Their use of ‘advantage’ as a word reminds me of this classic Calvin & Hobbes strip.

https://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/201...

Looks like the 80s/90s kids that were brought up on these skits are finally taking over!

You can also "noun" verbs. One I hear in SV is "an ask". I find myself a bit peeved by it but I don't know why.

One of the ones I hate the most is "let's find a solve" when they mean to say "let's find a solution."

I almost involuntarily downvoted you when I read that

I can sympathize.

I think it's worse when they flip it around and inappropriately use a noun as a verb: "Let's solution this."

"Let's solve the problem."

“Ask” has had a noun form for as long as I can recall in British English. Phrases like “that’s quite a big ask” and “what’s the ask?” are commonplace IME.

Just out of curiosity, I looked it up in an American dictionary and it does have a noun form over here, as well, but it's noted as "chiefly British, informal".

Although, the term "big ask" is something I'm certain I've used before, as well as others, but more in a business/corporate context.

Or maybe I've just watched a lot of British television?

I remember that phrase appearing seemingly out of nowhere 10 years or so ago. (UK)

Very weird. Maybe it had been percolating in business circles earlier than that. I don't tend to mix much in those circles.

I still want to believe it’s people dropping the “t” in “task”.

I’ve heard both phrases you mention a lot in American English too.

Much as I tend to be in favor of language evolving, I react almost viscerally to 'compute' as a noun. It is a major irk.

Wait a minute, did you just "noun" irk? I'm irked.

Wait a minute, did you just "verb" noun? I'm adjectived

Yes it is called "verbing"

Did you just adjective adjective?

Technically he just verbed the noun 'adjective'

No, it’s used as an adjective here

When people say they grok something it hurts me deep inside.

Why?

Maybe because to truly grok a person, you have to eat them [1]. I’d imagine that could hurt that person deep inside if they were alive when you started.

[1] Per the end of A Stranger In a Strange Land

Eating someone isn’t required to grok them in a Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s an aid in doing so.

I wonder if that whale groks Michael Packard.

Yeah, tell me about it. People nouning things... argh, eyeroll.

What’s a better noun for “abstract resource I can use to do computations on?” Because computer is too general — literally encompassing everything, or too specific — as a synonym for a PC.

Wait until you hear someone noun “solve,” it’s the most infuriating sound to leave a PMs mouth.

I’m hoping we can come to an agreement during this meeting to find the solve.

Would ___ work for this solve?

I love that. It's an attempt to look smart when it really only makes you look stupid or pretentious. Or both. Do they not realize that there's already a word for that - solution?

A "solve" is common parlance in puzzling in my experience (ie puzzle hunt). Never used it in my day to day PM role though, agreed it would sound awkward.

”Learnings" is the one that gets my goat.

With no context, that sounds like a trading term to me, like "a put".

You can "hit the ask" during a trade

This is incorrect, old sport. You hit the bid and lift the offer (in your parlance "ask" although no one actually calls it that IRL).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hitthebid.asp

You can. It just doesn’t seem as clever to say “‘noun’ verbs”. It doesn’t have the property where the term is an example of itself.

In context it sounds like calling in a favor, like “calling in a chit”, in that it’s transactional unlike of the common usage.

You’re peeved by “ask” as a noun?! How the hell is “math” plural?! Why maths? The subject (singular) is math (singular). Do you study Englishes? Anthropologies? Medicines?

Mathematics are plural because it's a group of several disciplines, arithmetic and geometry today (music and astronomy used to be two other math branches in the past). It's actually an adjective that became a noun, so these four were the disciplines mathématiques, becoming simply les mathématiques later on.

At least that's why it's plural in French. I wouldn't be surprised if the English term is plural simply because it comes from French.

There are shortened forms of singular nouns that end in -s, which also end in -s. Some forms are more common in some cultures/places - "stat" vs "stats" for "statistics" comes to mind.

Yes, I'm also very peeved by "maths". And a million other things. Calling Universities "Uni". Horned-Rim glasses. A whole slew of grammatical oddities.

I guess that's why I ended up on this site.

You know that “math” is just the abbreviated form of “mathematics” right?

"mathematics" may end in "s", but that doesn't make it plural. We say "Mathematics is a science" not "Mathematics are sciences" (replace with "art/arts" if you don't belive it's a science). We also say "mathematics is a growing field", not "mathematics are growing fields". Because it's singular, the fact that it ends in "s" doesn't naturally require shortened forms of it to carry the last letter at the end. I get that in the UK people say "maths", but let's not make this out to be like one side is correct and the other is not because mathematics ends in "s". Particularly as "math" was first coined in the U.K. (much of contemporary U.S. English is an older form of contemporary British English).

