Culture
18,000 water cups, please

Yum! Brands is rethinking its rollout of AI drive-thru technology, according to The Wall Street Journal. Customers, frustrated by the tech’s glitchy behavior and quick but wrong performance, have taken to trolling the AI by placing ridiculous orders (see: “can I get 18,000 water cups, please?”).

Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told the WSJ that the chain is now thinking carefully about how to use the tech — which it’s already put in more than 500 US restaurants — going forward.

We’re not expecting too big of a pullback: earlier this year, Taco Bell partnered with Nvidia and said it’s invested $1 billion into “digital and technology.”

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Hollywood may have its best year at the box office since 2019, but streaming audiences are still obsessed with old content

Viewers are opting for catalog content over new shows and movies across (pretty much) every major streamer.

Tom Jones6/29/26
culture
Tom Jones

The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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