The incoming Q1 earning reports will show if these actions are mainstream enough to make a visible dent in companies quarterly earnings. For now, the already reported Tesla sales numbers in Europe are substantially down, but Tesla is the strongest target of the boycott. It will be interesting to see if consumer companies such as Coca Cola, Nike, Amazon also report a substantial drop in EU sales.
It feels like there's always somebody campaigning for a boycott of some megacorp or other, but this time there's likely to be a breakout from the narrow activist circles (who already weren't buying Coca Cola, Nike, Amazon) into the mainstream public.
Tesla in particular are so easily targeted for "secondary picketing": people making it embarrasing to own a Tesla or just straight up targeting them for vandalism.
Which... I never realised, I didn't think soda was still so popular, let alone coca-cola and co.
I do find it hillarious that Red Bull outsells Heineken nowadays. And I'm happy to see Hertog Jan sells much better, it tastes much better than Heineken.
Q1 is waay too early for any of these things to manifest. it's easy not to buy a tesla. it's much harder to move your company from one supplier to another.
Q1 may start to show some effects, especially for the likes of Tesla who rely ~entirely on sales of big-ticket items to consumers (though I think Tesla's a special case here in any case; Musk's recent misbehaviour would be hurting it even outside the context of an incipient trade war). There aren't actually many US companies in that space with a big European market, though. Apple, maybe, but even then a lot of their sales would be non-consumer.
As you say, big effects for most companies, if they come, will come later.
The German soda market is very very regionalized, along the same lines as the beer market (20 to 50km around the brewery, further away you won't get it anymore. Very big brands are exceptions of course). Practically every brewery (there are over a thousand) has its own line of sodas, usually white (lemon or lime) lemonade, yellow (orange) lemonade (both carbonated around here), spezi (cola plus orange), cola (some coca cola copy) and apfelschorle (apple juice plus carbonated water).
Additionally there are a few that cater to certain groups with special products like mate soda (Loscher invented it with Club Mate I guess, but nowadays there are 10 big brands and a few small ones) and special kinds of cola like AfriCola or Mate Cola. Fritz-Kola is one of those products, you can get it in every city in well-stocked supermarkets, but it is a product that only caters to a certain kind of people and establishments (think "Berlin-like club-going techno-mad party-crowd" maybe). So many places will carry something else that caters to their group, and their region.
That is also why the Coca-Cola marketshare that the sister comment mentioned will go down, but it will not be replaced by another big producer, just maybe a handful of nationwide brands plus tons of regional ones.
Even before everything happened I prefer to get Fritz Cola in German supermarkets because I can get Coca Cola literally anywhere else in the world. If only they would sell 0.5L glass bottles with screwtops more / start selling 0.33l Aluminium cans, I would switch over entirely.
But in big supermarket chains you overwhelmingly find Coca Cola or the cheap house brand of the chain, at least when it is about big bottles or sixpacks. Sure, supermarkets like Edeka may also have alternatives like Afri Cola or what those are called, but big masses are Coca Cola.
yes but coca cola lost in the western market. they sell mostly in the poorer countries. dont forget its cheap as shit water with sugar. The premium feeling comes because of marketing
No it's still absolutely dominant in the western market - partly because they own a whole load of other brands, and they have absolutely unbeatable distribution. There's a few countries where Pepsi is more dominant. But the only place where a non-Coke/Pepsi soft drink is dominant is Scotland (AG Barr's Irn-Bru and other drinks). I think they even bought out the last other holdout (Peru's Inca-Cola)
Well, if you accept Irn-Bru as a Cola replacement then Germany already isn't a Cola country anymore. The vast majority of sodas consumed is rather of the Cola-Mix kind (there are two very common products named "Spezi" and a ton of smaller brands) and Apfelschorle. CocaCola dominates the Cola market only, the sum of all the other sodas is far greater.
