wvenable

> How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way?

I don't think it's fair to imply that McDonald's is doing anything shady. They have over 2 million workers (although not directly, it's a franchise model). They make a lot of profit but, proportional to the total workforce, it's about average. Hardly something to be outraged about.

If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.

The underlying implication here is whether companies should make any profit at all. If the amount of profit allowed is non-zero, what is the correct number? And if there is a correct number, what do you propose to do about it?

Who say's they don't? How does this compare to what you do for a living?

This is meaningless because it's entirely hypothetical. If McDonald's is only looking at quantitative data the "bad outcome" hasn't come for them. It seems quite successful in fact (especially in these tough economic times). Maybe if leads to a massive failure we can come back and revisit this but for now, based on facts, it's working just fine for them.

People like to believe that enshitifying everything will eventually lead to failure because sucks for us. It does suck for us. But I'm not convinced that karma is coming for them.

The large multi-national corporation known as "McDonald's" should care about its family, friends, and personal fulfillment instead?

Except that, adjusted for inflation, a Big Mac was cheaper at that time.

They only changed this recently.

These bad outcomes aren't coming. Maybe we as customers don't like it but it doesn't mean the companies are suffering for it.

For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.

That was my impression as well. The data collected is fairly innocuous.

This is exactly the kind of data that every business collects and processes to one degree or another even without an app or loyalty program.

I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it.

Has anyone thought about building something like this?

> Like I said - reports from users.

How does that work? Are they generating the same project in different languages and comparing the results? What does it mean for the code to be "better"?

As linked in the article, you could read the patent application:

https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...

Economic theory would work a lot better if humans weren't involved.

It's almost impossible for a new company to join most of these markets; the major players are so large that they have influence over the retailers, the suppliers, and everyone in the middle.

But every so often successful higher volume/quality/durability products do manage exist for a time but are eventually bought out and the brand destroyed. This has played out over and over.

The market optimizes for profit growth, not for customer satisfaction.

I disagree that it is what people want. Nobody wants a smaller chocolate bar for the same amount of money, more cramped seats, washing machines that break and need constant replacement, etc.

Massive corporate consolidation means that when you're looking at the rack of chocolate bars there's a good chance that just 2 companies made all of them. You have the illusion of choice.

None of this happened over-night. It's a slow steady financial optimization in all industries all at the same time. It's very hard to vote with your wallet when there's very little difference.

Often I find I want to correct the LLM; I think it makes more sense to do that before the commit. I don't want to commit a bunch of half-baked work even if it is just local.

Even a roof on your head is perishable over time.

Human life requires some consumables. Even with less stuff, you will always need some stuff.

Commit is the line I don't let the LLM cross. There's no reason for it commit; that's the part where I check its work.

> I'm so sick of having AI chase a bug and having to lead it by the hand like a toddler to try and help me solve bugs.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I can give it a vague description of the problem and have it find it pretty easily without any more input from me.

I do think there's a pretty big variation in tools and setups and what output people are getting. I'm now just using OpenAI Codex in VS Code and it churns through problems like they're nothing.

Sometimes I have to get it to not over-engineer a solution; not because it's necessarily wrong but because I don't need that much correctness.

That neglect is the reason that it was made worse. Everything added to Windows that was worse is actively designed to generate some kind, any kind, of revenue growth. Without the full force of the organization behind it, it now has to struggle to prove some kind of worth and that enshiftification is the result.

I think neglecting Windows is a huge failure for Microsoft. Azure might be where all the money and growth is, but it wouldn't be anything without Windows. Owning a platform is a massive advantage. Apple has their own platform. Google has Android. Microsoft has Windows. Every other major tech player from Meta to OpenAI is desperately trying to get themselves a platform. Because it's so fundamentally important to succeeding at this scale.

For Microsoft to neglect their platform is, in my opinion, a massive strategic mistake. Microsoft already failed with mobile and it cost them an entire seat at that table. If people hate Windows, it's going to have knock-on effects to everything that Microsoft sells including Azure. I would argue that Windows is what keeps Azure from becoming just another commodity cloud provider.

That is not correct at all.

Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.

I disagree. Microsoft software was some of the best. Maybe not because their quality was excellent but because their competition was easily worse.

If customers have a real choice between ad supported and not ad supported then that's fine.

(And by "real choice" I mean that ad-free isn't ridiculously overpriced)

(And not a subscription fee to avoid ads)

> Wouldn't it be fair if BMW at least shared the advertisement revenue with the car owners?

No.

Or making a VR headset that has to be tethered but still put all the compute on your face.

70hz to 75hz on 12th Gen Core i7-12700

Get about 10 more hz in Firefox than in Chrome which was unexpected.

I was going to say that really shouldn't be a problem but then I read further:

https://sqlite.org/nulinstr.html

> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.

In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Tapping an icon on the screen is instantaneous. There's also some extra complexity in what grid of icons you currently have selected and how to move between them.

But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.

Of course, cars are always evolving, that's why a new model comes out every single year. Ironically, the screen elements of cars always become the most dated part. I don't feel there is nearly as much fashion in the touch screen as the physical elements.

Tesla is the exception that proves the rule; its fashion was its unique minimalist touch screen style compared to other vehicles. Car companies copying that design are making it passé.