> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.
> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?
> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.
The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.
That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.
Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.
And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.
Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.
And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.
You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.
First of all I never said these things you claim.
I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.
> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.
What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.
(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)
You are better than me. Back when you could mine BTC with the CPU, i had about 2 coins. I found it useless and silly and deleted my wallet at some point :)
There is a shift to software mass production over the last decade(s). AI is now speeding up this process extremely. There will be most software produced with AI and "cog coders", similar to a production line in manufacturing.
Some few (good ones) will find niches and "hand craft" software, similar to today when you still can buy hand forged axes etc. Obviously the market for these products will be much smaller but it will exist.
I you love programming you should try to get into the second category. Be a master craftsman.
All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself.
Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
What I use AIs for is searching for stuff in large codebases. Sometimes I don't know the name or the file name and describe to them what I am looking for. Or I let them generate some random task python/bash script. Or use them to find specific things in a file that a regex cannot find. Simple small tasks.
It might well be I am doing it totally wrong.. but I have yet to see a medium to large sized project with maintainable code that was generated by AI.
At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it. Perhaps, it's not as good remembering all the intertwined side-effects between functionalities/ui's and I have to let it know "in the calendar view, we must hide it as well", but that takes little time/effort.
Does it break down at some point to the extent that it simply does not finish tasks? Honest question as I saw this sentiment stated previously and assumed that sooner or later I'll face it myself but so far I didn't.
I find that with more complex projects (full-stack application with some 50 controllers, services, and about 90 distinct full-feature pages) it often starts writing code that simply breaks functionality.
For example, had to update some more complex code to correctly calculate a financial penalty amount. The amount is defined by law and recently received an overhaul so we had to change our implementation.
Every model we tried (and we have corporate access and legal allowance to use pretty much all of them) failed to update it correctly. Models would start changing parts of the calculation that didn't need to be updated. After saying that the specific parts shouldn't be touched and to retry, most of them would go right back to changing it again. The legal definition of the calculation logic is, surprisingly, pretty clear and we do have rigorous tests in place to ensure the calculations are correct.
Beyond that, it was frustrating trying to get the models to stick to our coding standards. Our application has developers from other teams doing work as well. We enforce a minimum standard to ensure code quality doesn't suffer and other people can take over without much issue. This standard is documented in the code itself but also explicitly written out in the repository in simple language. Even when explicitly prompting the models to stick to the standard and copy pasting it into the actual chat, it would ignore 50% of it.
The most apt comparison I can make is that of a consultant that always agrees with you to your face but when doing actual work, ignores half of your instructions and you end up running after them to try to minimize the mess and clean up you have to do. It outputs more code but it doesn't meet the standards we have. I'd genuinely be happy to offload tasks to AI so I can focus on the more interesting parts of work I have, but from my experience and that of my colleagues, its just not working out for us (yet).
I noticed that you said "models" & not "agents". Agents can receive feedback from automated QA systems, such as linters, unit, & integration tests, which can dramatically improve their work.
There's still the risk that the agent will try to modify the QA systems themselves, but that's why there will always be a human in the loop.
Should've clarified in that case. I used models as a general stand-in for AI.
To provide a bit more context:
- We use VS Code (plus derivatives like Cursor) hooked up to general modals and allowing general context access to the entire repository.
- We have a MCP server that has access to company internal framework and tools (especially the documentation) so it should know how they are used.
So far, we've found 2 use-cases that make AI work for us:
1. Code Review. This took quite a bit of refinement for the instructions but we've got it to a point where it provides decent comments on the things we want it to comment on. It still fails on the more complex application logic, but will consistently point out minor things. It's used now as a Pre-PR review so engineers can use it and fix things before publishing a PR. Less noise for the rest of the developers.
2. CRUD croft like tests for a controller. We still create the controller endpoint, but providing it with the controller, DTOs, and an example of how another controller has its tests done, it will produce decent code. Even then, we still often have to fix a couple of things and debug to see where it went wrong like fixing a broken test by removing the actual strictlyEquals() call.
Just keeping up with newest AI changes is hard. We all have personal curiosity but at the end of the day, we need to deliver our product and only have so much time to experiment with AI stuff. Nevermind all the other developments in our regulatory heavy environment and tech stack we need to keep on top off.
> At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it.
How do you do this?
Admittedly, I'm using Copilot, not CC.
I can't get Copilot to finish a refactor properly, let alone a feature. It'll miss an import rename, leave in duplicated code, update half the use cases but not all.. etc. And that's with all the relevant files in context, and letting it search the codebase so it can get more context.
It can talk about DRY, or good factoring, or SOLID, but it only applies them when it feels like it, despite what's in AGENTS.md. I have much better results when I break the task down into small chunks myself and NOT tell it the whole story.
I'm having trouble at 150k, but I'm not sure the issue is that per se, as opposed to the issue of the set of relevant context which is easy to find. The relevant part of the context threatens to bring in disparate parts of the codebase. The easy to find part determines whether a human has to manually curate the context.
I think most of us - if not _all_ of us - don't know how to use these things well yet. And that's OK. It's an entirely new paradigm. We've honed our skills and intuition based on humans building software. Humans make mistakes, sure, but humans have a degree and style of learning and failure patterns we are very familiar with. Humans understand the systems they build to a high degree, this knowledge helps them predict outcomes, and even helps them achieve the goals of their organisation _outside_ writing software.
I kinda keep saying this, but in my experience:
1. You trade the time you'd take to understand the system for time spent testing it.
2. You trade the time you'd take to think about simplifying the system (so you have less code to type) into execution (so you build more in less time).
I really don't know if these are _good_ tradeoffs yet, but it's what I observe. I think it'll take a few years until we truly understand the net effects. The feedback cycles for decisions in software development and business can be really long, several years.
I think the net effects will be positive, not negative. I also think they won't be 10x. But that's just me believing stuff, and it is relatively pointless to argue about beliefs.
> Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
Funny you say that, I encountered this in a seemingly simple task. Opus inserted something along the lines of "// TODO: someone with flatbuffers reflection expertise should write this". I actually thought this was better than I anticipated even though the task was specifically related to fbs reflection. And it was because I didn't waste more time and could immediately start rewriting it from scratch.
So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.
How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question).
People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.
Afaik, the bulk of the US' federal centralization of commerce is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution [0], which based on reading (and more so on precedent) grants the US federal legislature the ability to regulate commerce between states. As most commerce crosses state boundaries, this de facto allows the federal legislature to define and enforce regulatory standards.
In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court.
I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be.
> So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.
The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs.
> How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Why do you assume they are different? Or better?
> E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better
You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour.
> People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states.
Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.
So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".
In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.
Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.
After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.
In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
That's so funny: I also first started to realize I had aphantasia during a period when I was taking chess very seriously during university. Unlike even lesser skilled peers, it was so difficult for me to understand games written out in chess books without playing them out on the board and I couldn't understand why...
Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.
Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.
What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...
I definitely have memories linked to smell, but I can't imagine or remember and pull them up on demand, I am reminded of them when I detect that scent. I can make myself imagine/remember sourness though, but not other flavors. Just thinking of lemon, citrus, pickles, etc. makes my mouth water and start tasting sourness.
Day 2 starts with a Neovim config in vimscript. Just a heads up for people like me who switched away from Vim primarily because of vimscript in the first place.
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.