I am from germany and this is true. I can remember the 90s and 2000s where coca cola was totally dominant and the only thing you can get in bistros restaurants etc. but now only cheap places like döners serve coca cola. what I meant is that they are still one of the most sold brands in western europe but not as dominant as it was with a steady decline. While in other parts of the world they can sell their sugarwater without regulation and thats where they make money. the rest of the world wants a taste of the free world drink.
That's a really good source (albeit from 2017), but while it does support your argument that sales by other companies dwarf those by Coca-Cola, the latter is still firmly in first place, with 3.3 billion liters sold -- as much as the companies placed 2 to 4 combined.
I guess Coca-Cola will not be replaced in the top position in any short to medium timeframe. While they will dwindle, I don't think one big competitor will gather their market share, rather a lot of small ones.
Coca-Cola completely dominates retail in Germany. The most recent numbers I could find[1] are from 2018, but I have no reason to believe the situation, you know, flipped on its head -- the top 3 lemonades were Coke, Coke Zero and Coke light, making up about 75% of the market. In 2022[2] Fritz had 2.9% market share. Maybe the market share is higher in restaurants, though I'd be shocked if it Fritz was even at 25%.
Surely they ship [components of] the syrup because otherwise they have to ship the raw coca leaves? Is the global supply of coca extract processed by the Stepan company in USA?
Profits move the other way through IP payments.
We can cut off the bleeding of profits by buying products with locally owned IP.
The Wikipedia article on Stepan company says that they use 100 tons of leaves per year.
If we assume that the processed leaves sold for coca cola weight the same as unprocessed (what is very doubtful), then how much would Europe get allocated? Probably less than half. But let's say it's half.
50 tons of this special extract isnt much. That's just two shipping containers.
Also with their scale every bottle probably onlu getd some trace amount, so I wonder if cola would taste any different if it didnt include this.
Surely they ship [components of] the syrup because otherwise they have to ship the raw coca leaves? Is the global supply of coca extract processed by the Stepan company in USA?
Profits move the other way through IP payments at least.
...I've only ever seen Fritz-Kola as a Berlin phenomenon tbh. There are some other regional brands though (e.g. in the Eastern German parts you're likely to see Vita Cola next to Coca Cola - completely different taste though).
Hamburg is also full of Fritz Kola. As this article[1] claims, Fritz Kola is the third largest cola brand in Germany. And it is exported in over 20 countries. They also search for bottling plants in Spain to produce drinks over there.
I've seen it for sale in at least a couple of bars in Copenhagen.
A bar owner I know here says selling these more-premium sodas is a good way to make a bit of extra money on people who aren't buying alcohol — you can charge more for Fritz-Kola than for Coca-Cola.
A different bar owner I know chose Jolly Cola, avoiding an American product but keeping a low price.
Social media makes it possible for leaders of nations to pick fights with random individuals on Twitter. Or entire subcultures, nations, or groups of people.
I've not seen large companies advertising "from Europe" despite this now being something a lot of people seem to be looking for (hard to tell with social media). Perhaps they fear losing USA sales?
It's going to take time.
Media services (films, video games, social media) is pretty tricky to move on.
I don’t think that it will be visible so quickly. These things will take more time.
Will my company switch away from azure today? Probably not. Will my company include more European alternatives in the next vendor selection. Definitely yes.
If I use Signal or Discord to send someone a link to anything hosted on a server controlled by me, provided that the user opens the link, I will get an exact IP address of the user. IP address is much more useful in de-anonymizing the user than the nearest CloudFlare datacenter location.
I wonder if replacing laptops with smartphones based computers has a potential to ever become mainstream. Instead of carrying a laptop, use your phone + foldable display + keyboard and mouse. This could be more ergonomic than laptops, you could have larger display, placed higher and further away, and use a more comfortable keyboard. It could also be smaller and lighter in total than carrying the laptop.
This has been tried several times (most notably Samsung Dex; but long, long back by Motorola in Atrix circa 2011) - nobody wanted it because the display plus the keyboard and a mouse is as heavy as a laptop.
