KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General Hospital | Hacker News Reader

KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General Hospital

esoteric.codes

103 pointsasjo83 comments

It is interesting to see how much of human parsing of language depends on prior probability, probably expected pairs of concepts, because I had double-take on that sentence, since my brain really was not expecting to find combinations of KFC, Malbolge, or General Hospital in a single sentence.

Seriously thought the whole thing was generated by a connector between GPT-3 and a new deepfake engine. Still think that's what it is. This is mind breaking.

Ah, you beat me to writing a comment that mentioned GPT-3, but I promise I didn't see yours when I started writing mine. Perhaps human thoughts are more predictable than we like to believe.

Anyway, to make your suggestion of "a new deepfake engine" more concrete, let me include a reference to DALL-E, the recently announced text-to-image engine from OpenAI:

https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/16/openais-text-to-image-eng...

Thank you, that's deeply horrifying! :)

That was my first thought as well until I saw the tweet, though the possibility of it being an acid flashback was a close second.

I had a similar experiencing when reading it, and now I'm wondering if there is a way to use a language model like GPT-3 to measure how unlikely a given string of words is, relative to other headlines.

I don't think you need something that heavyweight to do this (although maybe for an entire headline). Amazon has had the "Statistically Improbable Phrases" feature for books for quite a while now.

I was not aware that General Hospital was the name of a TV show, so not only the headline but the article itself made little sense to me initially - it read like randomly generated spam.

My takeaways:

1. Colonel Sanders is cannon in General Hospital

2. He knows how to code; in Malbolge

3. He doesn't know how to pronounce Malbolge

4. He was cursed by a warlock

5. Some Syndicates cannot be reasoned with

https://twitter.com/generalhospital/status/10153849081921904...

> 3. He doesn't know how to pronounce Malbolge

That's actually the curse

LOL

1. Boom!

and: 6. "Stay crispy and stay humble" - sounds like a good new slogan for KFC.

Haha, nice

The Venn Diagram of people who know about Malbolge and people who watch General Hospital has to have little to no overlap. Was this reference made for exactly one guy or something?

Maybe it was just an experiment with viral marketing, estimating a 1%-10% chance it would make it into programmer social media circles and make them hungry for KFC instead of pizza or avocado toast.

The inclusion of Malbolge is obviously intended to cause them to look up how it works, resulting in acceleration of both their mental fatigue and physical hunger.

Might have also been included because Malbolge is included in a listicle that is the top search result for "weird programming languages." I wouldn't be surprised if show writers did a search for something close to that phrase, found the article, immediately got the literary reference and included it in the show for that reason.

Also, you probably can't say brainfuck on daytime TV. None of the other languages had interesting names, i.e., glass, whitespace, chicken, lolcode.

Edit: They've probably done something similar with other technical topics, but we don't watch the show to know. Such as, having a rocket scientist on the show talking about building rocket recovery wadding or something after looking through a GIS for "rocket parts."

"Malbolge" does at least sound sinister, so if you're going for an evil hacker vibe it's perfect.

> None of the other languages had interesting names, i.e., glass, whitespace, chicken, lolcode.

Befunge[0], obviously, though you don't get a literary reference out of that.

0: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge

INTERCAL seems well-suited for daytime TV.

>Also, you probably can't say brainfuck

Honestly, I have never figured out how to say that code out loud anywhere.

I've found a lot of places where you can just say it normally.

Perhaps the people writing General Hospital would rather not be doing that, but it makes too much money to cancel and the audience is inelastic, so they decided to have some fun.

>Was this reference made for exactly one guy

probably yes, and that one guy works as the technical consultant on the show.

A google search for "most obscure computer language" (with "computer language" being the terminology they use in the episode) returns this article as the first result https://blog.payara.fish/6-of-the-weirdest-most-obscure-prog...

My guess is that they just skimmed through that and picked "Malbolge" because it sounds the best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS would be the obvious choice...

Well, we are discussing it so apparently the marketing worked.

KFC’s current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us down recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special, and have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a warming bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be written about these mad geniuses very soon.

Arguably this started decades ago when they successfully established the KFC Party Barrel as a traditional Christmas meal in Japan.

I lived in Japan for 2 years, and found it absolutely insane how strong the following of the Party Barrel is. The KFC in a town near by had sold out their availability 4 months in advance one year.

That wasn't something that they outright did, it just kind of happened.

I would also be _shocked_ if that team had any relation to the team doing their current ad work.

From what I've read there's a lot of credit attributed to the manager of the first KFC in Japan (who eventually became CEO of KFC Japan), and they started a "Kentucky for Christmas" ad campaign there in 1974.

I took a bit of dramatic liberty in connecting that to their present-day efforts, but I could definitely see it being a part of company lore encouraging unconventional marketing strategies.

I highly doubt anyone will ever actually be able to buy the KFConsole. It's "real" in the sense that they've made one, but it's not actually for sale.

They've done stuff like this in the past and followed through with it.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/11/20/16679480/...

Sounds like a challenge for Etsy

If only they sold a decent product.

> KFC’s current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us down recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special, and have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a warming bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be written about these mad geniuses very soon.

