Hacker News: m101

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:24:50 +0000

I am not sure you have actually closely read what I have said.

Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

Spent fuel is mostly reusable:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...

Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

And no, solar is NOT free..............

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:09:31 +0000

For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:02:17 +0000

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:55:45 +0000

Nuclear used to be built cheaply, before regulatory uncertainty made private construction effectively impossible:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:51:38 +0000

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/how-can-nrc-style-regula...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:49:53 +0000

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-nucle...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:48:13 +0000

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-is-too-expensive

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-case-for-1-msv-per-d...

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:44:44 +0000

When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:35:07 +0000

100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:33:28 +0000

The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?

Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.

Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.

For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:24:58 +0000

Ok, in my own words it's something like this:

- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.

- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated

- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.

- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.

- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:09:48 +0000

The Gordian Knot and Jack Devanney's website is a goldmine of information which will address almost any question anybody has on the subject.

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:07:40 +0000

If only that were not just the start of the issue. Regulation means nuclear is probably an order of magnitude more expensive than it could be.

New comment by m101 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

m101 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:57:10 +0000

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:

- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power

- nuclear waste is not a problem

- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors

- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear

- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero

There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:

gordianknotbook.com

Or the substack:

substack.com/@jackdevanney

New comment by m101 in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

m101 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:24:21 +0000

My experience of reddit forums is extremely poor. I admit to sometimes wanting to see if I can crack the AI on something, but mostly use it like a search engine for topics I'm not familiar with rather than to speak to/debate.

New comment by m101 in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

m101 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:59:32 +0000

I was having a back and forth with Claude over a somewhat controversial topic, and I found it difficult for it to not misinterpret my questions. It was like speaking to a motivated reasoner who misinterpreted the 3 important words because the 10 others gave it cognitive disconence.

Eventually I cracked it and it said this:

“ I treated the subject as denial-adjacent and reflexively re-asserted the obvious, which means I was answering an imaginary opponent instead of you.”

New comment by m101 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

m101 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:40:05 +0000

Yes - I was thinking this - however I had already worked on it so many times with opus and gpt that I thought they had enough time to realise some common sense things that fable just got and understood first time, on the first pass. The difference seemed significant enough to comment about.

New comment by m101 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

m101 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:38:14 +0000

i had to specifically tell fable not to use a bunch of subagents in order to preserve my token allowance.

New comment by m101 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

m101 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:07:24 +0000

The point is that there's a difference in these models and everyone is looking for where the differences are. stop being an arse.

New comment by m101 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

m101 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:28:31 +0000

I've been making an auction site and have been using an AI swarm to test it: sellers, intermediaries, buyers, market practices/norms etc. I was mostly using GPT 5.5 xhigh to code up the scenario, and looping over it to check with opus 4.8.

Out of curiosity I asked Fable to review it all and I was shocked to find that there were a lot of blindingly obvious common sense mistakes that got through, for example:

- all intermediaries were given the prices of all buyers up front

- private price information in certain auction types was actually being broadcast to everyone

- multiple contradictions in instructions

If it was any one of these things then I might have understood - but the fact that so many got passed both Opus and GPT 5.5 makes me think that Fable has something special. This is a common sense type thing, that I think you only get to notice when your task doesn't involve a measurable metric, but rather some sort of real world fuzzy task.

There's clearly a problem with all these measures of performance when the difference between these models was night and day in my specific task.