They must be doing a very poor job of optimizing their marketing. I had a long history or ordering the same items using the same "deal", dozens of times a year. They removed that deal and my spend at McDonald's dropped 90%. I didn't place a single order for 6 months - unprecedented. Have the noticed? Have they adjusted their marketing towards me? Did they bring back that deal or offer alternative promotions on the same items? No, no, and no. The purpose of apps and big data and especially AI is to be able to achieve the goal of 1-to-1 marketing based on individual preferences and patterns. Yet it appears a massive corporation like McDonald's is unable to achieve any of these goals, it's just continuing "mass marketing" - same deals to huge portions of their customer base, without differentiation - the same as the 1990's.
I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.
I think it's hard for us as individuals to understand the scale of McDonald's. They claim that 1 in 8 people in America have worked at McDonald's... that's... INSANE!
Sorry, not giving McDonald's a pass. They have a large team of data scientists and technologists working on their app and customer data. Even with a massive base, running a query to find individuals whose spend has dropped 50% y-o-y is not too difficult, and should be an urgent priority at a company that reported "negative comparable guest counts" (i.e. fewer customers y-o-y) for fiscal 2024.
Honest question, going back to Java, dont you miss scope functions (let, apply, also, etc)? Extension functions? Using sealed classes and "when"? I am happy to see Java (and the JVM) improve but it still seems to be missing some of Kotlin's best language features.
With the proliferation of JS, TS, Python, Go, etc, Kotlin is probably not even a thought for many young developers. Any efforts by JetBrains to bring Kotlin to where the people are at (as opposed to expecting people to come to IntelliJ) is welcomed. Call me a stan, whatever, but Kotlin is the best, most productive language I've ever used, by far. Yes, it takes some effort to understand how to effectively utilize some of its features, but once you do, productivity (and enjoyment) elevates tremendously.
Because you'd also have to submit the money it would cost to buy every combination, and also, you likely couldn't fit every ticket (tens of millions of combinations) with a realistic-looking ticket generation time (approx 1-5 seconds between each ticket created). i.e. if 50,000,000 tickets all had the same timestamp (or were off by nanoseconds) it would be a dead giveaway.
Tldr- about 20 years ago, when off-track betting systems were less sophisticated, an insider past-posted horse racing jackpot winners by waiting until the first 4 races of the Pick-6 were final before creating the ticket. They got busted and served time in federal prison because they had multiple winning tickets for the Breeders Cup Pick-6, basically the Super Bowl of horse racing, where scrutiny was extremely high.
Organized crime ran very small, very basic "numbers" games that are the equivalent to the low-profile "Pick 3" or "Quick 4" games most states run. Hundreds, maybe a few thousand dollars of prizes. No organized crime ring paid out multi-million dollar jackpots -- this is entirely the invention of government lotteries and the private administration companies that run them, like G-Tech. When 8-digit jackpots weren't enough to draw desired participation, states joined together (MegaMillions, Powerball) to create 9- and even 10-digit jackpots.
Install StartAllBack and choose the Windows 7 theme. Even if you dont care about the other UI improvements like the older Start Menu, it's worth it just for the improvements to the clock and calendar - the analog clock especially.
Kotlin is an awesome back-end language with strong typing, tons of libraries and multiple HTTP frameworks (http4k, ktor, vert.x, many more) and templating options (jte is terrific, and fully typed). Guessing it's too late to switch now but worth checking out.
I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.