Yeah, this decision makes no sense, AWS is not even cost-effective past a certain, relatively small, amount of resource usage. Netflix could have easily built their own infrastructure for this, plenty of smaller companies do it and save tons of money. The only thing that would make sense here is if Amazon offered them their services at a huge discount, which could be a move looking to either acquire Netflix in the near future or cripple it.
it is WAY more cost-effective when you get to that kind of scale to use someone else's battle-tested APIs. the best part is that when that stuff breaks down, it's not your job to fix it.
At this point, I'd imagine Netflix's main expenses are not engineering/bandwidth/compute -- it's content. My guess is that there's better ROI in paying Amazon a premium to not have to worry about the CDN engineering while concentrating investment on expanding their library.
Not really, AI is still absolute shit at most tasks, and programming requires many different skills. AlphaGo, for example does a fairly simple task (relative to programming), which was trained on tons of existing and very simple data. If you are automating coding and design tasks that means you are adding new tools, that people on both ends on the automated process will need to learn and understand, this adds extra cost and complexity. I agree that many programming tasks can be automated, but I don't think it will have a significant impact in the next 50 years. I think automation will hit most other sectors a lot faster and harder than it will IT, and the new automation will require more engineers to manage it.
It's a shame that so little philosophical thought has been given to cryptography. In fact, the very concept of order appears to have been lost in all contemporary discussions. Consider Leibniz's discussion and you may see some shocking origins: http://www.labirintoermetico.com/12ArsCombinatoria/Leibniz_G...
