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It's deceptively undefined I'd say. People can argue under the impression that everyone shares their idea of what "intelligence" means, before realizing that their counterpart actually has an entirely different idea of what it means.
I'm leaning towards there being a divide between those who feel "intelligence" is entirely separate from "sentience" and those who feel that one implies the other.
Can't comment on FP, haven't touched it since SMLNJ in the late 90s. I fear my mind is now congealed in OOP paradigms and the threshold to FP is too high.
Anyway I can say this - the free web interface to ChatGPT in 2024 vs what you get with agent harnesses and the latest large models now is like comparing a wombat fetus to a college graduate.
Get one of the 20 or so dollar subscriptions, install Claude code, codex or similar and start by explaining what program you want to make and which language you want to do it in. Have it make a plan first, and do some back-and-forth to refine it until you're ready to let it implement.
If your experience is from ChatGPT two years ago I think you will be floored by the results, even in Haskell.
if he ever introduces a second developer to his project those 'solved' problems will become a point of friction. They'll go from 'solved' to 'solved, but in the wrong way' or 'solved, but not for this edge case', or 'solved, but why is the code so verbose?'
I agree with the problems you list, but I don't think a framework solves them. The same complaints can be made by the second developer because the first developer chose the "wrong" framework. Solved the wrong way, not covering the edge cases of your domain, too verbose etc.
Additionally a framework will likely be bloated and inefficient because they try to solve every problem for everyone, and you introduce a random breaking point where any framework update could in theory break your system.
"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want."
--Steve Jobs
I think the same goes for newspapers. They are businesses that make money from giving people what they want, and like all businesses they eventually care primarily about making money. Whatever else they were founded to care about is secondary at best.
Burke Holland has a few good videos that helped me. For example this on agents[1]. He uses Copilot but the principles are similar for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and other harnesses:
So far in the LLM coding revolution I still feel like it's software development. I just work with systems on the level of features and architecture instead of flow control statements. Some day we might lose that too, but I think it will take a while.
Journalism is allowed to have an opinion, that doesn't make it propaganda.
How do you figure? Surely it becomes propaganda for the opinion?
Journalists are not supposed to let opinions show in their reporting, that’s why editorials exist.
How does one get to "half ten" in German? Is it simply starting from "half to ten"?
Never thought about it much but I think you're spot on. English uses "half past" and therefore "half 10" means 10:30, whereas most other languages use "half to" which causes "half 10" to mean 9:30.
One would think this should cause confusion for international meetings often enough to be common knowledge, but I didn't know until today...
Oh come on! I'll take a few years of expensive RAM in order for humanity to get wide access to something near as makes no difference to the Star Trek Ship computer.
Which is 100% what this has felt like to work with, all spring and summer.
So we're in a slop phase, it'll pass. The first few years of youtube gave no hints that we'd get stuff like Veritasium.
Ignore the slop and use the tools to create something you never thought you could do. That's what it's for!
DTOs are one of the big code smells of a code base
I actually agree but think serialization overrides are even worse, and the code smell that causes both of them is the ORM. ;-)
In the time it takes me to make a single-node webservice with a CLI POC client I can now have a fully scalable SAAS with clients for iOS, Android, mac, linux, windows and web-based, user documentation in several languages and a suite of unit tests.
Surely that's both faster and further?
IMO AI agents are like a team of remote consultants that only talk shop and have no sense of humor.
and Django was like this 15 years ago when I first started using it. The core design hasn't changed, it just sounds like most other ORMs don't really know what they're doing.
Django is an opinionated web framework that uses an ORM, not just an ORM.
Django can by all means be a great way to make a web site (I have little experience with it) but if you have a db that is accessed by various systems written in Java, dotnet, erlang or whatever else I suspect the smooth sailing of Django can run into headwinds quickly and the python plumbing you have to deal with then quickly becomes an issue in itself.
But I admit it's just a guess.
