legulere

Median automation engineer in Germany made 78 840 € in 2025, according to government statistics

https://web.arbeitsagentur.de/entgeltatlas/beruf/59351

How sure we are that something causes cancer and how often it causes cancer are not the same. Those WHO classifications are about the former. Usually the two are pretty much entwined, because you can more easily find larger effects. The effect of meats is a counterexample though: because it causes specific types of cancers that are otherwise rare you can be pretty sure it causes cancer even though the effect is not as big as e.g. smoking.

Uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication are all not free.

Because of protection from radioactive radiation, you have higher costs handling anything in a nuclear reactor compared to a coal plant. Then you have the issue of runaway nuclear reactions, hydrogen buildup etc.

To quote the article: "Don't confuse motion with progress."

We've been using probabilistic algorithms a long time now, also known as randomised algorithms. You probably won't find a program that is not using a hash table.

Compilers actually actively try to stay deterministic in their output.

Here in Germany there was a bidding frenzy for 3G frequencies. The end result was simply that 3G was more expensive than in other countries and reception was worse.

Aren’t executable specs not code?

That’s just hindsight. People work on a lot of different things. Breakthoughs and cumulative improvements reaching a tipping point might happen or not.

It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away

> The reliability of french electricity

Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.

Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.

At least FoxPro stores code in binary files, but I’ve seen scripts to convert them back and forth to a text representation that can be checked in.

Memory unsafety in C/C++ is a big portion of security issues, but it's not everything there is.

Would you tell a human that just tried doing an illegal move that they did "a really good job of playing chess"? The probability for such mistakes is greatly reduced but still far from negligible, which proves the point that guardrails are needed.

One advantage of percentages is that you can multiply them if the outages aren't related. If you rely on 10 systems with a 99% uptime each you end up with roughly 90% uptime in total.

That is not what I'm saying. There can be a lot of disagreement about a lot of things but there needs to be widespread agreement to not start wars and to use strong non-war mechanisms to stop war mongers. I know that it is far off from where we are today, but it is not impossible like needing everyone to agree with everything.

You need to get a critical mass of people to despise war so much that they are ready to have disadvantages themselves to make a war free world a reality. E.g. complete stop of trade with countries starting a war or supporting such a country.

It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.

LLMs certainly can interpolate between information found in its training set vastly faster than humans can find similar code on GitHub and stack overflow (or in math papers). It's certainly a tool that can be used when programming.

On the other hand also calculators help solve problems people have struggled with for millennia. It also doesn't mean that the end result is better than by hand. It's actually not, and that's the reason why you cannot replace programmers, because you need them to steer the LLMs for a good outcome.

And even the answer to the question, if LLMs make us more productive as programmers long-term is not really clear

> that's only going to happen if splashed urine is the determining factor in how frequently a bathroom gets cleaned

If you believe in the broken windows theory, there's not one determining factor: Splashes of urine make the bathroom look dirtier and lead to people not taking care of the bathroom properly.

> But certainly not in the 70s and 80s.

Some already developed even earlier and most ideas were already there in the 80s. The problem was just that the field was growing so fast that it was filled with people without formal training or fresh out of university. That way the knowledge did not spread.

For instance the 1986 paper „no silver bullet“ already described the need for iterative approaches later described as agile.

Any text/program/formula describing a real number can be represented as an integer number, therefore there's only a countable amount of real numbers that can be worked with.

A new technology being able to do something better than humans does not mean it’s intelligent though. A calculation program is not intelligent just because it can remember more digits than me, work more than me

Depends on the false-positive rate of the test. With a high false-positive rate testing a lot of people leads to a lot of unnecessary treatment

The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well

No, Germany imports massive amounts of fossil fuels. Renewables and electrification help reduce that. Electricity-wise Germany is a net exporter again

There are indeed bidding zones in Europe. France is one bidding zone and Germany and Luxembourg is another one. Market prices are indeed pretty comparable.

Taxation and cost for the net are very different with a higher price for the connection in France and a higher price per kWh in Germany. In the end for a normal use of electricity the prices are very comparable.

The actual article explaining the use for fountain codes in this use case: https://divan.dev/posts/fountaincodes/

An inch is 1/36 yd or 1/12 ft or 6 pica or 72 pt. There is no power of two whatsoever in this.

With imperial you have weird fractions instead of decimals. To know that 3/4“ is larger than 1/2“ I have to actively think, decimals come pretty naturally (which was probably different in times before people went to school and learned to do math on paper)

There are enough standards that don’t have non-metric alternatives like the square drive of socket wrenches or a lot of bicycle standards. It’s very unlikely that they will get replaced

Microsoft is in the same situation as IBM decades ago. „ nobody ever got fired for buying IBM“ used to be a common saying. If at all you’ll see a slow decline.