• 0 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • placatedmayhem@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Apple Explains Why It Doesn't Plan to Create a Search EngineEnglish
    12·
    6 months ago

    Maybe now, but definitely not originally. Apple grew the Maps ecosystem originally for feature parity reasons, not privacy ones. That’s at least a bit more similar to the Search situation.

    Turn-by-turn was the killer feature back in iPhone 4S time frame, and Google refused to allow it iOS, shipping it only on Android. Apple had some geographic features (reverse geo lookup specifically, iirc) prior to this in-house and had started developing their own maps because of the longstanding tension with iOS and Android, but Apple rushed to get turn-by-turn directions out the door in mid-2012, which is partially what caused it to launch pretty half-baked. Google introduced a dedicated Google Maps app on the iOS App Store in late 2012 with turn-by-turn in response to losing millions of daily-active users to the launch of Apple Maps.

    Here’s a retrospective from 2013 by The Guardian on the whole thing with a lot more detail:

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users

    Now, Apple has run a web crawler since at least 2015:

    https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-06-apple-web-crawler.html

    Apple has been steadily building up its search expertise for the last decade. Notably, it acquired Topsy back in 2015, which was a search engine mostly based on Twitter data:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shuts-down-topsy-the-200-million-mystery-laid-to-rest-2015-12?op=1

    … then launched a few web-based Spotlight search integrations a few years later (which I can’t find a good source for) which integrated common web searches for things like weather and news directly into Spotlight.

    IMO, based on the above (and maybe a bit more), Apple’s explanation in the article doesn’t tell the full story. It doesn’t want to build it, but it could. This is more is about Apple wanting to keep extracting the money from Google and not having to build another also-ran service to directly compete.

  • placatedmayhem@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*English
    38·
    10 months ago

    Yes. I’m not sure what you think makes you bad at writing bug reports, but here are tips I give to everyone (my day job involves working with bug reports).

    Nominally, a decent bug report should have:

    • the steps that got you the bug
    • whether you can reproduce the bug
    • what you expected to happen instead of the bug

    Doing any of these things makes bug reports so much more actionable. You can do it. I believe in you!

    Edit: Including a contact method so the software developer can have a conversation with you can also be helpful but not strictly required. Some bug reporting methods do this implicitly, like email bug reports and GitHub issues.

  • placatedmayhem@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why are doctors so hands off and unhelpful in the USA?English
    501·
    10 months ago

    It’s exactly this. The policies put in place by “healthcare administrators” (MBAs and such with healthcare flavoring, not people that actually know how to care for people’s health like doctors and nurses) are designed to process the most patience in the least amount of face time possible, so that each doctor and nurse can see more patients per day, meaning more office visit fees, meaning higher profit. My dad calls it the “cattle shoot” and I feel that’s a pretty apt analogy. It’s the same general reason that fast food restaurants and pharmacies and department stores are perpetually understaffed: fewer staff members means lower “overhead” costs.