As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.

As a former physicist and current data scientist/engineer, I know for a fact that commercial utility drives math research and researchers.

Math is a tool to solve problems. Some mathematicians might only love the process of using the tool, but commercial logic absolutely drives mathematician attention to develop commercially useful tools.

That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.

If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.

It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.

For some people, yeah, this could be a career killer. For some other people, it might just precipitate a flight back to Moscow or Beijing or something.

The not-responding-when-notified part makes me think it's not just incompetence.

Reading code carefully is harder than writing code unless the code is written consistently and clearly in a way that is idiomatic to the reader. And there's way more code to review now, but companies aren't scaling up the number of skilled engineers on staff. So in practice, never reading all of the diffs is the MO that will be built into code we depend on.

Maybe for the ideas that are so far from novel that there's a corpus of training data that could train an LLM to reproduce it. But for actually novel ideas, LLMs won't ever be much use. They can't interact with the world directly, they can only interact with text (or I guess bits).

And I guess that's not much of a distinction, as truly novel good ideas are very rare and you can go very far applying a good idea into a new domain. But at the edges where true novelty is required, LLMs will either hallucinate or guide you away from the edge.

But developing the people [who can build great new abstractions or the people who can build those abstractions into ergonomic tooling] involves a lot of cognitive struggle through which these people learn how to push knowledge forward.

Forming the mental models for how things work takes struggle. Debugging errors in your code forces you to figure out the disconnect between your mental model and reality.

Claude can figure out most errors I show to it much faster than I can, but when we're building something I could build from scratch, I regularly find even Opus 4.7 regularly provides vastly overcomplicated and inferior solutions and I have to redirect it. I assume this is also the case when we're building stuff that's new to me and I just can't recognize all of the overcomplicated suboptimal solutions until I get to testing the behaviors I need to be correct. If I got a tool like this at the start of my career or education, I just don't know how I wouldn't end up completely stunted.

You can't impersonate something to a text editor as there's no special compliance you could get; WYSIWYG. But to a chatbot, you could get special compliance based on your identity.

15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day.

The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good.

Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.