> Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.
I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.
The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)
Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.
> you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright
The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.
Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.
Compared to other countries I've lived in, Belgium doesn't do too bad of a job in promoting 'green energy'. Although I've not lived there for some years, they used to subsidize things like solar panels on roofs (at least when my parents installed them 20-ish years ago). And there are 'green energy' companies as far as I'm aware, so you don't have to stick with the larger energy providers.
That is about production. The story that you don't get from these graphs is that Belgium is highly dependent on imported energy because the production is just too low.
It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.
Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country.
And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.
But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
I would love to use Clojure but there are basically no jobs in my area with the language. Seems like the Nordics like Clojure but I'd need to move.
The very good backwards compatibility is attractive but as the result of the small community, there's also a lot of abandoned packages and fewer QoL packages (formatters, linters, etc); I know there are some but for example I had setup `cljfmt` in Emacs and it wouldn't work, didn't look further.
VS Code and its forks (Cursor, Antigravity, etc.) have Calva, a fantastic REPL with excellent linter Kondo. These are amazing tools; formatting is the very least of it. You don't need Emacs. I personally using VS Code + Doom Emacs. Also, many packages that look abandoned are simply mature. You can literally use ten year old packages.
I'm not a hot shot programmer, entirely self-taught but a decent architect who thinks hard about problems, and with LLM agents Clojure shines for me. There are some fantastic databases also starting with Datomic -- free now thanks to Nubank -- and everything inspired by it and the Clojure flavor of Datalog. These include Datalevin, Datahike, DataScript, XTDB. Datomic itself is probably best for enterprise though there's now an embedded version.
But I'm pretty convinced that most LLMs I've used are more reliable with Clojure (and Elixir) than with most of the popular languages, and I can say they use Datalog extremely well, seemingly much better than SQL despite the vast difference in corpus size. For one thing Datalog just gets rid of joins issues.
cljfmt is included with both Clojure-LSP and CIDER, so if you have either installed it should work out of the box.
With LSP mode the standard `lsp-format-region` and `lsp-format-buffer` commands should work, and on the CIDER side `cider-format-defun`, `cider-format-region` and `cider-format-buffer` should also invoke cljfmt.
I'll add a note to the cljfmt README to tell people about these commands, as your experience shows that it might not be obvious to people that they likely already have access to cljfmt in Emacs as a result of using LSP or CIDER.
There are still Clojure remote positions. Thankfully, I have used Clojure professionally long enough that my core ability shouldn't atrophy too much now that we have moved away from it at my current position. I am looking forward to Jank actually.
There were multiple reasons at our company -- my particular team, all skilled Clojurists, decided to default to python last year for a variety of reasons including both AI code generation suitability and AI model utilization in our code bases; the latter is of high relevance for our particular work. While I find Clojure to be among the best languages for interacting with LLMs via API, it is awkward for interacting with local models directly. Of all on the team, I was probably most open to a polyglot approach.
Incidentally, I am having great success using AI with Clojure. In fact, from what I read online, better than most. I'm not sure if it's due to Clojure's terseness (and hence, token economy), or other reasons, but it works very, very well.
That's kind of the point. These things don't just happen, people start talking about it at a high level (this doc, conversations like this) and then dig in and solve the problems over time.
Looking at their misrepresentations and over-exaggerations regarding Erlang it now seems like a long lead-up to a sales pitch. Their motivation to exaggerate deficiencies in existing approaches is to lend chapter 7 more rhetorical punch. All the same, I'm keen to hear what they have to say.
There are some use cases for very dynamic code, like ORMs; with descriptors you can add attributes + behavior at runtime and it's quite useful.
Anyways, breaking metaprogramming and more dynamic features would mean python 4 and we know how 2 -> 3 went. I also don't think it's where the core developers are going. Also also, there are other things I'd change before going after monkey patching like some scoping rules, mutable defaults in function attributes, better async ergonomics, etc.
You'll just end up creating a black market (high tax has resulted in 1/3 of cigarettes being illegal in the UK) and home production (since anyone can make their own alcohol easily)
And what does that achieve? It makes the poor poorer. The alcoholics will still drink but their families will have less.
What you do do is create a black market, because people will want to buy it cheaper elsewhere. That puts money into the hands of criminals.
Anyone can make alcohol unlike most drugs. It's remarkably easy to make. You just need patience, and raw materials: potatoes, fruit or whatever. You can make it in your back room. The problem is that it is not high quality, and can contain chemicals which can make you drunk.
Full support to the author, I hope they'll be able to keep making things that are interesting and outside the box like Decker and WigglyPaint. I hope they'll find solace in keeping at creative things.
I also wish LLM copies were not crowding out actual artists.
Absolutely insane take imo. You do you man.
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