What the absolute fuck is this... I can't wrap my head around what seems like an AI based structured sentence, that I presume you wrote, and is starkly reminiscent of that story written about an app based darknet economy that is really just an AI meant to kept Humans addicted to devices and plugged into 'the matrix,' but I can't help but be intrigued.

Can you provide links to this console and this series... I want to give myself a reason to stop being on the internet for a few days and I'm sure this would do it.

Console: https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/

Lifetime movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k

Bonus round -- the KFC dating simulator game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...

It has fucking Slater from Saved by the Bell as the Colonel in it!!

Oh, I can't take more of this I'm taking an internet sabbatical for a few days, this it just too much non-sense to process.

It's like the Corpo dramatized parody version the Libertarian® Utopia™ [0] story run amok.

In case its relevent: if I ever feel like fried chicken and get tired of chicken katsu or kare-age, I'm going for the grocery store option or Popeye's, this is the worst thing I've seen in ages and we really have to a deep look at ourselves if this actually works to move KFC buckets in masse.

I'm going dark for a few days.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DloaYxQn1BM

I think you might be taking this a bit too far.

This was made possible in part by the culmination of multiple democratization events that made it viable for Yum Brands: a large company but nowhere near the big guys to be able to effectively punch above their weight class.

1) Youtube allowed them to shoot some silly 15 min short film and not have to worry about massive distribution costs or paying for a spot on TV.

2) The rise of Netflix and other streaming has helped to break down the walls that may have prevented KFC from even considering to hire people like Mario Lopez.

3) The Console is just a PC in a custom case. The increasing commoditization of tech + the rise of cheaper and cheaper manufacturing of commodity components allows the production of one off SKUs like this to be within reach to more and more organizations.

We see amazing quality videos being produced by people in their bedrooms. It stands to reason that an ambitious company with a decent budget would produce something like this.

Years ago, Google experimented with enabling regular people to buy TV ad spots through Google ADs. I feel like that was a democratization of getting on TV for regular people that I wish was continued but I guess Google had a different vision.

It's marketing copy, not some sacred text they are desecrating. Their goal is to be a little silly and maybe elicit an emotional reaction, judging by your reaction it seems like it worked well.

> It's marketing copy, not some sacred text they are desecrating. Their goal is to be a little silly and maybe elicit an emotional reaction, judging by your reaction it seems like it worked well.

So, if I'm hearing you correctly: good marketing involves making someone so disgusted by the this ever pervasive Corporatism so much that it will actively make someone avoid eating there ever again? And thus reducing their potential market share?

Then again I guess polarization does sell ad-space, look at CNN/MSNBC these past 4 years who made billions in ad money for their perverse 24 hour version of 2 minutes of of hate with Trump spam. But I fail to see how that works on people that aren't the senile boomer demographic who rage on Facebook and foment more division and discord demographic?

Honestly, I was so glad that I went dark for those days. I avoided all the pointless Trump-Biden inauguration drama and was actually super productive and it reminds me I should do that more often.

I actually went back to Jermey's Scahil's expose on Trump's 4 years on the Intercept and watched Curtis' HyperNormalisation that reminded me why I have the views that I do.

The "Console" is just a gaming PC in a novelty case.

I still can't believe that console is not a joke product. I dread to think about the smell if not cleaned after each use, or the chicken grease getting inside the controls for that matter.

I'm pretty sure it's a joke product that they made one of so they could have people say it's "real". You can't actually buy one and there's no release date announced.

What I loved about this article was the feeling of being dropped into a completely foreign world. The visual and acting style of the soap is so weird. The presence of Sanders is so unexpected. Not being familiar with Malbolge, it was all especially esoteric.

While there are many things in this world that I don’t understand, I few like this whole thing was a kind of delightful puzzle for five minutes. Nice to remember that off kilter feeing.

This is like the modern equivalent of the Max Headroom signal hijacking. Bizarre mashups of tech, television and corporate icons. It's definitely a form of culture jamming.

...except this time it's literally just marketing material for a giant corporation hawking junk food. The opposite of culture jamming, I guess.

The guy that named gifs may insist on a soft g, but he’s obviously wrong or a troll because graphic isn’t pronounced /jrafik/, and everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way.

Similarly, Kalle Lasn‘s perspective was limited by ideology when he coined “culture jamming”. The term’s usage has expanded to encompass a wider range of mashups, thumbs-in-eyes, and appropriations than what its creator intended, and is frequently used in ways that raises the hackles of old school readers of Adbusters.

In some ways its modern usage has become a meta-commentary on itself.

> but he’s obviously wrong or a troll

He once made this assertion while standing in front of a PowerPoint slide that read "It's pronounced 'JIF' not 'GIF'".

It has to be a troll, because no-one smart enough to invent the format is going to look at that slide and go "yep, this strengthens my argument".

> raises the hackles of old school readers of Adbusters.

I feel seen.

I wonder about that. Knuth pronounces TeX like "tech" and Kleene pronounced his name like "Clay-knee", but are these wrong or trolls? Are folks who say "liberry" or "nukular" wrong or trolls? There are deep linguistic questions here, and they won't be reached by simply dismissing heterodox pronunciations as wrong.

