Could you clarify what you mean by design questions? I do agree that GPT5 tends to have a better agentic dispatch style for math questions but I've found it has really struggled with data model design.
>I'm surprised any cloud provider does not invest drastically more into their SDK and tooling, nobody will use your cloud if they literally cannot.
Building an efficient compiler from high-level ML code to a TPU is actually quite a difficult software engineering feat, and it's not clear that Amazon has the kind of engineering talent needed to build something like that. Not like Google which have developed multiple compilers and language runtimes.
It started before that. The powers that be in western European countries can no longer deliver prosperity or security to their citizens, so must instead use force and repression to cling on to power.
Many European countries got rich without colonization (e.g the Baltic States before WW2, or Austria-Hungary).
Moreover, economic studies show that the profitability was discutable - in the case of France it was a net loss due to the massive infrastructure costs and the subsidies for non-competitive industries.
In 1096AD, while the Mayans were plunging daggers into their sacrifices' chests, England was busy opening Oxford University. What sort of fool would think that somehow all the engineering and scientific advance that would allow England to reach around the world and establish an empire could possibly have been caused by that empire?
But in the long term it seems to destroy the ability to self-learn; the vast majority of graduates go out of their way to avoid acquiring any new academic knowledge after graduation. College (aside from phd programs) fails at teaching people how to learn.
Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life.
Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook...
Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
This is empirically false; the rates of chronic physical and mental illnesses nowadays are are far higher than e.g. 50 years ago, and these are serious illnesses, not the kind of thing that could have been just not noticed.
The data is very clear that the rate of mental illnesses is increasing. Rates of severe mental illnesses like Schizophrenia are also increasing.
NONE of the current theories being experimented with on patients have a concrete, proven scientific basis with some such as the decades-long SSRI scam have actively harmed patients and created physical dependence/addiction and actively causing harm to patients and their families (eg, SSRI-induced suicides).
I trust science, but I don't trust scientists any more than I trust any other human with their money, career, and reputation on the line. I trust the FDA and pharmaceutical company ethics even less (eg, Bayer knowingly selling HIV-infested drugs to hemophiliacs, saying Oxycotin is non-addictive, or the revolving door that allows non-working SSRIs to be released and marketed as working despite all evidence to the contrary).
Our ability to diagnose mental illnesses are improving.
50 years ago many people with mental illness would go undiagnosed. They would instead self-medicate through alcohol, illicit drugs, or risky behavior and die far too young after leading miserable lives.
This is an assertion, but there’s no supporting evidence and many indicators you are incorrect.
50 years ago was 1975. It wasn’t the dark ages and the worst cases were already being moved to asylums for at least 150 years before that.
Suicide in particular is hard to hide any suicide rates are going up despite treatment. If mental illness rates are the same as 50 years ago and more people are getting effective treatment, we’d expect per capita rates to decrease.
Impoverished third world countries where people have nothing but problems almost universally have higher reported happiness and less suicide.
Severe mental health issues don’t just go away because you drink and if alcohol could suppress the problems, we’d never have made treatments to begin with.
In terms of “self medicating” with drugs, we’re hitting an all-time high (pun intended). Risky and self destructive behavior is also way up as evidence with our prison systems overflowing.
Nothing indicates to me that mental health is improving and everything seems to indicate it getting worse despite all the attempted interventions.
