[HN Gopher] KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming o...
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KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General
Hospital
Author : asjo
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-01-19 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (esoteric.codes)
(TXT) w3m dump (esoteric.codes)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| KFC has got a zany marketing team.
| mbg721 wrote:
| It seemed like Burger King was headed that direction when they
| released their line of (surprisingly playable) Xbox games, but
| I guess they've backed away since then.
| monocasa wrote:
| That was because they hired CP+B, but then CP+B were too much
| of classic problematic ad bros for them, so Burger King
| backed out.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Porter_%2B_Bogusky
| mbg721 wrote:
| Interesting; I wasn't familiar with the various players in
| big advertising (other than Sterling Cooper).
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Maybe big tech companies aren't the only ones who try to
| expand their moats with entries in random product categories
| and moonshot projects.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Probably shrinking their marketing team like they did to
| their sandwiches.
| mbg721 wrote:
| As opposed to KFC doubling-down?
| astrange wrote:
| They just did a great looking rebrand, at least. Although
| the building renders look like Jony Ive did them.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90591634/burger-king-unveils-
| its...
| marktangotango wrote:
| I had this thought as well. "Sneak King" and the commercials
| back then were brilliant. Too bad the BK nearest me is nearly
| unedible.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Their Subservient Chicken website was one of the strangest
| pieces of marketing I've ever seen for a major corporation.
| glaugh wrote:
| The BK bumper car game has turned into a weird little
| christmas tradition in my family. Actually a very fun, easy-
| to-learn/hard-ish-to-master game (basically 2D Rocket League)
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Burger King created WhopperCoin, but only for Russia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhopperCoin
| dawnerd wrote:
| W+K (not sure if they were part of this) is pretty good.
| eindiran wrote:
| On the topic of zany and bizarre KFC marketing strategies,
| there have been several I bumped in to in the last few days.
|
| This dating simulator is published by KFC, starring the Colonel
| himself:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...
|
| Another bizarre one I encountered in the last few days; there
| is the new Lifetime movie about Colonel Sanders starring Mario
| Lopez, entitled "A Recipe for Seduction"....
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGUMA2LwskQ
|
| [EDIT] Apparently the whole mini-movie is available online:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k
| tclancy wrote:
| Is Steam compatible with the new Coolermaster?
| https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/
| munificent wrote:
| As consumers naturally learn to tune out advertising,
| advertisers must constantly adapt in order to get past their
| cognitive defenses.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| It is interesting to see how much of human parsing of language
| depends on prior probability, probably expected pairs of
| concepts, because I had double-take on that sentence, since my
| brain really was not expecting to find combinations of KFC,
| Malbolge, or General Hospital in a single sentence.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Seriously thought the whole thing was generated by a connector
| between GPT-3 and a new deepfake engine. Still think that's
| what it is. This is mind breaking.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Ah, you beat me to writing a comment that mentioned GPT-3,
| but I promise I didn't see yours when I started writing mine.
| Perhaps human thoughts are more predictable than we like to
| believe.
|
| Anyway, to make your suggestion of "a new deepfake engine"
| more concrete, let me include a reference to DALL-E, the
| recently announced text-to-image engine from OpenAI:
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/16/openais-text-to-image-
| eng...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Thank you, that's deeply horrifying! :)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I had a similar experiencing when reading it, and now I'm
| wondering if there is a way to use a language model like GPT-3
| to measure how unlikely a given string of words is, relative to
| other headlines.
| siegecraft wrote:
| I don't think you need something that heavyweight to do this
| (although maybe for an entire headline). Amazon has had the
| "Statistically Improbable Phrases" feature for books for
| quite a while now.
| vessenes wrote:
| KFC's current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us down
| recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special, and
| have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a warming
| bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be written
| about these mad geniuses very soon.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > KFC's current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us
| down recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special,
| and have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a
| warming bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be
| written about these mad geniuses very soon.
|
| What the absolute fuck is this... I can't wrap my head around
| what seems like an AI based structured sentence, that I presume
| you wrote, and is starkly reminiscent of that story written
| about an app based darknet economy that is really just an AI
| meant to kept Humans addicted to devices and plugged into 'the
| matrix,' but I can't help but be intrigued.
|
| Can you provide links to this console and this series... I want
| to give myself a reason to stop being on the internet for a few
| days and I'm sure this would do it.
| eindiran wrote:
| Console: https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/
|
| Lifetime movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k
|
| Bonus round -- the KFC dating simulator game: https://store.s
| teampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| It has fucking Slater from Saved by the Bell as the Colonel
| in it!!
|
| Oh, I can't take more of this I'm taking an internet
| sabbatical for a few days, this it just too much non-sense
| to process.
|
| It's like the Corpo dramatized parody version the
| Libertarian(r) Utopia(tm) [0] story run amok.
|
| In case its relevent: if I ever feel like fried chicken and
| get tired of chicken katsu or kare-age, I'm going for the
| grocery store option or Popeye's, this is the worst thing
| I've seen in ages and we really have to a deep look at
| ourselves if this actually works to move KFC buckets in
| masse.
|
| I'm going dark for a few days.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DloaYxQn1BM
| dharmab wrote:
| The "Console" is just a gaming PC in a novelty case.
| dharmab wrote:
| If only they sold a decent product.
