draaglom

I'd answer this from two perspectives.

As a forecaster: It's fun! It's an interesting way to learn about the world -- rather than gathering inert facts, you're forced to integrate them into a mental model, and then your model is tested for its validity empirically. It's also difficult and competitive, if you like that sort of thing.

As a consumer of forecasts: There's good research that prediction markets and other forecast aggregators are the best technology we have as a society for quantifying uncertainty. Not everyone will listen to them, just like not everyone eats their veggies, but c'est la vie.

I don't think there's too much risk of self-defeating forecasts (where a low forecast lulls decision makers into a false sense of security) - at least not yet. They're still pretty niche.

I think the article focused on base rates because they're a relatively unusual and legible "trick" to coming up with a forecast, but really they're only one element of a forecast; typically a forecaster will think about many different ways to "attack" a question and synthesize them (somehow!). Choice of denominator for your base rate is very important also and can radically change the answer you get.

The sites which host these forecasting competitions correct for the bias against rare events through what's called "proper scoring" rules -- there's some specific maths to it, but the short version is that you're exponentially rewarded for being a correct contrarian and exponentially punished for being confidently wrong.

There are limits to that too, of course -- the folks in the article will "only" have made on the order of mid hundreds to low thousands of predictions, so roughly speaking, you can expect these people to be calibrated for 1% or 0.5% odds but probably not 0.1% odds.

I don't have any knowledge of IFTTT's budget, but the truth value depends on the exact framing of cost.

Your framing is "the marginal cost of any given request rounds to zero" which is probably true.

Another likely true framing is "there are substantial numbers of users on legacy plans who in aggregate cost more to serve than they pay".

$26 billion (Q4 2022 through Q3 2023)

The primary goal of most large organisations' dev blog is to attract potential candidates to the top of the recruitment funnel.

This picture appears to be (presumably) the actual team doing a team building activity.

This is both a reasonable choice given the inferred instrumental goals of the blog, and a honest reflection of (one part of) the team life, assuming it's a photo of the real team.

how: ice cores (I don't know the answer re: 1600s)

As long as you believe you can acquire customers for some margin less than (you project) they will pay you across their lifetime as a customer, the rational choice to to maximise your money is to spend all the money you have (and more!) on acquiring more customers.

As a result, the majority of SaaS businesses aren't profitable, and people talk mostly about MRR.

The decision likely got made before performance was a major constraint.

As I understand it, Instagram is a python codebase and (guessing) may be the primary motivator here.

Probably the first, say, 100 person-years of effort poured into the Instagram codebase were done at a time when product development velocity, not performance, was the main priority.

It's not that bizarre. It's path dependence. They have an existing codebase with hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of person-years of effort contributed in python already, so a complete rewrite would be too expensive to consider.

someone takes what you said to an employment tribunal and makes the case they were fired without the proper dismissal process ('unfair dismissal')