It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

https://www.ibm.com/history/th...
"An ad hoc lecture [from 1915] from IBMâ(TM)s future CEO spawned a slogan to guide the company through a century and beyond"

https://humancenteredlearning....
"And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think. And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.' (Thomas Watson, IBM)"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
"All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work. (Nicholas Murray Butler, often misattributed to Thomas J. Watson)"

So, yeah, echoing your point, make programmers do the hardest parts of their job all the time -- especially reviewing code from inconsistent-to-put-it-politely AI contributors -- and no wonder they feel "fried".

Does AI support for programming need to be this way? I might hope not, but we are also mainly hearing about AI used within a short-term-profit-maximizing hyper-competitive corporate social context. Like I say in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Thus practice may be very bad for your health. Not that these "executives" care, but you should.

Yes. And that is how AWS got their 13 hour (?) outage. That outage was probably more expensive than what they can save in cost over a year or several by using LLMs as surrogate coders.

Why stop there? Make it part of the start-up message and if there is none, add one!

Well, the routinely clueless economics graduates certainly think so. My take is that in a few years actually competent coders will be in high demand to fix the mess and out out a lot of fires. When that happens and if you are inclined to participate, make them pay through the nose.

Sounds like very risky behavior. But some people are simply not smart...

Will probably not take long.

I have no idea what graduates you look at, but this is not the case here (Europe).

Pretty much this. LLMs can be convenient, but they are not magic and that they make competent coders slower is pretty well established by now.

The problem with that is that external pressure to get better is raising, both from reliability requirements and from security requirements. In this case, stagnation means getting worse and worse.

Well, that is certainly what they are planning. Just one problem: The evidence is mounting that LLMs cannot replace competent engineers.

No surprise this idiocy is happening in other areas too. There is a special kind of mental disability you need to have (or acquire) to be an economics graduate: A total inability to see more than a few months into the future and a total inability to do any kind of risk management. It worked? Everything must be more than fine and surely we can do it cheaper, right?

That is why people with critical institutional and technological skills are not treated even remotely at their value, let alone critical for organizational survival. Tech history is full of big names that are not around anymore or only in massively reduced forms. And in most cases, it is because some "managers" did not manage to think.

> No it's not. Multifunction devices existed long before enshitification. The two concepts are not remotely related.

Enshitification predates the internet. It is a concept as old as human invention itself. We just don't see it int he historical record, for the most part, because shitty devices generally don't become popular enough for examples to survive the scrap heap. However, if you dig into some antique catalogs (catalogs that are antiques, not modern catalogs listing antique items...) you'll see lots of dubious devices being advertised.

  > Your phone's main purpose is to make phone calls.

A phone's main purpose is to make phone calls. This is a categorical error on your part; a modern smartphone is, despite the unfortunate etymology, not a phone. It is a portable internet terminal more than anything that just happens, perhaps merely by virtue of its history and nothing more, to be able to make live voice chats.

> given this is an optional extra that costs money it is clear that someone deemed it a benefit

Yes. that someone being the manufacturer, who can add $20 worth of parts and sell it to dipshits like you for an extra $500 because apparently you're a toddler easily distracted by bright colors and movements. You're like the living embodiment of that Simpsons gag Nuts and Gum. And of course, apropos to this story, the manufacturers see extra benefit in that they get another way to harvest your behavioral data and shove advertisements in your face. You're being sold a solution to a problem you don't have in exchange for your privacy and attention. You are paying extra to become the product. You are both a figurative and literal tool.

> Man if only there was an internet connected screen in the kitchen from which to pull up my recipe...

It's amazing to me that you can have the solution literally in your hand and still sarcastically complain that there is no solution to the non-problem you have already solved. Just... fucking amazing. Is carrying a tablet from one room to another such a heavy burden that it justifies building another, shittier tablet into a random appliance? Even if you absolutely needed a tablet in every room of the house, could you entertain the idea of just.. buying them separately?

A true luddite would argue if you even need an internet connected device when printed books dedicated to recipes are a thing, and they'd at least have a solid point to make in that at books don't need batteries and continue to work even when the internet doesn't... and they don't actively spy on you either.

> False equivalence. A leatherman directly trades off primary function against additional functionality.

And a tablet built into a fridge door trades primary function (portability) for... actually not even additional functionality because a tablet in a fridge door does literally nothing to make the fridge better at its job, and attaching a fridge to a tablet does not make the tablet better at its job either.
=Smidge=

It could. But it could also be completely genuine. There really are people that badly defective and apparently not only a few.