Yeah totally, nice to be able to put the AC/heater on "for free". I even got a negative power bill once!
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
> It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
Yeah, it's tricky because basically all solar arrays (rooftop and utility) all come online at more-or-less the same time so there's a huge influx of supply which drives the price down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
Heya, fellow Aussie here. Have you ever tried contacting your local MP?
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
Yes, contacting your MP and senators can be very useful, including for federal stuff.
It's harder to actually get meetings with Federal members (they spend a lot of time in Canberra) but still worth trying.
Also it is very effective to vote for independent senators. You need to pay careful attention to make sure they aren't secretly insane but senators like David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie are very effective (Lambie seems crazy sometimes but she is surprisingly willing to change her mind on issues).
Pocock is a blight on the senate. The guy is just a seppo complaint repeating station. I swear he is more in touch with the democrat party than any Australian.
I contact MP's, I make submissions to parliament and I email media companies. I have done since 2017. You used to be able to google my name and get a bunch of hits for pdf submissions on aph.
Its done exactly squat.
>MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts,
Pocock was repeating data centre noise concerns, but refuses to simply hold a press conference on the street outside of his local to demonstrate them. Facts are not desirable for parliamentarians, they routinely get in the way of business.
I work at Influx (https://influx.com) which is human powered customer support.
We've found that inevitably AIs have some error rate and customers want to escalate to a person.
Our strategy has moved to:
- Let humans do the things that humans are good at: judgement, decision making, high novelty situations.
- Let AI do the things that computers are good at: repetitive tasks that require persistent effort
We've seen a lot of clients turn on these AI tools in their helpdesk.. hope for the best.. and get crap results. The tech isn't the hard part, the AI needs access to high quality context to answer questions accurately. But that requires more than just connecting your google drive or scraping your website.
We've found that a skilled human operator + AI is the best way to engineer high quality context to get the most out of the tools.
That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.
If you’re going to commit crimes, be ambitious. Theft, murder, and lying all have lesser punishments the bigger you go with them because you get grouped with the investor class that does these things all the time and has immunity from severe consequences
It really is the case-- Post Covid Wright's style of GST fraud[1] went pretty much viral and they did start heavy enforcement actions, but their videos are full of raiding the homes of people living in public housing who stole a few thousand. I guess if you stole enough to pay for a fancy law firm like Wright did, you're much better off.
[Wright's whole Satoshi cosplay seems to have resulted from this fraud because when the ATO did catch him they asked the obvious question: "Where did the money you were supposedly spending come from in the first place?" Bitcoin was just hitting the news bigtime then so he claimed to be an early bitcoin miner, but the amounts in question were so large that he needed to eventually extend it to being Satoshi to try to make it make sense.]
[1] in AU instead of not charging resellers sales tax businesses just apply to have their sales tax paid refunded, and it more or less works on the honor system. So you can spin up a bunch of on-paper businesses, make some sham sales between them-- the buying side claims the GST refund, the selling side just goes out of business without ever paying the sales tax.
Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
Speaking of pause. I like double period for pause.. it’s like a more polite and shorter pause than the DOT DOT DOT that screams awkwardness and doubt.
But I agree that triple em-dash for pause is not half bad either. I could see it becoming a thing, with how it goes the opposite direction and is so over the top :)
Starting to look like Emacs Lisp source code now, coding standards for which include snake-casing identifiers (standard for Lisp), but since there's no notion of namespacing in the language, identifiers private to package foo start with 'foo--', not 'foo-'.
I'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable?
- WordPress code is open-source.
- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.
I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?
If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?
The WordPress community of developers/contributors has been under the impression that the dot org site was under the control of the nonprofit WP foundation. However Matt recently declared that dot org has been his personal website this whole time, and that entitles him to solely decide when someone else can no longer use it. However documents of the founding seem to indicate that dot org is indeed under the foundation: https://x.com/sneakytits85/status/1881119968215142462?s=46
Because the Wordpress organization is a nonprofit, the organizations assets can't be used to the exclusive benefit of a for profit- Automatic. And therein lies the issue- Mullenweg attempted to weaponize the nonprofits assets against WP Engine in favor of his own for profit. Whether or not those actions were legal is being decided in court, but it doesn't look good for Mullenweg. And it certainly wasn't in the best interests of the wider Wordpress ecosystem, which is what Wordpress.org the nonprofit was setup to serve.
