Even 30 years ago more than half the sales at a McDonalds were in the drive through. Some new McDonalds don’t have much of an inside dining room at all anymore, while having multiple drive through lanes.

I imagine kitchen robots are harder than they might sound. Kitchens are rough environments for machines. They are hot, greasy, and steamy. And everything that comes in contact with food needs to be able to be taken apart, washed, and sanitized at least daily.

Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.

Inner city high rise construction is entirely different from tip-up and bolt together single-story box stores in the suburbs.

Where are the billions of dollars spent on GPUs and new data centers accounted for in this estimation?

Ya completely agree, these companies will eventually push these costs to the consumer, might be in 1-2yrs, but it will eventually happen and though regulatory capture make it harder and harder to run local AI models because of “security” reasons.

Strange how that line of thinking always winds up in places like "vaccines are bad" or "ivermectin cures COVID".

It correctly observes that experts are not always right, and often incorrectly responds by turning to loud, persuasive quackery.

No relation (except in your winding mind).

Cortana... ah yes, that thing that I immediately disabled. I had forgotten its name.

... they have no taste.

Skype was an acquisition.

And became pretty bad afterwards

Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).

Has google sheets filled out the lambda helper functions yet? If so that could narrow the gap.

Passing around vba based xlsm is really awful, so if google sheets has lambdas they can probably get a lead with google sheets queey language over filter.

Groupby and pivotby are the new excel alternative, but if they filled out lambdas, then does that keave VBA and power query as the only reasons for Excel?

Not sure what lambda helpers are. But you can write Google AppScript which is just JS and do some pretty cool stuff, including define custom functions and fully integrate with Google APIs. I've used to to send emails, or create calendar events for example.

Byrow, bycol, map, reduce, scan, makearray, and most recently groupby and pivotby.

Basically functions that take a lambda argument and apply it over some range.