You don't carry around the screen/peripherals. You arrive at a workstation and just plug in your phone. The monitor/mouse/keyboard are already there. You can work while on the go or out/about and then setup at a workstation instantly.
Dex is actually useful and I see people using it in business settings somewhat often. Basically anywhere a chromebook is useful Dex also fills that niche surprisingly well.
on android there's also windows connect or whatever it's called so you can pretty seamlessly use your windows laptop and samsung phone side by side. Everything syncs nearly instantly, including texts/phone calls. It's pretty rad when it works properly.
>You don't carry around the screen/peripherals. You arrive at a workstation and just plug in your phone. The monitor/mouse/keyboard are already there. You can work while on the go or out/about and then setup at a workstation instantly.
At that point, why are the peripherals not just accompanied by device with a CPU & internet connection?
As an ergo nerd who has played around with a ton of different form factors, including exactly the one you describe, I'm genuinely starting to believe that wearable tech, i.e. 'XR' glasses, is the most promising in this space. Something like this[0] but with a phone instead of the computer.
I plug the Viture XR pros into my Samsung phone and put them on, I get a beautiful 1080p screen projected 3m in front of me, the phone becomes a touchpad, and I have a low profile bluetooth split I type on. Very comfortable, very usable everywhere, including while you're walking around (not that I do this very often). It looks a little dorky but less with every iteration, and way less so than having an Oculus on your head. Not to mention that the quality of the displays is incredible.
One of the main issues with the infamous butterfly keyboard Apple put on MacBooks a few years ago was the near lack of tactile feedback. It had feedback, but not nearly enough for a half-decent typing experience. Zero tactical feedback is probably 100x worse than that.
There’s a crazy guy who’s the author of my favorite neovim plugin called markview that has 2k+ stars on github, he does everything from his phone, but I have no idea how lol
I run an authorization service that allows to log-in using magic links and we managed to solve this. First approach was for the link opening GET request to do not log the user in, but to include an HTML page with JavaScript that issued a POST request with a code from the link to log the user in. This worked well for a long time, because email scanners were fetching links from emails with GET requests but did not execute JavaScript on the fetched pages. Unfortunately, some time ago Microsoft tools indeed started to render the fetched pages and execute JavaScript on them which broke the links. What works now is to check if the link is open in the same browser that requested the link (you can use a cookie to do it) and only automatically login the user in these cases. If a link is open in a different browser, show an additional button ('Login as <email address>') that the user needs to click to finish the login action. MS tools render the login page but do not click buttons on it.
The issue that MS tools introduced is broader, because it affects also email confirmation flows during signups. This is less visible, because usually the scanners will confirm emails that the user would like to confirm anyway. But without additional protection steps, the users can be signed up for services that they didn't request and MS tools will automatically confirm such signups.
> check if the link is open in the same browser that requested the link (you can use a cookie to do it) and only automatically login the user in these cases. If a link is open in a different browser, show an additional button ('Login as <email address>') that the user needs to click to finish the login action.
Thanks for checking if it's the same browser. Some companies don't care about that (cough booking cough) so harmful actors just spam users with login attempts in hope a user will click by accident. And puff, random guy gets full access to your account. I got those every day, if I ever needed to login this way I would not be able to figure out which request is mine.
Ok, what if an email has "click this link if it was you who tried to log-in", or "if it wasn't you"?
Will Microsoft automatically authenticate malicious actors, or block yourself from services built with assumptions that the email client won't auto-click everything?
Login links from my service were automatically clicked and rendered and I know that other services discovered similar problems. Based on this I think that it is very likely the case with all the links in emails, but I don't know if there is any additional heuristic involved that would treat some links differently.
> But without additional protection steps, the users can be signed up for services that they didn't request and MS tools will automatically confirm such signups.
Indeed it's a bad thing but how bad?
