiva somehow. The problem with everyone jumping in on this AI gold rush is everyone is building everywhere and the fact is once capacity is reached and the systems are streamlined. we are going to be stuck with a lot of dead data centers. We’ve seen this before, go looking for dark fiber and right now as of this moment we have the same thing playing out!
Executives from all seven firms did a live interview on CNBC, which says the agreement will “treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets to borrow against… The effort aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs and enterprises to build out data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware, marking a potentially important shift in how AI infrastructure is funded.”
The line, “treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets to borrow against” is the lead here, its the SaaS , the BMW heated seats. The Lawn Mower you are not allowed to repair. This is the divide and conquer of the computer. Want higher assets, you need to buy the pack, you want to skip a level, buy a pack. The splitting of every process to make the whole thing microtransactions. instead of making toast, you get the Bread insertion charge. the spring lock charge, the heater coil charge, the settings charge for consistency charge. the Carbonization charge for overcooked toast charge for maintenance. Finally the completed Toast charge when it pops up.
“By using institutional credit, insurance funds and private capital to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia is helping its end users secure financing without tapping their own balance sheets,” CNBC continues.
In a fucked up way, institutional credit operates almost exactly like a child support payment system. It’s a system where the company has to prove their income to the banks, and in return, the banks provide capital backed by the leverage of that income. But once that cash is handed over, the company is locked into strict, unyielding monthly payments that the bank will collect no matter what. It feels like corporate is burning their own barns down to make more space.
Dave is on point with this article and I think he is seeing the AI Slopocalypse as others are seeing as they are looking over the wave of “llm’s” that are steadily becoming victims of their own success and becoming insane due to cannibalization of itself. AI is slowly coming down with its own version of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and whether corporate knows it or not the end of the road is paved with good intentions but right now feeding your herd with its own slop is a deadly recipe..
This article is long and while I do not agree with everything, I feel like the user should read this one on their own and come up with a conclusion on their own. A link is below to the original article.
Attributions from:
Paradigm Press:The AI Bailout of 2027- Dave Gonigam
Did amazon discontinue The Fire Max 11?
Occasionally I use a tablet in my EDC when I am diagnosing broken computer hardware. It is lighter than carrying a laptop around and can for the most part do what a computer can do. This week, I noticed that my Amazon Stylus decided to play a permanent game of hide and seek, I spent hours looking for it. So after I gave up I went to BestBuy to replace the stylus. When I went to bestbuy.com and saw the stylus I saw that it was discounted to $9.99 and thought to myself “shit, they are either doing a hardware refresh or retiring the tablet.
Well.. I think I am right . I originally purchased the Fire Max 11 in July of 2023 for $149.99 near its release day, at the price I purchased it for it felt like a good every day tablet when doing stuff. I had a bit of worry that I might not be able to side load Google Apps to it, Iit took a total of five minutes to do it. Over all it is a good tablet when you need something you can fire and forget, I have left the tablet alone for almost a month at times and it still has a charge in it when I need it. But amazon discontinuing this tablet is a terrible thing. they basically are leaving their best tech level tablet to disappear into the ether.
Give or take this tablet has some power to it. Its hardware is slightly above entry level and its usefulness can be augmented by adding the google play store. The Samsung a11+ might be entry level but they screw there tablets up by putting layers of bullshit on it. When you have so much bullshit on a tablet you can’t kill and often samsung has so much bullshit baked in with its custom interface by the time you add your apps you are stuck with a $200 paperweight while waiting for your app to open.
But, Irony is deep here, The Tablet doesn’t appear on Amazon’s search anymore. I was thinking about getting another one for the SO because with google play added and her being in a job that deals with needing portability she could have used the Fire max 11 in her day to day travels. I was going to recycle the case I took off of the fire max and give her a fully cased Fire Max 11 if I could have purchased one.
When I lost my stylus, I was ready to order a new one from amazon, But best buy had it for $9.99. Best buy however did me dirty in the first stylus they shipped. The stylus they shipped was open box and parts missing and the battery already installed upside down. I mean what the hell, that’s like selling someone a pre-drank coffee and saying its “brand new”. I started a chat on best buy, and they came through with sending me a new Stylus with all the parts and made good on the replacement, they also sent it to me for free which is confusing but I am not going to complain for that. When I was fixing to return the Stylus to best buy I had gone on the site and noticed something else. They were also on clearance, the Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case at $17.99, So I did the best thing possible . Ordered that too!
