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Comment "sources familiar with Apple" (Score 1) 58

Are usually full of shit. Whether it's Gurman or Kuo, or less well known Apple 'prognosticators', their track record is poor. Apple is very (notoriously) secretive, and to think that product release plans would be leaked is very unlikely.

But if you believe what you read on the Internet, I'm sure you live an "adventurous" life...

Comment Re:"Enshittification" is not just a US thing (Score 2) 93

I've been reading "Enshittification" and Doctorow clearly calls for much more aggressive anti-monopoly regulation and enforcement. What he's calling for, as I understand it (I haven't finished the book) would be a significant change to US understanding of 'illegal monopoly'. But Europe operates under different rules, as EU actions against Apple and Google have shown. One could well argue that Spotify should be qualified as a 'gatekeeper' kind of company, but I am certainly not a EU lawyer. A ruling that says "engagement engineering" is illegal would be difficult to enforce, but presumably not impossible.

Comment Re:specification & testing (Score 1) 52

You can do software engineering in any language, even C or Visual Basic. But it's easier with languages that provide more precision in specification and in behavior. Once you get used to it, strong typing, particularly for scalars (integer types) is your friend. It can catch at compile-time subtle bugs that can be hard to find. Similarly, languages that make it easy to define chunks of code with well defined interfaces/APIs (and that do information hiding on details) is a huge advantage in large (as in 'many developers') and long-lived (as in 'many maintainers') systems. In large systems, code is read -much more frequently- than it is written. And that a good API specification should help the user/reader understand what happens when things go right, and what happens when things go wrong. Even in Ada, there are a few things in the language specification that are 'undefined', which means "we have no clue what a program that makes this mistake will do."

Comment Re: specification & testing (Score 1) 52

I've been doing software engineering for over 20 years now ans, just like unicorns, I'm yet to see a specification document which does more than scratch the surface.

Then clearly you've not worked in a safety-critical regime, where specifications are required to fully cover behavior sufficient to generate test cases that cover 100% of the requirements, and by extension 100% of the code branches.

But even in "regular" development, the API specifications I wrote, implemented and tested were all expected to be sufficient to be useful for test and verification.

Frankly, if you haven't seen this level of specification, I really question if you've been doing "software engineering", or just hacking.

Comment "influencers" citing other "influencers" (Score 1) 79

"Sources familiar with the situation" make shit up all the time. Apple production numbers and expectations are tightly held, but people still believe "media influencers" who look around and say "Huh, we can collect clicks by generating some FUD around Apple." In this case, we see is one "media influencer" citing another "media influencer" using their "proprietary algorithms" (usually involving rectal sampling.)

When you're in a yearly production cycle, there's ALWAYS production cuts after the product release, you produce leading up to release, and then move production to The Next Thing.

Comment Re:Also, don't trust human Reddit answers (Score 1) 70

Uh, yeah. That's exactly what I thought when I saw this.

All Social Media is full of 'influencers' who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. The potential benefit of a (wrong) AI answer is that you -might- be able to query the AI to find out how why it said that. Of course, the LLM is likely to say "That's the most common content from Social Media."

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