It's not that your domain is different
You have mixed the posts you are replying to - the domain being different from the database is stipulated here.
I was giving examples of how this typically happens, and the reasons are entirely independent of whether or not an ORM is being used.
I am fully aware that you can handle any mess using an ORM as well, which is why I was surprised at the original claim that ORM's force proper domain models. I haven't observed that so I was genuinely curious.
Separately from that I have to say your suggestions of things to do to force an ORM into the situation are bad ideas. The complexity of custom serialization, various mapping hooks or attributes to bless individual properties will lead to pain and misery down the line.
Just accept the extra layer of DTO's. They're a detour over pure SQL but are at least easy to maintain and hold no surprises. They say there's a special place in hell for people who write SQL triggers and I think people who override ORM serializers are welcome there. ;-)
Why is your database so different from your domain?
Usually it's due to one of these:
- The domain deals with a lot of things that are not in the database.
- The domain is one of many and deals with just a fraction of what is in the database.
- The domain deals with things stored in several databases.
- The database was designed in the 90s and the domain is new.
- It's not my database so I can't change it.
(Even for greenfield systems I don't think it's generally desirable that the database matches the domain model.)
This might be the last year where we have to write code by hand unless we enjoy it though. ;-)
ORMs being a forcing function for domain modeling is enough benefit for me that it outweighs all of their obvious limitations.
That was a surprising take!
I know only a few ORM's but it seems they end up just adding another layer of DTO objects that are entirely separate from the domain classes anyway. So best case the ORM is just a detour for a good domain model. Worst case it creates a weird database-contaminated domain model that's hellish to maintain.
So I would't say ORMs force domain modeling, or even help. Are you perhaps thinking of a particular stack where the ORM is just one part of it?
It's a combination of small things really. The mentioned ability to easily call on various models in the same prompt, having agent definitions be able to orchestrate other agents just by mentioning it in the description, doing things like goal/loop automatically.
There is also IMO a distinct difference in "tone" in the dialogue. Claude seems to impersonate a human a bit more than I like.
Claude is of course very good as well and does a few things better than copilot too, but overall I'd prefer to use Copilot.
I am a huge fan of Copilot CLI. It just feels so logical and low-friction to use compared to Claude Code. Having the ability to juggle various models at will is really nice too. ("Plan this using Opus 4.6, let GPT 5.4 verify the plan and give feedback before implementing with Sonnet 4.6").
Unfortunately the June pricing change for Copilot forced me personally as well as my entire department at work to switch to Claude Code. With copilot we were hitting a few dollars of extra spend over the included credits in April and May, then in June we started chewing through the monthly budget every 2-3 days.
Just a completely insane price hike from the customer's perspective, I don't know what MS were thinking there.
Even if that is the price they need to be sustainable they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot lost 50% or more of their customer base last month.
Eventually this could be where all the major players set their prices, so the thought occurs to me that nations should run some form of "public access AI", just like they did for TV. Use the free open models and use tax money to finance a few datacenters. Geo-lock the use and set strict throttles to manage load, but let school children and citizens use that AI freely otherwise.
If Copilot's pricing is the level for all AI in a few years, only the unicorn companies can afford to use them, and everybody else has no chance of competing with a company that can use AI.
The article claims:
"After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm."
This is also not true, the actual reports estimate 33-100 deaths, 90 nonfatal cancers and 10 birth defects. (summary from wikipedia):
"These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer.[74] An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years.[75][76] The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.[75]"
It's hard to imagine ignorance that manages to be familiar with Windscale yet not know anything about the estimated harm.
Perhaps I didn't make my point clearly enough?
The claim that lack of nuclear power is to blame for global warming doesn't hold up because even in a best case scenario, nuclear power can only replace a small part of the activities that cause global warming, and it takes way too long to even replace that.
The argument that we have a choice between nuclear power or global warming is therefore either misinformed or dishonest.
