The post itself says that publicly announcing the policy in advance would be detrimental. The policy is now public and they clearly notify the offender of violation. It probably took bot maintainers less than an hour to update their scripts to pause attempts/switch accounts on first failed request. It's the humans who keep trying. Any heuristic they'd want to apply to detect bots would be applied to action history, tuned to acceptable false positive rates and silently rolled out. This circus doesn't align with the statements at all.
I have a faint memory of watching a Youtube demo video couple years back of a concept similar to Bret Victor's DynamicLand where you connect lego-block-like things together and they do cool stuff. Does anyone remember what that product is, and what its current status is?
I think a more useful metric would be average life expectancy of the subset of people who lived over say 20 or 30. We could compare that number at 1600s with the present to see the net impact of lifestyle changes (fast food, minimum exercise) vs advances in medical care.
