This reminds me of the multiple AI videos out there that I have to involuntarily listen to because people hate using earphones/headphones. They just start off like "The man/woman blah blah blah", and my poor brain is always noting that's bad English/grammar or whatever because What man/woman are you talking about? Where did he/she come from in this story that you just started telling?
Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
Well, in Zimbabwe because of the large user base WhatsApp got when it initially arrived (due to reduced charges, SMSs where about 15cents a pop then) around 2011-2012, the ISPs have effectively made it the only way to communicate economically by providing a "bundle".
Basically they offer you a drastically reduced price to only access WhatsApp, mostly text message without media at that. Compared to the data plan that can access the whole internet it is very very cheap to use just WhatsApp.
The cheapest WhatsApp bundle on the most popular network (Econet) is currently at around 51cents to text the whole week (65MB of data) vs the $13 for 8gigs. Granted the 8gigs is for a month but $13 is a big amount in this part of the world, and with regular data there's the aspect of discipline to not use all that data on youtube and other data hungry apps/websites.
On Chrome Desktop Linux, it doesn't work despite me being logged into whatsapp web. Tries to do some xdg-open thing, but clearly that will never work considering whatsapp web has no registered protocol handlers...
Looks like it is some half completed demo integration rather than production ready...
Yeah it used to be quite hopeless unless you opened the link in a tab that had already loaded WhatsApp web. Now however, if you click the green button that says "CONTINUE TO CHAT" on the initial screen, it'll load a page with an option to download WhatsApp and another that's titled "use WhatsApp Web", just click on that one. Unfortunately, it will load a new instance of WhatsApp web in the current window even if you already have another open in another tab.
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