We're already dealing with global warming, and as of 2026 the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to replace fossil fuel is solar power and batteries, not nuclear power.
Batteries are so far mainly deployed in cars, where they replace millions of gallons of fossil fuels from being consumed every day, but they can also effectively be deployed in homes, communities and cities. It takes days to deploy, can be mass produced and distributed to any country in the world with no issue (even North Korea and Iran) and immediately reduces fossil consumption.
Newly deployed solar panels are adding several nuclear power plants worth of new power to the world every year, and they too start working the same day and can be deployed by almost anyone, everywhere.
If we want to stop altering the biosphere by burning fossil fuels, clearly we should hurry up with batteries and solar and not spend billions and decades on nuclear.
The list is entirely relevant - the article itself talks about radiation and spends half the text analyzing the result of exactly the kind of exposure that the wikipedia article has several examples of:
"There are cases of Keralans exposed to sand containing thorium; Manhattan Project scientists who inhaled so much plutonium that they peed it out; early British radiologists who worked without any protection from the X-rays they worked with. "
But the article avoided the ones that caused fatalities, despite there being many, many examples.
Why did it do that? Why cherry-pick harmless examples to argue that something is harmless when there are many, many examples that show the opposite?
The explanation is revealed quickly - while the article pretends to talk about low-level radiation being harmless, which is frankly entirely uncontroversial, it is actually using that to try to argue that nuclear power is over-regulated:
"the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology. "
But the safety protocols for nuclear power are NOT based on worries from low-level radiation exposure, they are based on the known risks and dangers of HIGH radiation exposure!
If anything the current problem with nuclear power plans is a lack of respect for how dangerous it actually is.
Nuclear power has been allowed to operate with nowhere near the security measures it requires for decades. The realization of the dangers have so far mostly been discovered by close calls - the 9/11 hijackers at one point planned to hit a nuclear plant. Oops, nuclear plants worldwide were upgraded with security measures to handle passenger jets crashing into them. At least one.
Fukushima had bad reserve power. Oops, let's ensure we have better reserve power. The Sellafield site, The Asse II mine - Oops - We need better storage.
(https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...)
We have gotten reminders of how lax the security of nuclear power is many, many times, but so far we have never had a worst case scenario. And because of that, articles like this one pop up claiming it's safe. But it's a lie.
The actual truth is that operating a nuclear power plant safely takes enormous effort and is so expensive no company can do it profitably. The cost always gets shifted to governments.
we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity
You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption.
That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions.
Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.
This is not true, it wasn't the only and not even the first. Some examples are collected in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
The argument is also an annoyingly common attempt to sell the idea that nuclear power is not dangerous because there haven't been worst-case accidents yet.
But we know they can happen and what the consequences would be, so it's entirely irrelevant what has happened so far.
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl are active incidents ongoing as we speak, we don't know how bad even they will turn out to be.
And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted
That counts the value twice though. The value of the labour is precisely the payroll and the profits so it's accounted for.
Edit: So simply put, Volvo (or any other co with a factory in the US) operates a business that generates a lot of payroll and some profits, and the payroll remains in the US.
The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.
Not sure what you mean here but I suspect we're talking about different things. Payroll is obviously value created by the business that's directly given to the society where the business operates, and it's not uncommon that it's higher than the company profits.
Take Amazon for example, payroll costs are much higher than the profits.
Car companies also create a secondary maintenance and repair business, insurance and financing business, resale business and so on that generate more value in the country they operate as well.
So I find it likely that a well established car brand like Volvo generates more money that stays in the US than they generate money that is extracted out from the US.
To be clear - most of Volvo's BEVs are their own designs, including all currently for sale in the US.
I don't think Polestar should be banned, nor any other Chinese car maker for that matter, but I can understand why Volvo gets a different treatment.
Volvo probably employs several 1000s of people throughout the US from decades of dealerships, workshops, second hand sales etc, and they have a relatively large factory in the US.
