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Comment by ofslidingfeet | Hacker News Reader

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ofslidingfeet·

This mindset is even less ethical than it seems, and I'm not surprised to see it present at microsoft.

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What do you mean by "ethical" here, and why is it unethical to preserve ABI compatability?

> why is it unethical to preserve ABI compatability?

Straw man. What's unethical here is deceiving the user.

There is no deception. There are no printers, and that's what the API returns.

The deception is concealment of the fact printing is unsupported. Nk printers is merely a cover story.

"NotSupportedException" is there for a reason.

Nothing is being concealed. If you want to know if printing is supported, call IsPrintingSupported. The information is there, the API is there.

The one deceived is the user. He does not have the option of calling an additional function.

I didn't say it's unethical to preserve "ABI compatability." It's the software equivalent of the Chinese government gaslighting everyone while they wait for the dancing grannies to get the hint and go home. It is, in fact, the exact same technique.

And not only that, we're fast approaching the day where we all power on our PCs to discover that you can login with any user you like. And it gives you the list of all users who have a one drive account.

It's nothing of the sort. They provide APIs to check if functionality is supported and encourage their use. Helping users deal with apps that weren't written to deal with them isn't lying to users.

This is obviously how they made their recent hit game "authenticator loop" that we all loved so much for a while there, for instance.

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