philwelch

The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.

You throw the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor and make more fuel out of it. It's really not that hard.

None of that is true.

No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.

> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.

What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.

Or conversely, if you have cash income you need to launder…

Outlook and Teams are both web apps, or at least they were when I last used them. Even if you download the "native" app it's just Electron. I haven't had trouble using either of them on Linux.

Those are an order of magnitude higher doses than recommended.

It seems common for taxi drivers to form a government-sanctioned cartel in order to limit the amount of competition. In the US this traditionally took the form of local taxi medallion systems, where there was a hard quota on how many taxis could be in the city. London's barrier to entry, unlike ours, at least guarantees a level of competence, even if it's excessive.

At least in the US, Uber and Lyft basically went around the taxi cartels. I'd assume that it wasn't easy for that to happen in Sweden though.

I was going to make the same wisecrack, but in seriousness I assume they're counting elderly retired taxi drivers as taxi drivers even if they stopped working years before their deaths.

Even I think ten years ago, my Levi’s would consistently fail within a year. Switched to cargo pants and haven’t had that problem since.

That's the law in Colorado, DC, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont, all of which are blue states.

Democrats opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003, and multiple blue states allow abortion at any point prior to birth.

> If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit

No, the standard Democrat policy is to allow abortion on demand at any point prior to birth—40 weeks or so.

In Seattle you’re considered conservative if you’re not a Marxist.

If we're going to gatekeep the word "engineer", you're not in the most defensible position as a train designer. If you want to go back to the original definition, engineers were soldiers specialized in siege warfare, which has nothing to do with designing trains. Alternately, "engineer" can be broad enough to include someone driving a train, which presumably required some understanding of how the locomotive worked but was more of what we'd call a skilled technician.

“If the government pays for it, it’s free!”

The prosecution has the burden of proof to establish the basic accusation, and the defendant is always entitled to offer the negative defense of "I didn't do it". For instance, if I'm accused of killing Paul, I can always say "I didn't kill Paul" and the prosecution has the burden of proof to say that I did. On the other hand, if my defense is that I killed Paul in self defense, the burden of proof is on me to show that my actions satisfied the legal definition of self defense in my state.

Wise decision. If you did anything to the thief, odds are the cops would have cared.

> The burden is never on the defendant to prove their innocence.

False. Look up "affirmative defense".

> Anecdata is well known to be problematic.

Show me the data that backs that claim.

It's intentional on the part of the prosecutors, and the billionaire who funds their campaigns. I don't know what their actual motivations are--probably some combination of ideological derangement and ulterior motive. They just don't believe in prosecuting most ordinary criminals.

Licking asses to get grants has been the full time job of tenured faculty for decades. Peer review just means they lick each other’s asses.

Almost all of the YoY growth in the S&P500 is in a very small number of tech companies. If one of those fast-growing tech companies isn't in the S&P500, the index as a whole becomes obsolete.

Sure but it’s still more affordable than it was for the vast majority of our ancestors, and they still had kids, so it’s not an explanation for declining TFR in developed countries.

Life has never been more affordable than it is now. Virtually all of your ancestors were impoverished to a degree you can't even imagine.

Deregulation does benefit the people, at least if it's done in ways that lead to sustained economic growth.

No, I think AI actually gets us closer to the surgical team than before. The purpose of the surgical team is to maximize the value of a single individual contributor. Before AI, the only way to do that was to surround him with assistants, which is inherently hierarchical and never really caught on probably for that reason. The value wasn't in the surgical team being entirely human, it was in optimizing for the surgeon's output by offloading tasks that are less valuable for him to perform. Offloading those tasks to AI works just as well without offending our egalitarian sensibilities.

Yes and every AI-first development workflow worth its salt does exactly this, and it does it much more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a team of meatbags do it.

My workflow, at a high level, is:

1. I write a high level spec. Not as high level as a single-sentence prompt, but high level enough to capture my top requirements.

2. I prompt the AI to interview me about the spec to clear up any ambiguity or open questions, then when I’m satisfied, the AI writes a longer spec, which I then review.

3. Then I prompt the AI to write an implementation plan based on the spec. I might just skim this, and by this point I might be asking the LLM more questions than it’s asking me.

4. Now I hand it off to the implementer agent.

This isn’t cowboy coding, it’s not even agile. It’s waterfall. The problem with doing waterfall was that it’s too slow, especially with the deserialization/serialization cost of routing all of this documentation through meatbrains. The LLM is doing just as much work, true, but faster.

The thing I found surprising was that, while LLM’s are still pretty awful at writing as an art form, they are better technical writers than I have the time to be, especially when writing for an audience of other LLM’s.

You’re reminding me a lot of those old assembly hackers who thought compilers were bullshit because they could hand-write better assembly. And I don’t mean that as an insult; those guys were probably right about their assembly code, just like an Amish craftsman will make better furniture than a factory in China. The problem is that the world needs more furniture and more software than skilled craftsmen can produce, and the skill gap between the craftsman and the mass production process is diminishing fast.

We’re still going to have handwritten software, just like we still have handwritten assembly. It just won’t be the norm.