Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.
This isn't true at all. The vacation policy is "Our time off policy is short: take the time that you need" and "There is no minimum or maximum, but we encourage you to take at least 25 days of time off per year".
A bot scraping content will tend to go deep into the archives and hit all content systematically. Caching isn't as effective if you hit everything whereas real users will tend to hit the same content over and over again.
Chaos theory and deterministic systems are a fascinating vantage point for thinking about the dynamics of large computer systems. Thinking of them as stochastic systems is sometimes useful, but most of the systems are actually just operating in unstable periodic processes which are much closer to being a chaotic system rather than a stochastic system. This influences how I think about testing and debugging large distributed systems.
I will say, I'm not sure I could have learned it well without a class and a good professor. The author has a number of books though and is a professor at Cornell.
The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.