[quitit]

Bingo. It's easy to pay for influence, especially if one can spin a story for clicks.

I see a lot of cheerleading and parroted talking points against the interests of developers, particularly small and independent developers. A lot of the changes lobbied for by large developers give them an insurmountable pricing and competitive advantage over small developers and startups, yet I don't see much consideration here for that, nor the wishes of bona fide consumers.

Epic is particularly barefaced here, since they claim they are fighting for developers, when their proposals are not altruistic. Each clearly puts them at an advantage over smaller developers and consumers. Do we have such a short memory that we forget that this is the same Epic that settled with the FTC for using dark patterns and violating childrens' privacy for the purpose of tricking kids into accidental Fortnite purchases.(1) That was only 15 months ago.

While I'd expect reddit to be less informed, I'm not so charitable with HN: it's a forum where the bulk of participants claim to be developers.

(1) https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

[fragmede]

it's almost as if there wasn’t an ethics class in the CS majors’ required courses!

[xvector]

Actually most CS majors require ethics courses. I've met very few developers that don't care about ethics, especially when they work on something product facing. We've seen entire teams at Google quit or refuse to implement something, etc.

Meanwhile in journalism, ethics is a strong part of the course structure but you see countless journalists writing poorly researched ragebait articles for clicks.

The "programmers don't know ethics" meme is just that, a meme. The fact that there even is a required ethics course in most universities is far more than you can say for most other majors. Nearly every single programmer knows about Therac-25, I'd wager most graduates today are also learning about MCAS, etc.

[fragmede]

> I'd wager most graduates today are also learning about MCAS

Emphasis mine. you'd likely win that wager, I don't disagree, and that's great for today's graduating classes, but because engineer is not a protected term, especially not software engineer and definitely not prompt engineer, theres no requirement for a CS graduate to go back and do continuing education like there is in other fields, so graduates who don't seek out and do the, eg, OCW CS ethics class aren't going to find themselves in one. Curriculum has evolved over the years to include ethics as a requirement, but that meme isn't a meme because it isn't true in a vast number of cases, as evidenced by the multiple failures in, eg, this case here.