COBOL isn't a legacy language. It's domain specific language that is designed for exactly what banks need: high precision math without floating point errors.

Any Comp Sci student should be able to take what they learned and apply that to COBOL.

What actually sets COBOL devs apart is their attention to detail and ability to do math.

Even if backend banking code was written in TypeScript, they would still have to hire the best of the best to work on it. You can't have errors at that level.

Even better, lets see someone underwrite the insurance on the systems using it...

I think "What We Do in the Shadows" already did that villain.

Heh, they say "hallucination," you say "trap street."

Though put another way, capitalism is political power and decision making is in the hands of the people with the most money.

Eh, I am old enough to remember the arguments about if writing things in high level languages counted as 'programming' since you were no longer making the program that goes on the hardware.

scripting? But yeah, while I can see how one could draw distinctions between 'programming' and 'scripting', I've also seen people argue that C/C++ are not 'programming' either, so the 'this isn't programming!' always seems a bit silly.

No. Physics knows pretty well where its limits are. But as Physics is an experimental science, we have to find a counterexample to our hypotheses to know their limits. This is one limit we didn't know before, as we did not find an example like this before. Apparently, the mass aggregation of Black Holes is not fully understood.

Though even odder, he seems to be saying that bad custom software is better than working solutions using existing tools. Spreadsheets might not be as sexy as a custom app that you can show your friends, but they are a pretty reliable and simple way of doing things. its like he wants the prestige of bespoke software to show off with, and doesn't care if it works or not.

And those who could describe how software should work developed formal languages so they could be precise in their descriptions since that turns out to be easier to control.

Other modes of transport are walking, cycling, street cars, cabs, busses, trains, ferries... It does not boil down to EVs vs. ICEs. For me, the automobile is the vehicle of choice only if all other modes are exhausted, because it's the most expensive mode. That does not change much if I go from an ICE powered car to an EV. In general, the automobile moves the most mass per passenger compared with all other modes of transport. It is horribly inefficient.

You .. you killed it!

Still - it's two days in your average nuclear reactor.

On the other hand, Oklo is 1.7 billion years old, and any geological structure at that age is exceptionally quiet from a geological point of view. If this region was any more active, we would not have anything of Oklo left, except traces of it thousands of miles away. If you find 1.7 billion years old bedrock, it might be a good idea to store 10 pounds of nuclear waste in it - because that's the total mass deficit of U-235 recorded for Oklo. To put things in perspective, 10 lb of U-235, when spent, return 3.3 × 10^11 kJ of energy, which are about 90 GWh to heat water into steam, getting you about 35 GWh of electric power. A typical nuclear reactor produces about 7 TWh per year, which means that Oklo is equivalent to a commercial reactor running for about 2 days.

I am fine with storing 2 days worth of nuclear waste of a typical reactor in 1.7 billion year old bedrock.

Better a windfall bonus for those companies, than nobody getting any money back at all. Sure, consumers are worse-off victims than their vendors, but the vendors are nevertheless victims too. You can't really undo all (or even most) of the harm, but every little bit helps.