The admins of some web service get a database of emails, send them those registration links, make their mail software create the accounts and? They end up with a service with accounts that they could create without sending those emails, before they send some emails to solicit users to perform some action on their (long forgotten?) account. There is no additional threat unless I'm missing something.
The admins have only an extra thin layer of protection because of the confirmation step but I think that any court can see through it.
The exploitation and potential damage would be service specific. Say a Dropbox like service for computer file syncing: An attacker creates an account for 'alice@example.org' and gets the signup email automatically confirmed. The attacker uploads some malware files to the account. After some time Alice attempts to create a valid account and resets password for 'alice@example.com'. Then Alice installs a desktop file syncing client provided by the service and malware files from the attacker get downloaded to her machine.
Another example would be if a company hosted a web app for employees that allowed signups only from @company.com addresses. In such case an attacker could be able to signup with such an address.
> We blew past the Turing test and yet no one seems to marvel at that.
We didn't blow past the Turing test. Such comments are often made, but I think they are a result of misunderstanding or overgeneralizing of what a Turing test is. If you interact with a chatbot and it produces human-like answers, it doesn't mean it would pass or blow past the Turing test.
Turing proposed a rigorous setup for the test, he designed it in such a way, that passing the test could really mean reaching human level intelligence. In the Turing test a human is asked to use all of their intelligence to reveal which of the two peers in a conversation is human and which is a machine. Current chatbots are very far from passing such a test.
I have experimented with using LLM for improving unit test coverage of a project. If you provide the model with test execution results and updated test coverage information, which can be automated, the LLM can indeed fix bugs and add improvements to tests that it created. I found it has high success rate at creating working unit tests with good coverage. I just used Docker for isolating the LLM-generated code from the rest of my system.
It depends a lot on the language. I recently tried this with Aider, Claude, and Rust, and after writing one function and its tests the model couldn't even get the code compiling, much less the tests passing. After 6-8 rounds with no progress I gave up.
Obviously, that's Rust, which is famously difficult to get compiling. It makes sense that it would have an easier time with a dynamic language like Python where it only has to handle the edge cases it wrote tests for and not all the ones the compiler finds for you.
I've found something similar, when you keep telling the LLM what the compiler says, it keeps adding more and more complexity to try to fix the error, and it either works by chance (leaving you with way overengineered code) or it just never works.
I've very rarely seen it simplify things to get the code to work.
I have the same observation, looks like LLMs are highly biased to add complexity to solve problems: for example add explicit handling of the edge-cases I pointed out rather than rework the algorithm to eliminate edge-cases altogether. Almost everytime it starts with something that's 80% correct, then iterate into something that's 90% correct while being super complex, unmaintainable and having no chance to ever cover the last 10%
Unfortunately this is my experience as well, to the point where I can't trust it with any technology that I'm not intimately familiar with and can thoroughly review.
Hmm, I worked with students in an “intro to programming” type course for a couple years. As far as I’m concerned, “I added complexity until it compiled and now it works but I don’t understand it” is pretty close to passing the Turing test, hahaha.
That’s sort of interesting. If code -> tests -> code is enough to get a clean room implementation, really, I wonder if this sort of tool would test that.
I haven't notice any degradation so far. Recently they even announced a Bandcamp Friday - a day when a Bandcamp commission is 0 and all income from sales goes to the artists. Doesn't look like they try to squeeze as much profits as possible and slowly kill the platform in doing so.
I think that's been going on since early 2020. And yeah, I can't really tell a difference between Bandcamp before it was sold and today. It's a shame that they not only sold to Epic of all companies but then fired so many people.
Maybe. It's really hard to say because you don't know what it took to build Bandcamp up to what it is today. We also don't know if things are falling apart or if the people still working there have twice their normal work.
It would be great to see research which screen time activities have these detrimental effects, because umbrella term "excessive screen time" can be too generalizing.
No, as far as I know. And I have been thinking of ways to that fir the better part of the last decade.
I think bringing modern programming practices into Excel might make huge differences. But I don't know how to do that in an Excel user friendly way
