I needed to create a program to retrieve solar generation plants, select a plant from a gui, enter date ranges, cost info, then pull daily usage data from inverters and meters. The API inconsistently mapped endpoint names making it hard to find where the data lived.
Claude code sorted it all out in about an hour. It built test harnesses to verify correct endpoints. It built the gui and good looking excel outputs.
Built a really well documented .md and repo for checking into our internal gitlab.
I haven’t written or reviewed a line of code, as it is only an internal app to be used by one accountant in our business.
AI is getting shockingly good at least for small problem spaces.

When people tout nuclear, I tell them that China has already ignored that idea to have only 3 plants, stamped out: they are building ALL the designs, in hopes to sell to anybody despite NIH syndrome in every nuclear regulator. So if China can make it work with their thumb on the scales, if it isn't lies about some plants coming in at $4.50/watt, then we can follow their lead.

In the meantime, my original comment springs from the MIT study that you could come "close enough" to baseload emulation with $20/kWh CAPEX for batteries...and while we watch China build reactors for 5 more years, we may watch another part of China get below $30/kWh...and the game is on.

I'm afraid my money is on the batteries, after 50 years of nuclear cheerleading.

Investors can watch the nuclear industry trying hard with SMRs and thorium and traveling wave and pebble-bed, and NOT see industry getting the construction cost down below $10/watt. One hears tell that China is kicking reactors out the door in sixty months flat, at $4.50/watt. But then, China is an unreliable narrator about the greatness of China, and may be doing awful things to local environments. Even if they lean on our governments to ease up on nuclear (Trump sure would), halving the cost to $5/watt seems - well, unlikely: RISKY. And capital is a coward.

Meanwhile, investors are watching batteries and renewables get cheaper, steadily, are monitoring announcements from pilot plants and upstream to the labs, and must feel pretty confident that prices will KEEP getting cheaper, significantly so in the five-year minimum construction time for a reactor.

Nuclear is great, I was a champion for 50 years. But I can read an accounting ledger, and nuclear has been beaten.

Sigh. Yes. Yes, I do, because for TWELVE FREAKING YEARS, I've been having to find and copy this excerpt from the NYT story on it, November 16, 2014:

"Here’s another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust, costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.
Defenders of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.
The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more."

There can't be any bit of software in the world more documented as to the requirements of every singe function, every menu item, every bit of behaviour, than Excel.

And it's the only thing tying so many people to Microsoft. Windows and Word sure are the hell not.

I’ve been using vertical tabs ever since wide aspect monitors came out, which is one of the main reasons I don’t use chrome.

"The Spoils of War" by Andrew Cockburn. Goes way back to American soldiers having to steal boots off dead Chinese soldiers in Korea to get decent boots, their feet were freezing off.

"The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James F Burton. Burton was part of the 1980s "Fighter Mafia" who got the F-16 built, against Pentagon tendencies for every new plane to be twice the weight and twice the cost of the last one. (The F-35 continues the tradition.) They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

Cockburn laments that people thought it only applied to some things, when their point was that every $1 lightbulb on the console was $25 to replace.

Burton notes that one Army logistics guy got the price of a single uranium bullet down from $80 to $4 by whipsawing two suppliers into real competition, another reduction every purchasing round, for years. That guy gave a presentation to a roomful of Stars on it, and came back to his desk to find retirement papers waiting. Or a transfer to Thule. His choice.

Huh. Nearly every corporate uses a VPN to get external connectivity to their internal network.

I posted this in a substack forum recently, using very back-of-envelope arithmetic using half-remembered price mentions. I was surprised to see nobody dunk on the estimate. If this is for reals, I think my trollish ending of "so nuclear's toast" might be true?

The money issue is the one where I'd have to tell a Big Investor, that a good $10/watt should be budgeted as the CAPEX for a new nuclear station that will provide 7x24 power (85% of the time, they need scheduled downtime).

For $10/watt, instead of a gigawatt of nuclear, I can spend $10B on:

- 5 GW of solar at 20% capacity, so 1GW on average, just intermittent. ($3B at $0.6/Watt)

- 3 GW of wind at 30% capacity, another 1GW on average, intermittent ($3B at $1/Watt)

- 72h of storage of 1GW ($3B) ...I find that last hard to believe myself, but I'm told that $40/kWh is coming from sodium-ion, which is $40M/Gwh, but you have to spend $160M for 4 hours of discharge at 1GW. But $160M/4 hours = $1B for 24 hours, so I think I get to claim 72h for $3B of sodium-ion in 2030.

And I have a billion left over to make it all work together. And I can have it built long before your nuke plant is done, the battery price will come down while the rest is being built.

This system may not really replace a 1GW nuke plant - but it will certainly put out a hell of a lot more than 1GW at times, probably not a bad thing.

The thing is, it's close-enough to dispatchable power to take the investor's money away from the nuke plants. So I don't see any getting investment money without government intervention like Ontario's.

If you check news stories around Xmas week for both 2021 and 2023, the province of Alberta, a noted polity for disparaging wind and solar, had dunkelflautes exceeding 100 hours. Solar, rather obviously for when there's only 8 hours of sunlight, and that only 17 degrees above the horizon, and it was cloudy, was at 5%. Wind was at 10%. If they'd had a 300% overbuild of solar and 200% overbuild of wind, they'd still have needed 6GW of battery for over 100 hours to supply 12.5 GW to the grid. (Oh, yeah: it was also -35 F, so 12.5GW was without heat pumps we can expect in future).

The two Canadian prairie provinces are your very hard cases for wind and solar. The American states just south, hardly better. British Columbia would be worse (very low wind, more cloud) if we didn't have so much hydro.

I checked TFA, but it just said "314 Trillion". I'm still wondering if the actual number of digits they stopped at was 314,592,653,589,793 ...if guys like that start a little joke with "314", you'd think they'd go all the way.

...when officials filter out the AI by demanding handwritten submissions.

Few programs in the world are as exhaustively documented as Excel; there are so many doorstop books cataloguing the use and output of every object, method, and function.

So, that's perfect for reverse-engineering it, as long as you have a lot of programming time - or programming suddenly got almost-free. Just shove all those Excel manuals into your best coding LLM and tell it to clone excel with free code we can all use.

I will finally be impressed with AI-coding; and I will finally be able to leave Microsoft entirely, because the giant mountain of tools that is excel is my one reason I just can't leave; it's too useful.

Oh, clone ODBC while you're at it. Database hits are what Libre Calc particularly sucks at, and for me, database-front-ending and reporting was it's finest feature.

My Paypal account has been locked for 10 years now, because my personal email was linked to a now defunct business, and this traps you into a circle of ‘need more information to unlock your account’, business no longer exists, PayPal can’t compute, can’t unlink the account.
They also took ages to get 2FA, and this awful habit of auto logging you in for payments, so if someone had your cookies they could just make purchases without any addition authentication. Just change the delivery address and fraud is your friend.
Useless organisation.