It may interest you to know that GIF is pronounced "jif", because of the pun that "choosy developers choose GIF" [0][1]. Rather than dismissing you as wrong or a troll, I'd like to acknowledge that your heterodox choices are valid and enrich our language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jif_(peanut_butter)#Advertisin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF

I agree with your general point, but the claim "everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way" does not match my experience at all. People I talk to seem to be pretty evenly split on the matter, and most are entirely unaware that there is any controversy about the pronunciation at all.

The commodification of culture jamming!

I love these commercials (and the Dr Pepper Fansville ones). So stupidly clever.

But man KFC makes me feel so very ill afterwards. I'm not sure what exactly it is: I can eat Chik Filays and Burger King fine (the ~3-4 times a year I get fast food). But KFC, it's been like 7-8 years and I just steer clear now. It's nostalgically saddening because I remember loving the stuff when I was a kid, especially those mashed potatoes.

I agree with you. I also feel ill after eating KFC. It seems more greasy than something like Popeyes. My body feels like it has had a sucker punch after eating KFC so I try to stay clear. My theory is that it is a combination of something in the breading they use + the method of frying.

KFC uses a Pressure Fryer: https://youtu.be/9ZLKj2a_OPM?t=546

Wendys and Chickfila also use a pressure fryer but notably their sandwiches are not dripping with oil when you order them.

Here is the same pressure fryer Wendys uses but to fry chicken wings instead of sandwich patties, noice that they are dripping with oil: https://youtu.be/7owZz26W1_U?t=176

Popeyes uses a standard fryer plus a thick coating of buttermilk(as seen earlier in the video) and their chicken seems to come out cleaner: https://youtu.be/31dGYRnhS8k?t=113

Seems like Pressure fryers + breading might be the culprit but really, this is just a wild guess. If there are any fried chicken masters here, feel free to jump in.

KFC probably does not today taste much like it did when you were a kid (unless you are very young).

> especially those mashed potatoes.

Their potatoes are made from those dehydrated potato flakes and powdered gravy. You can make a decent facsimile using Idaho Spuds and Heinz jarred Homestyle Chicken gravy.

KFC has got a zany marketing team.

On the topic of zany and bizarre KFC marketing strategies, there have been several I bumped in to in the last few days.

This dating simulator is published by KFC, starring the Colonel himself: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...

Another bizarre one I encountered in the last few days; there is the new Lifetime movie about Colonel Sanders starring Mario Lopez, entitled "A Recipe for Seduction"....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGUMA2LwskQ

[EDIT] Apparently the whole mini-movie is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k

Is Steam compatible with the new Coolermaster? https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/

It seemed like Burger King was headed that direction when they released their line of (surprisingly playable) Xbox games, but I guess they've backed away since then.

That was because they hired CP+B, but then CP+B were too much of classic problematic ad bros for them, so Burger King backed out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Porter_%2B_Bogusky

Interesting; I wasn't familiar with the various players in big advertising (other than Sterling Cooper).

Their Subservient Chicken website was one of the strangest pieces of marketing I've ever seen for a major corporation.

Perhaps you missed it when the Quizno's marketing people had Rathergood's spongmonkeys sell toasted sandwiches:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePP7jPYl-pg

The BK bumper car game has turned into a weird little christmas tradition in my family. Actually a very fun, easy-to-learn/hard-ish-to-master game (basically 2D Rocket League)

Burger King created WhopperCoin, but only for Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhopperCoin

Maybe big tech companies aren't the only ones who try to expand their moats with entries in random product categories and moonshot projects.

I had this thought as well. "Sneak King" and the commercials back then were brilliant. Too bad the BK nearest me is nearly unedible.

Probably shrinking their marketing team like they did to their sandwiches.

They just did a great looking rebrand, at least. Although the building renders look like Jony Ive did them.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90591634/burger-king-unveils-its...

As opposed to KFC doubling-down?

As consumers naturally learn to tune out advertising, advertisers must constantly adapt in order to get past their cognitive defenses.

W+K (not sure if they were part of this) is pretty good.

While watching college b-ball with my son last night, I noticed that the field-house at Louisville is (now?) named the "KFC Yum! Center". I can't really eat KFC but do appreciate brands that can poke fun at themselves or otherwise advertise with some humor. The melting Colonel Sanders snowman was a little creepy though!

[0] https://www.kfcyumcenter.com/

Wasn't clear if you knew this, but KFC is owned by "Yum! Brands"

I did not though I did remember that they were somehow related to Pizza Hut.

i find it kind of unsettling how the colonel lives on as a cartoon

They should bring back the actual secret KFC recipe. Sanders actually said that, after he sold the company, they changed the recipe and he thought it sucked.

Anyone who has read anything about Col Sanders, would know he would have actually done this sort of thing, he was success at marking himself, as his brand.

FWIW the title is probably the best part of this story. I watched the video clips and it just seems no different from any other cheesy soap opera.

This is a new frontier for native advertising. Instead of a few gratuitous product mentions, the entire script is co-opted.

Well.. I'm now thinking about fried chicken. So, while I am not going to eat any, they kind-of succeeded.

Beautiful.

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