Are we surprised at this outcome? Most of HN encourages forming companies to find a niche in the world, build an arbitrage over it and charge rent. Payment processors and banks do that. Just like startup founders they then listen to the stakeholders with the biggest wallets. It turns out prude Christians have fucking money and apparently more than horny gamer bros.
Admitted, i'm an old fart, but when i was a kid, cake was something we had on sundays, sodas was something we got at a birthday party, and we had one, maybe two, and meals were rich in protein and fat, with carbohydrates usually being at the bottom. We spent the entire day outside, riding our bikes, playing (as in physical, not computer), riding skateboards, etc.
These days it almost feels like sugar has replaced a lot of the protein and at least some of the fat, and we eat a lot more of it.
Sodas are no longer a "monthly" event, but a daily event, and people will happily drink 2-3-4 sodas per day (or more). In our food, a lot of the protein has been replaced by sugar and fat as well.
And instead of running around, playing on the streets, kids these days sit in front of a computer/tablet/phone/tv/whatever.
Maybe the younger generation has learned the lesson, but many people 30 plus still drinks 1-2 liters of the stuff every day. Many 20 plus year olds I know also drink energy drinks like it’s a miracle drug, when all it really is, is soda in disguise.
I've encountered possible food fraud with both srawberries and beef, though water for cheapening meat is more common than flavor improvement.. Eggs are probably not worth trouble though possible to treat.
This is one of the most fascinating things I've found in the past ten or so years. When did people in general begin to buy into the bullshit spewed by big shots in corporate or really any commercial venture. People at least implicitly understood that the boss just wanted money and would fuck you, nature or his own firmly held beliefs to get it.
People are now shocked when a company cuts a loved product or their boss fires them when someone cheaper comes along.
Is search, even legacy search like a table of contents or the Dewey decimal system not useful? It may not point you to what you want either.
LLMs are an ok iteration on search with up and downsides.
One of the upsides is better contextual hinting from the users input. One of the downsides is that it also makes it trivial to spew out so much bullshit content that soon I doubt it will be able to train on most of the public internet anymore.
The killer feature of this and like 90% of apps in this market capture model is laziness. They realize if you can make something easy for someone they will do it even if it’s not quite what they want.
Users want good fresh food delivered at a reasonable price. But they are willing to tolerate shitty cold food at an expensive price because it’s a tiny bit easier to do than picking up the phone.
We are lazy by nature to preserve energy and many many companies have just perfected finding the right ratio of how fucked we will allow our selves to be to tickle that lazy button.