This is interesting in terms of Github. They could pull the same thing and say only the porceline git client and MS approved clients can pull. After all it is their servers. The open source licenses are orthogonal to this and are between authors and users.
Open source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose?
Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.
Using WordPress.org services isn't some rogue hotlink, it's hardcoded into the WordPress source code. And Matt explicitly refuses to add a config option to switch servers[1] - you have to manually patch WP to do so.
Legally, he may be in the right (I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend like I can accurately predict the outcome of the ongoing lawsuit), but morally I think I can reasonably say that Matt is pretty squarely in the wrong when he's trying to abuse WP.org services to blackmail WP Engine out of 8% of their revenue.
Curious what you'd make of these holdings, I'm not up on all the nonsense that's happened:
- It was reasonable, in that it is fair and sensible, in that it was not trying to attain an unjust advantage. It might not be generous. But that's life in the big leagues.
- Going about it boorishly (ex. the login checkbox), then reacting poorly in an attempt to own the haters, definitely crossed a line (I'm sure stealing their plugin did as well, assuming they overrode someone else's code with their own in people's installs)
Nothing entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free
I wanna be really ultra-clear here, because I might say this and be perceived as defending wordpress or thinking it's a good thing: this is bad!!!
I, unfortunately for myself, have some legal background and that's a...choppy...reading of it.
Let me explain:
The court found WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim that WordPress.org/Automattic/Mullenweg intentionally interfered with WPEngine's existing customer contracts through specific harmful actions taken after September 20, 2024, including:
- Suddenly blocking access that had been freely available.
- Taking over and modifying the ACF plugin without authorization.
- Forcing WPEngine's customers to declare they weren't affiliated with WPEngine.
- Making it difficult for WPEngine to service its existing customers.
- Actively trying to get WPEngine's customers to break their contracts.
The court viewed these as potentially illegal interference tactics, especially since they appeared to be retaliatory after WPEngine refused to pay the demanded 8% revenue share.
However, this is different from a finding about WordPress.org's general right to implement a fair charging system in the future. The issue isn't that WordPress.org wanted to charge money - it's that they allegedly used improper interference tactics to try to force payment and harm WPEngine's business relationships.
Noting again for the record, I deplore the behavior here. However, you are allowed to charge people: just not start doing only with one singular entity, as a gish gallop of nonsense that affects the one singular entity's customers.
(the shortest smoking gun on this is footnote 11, but it might be too legal-ese to parse the plain meaning, which is "hey this makes sense if you're complaining about a one-off surprise of fucking with only your customers, but I can't justify it in the long term, and you know that, you're not trying to either")
Footnote 11: "In its briefs, WPEngine refers to its “interference claims” but only addresses the elements of theclaim for intentional interference with contractual relations. See Mot. at 26-28. For this reason,the Court does not separately analyze whether WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim forintentional interference with prospective economic relations.")
In the abstract, yeah, that'd probably be fine. Maybe not 100% legally -- the injunction that WP Engine got seems to imply that blocking one specific competitor from using the infrastructure might not be cool -- but if it was a restriction that was in place from the beginning, it'd probably have been acceptable.
It's mostly that WordPress maintained that infrastructure for a very long time without having any sort of restrictions on who could use it -- whether you're a self-hosted WordPress site, or you're using some sort of managed hosting (like WP Engine or WordPress.com). Plus it's literally hardcoded into WordPress to use it; you can't change that without maintaining your own patched version. So everyone involved in the WordPress community viewed it as a general public good for all users of WordPress... and it suddenly getting weaponized didn't play well. For one thing, it put up a lot of people who were just users of WordPress as collateral damage.
(And the cost of the infrastructure doesn't seem to have been one of Matt's complaints, in general. If it was, and he'd been up-front about that, I suspect reactions might have been different.)
..and for more fun:
:-)reply