mcbroken-archive VS sf-tree-history

Edge computing will enable applications like predicting when kitchen equipment—such as fryers and its notorious McFlurry ice cream machines—is likely to break down, Rice said.

It is not hard to know if a machine is broken. There is an entire map dedicated to this, which shows state-wide broken rate as high as 40% for some states.

https://mcbroken.com/

If you know these machines are broken and they are not being fixed, what use will be to know what machines will break in the future? This is not a technology problem, this is a business and people problem. Another case of companies using AI to garner positive marketing, instead of improving their service and customer's experience.

Try mcbroken.com.

There is a hot mic admission by Taylor representatives that the McFlurry machine was designed specifically to increase maintenance costs to extract more money from franchisees.

Working McFlurry machine map: https://mcbroken.com

The McBroken is a real time website that lets you know the exact location of every working and non-working McDonald's ice cream machine.

I think this headline was poorly chosen.

When I see the term "Open Data" I instantly think of open data portals - mostly run by governments around the world. These things have never been healthier: ten years ago they hardly existed, today you can get civic data from local governments all over the place (last time I saw an attempt to count there were over 4,000 of these portals, and that was a few years ago).

My favourite example is still this CSV of all 190,000+ trees in San Francisco, which is updated most business days with details of the latest tree changes: https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... - I track changes to it here: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history/

This article is about something different: it's about what I guess you could call the "Open APIs" movement. Back in the days of Web 2.0 every service was launching an open API, hoping to harness developer attention to help make the platforms more sticky. Facebook and Twitter both did incredibly well out of this strategy, at least at first.

THOSE APIs are mostly on the way out now. Companies realized that giving away their data for free has a lot of disadvantages.

Open Data is doing great. Open APIs are not.

I've been Git scraping the San Francisco version of this for a few years now.

My https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history repo now has 444 commits (most recent one was just 4 days ago) tracking every change that's been made to https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... since March 2019.

I haven't yet done anything with this data, but there is so much potential for visualizations and other fun stuff with it. If anyone wants to have a go please be my guest!

Wrote more about this project here: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/

Trees in San Francisco: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history