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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: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday October 27 2020, @06:50PM
>It's addictively delicious.
I remember hearing once that their secret is using lots of sugar in their frying grease. Take that for what you will.
"Hey Garfield, wouldn't it be great if there was a unit to measure how good food tastes?"
"Oh there is John, there is. It's called the calorie."
There's probably also some distinctive seasoning blends - one of the big reasons fast food tastes so good (in addition to lots of calories and salt) is they actually use a lot more spices than people typically use in home cooking. And I will say that doubling, even tripling the seasonings used in most recipes enhances them greatly (and that's before you even get in to introducing new ones). I suspect that traditional European cuisine especially suffered greatly from most spices being expensive imports, and has remained relatively bland mostly by tradition.