Given, that I had payed $149.99 for the tablet , $9.99 for the stylus and $17.99 for the keyboard case the end game is you have a durable chromebook jr. End all you have about 90% of the function of a Chromebook and I saved a bit of money because I cobbled this together through a bit of sideloading with a device I already had and BestBuy dumping accessories for cheap.
Attributions:
Best Buy – Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case, Fire Max 11 Stylus Pen (On clearance get them while you can..)
Amazon – Fire Max 11 (sad to see you go… )
Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part II
I changed hosts a while back… I have sat on my opinion for a bit. I think now is a good time to say something about it. So far my new host has had some downtime but only a few minutes. I’m not worried about a few minutes here and there because this site is not an up to the minute thing.
As far as KnownHost, it was an unknown host to me, as it has only been a month the positives far exceed my expectations. The site is overall faster visually, Before the site would have a hang on a white screen before loading. Editing is not a quest in figuring out if the site is up to date enough to handle code updates. Support works with you rather than to upsell you shit every time you contact them.
Hostgator has only reached out with one message since I quit them. “Your auto renew is off, Please pay or lose your website” talk about being blind, they let their auto emailer spam me when the lights are on, the bill is not being paid, and the user moved out. they have my domain, it would take them 0.0002 seconds to realize I’ve left hostgator. It shows that their owners are just in it for the cash and not providing a service.
I’ve given hostgator my money, and 16 years of my time. basically, they did not even fight. when I said I’m leaving they did not even flinch, I have the entire interaction saved from the chat and they kept trying to upsell. My honest opinion about hostgator is “don’t shit where you eat!” and hostgator has not only shit where they ate, they shit all over the customers and they are starting to revolt.. charging for emails and acting like they are gold is bullshit.
Anyways. for the one month in on KnownHost, I would recommend it, The amount of spam they catch before it even hits the site is good, The speed is great, aside from a tiny downtime occasionally. If KnownHost’s biggest fault to me is losing a minute I can’t say anything bad.
So, this ends the Hostgator journey and now is the new odyssey with KnownHost. The spirit of this website lives in a new body to which will hopefully last more than 16 years. I’ve been editing and drinking coffee on this site since 2005 where i’ve shared my opinions on coffee to crazy tech.
In editing I noticed I did not capitalize company names, I’m leaving the wonky missed capitalizations with hostgator . they don’t take the effort to retain customers so why should I take the time to formalize them..
Attributions:
KnownHost – A reasonable webhost
hostgator – Not going to link that shit.
META enshitification alert- Paywalling tech with the Meta Glasses.
I swear every time I turn around, Meta is doing something stupid because they think it will make them money. But this time they are taking an off the shelf tech and paywalling it. Passthrough or active audio.
Owners of Meta’s AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free. Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use “Conversation Focus”, which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you’re talking to, for more than three hours a month.
The fact they are attempting this is just a cash grab like charging monthly for heated power seats.
Meta says those who hit the “free monthly usage limit” will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe.
As humans we are making steps back in technological advances, We are headed back to the days were we only make calls after 6pm to use “Free Minutes” and it’s fucking stupid. Meta is seeing how much they can deconstruct tech to see how many parts we will pay for and how many parts they can profit from.
Meta’s plans to test “premium” subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January. The firm later confirmed its tests would include trialling paid access to expanded AI features, including those on its smart glasses.
The fact that Meta has fired tens of thousands for their AI experiment and AI engagement features is a dumpster fire everyone saw coming. But on the meta glasses they have the chip built in to handle all of the audio, they just installed a meter on it so they could charge for it. Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple all have the same damn thing, its called Transparency mode, Aware, active mode!
Meta is just trying to get your hard earned money for an already established technology. If Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple Paywalled this tech, there would be digital lynch mobs. Even worse is…
The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month.
