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Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working:
Burgers, fries, and McNuggets are the staples of McDonald's fare. But the chain also offers soft-serve ice cream in most of its 38,000+ locations. Or at least, theoretically it does. In reality, the ice cream machines are infamously prone to breaking down, routinely disappointing anyone trying to satisfy their midnight McFlurry craving.
One enterprising software engineer, Rashiq Zahid, decided it's better to know if the ice cream machine is broken before you go. The solution? A bot to check ahead. Thus was born McBroken, which maps out all the McDonald's near you with a simple color-coded dot system: green if the ice cream machine is working and red if it's broken.
The bot basically works through McDonald's mobile app, which you can use to place an order at any McDonald's location. If you can add an ice cream order to your cart, the theory goes, the machine at that location is working. If you can't, it's not. So Zahid took that idea and scaled up.
[...] "I reverse-engineered McDonald's internal ordering API," he explained when he launched the tool, "and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every McDonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine."
[...] The Verge interviewed Zahid about his project once his tweet announcing it took off.
NB: The bot does not actually place the order. It attempts to set up an order, and if it is allowed to add the item, it is assumed to be available. Taking note of that, it then exits out of the attempt. At no time is money exchanged. Also, he discovered that he had to back off to once every 30 minutes or it got blocked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:42PM (9 children)
A web scraping script is news for nerds, stuff that matters?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:57PM (5 children)
> A web scraping script is news for nerds, stuff that matters?
Wrong site :-P
I do get your point though. Things that once upon a time were considered relatively basic tech-y stuff (like writing web scrapers), that most people would not even bother mentioning they did it, seems to have been elevated to some uber-leet work now, with articles and minor celebrity status.
Either the pool of skilled people is diminishing, making these relatively simple things seem some amazing magic now, or the degree of self-aggregation and attention whoring has markedly increased.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday October 27 2020, @04:12PM (1 child)
Actually, neither. The burger-tards find someone being able to predict availability of ice-cream to be even ueber-ueber-leet, for even living two lifetimes wouldn't be enough for them to figure it out themselves.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday October 27 2020, @04:54PM
Its because software firms hire Chinks and Pajeets. Though it makes sense that this particular example was an Arab, the used-car salesmen of the tech world. This is something that Quark would be depicted doing in the future to turn a few more cents of profit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @04:36PM (2 children)
I would say it is neither of these things. It is simply a consequence of the widespread adoption of computers in people's daily lives. Almost everyone nowadays is using computers, practically all the time, resulting in a massive increase in the proportion of computer users who have no interest or knowledge in how computers work (for better or for worse).
When I was in grade school many families did not even own a computer and "being good with computers" was not a particularly impressive skill to someone who doesn't have any idea what a computer can even be used for. You would only be able to show off what you make to your friends who are also into computers and have a similar skill set.
Nowadays if you do something cool on a computer you can show it to basically anyone and impress a lot of people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinnia Zirconium on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)
No, you're wrong and I'll tell you why. This has nothing to do with computers. Being "good" with computers is not impressive. Doing something cool on a computer will not impress anyone. It never has. Nerds are not cool. Nerds have never been cool. I know this because I've been writing bots to do scraping tricks for ten years and nobody gives a shht about anything I do. Nobody gives a shht because I don't care to scrape billion dollar corporations. The companies behind the sites I scrape are small and relatively unknown.
No you're looking at this story all wrong. This is not a story about some guy who wrote a bot. This is about some guy who wrote a bot to target a billion dollar corporation. The guy doesn't matter. The bot doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the guy used a computer. The billion dollar corporation matters. The money matters.
It's all about the fukken money, boys.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:17AM
+1 Sardonic
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @04:57PM
Yes. This is "cool."
It's a clever hack to determine machine status, it's interesting to see how much McFlurry machines are "broken" (read: too dirty and require cleaning, or whatever - 10%? For a company at the scale of McDonalds? Really?!), and the fact that it is "pulling one over" on a company like McDonalds makes it more fun.
Put another way, if in advance, somebody in an interview asked you to "Write a program to determine what percentage of McDonalds McFlurry machines are currently working," you'd struggle to do it. Now that you heard about this it is obvious, but in advance? I know I'd probably fail that question.
I think the fact you assume that *nobody* would find this interesting is kind of sad.
And, as noted by others, this site is not "news for nerds, stuff that matters." We it "... is people" here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @05:07PM (1 child)
You gotta do something once your job gets outsourced to keep your skilps fresh. I started committing to a 20 year old open source game written in PHP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:31AM
Kingdom of Loathing?