I didn't say it's plural, I said it's the abbreviated form. Math and maths are both abbreviations of mathematics.

You changed the post I was responding to, which was something to the effect of "don't you know mathematics ends with 's'"?

No, I did not.

In case you're interested, word creation is a pretty interesting topic in linguistics. The wikipedia page on this -- they call it "conversion" [1] -- seems like a good starting off point for someone interested in the subject.

[1]: Conversion (word formation), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

Perhaps they use the word “advantage” specifically because it has no clearly defined meaning, so it is just a weasel word for legal purposes. Clarity is not your goal when the wrong sentence could cost a metric fuck tonne of money in court.

Lol. Calvin & Hobbes is amazing.

Randal Munroe has one in a similar vein: https://xkcd.com/1443/

I am grateful to Bill Watterson for gifting us with that.

For nearly a decade, they preferred to open addresses with Apple Maps instead of my preference of Google Maps. And they gave me no option to use Google Maps as the default. Apple defaulted to their own apps and I think they still do (I’m not sure if this changed)

The worst offender for this is opening Bing when I mistype something in the Windows Start menu. I can't help but think this accounts for a large percentage of claimed traffic for Edge and Bing. It certainly is the only time I use them (and by use I mean click the exit button)

it is really annoying and pisses me off every time it happens, it is a dark pattern for sure.

At least you can now delete Apple Maps. That prevents it from starting inadvertently.

Didn't know this. Thanks for the tip.

Isn't it obvious? They say they don't give advantage to their own apps as a company policy but they made exception to this during an event.

The follow up e-mails indicate that the upper management wasn't happy about this and demanded high level approval before this happens next time.

So it's not really evil Apple caught doing something that they say they don't. Its more like corrupt Apple where someone did something somewhat justifiable(A relevant app being boosted during an event could be justified, though better not make it a habit) and then conveniently forgot to turn it back. Later a high level officer created a mechanism for preventing this happening again.

If it was something fineable, I would have been completely fine if Apple paid a fine and damages to Dropbox and others. Yet, I would stop short from labelling the company as "lying" as their words seem to match their actions with an exception of one event that was taken care of.

Remember the time when it was revealed that Google invited developers to discuss hiring or acquisition but copy their work, apply for patents before them? That also wasn't Google doing it, it was more like "ambitious white collars hacking their way to boost career", to put it lightly.

After all, companies are simply made of people with contracts. Surely the company is responsible for the actions of their employees but there's a distinction between company policy and individuals actions.

> they made exception to this during an event.

It was for 11 months, and the event was for launching the competitor product.

I would understand the argument if they boosted for a reason which wasn’t to give themselves an advantage over the competition, but in this example that was their exact plan! Boost during launch to give their new competing product a kick start, and give themselves an advantage nobody else has launching a service.

And I might understand it if they boosted to the top for the keyword “files”, but the keyword was “Dropbox”.

The statement "we do not advantage our apps over those of any developer or competitor" is not about a policy, and is false even if you aren't only doing something "during an event"; eve more to the point: it is even still a lie if you have only done it as some kind of mistake, and even if everyone involved was fired over that mistake. It might be OK that it happened, but it did happen, and you need to explain it and justify the situation... you can't claim it simply doesn't happen and still be considered "honest".

I am not under the impression that it's a honest mistake. What I think had happen is that someone involved in the Files app let it happen, then boosted about the spectacular adoption rates of the app in their presentations.

The Apple's statement is technically correct as it could be interpreted about what's the current situation or what is their company policy. It doesn't say it never happen.

Think of it like the "muslims don't eat pork" statement. Although the general policy is that muslims don't eat pork, there are clear exceptions where they can eat pork(when no other food is available and they starve). Also, there are muslims that simply love prosciutto and they sin.

    Surely the company is responsible for the actions of their employees but there's a distinction between company policy and individuals actions.

And the well-made arguments you have presented is how corporates regularly abuse this "distinction" between company policy and individual action when caught - it was not us, it was this guy. Plausible deniability is standard tactic of management. I would be more willing to accept your version if Apple took public punitive actions against the employees responsible here.

That depends on the interpretation og the data available. From the published e-mails, my understanding is that an action was taken to stop and prevent it from happening again before the incident was made public which I would interpret as Apple doesn't do it as a company policy.

Of course someone can claim that these were sham mails designed to make upper management look good despite not having any indications whatsoever to support that. I've heard that the world is only 4000 years old and the god put dinosaur fossils to confuse us, therefore I'm willing to accept that people are going to believe whatever they would like to believe.

    I'm willing to accept that people are going to believe whatever they would like to believe. 

That's true. What matters is their underlying facts or beliefs that lead them to believe so. I choose to believe that Apple is being duplicitous here because historically, corporates have never been known to be ethical in their business practice nor benevolent when it comes to their competitors. There have been similar issues highlighted here on HN, and elsewhere, that shows that Apple is no different from Google or Microsoft or Amazon or any other tech corporate in hesitating to abuse their status against competitors or anyone disparaging them.

> A relevant app being boosted during an event could be justified, though better not make it a habit

That doesn't stand if it's only Apple's apps and events that get this special treatment. Did Dropbox's app get a boost during Dropbox promotional events?

Actually, with iOS 15 that would be the case. They introduced events functionality that is supposed to give extra visibility in the App Store for apps with live events. Check: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/in-app-events/

Anyway, it’s obviously a case of special treatment that was forbidden of being repeated once made aware by the higher management.

Wasn't aware of that, thanks.

> So which of these is true?

PR puffery usually doesn't get introduced as evidence in court cases.

Apple executives repeat PR puffery under oath.

And they'll be held to those statements during cross-examination. That's how the truth comes out.

Apple PR often says things that are not reality... It is almost like Apple PR does not really know what is happening inside of Apple....

But they still have to be cleared by legal. And for the past 6 years lots of Apple PR put out were lying by omission. Both Qualcomm and IMG's case has plenty of concrete evidence.

For example

>> we do not advantage our apps over those of any developer or competitor

They could redefine the word "advantage" or "competitor" in this scenario where the above sentence would be factually correct.

However in court, it becomes quite clear Tim Cook does't care about the PR speak. He does when he is in front of media, but not in front of court. So I am now convinced "someone" deciding on the tone of PR has been sending these memo and infecting Apple. And I would not be suspend if he/she came from Google because they sound exactly the same as google in the early 00s. And it changed after Katie Cotton retired mo 2014.

Unity support tells people all sorts of things that aren’t true about the licensing. You have to press them, then they ask legal, and then they backpedal because it was all a mistake, and one that you are on the hook for

It's probably better that way. Knowing any details is not their job and would only distract them.

This inferred charge of hypocrisy would make sense if the Files app competes with Dropbox. I can see why that would be assumed. But while there’s certainly some overlap, Files isn’t a replacement for Dropbox, or vice versa. Perhaps controversially, I would argue that they do not compete.

Files is a built-in app that ostensibly fills the role of Windows Explorer on macOS Finder, to the extent that the concept of a file browser makes any sense on iOS.

The purpose of the Dropbox app is to access the Dropbox service and to buy their cloud storage. Apple’s Files app does not compete with this—except insofar as it shows you the cloud storage that you are currently paying for (potentially including Dropbox) or local storage that you have already paid for.

Let’s be real here, if anyone typed dropbox into an App Store search because they wanted the dropbox app, literally nobody is going to be confused. Literally nobody is going to be misled by an app that isn’t called Dropbox. We all understand this sensation when doing Google searches—even when a competitor’s ad is bigger and more prominent, we can be functionally blind to it when exactly the result we wanted is right there underneath.

(By they way, let’s also remember that the word dropbox is a generic term. It is a word that has been used for file sharing before the Dropbox(tm) service existed. Companies shouldn’t get to own generic words just because they were first to commercialise them. Microsoft wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, legally or morally, if Oracle or postgres wanted to market the offering as an “SQL server”.)

The entire concept of how the files app works and integrates indirectly with everything on iOS is effectively a stand-in replacement--maybe a better one for some use cases, for sure, but that seems besides the point--to Dropbox. This is because iOS ostensibly doesn't really want to have a file system, and so the concept of storing things into the Files app--which is the interface for and is largely backed by iCloud Drive, which is 100% a competitor to Dropbox--is about as weirdly indirect as storing something into Dropbox. I would thereby think that, in fact, a number of people looking for Dropbox's functionality--to share files between apps on their phone and store them in the cloud--might get tempted to use Files instead to accomplish that exact same core use case.

Files takes an extension (plugin) approach to files, and is decidedly non-Posix since it was focused on supporting remote/slow file sources first.

iCloud, WebDAV and CIFS (as well as On Your <device>) are examples of support that Apple ships first party, while third party extensions include Dropbox and OneDrive as well as more exotic things like emulator file systems (iSH) and SSHFS.

Before Files came out, every app that wanted to integrate with DropBox had to ship a dropbox SDK which included people logging into dropbox through each app, individual developer API tokens, etc.

Now the user just installs Dropbox and it works.

The challenge for Dropbox has and continues to be being a product and not a feature (with a nod to Steve jobs).