The sad thing is, we engineers are building this dystopia. Maybe even fellow HN readers. Our next JIRA ticket in the queue is to shove another ad onto another previously unmonetized surface. Many of us are actively bringing about this world!
The engineer who built this grocery screen was probably highly compensated for it. The biz guys who just hi-5'ed each other for "crushing it" are too, and the entrepreneur is probably already a millionaire. Everyone's making money by being part of the problem.
Probably force-repeat the ad.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is a thing because just having your brand name out there (even if it’s bad news) is better than it not being out there at all.
Fuck advertising and the greedy profit-driven place it comes from.
1. waywaywaybackmachine/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27637963
One day someone will be hunched over on a sidewalk, dying of thirst, and a patrolling Nestle®-branded drone senses (using state-of-the-art machine learning "customer needs" technology) his predicament. The drone hovers there projecting a holo-ad about Nestles hot product "Nectar of Life" which is just water from the region's last remaining aquifer cut with brackish water from the coast. The ad ends with a map to the nearest vending machine and buzzes off for it's next engagement. The man, too weak to move, just sits there, nothing he can do except wait for another ad drone to come by.