| resu_nimda wrote:
| Arguably this started decades ago when they successfully
| established the KFC Party Barrel as a traditional Christmas
| meal in Japan.
| ravenstine wrote:
| They should bring back the actual secret KFC recipe. Sanders
| actually said that, after he sold the company, they changed the
| recipe and he thought it sucked.
| smoyer wrote:
| While watching college b-ball with my son last night, I noticed
| that the field-house at Louisville is (now?) named the "KFC Yum!
| Center". I can't really eat KFC but do appreciate brands that can
| poke fun at themselves or otherwise advertise with some humor.
| The melting Colonel Sanders snowman was a little creepy though!
|
| [0] https://www.kfcyumcenter.com/
| modzu wrote:
| i find it kind of unsettling how the colonel lives on as a
| cartoon
| dekhn wrote:
| Wasn't clear if you knew this, but KFC is owned by "Yum!
| Brands"
| phaedryx wrote:
| My takeaways:
|
| 1. Colonel Sanders is cannon in General Hospital
|
| 2. He knows how to code; in Malbolge
|
| 3. He doesn't know how to pronounce Malbolge
|
| 4. He was cursed by a warlock
|
| 5. Some Syndicates cannot be reasoned with
|
| https://twitter.com/generalhospital/status/10153849081921904...
| jandrese wrote:
| The Venn Diagram of people who know about Malbolge and people who
| watch General Hospital has to have little to no overlap. Was this
| reference made for exactly one guy or something?
| mbg721 wrote:
| Perhaps the people writing General Hospital would rather not be
| doing that, but it makes too much money to cancel and the
| audience is inelastic, so they decided to have some fun.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Was this reference made for exactly one guy
|
| probably yes, and that one guy works as the technical
| consultant on the show.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Maybe it was just an experiment with viral marketing,
| estimating a 1%-10% chance it would make it into programmer
| social media circles and make them hungry for KFC instead of
| pizza or avocado toast.
|
| The inclusion of Malbolge is obviously intended to cause them
| to look up how it works, resulting in acceleration of both
| their mental fatigue and physical hunger.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Might have also been included because Malbolge is included in
| a listicle that is the top search result for "weird
| programming languages." I wouldn't be surprised if show
| writers did a search for something close to that phrase,
| found the article, immediately got the literary reference and
| included it in the show for that reason.
|
| Also, you probably can't say brainfuck on daytime TV. None of
| the other languages had interesting names, i.e., glass,
| whitespace, chicken, lolcode.
|
| Edit: They've probably done something similar with other
| technical topics, but we don't watch the show to know. Such
| as, having a rocket scientist on the show talking about
| building rocket recovery wadding or something after looking
| through a GIS for "rocket parts."
| jandrese wrote:
| "Malbolge" does at least sound sinister, so if you're going
| for an evil hacker vibe it's perfect.
| tclancy wrote:
| >Also, you probably can't say brainfuck
|
| Honestly, I have never figured out how to say that code out
| loud anywhere.
| recursive wrote:
| I've found a lot of places where you can just say it
| normally.
| Aeronwen wrote:
| INTERCAL seems well-suited for daytime TV.
| snake_plissken wrote:
| I love these commercials (and the Dr Pepper Fansville ones). So
| stupidly clever.
|
| But man KFC makes me feel so very ill afterwards. I'm not sure
| what exactly it is: I can eat Chik Filays and Burger King fine
| (the ~3-4 times a year I get fast food). But KFC, it's been like
| 7-8 years and I just steer clear now. It's nostalgically
| saddening because I remember loving the stuff when I was a kid,
| especially those mashed potatoes.
| mywittyname wrote:
| KFC probably does not today taste much like it did when you
| were a kid (unless you are very young).
|
| > especially those mashed potatoes.
|
| Their potatoes are made from those dehydrated potato flakes and
| powdered gravy. You can make a decent facsimile using Idaho
| Spuds and Heinz jarred Homestyle Chicken gravy.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This is like the modern equivalent of the Max Headroom signal
| hijacking. Bizarre mashups of tech, television and corporate
| icons. It's definitely a form of culture jamming.
| munificent wrote:
| ...except this time it's literally just marketing material for
| a giant corporation hawking junk food. The opposite of culture
| jamming, I guess.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The commodification of culture jamming!
| krrrh wrote:
| The guy that named gifs may insist on a soft g, but he's
| obviously wrong or a troll because graphic isn't pronounced
| /jrafik/, and everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it
| the correct way.
|
| Similarly, Kalle Lasn's perspective was limited by ideology
| when he coined "culture jamming". The term's usage has
| expanded to encompass a wider range of mashups, thumbs-in-
| eyes, and appropriations than what its creator intended, and
| is frequently used in ways that raises the hackles of old
| school readers of _Adbusters_.
|
| In some ways its modern usage has become a meta-commentary on
| itself.
| eindiran wrote:
| I agree with your general point, but the claim "everyone
| other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way" does
| not match my experience at all. People I talk to seem to be
| pretty evenly split on the matter, and most are entirely
| unaware that there is any controversy about the
| pronunciation at all.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| Beautiful.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| FWIW the title is probably the best part of this story. I watched
| the video clips and it just seems no different from any other
| cheesy soap opera.
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(page generated 2021-01-19 23:01 UTC)