Polestar OTOH has no factories and use direct-sales instead of going through dealerships.
So it's likely that Volvo generates a lot more value inside the US than they extract, while Polestar probably doesn't.
I would be more terrified if they didn’t spare a manufacturer who designs and makes cars in Sweden and the US since decades just because the majority owner is Chinese.
It looks more like you are spreading fear mongering trying to portray nuclear more dangerous that it is.
Every country operating nuclear power has rules, regulations and action plans that match what I am saying about the dangers of nuclear power plants.
If I'm spreading anything it's knowledge that's agreed upon by every expert in the field.
Your arguments rest on the idea that nuclear is harmless because the harm hasn't happened yet, and that's simply not good enough.
The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it
No it's not BS. I assumed you were familiar with ARENH but apparently not - in short, France decided that nuclear electricity should be sold at 42 euros per MWh, but it turned out that was not enough to sustain the plants and keep them in good shape. It ended with France having to let taxpayers cover the EDF debt and renovations.
Once the nationalization was done, the new price is 70e per MWh.
This means exactly what I said - during all of ARENH, nuclear power "pretended" to be cheaper than it actually was, but there was a hidden cost that ended up having to be paid for by taxpayers decades later.
If 70 is the true cost or just a less bad price than ARENH dictated remains to be seen, but there is one fact we know already - the price for electricity in France is often less than 70 euros. And when it is, the taxpayers in France take the loss.
A similar hidden cost is brewing in Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, the US, and it has surfaced in Japan (bigtime) and Korea.
I want you to study other sources than the ones you have studied so far, and widen your knowledge about the topic. But you are clearly annoyed with me so it's probably counterproductive to argue this further here.
So a scenario where humans will not do anything to stop a fire? Sorry that's not realistic.
You seriously can't imagine people fleeing instead of sacrificing their lives? You can't imagine an ongoing war or natural disaster making it impossible to stop a fire? You can't imagine anyone wanting to sabotage a plant as a terrorist act?
We are very lucky then that the people actually in charge of nuclear power have better imagination!
Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better
Only in the sense that it wouldn't have spread as far as Chernobyl's waste did. It would still have meant hundreds of thousand dead in Japan, and probably made it impossible to stop the groundwater contamination, leaving large areas of Japan uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Again, you seem to be woefully uninformed, or even misinformed, about the actual dangers involved because you only look at what has happened so far.
The gun was fired, the victim was hit in the shoulder, and the hospital patched him up - your conclusion is "guns are not dangerous". This is the wrong conclusion.
I can only reiterate that you need to look at what COULD happen, not what DID happen.
You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime?
France is nowhere done spending money on nuclear. They got a 64 bn "forgotten bill" just 4 years ago, it has happened before and will happen again.
The truth here is that France basically pretends to have cheap electricity by hiding a large part of the electricity bill in general taxes, that is not only paid by taxpayers today but will be paid for generations to come.
As for Germany, since they closed the 3 remaining nuclear plants in 2023 they have added approx 3x as much power generation in TWh from solar than those plants produced.
So they could never have reached the same amount of power production by going for nuclear instead. No chance.
Now - one might argue that they should not have decided to close the existing plants when Russia was about to attack Ukraine, and I certainly agree with that!
Maybe they too suffered from lack of imagination?
Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination
A scenario where the fire continued for 4 weeks instead of 10 days takes very little imagination and would be much much worse than what actually happened.
Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage
Fukushima would not have had a graphite fire, but we were lucky to not get a fuel rod fire which would have been very bad as well, although likely more limited geographically than Chernobyl.
As it is, Fukushima will perhaps "only" cost an estimated 500-600 billion dollars for the Japanese taxpayers over the next 100 or so years. Unless another earthquake hits and breaks the ice wall of course, which also requires very litte imagination, it being Japan.
Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?
"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free.
What else is the problem? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear?