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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

It's really staggering how much impact one engineer can have when working on a product used by billions of people. Fixing just one of these issues would instantly be the most valuable thing that person ever does in their life by orders of magnitude. We have incredible leverage in the software world.

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You'd be surprised how many Apple engineers are fixing many bugs, of this caliber, on a semi-regular basis.

That "Human Hours Wasted" is not just sitting there because engineers don't care about it, it's because there are many many other opportunities to save similar amounts of time. Crashes waste time, perf bugs waste time -- and security bugs are much worse.

I really doubt everyone or even a tiny fraction of people at Apple are working on opportunities to save more time than fixing the repeated autocorrect issue. It affects everyone and it's been a meme since forever.

I actually think most security bugs have very low impact unfortunately

At this scale, some bugs become features. I think fixing the bugs would need lots of conceptual work, due to the fact that there are millions of users of these apps.

Trouble is, at that kind of scale even your bugs have users.

The fact that a similar bug was left in GTA5 ON PURPOSE FOR YEARS (making load times for multiplayer like 10x what they should be) to get more people to see their shitty ads for currency is why I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that we are all overpaid and deserve a solar flair to force us to actually do something useful.

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