This reminds me a lot of NYT strands, in the sense that it’s “multiple themed rounds of classic word game format X” In the strands example, the base word game is a word search in which they break the rules a bit to make it harder. Here it’s a simple word unscrambling. Makes me wonder what other games you could make by following this “themed rounds of X” format.
I've noticed more and more super/hypermarkets started asking for your zip/postal code sometime during self-checkout. I'm guessing they use these as approximations about where people travel from, so they can evaluate if to open more stores closer to popular areas, or something like that. Pretty sure there is more use cases for postal codes too.
Postcodes are very useful (but not perfect) proxies for household socioeconomic status, which is useful for marketing and sales analysis.
That data linked with the payment method that the register collects pretty much gives the store exactly who you are and where you live even if you chose not to sign up to the store's loyalty program.
The point was it’s getting harder and harder to do that as things get locked down or go behind a massive paywall to either profit off of or avoid being used in generative AI. The places where previous versions got data is impossible to gather from anymore so the dataset you would collect would be completely different, which (might) cause weird skewing.
But that would always be the case. Twitter will not last forever; heck, it may not even be long before an open alternative like Bluesky competes with it. Would be interesting to know what percentage of the original mined data was from Twitter.