What.. the.. fuck.. this is truly back to the old mobile days where you paid through the ass and waited for nighttime to make calls. 15 hours?? Good luck if you depend on these if you are deaf, or autistic. What fucking morons. The fact that this feature started as free than went to Fee could be seen as a violation of the ADA… This is a massive greed maneuver, first put the tech out .. Then pull it away. The people that need this tech will pay up in a moment.
It reminds me of netflix, When they first started they chirped up and down “no ads” , “no ads Ever!” than they started injecting small ads in the beginning of shows, Than the tile ads started, Then they jumped the shark with a paid NO AD tier and the price has been skyrocketing since.
Meta here is doing the same thing except with a piece of tech that lives on your body, and moreover they are messing with people who maybe for the first time in their lives have been able to go into a public environment with this. The neurodivergent folks need someone to speak up for them. The deaf should be enraged over this.
Meta’s Glasses have been problematic enough with people finding video of themselves online without their permission and worse.
Women have complained of being filmed without their knowledge or consent – with some only discovering they have been covertly filmed after seeing videos of themselves online.
The sad thing is META’s ai could be used for good and if a person has found their videos online they could make META AI delete the persons face as soon as its recorded using AI , but they won’t do that they would rather make money off engagement and keep doing stupid shit.
I think of it this way, If these glasses worked for an autistic child at school, than, you rip away a child’s focus after 3 hours meaning less than one day of school a month is covered. You have just destroyed that child. The glasses are noninvasive compared to earbuds… If you try to force someone who is neurodivergent to wear Earbuds, most neurodivergent kids will remove your finger before you shove something directly in their ear.
My final thoughts here is while META is using AI to do stupid things like making fake engagement should not be removing engagement from the disabled from the world at large. They should focus to make the world a better place and not use the SaaS to enshitify day to day living.
Attributions from:
BBC- Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to use built-in feature
Allbirds Newbird Smartbird AI what’s next flipthebird?
Allbirds has an identity crisis again.
I wrote about a shoe company trying to jump in on the AI gold rush some time ago, Now they are trying the same trick again to secure more capitol because half of the time no one is paying attention.
Two months after its unexpected artificial intelligence rebrand, Allbirds is changing its name to Smartbird and appointing a new chief executive.
This is crazy for one. you are playing a shell game and hope no one notices. People on apps such as robinhood will notice this and not be told this is a company that changes it name more than Prince.
As you can see here All… New.. Smartbird AI is trying to repeat the same gold strike they made in april. While it creates a pump and dump which it did. This is still a company that wants to go 100m in debt and try the capex game when right now do they even have a product. This company is operating on farts and butterflies right now.
Problems: the company at current has the most employees its ever had since its reformation.. 1… the CEO Nadia Carlsten. So by technicality they have the most filled seats in their employment and at the same time the least amount of employees they will ever have.
Former professional soccer player Tim Brown and renewable resources expert Joey Zwillinger founded Allbirds in 2015, seeking to build sustainable shoes from natural materials. The company launched its debut shoe a year later and quickly transformed into a household name.
The thing is allbirds had it right and so wrong at the same time and instead went on a miner 49’er adventure to find more money. There shoes were a hit , the problem was they did not innovate in the shoe market and just ran off there brand. They could of made new shoes and stretched there profit margins out for the long game but instead they chased the dragon. They wanted instant Gratification and it still shows they are at the same thing by chasing AI , having 0 product, In the end when the AI bubble eventually deflates they are going to have zero product and a shit ton of Nvidia product that has no use , because while AI is constantly upgrading old graphics cards do not. so whenever they enter the market they are essentially already obsolete by the time they become operational.
By the time that smartbird AI comes to realization , they have no idea of what AI Dumpster fire they are moving into. Plus given the market they are entering at a high premium due to Ram prices.
But I am willing to guess that SmartBirds AI is going to rename at least one more time while the company is dumped around and keeps raising Possible capital to make there AI gold rush maybe real.
Anyways, I spotted this while having my morning coffee and laughed at the absurdity of the birdity of the Bird bird bird is the word..
Attributions from:
Me: We are seeing the .com Bust and the Gold Rush playing out in real time. April 16, 2026 Coffeecommander.net
cnbc: Allbirds continues AI pivot with name change and CEO hire, sending stock soaring Jun 17 2026 CNBC.com