Most? Almost all my requests to the "Auto" model end up being routed to a "thinking" model, even those I think ChatGPT would be able to answer fine without extra reasoning time. Never say never, but right now the router doesn't seem to be optimising for cost (at least for me), it really does seem to be selecting a model based on the question itself.
You can distribute to "internal" testers (people you add to your developer account) without any review process. The app is only reviewed if you want to distribute to external testers.
They used sentence dependency graphs - in this sentence "John", "trash" and "out" are dependencies of "threw". There's a few variants, but the graph construction rules are standardised.
People with depression do not generally have low serotonin levels, and it's unlikely low serotonin is the cause of chronic depression. If it was, serotonin agonists would be effective much faster than the 4-8 weeks they currently take. There's some evidence that increased serotonin levels modulate glutamate after about 4 weeks, and glutamate antagonists like Ketamine are effective on depression more rapidly than serotonin agonists (as quick as 40m in some studies).
Also the depression effect of alcohol is completely different to chronic depression, any mood effects you feel during a hangover are likely related to reduced dopamine.
Sleep is very important though, and, in Australia at least, melatonin is commonly prescribed for sleep issues that have a psychiatric cause.
"Blood levels of serotonin are measurable -- and have been shown to be lower in people who suffer from depression – but researchers don't know if blood levels reflect the brain's level of serotonin.
"Also, researchers don't know whether the dip in serotonin causes the depression, or the depression causes serotonin levels to drop.
"Although it is widely believed that a serotonin deficiency plays a role in depression, there is no way to measure its levels in the living brain." -- (http://www.webmd.com/depression/features/serotonin)
You possibly didn't fool them - they may have suspected you were faking the symptoms, but when a patient shows up to a psychologist/psychiatrist on their own volition it suggests they're in distress. It could be considered malpractice to turn someone away who's seeking treatment.
A friend of mine spent two weeks in a hospital psych ward (in Sydney), and requested his records after he was discharged. It was surprising how much detail the doctors noted in the records, and how often they (correctly) picked up on avoidance and lying (yet they didn't give this impression in person). Based on this experience, it's possible the psychs your class visited gave you the diagnosis you wanted, but privately noted something very different you weren't aware of.
There has been a lot of progress in objective diagnostic tools recently - e.g there's a clinic in Sydney that diagnoses ADHD using EEGs, and selects medication based on response to the med (also measured using an EEG). And I read a paper last year that described a machine learning model trained on MRI images that could diagnose some of the organic psych diseases (bipolar, schizophrenia, depression etc.) with very high accuracy (70s/80s from memory), and distinguish between the diseases in borderline cases.
Psychiatry won't rely on symptoms alone forever, and don't think psychiatrists aren't already aware of the problems. But every psychiatrist who looked after my friend used whatever tools they had at the time to try and help. It's far from perfect, but they did their best and they really did help. And I'm really glad they did because he's finally a genuinely happy person.
It's interesting seeing differences between countries. Like the author said in the comments, 401k isn't an "issue" in Australia. I don't know how 401k works, but Superannuation in Aus is a compulsory 9%-10% of your salary that your employer sends to your super fund (that you can't access until you're 60). If you're a contractor you don't have to pay yourself super (so you could have more immediately available money), but you could also put away 9% just like your employer would. There's no insurance issues because we get government provided healthcare, and depending on the contract structure you go with there's actually a few decent protections an employer is required to provide you (if you structure it that you're a company contracting to another company then you're out of luck there).
So realistically the major difference is "security", which to be honest there isn't much of regardless you being an employee or contractor. So at least in Australia, unless you're getting an increase in your hourly rate, or a company says they'll only continue to send you work if you're an employee, there's no major advantage to switching to be an employee.
Re #1 and #3, that's not really true. They performed a manual landing, and the procedure in any emergency is to 'follow the book' regardless of the type of plane being flown. Their job was to evaluate the damage & take actions informed by their experience, ensure the plane was in a state to land, and then land it. That's what they did, a computer didn't do that for them.
Other implementations you haven't mentioned like MacRuby are much faster. In my totally unscientific and completely biased benchmarks (small tests related to the type of work I do mainly - Machine Learning) MacRuby is now faster than Python (2.6) and is closing the gap on V8 (which, in the tests I wrote, was even faster than Go, and less than twice as slow as C).
"By lacking sophistication, I mean a system of alternative capital (VC) that fully recognises Startups as a serious way to generate wealth"
That's definitely changing, e.g Innovation Bay, Startmate, the Sydney Angel Sidecar Fund, and others. VC/Angel investing is not at the same maturity as overseas yet, but it's definitely changing.
Take a look at some of the other projects on Kaggle - a lot of them have no money or roughly similar amounts. One of the main crowds Kaggle attracts is University students and staff, and they do these projects because they're interesting and fun. It's similar to a shared task at an academic conference, which is the sort of thing most of the active ML/KD&DM community are interested in.