It also shows extreme overconfidence in AI and/or a lack of awareness of their own shortcomings as a programmer.

AI code generation can be very useful but unless someone understands the code to a degree of expertise they have no idea if it's trash or not and certainly no idea how to debug it. So yeah I'd say it's fine to ask AI questions and get it to generate boiler plate but only if you can understand what it's outputting and fix it or deal with edge cases. So it augments knowledge, it does not replace it.

What is worse is that when it's wrong it can be very wrong in obvious or non obvious ways. That is not surprising considering how AIs work (ingesting large quantities of data, training, and spewing out tokens based on probability and randomness). They can hallucinate and they can exhibit bias. I have to wonder where they even get their code samples from, but let's say somewhere like GitHub, then obviously they could be trained on some really terrible code and the farther from the beaten track you go, the worse it's going to get.

About the only appliance I see merit in being smart is a robot device. Like a vacuum cleaner or mower. There is no practical reason whatsoever to add the same to a cooker, fridge, washing machine, dishwasher or other such device.

These refrigerators will be bitrotten or lobotomized in a few years when Samsung no longer bothers to maintain them. Services will be shut down, tokens & certificates will expire and vulnerabilities will be left unpatched. And then you're left with a fridge which might not even work properly as a fridge, let alone one which is allegedly "smart". It might even be compromised and / or bricked if you're extra lucky.

But hey in the meantime, you get to enjoy Samsung's dogshit cloud services, widgets and ads. And if that isn't worth spending 2 or 3 times as much on a fridge for then I don't know what is.

While I don't know what question IBM is the answer to these days they do have a substantial portfolio of things to sell, both hardware and software and presumably their customers have very deep pockets and would very much like proper and prompt support. If they shed these jobs or outsource to some crappy Indian outfit then they're only hurting their own business.

I bet the people there were much more proficient than those getting replaced. Of course there might be a lot of lifers there too. But they're still experienced and knowledgeable people.

I remember working for a US investment firm who outsourced work to India and I had to oversee people doing that work. Every single phone call with them was them asking "how do I do this?" rather than "I've been thinking about doing it this way what do you think?" - a sign of some independent thinking. It's like they were scared to submit their own ideas or simply had no clue. Then they'd be gone within a month or two to some other company because of their revolving door employment practices. It was a complete culture failure. It was clear they only outsourced because they thought Indian wages were 1/2 European and 1/3 US so what's not to like. Except for the work that took 2-3x as long to arrive and was so shitty quality it was terrible.

Let's replace all the workers with knowledge, experience, cultural understanding, language skills, customer relations and career investment in IBM with people who have none of those things. Because they're cheaper. Some VP will get a bonus because of the money they've saved even though it will cost the company 10x as much in the long term.

I'm sure people will develop other ways to share games

So they basically played all those idiots to their own advantage.

There is very little reason at all for any white goods to require connectivity. And the reasons that do exist are of such questionable value that they're outweighed by the risks to security, the retail cost and the lifetime of the product. Anything claiming to be "smart" or "AI" is a red flag. Just as bad are those with touchscreens and embedded browsers like some Samsung fridges. There is no way that those things with their useless features, ads and spyware won't be broken and bitrotten within 5 years despite costing 2x as much as a regular "dumb" fridge.

About the only appliances needing connectivity are robot devices like vacuum cleaners and mowers. But even those should not require cloud connectivity to function.

Yeah just like blood, hair, hormones etc. which are harvested from the poor & desperate and make companies billions. How long before a mysteriously large number of bodies show up from Calcutta or Laos all of who seem to have signed paperwork donating themselves to a megacorp?

I use an ad blocker and I've seen occasional websites which refuse to work unless I disable ad blocking. Some might complain I'm missing out on the "optimal" experience by ad blocking. But most work fine. It actually surprises me there are not more doing this since it should be easy to do - put a "secret" in some JS that is served by an advertiser and look for it later and if its not there, the person is blocking ads.

I've also seen a lot of news websites where they will force visitors to accept optional cookies unless they pay to remove them. I cannot see how this is legal in the UK & Europe and I suspect it's a dark pattern that can be overcome but it's malicious.

A lot of websites like Facebook & LinkedIn also deliberately cripple their mobile browser experience and insist visitors use the bloated app to get the full experience. Even though the app is embedding the same browser to show the full experience. This is more to do with serving ads, geolocation and scraping things like contacts than it has to do with any benefits of using the app.

Lots of Facebook ads are outright scams too. Not to mention campaigns have bought elections with ads, so even a free service comes with a cost.

Personally I consider that any social media platform that uses real-life personal information to be so toxic that the best advice is not to use it at all or use it sparingly and esoterically to minimize potential harm - don't provide personal info like relationships/birthdays/jobs/politics/sexuality/interests or falsify it if compelled, don't upload pictures, don't use their mobile app, lock down all the privacy settings to their maximum, don't accept links or engage with people you don't know, block all optional cookies & use browsers with social media cookie jails, don't use sso for 3rd party apps especially those that lift personal info, and have a solid reason to engage with the platform instead of inanely wittering at it day in day out. And use an ad blocker.

... they'll throw in some lame "I'm more important than you" features to elevate posts so that instead of cream rising to the top it will be turds.

Probably because like a lot of enterprise software, it's not about being good, or whether people like using it, it's about ass covering. "Nobody ever got sacked for buying ". And once it sinks its claws into a place, it is very hard to get it out because of sunk cost fallacy.