rswail

On rentals: Anecdata vs ABS statistics. No one is arguing that rents haven't gone up, but the rise peaked post COVID at ~8% and are now roughly reverted to the mean of 3-4% pa.

On smart meters:

Victoria has had them for 2 decades now.

If there were anti-consumer uses that our retailers or distributers took advantage of we'd know about them by now.

We've also had a fully privatized grid for quarter of a century, with generators, transmission, distribution, and retail separated.

The rorts have been by the distributors "gold plating" the poles/wires, and some machinations of the NEM by coal/gas generators.

Neither of which were caused by the smart meter rollout.

Hope HVDC really takes off, having a power network that has solar feed covering 3 timezones as well as multiple latitudes adds to the national solar harvest and grid resiliency.

Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper.

They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.

Rents have not doubled in 5 years.

Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.

https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/rent-inflation

In response to your nonsense about Victoria somehow being bankrupt.

Amber offers that in Australia.

https://www.amber.com.au/

Victoria has had smart meters rolled out for over a decade.

The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.

Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.

Bullshit.

Victoria's default offer will include the same offer from October [1].

Victoria has a separate regulator because it deregulated its electricity grid before the other states.

[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/save-energy-and-mon...

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.

Victoria has had smart meters for two decades. The rollout started in 2006 and was basically complete a decade later.

The other states are aiming for a 100% rollout by 2030.

It applies in Victoria as well.

Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.

All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.

Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.

WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.

Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.

The money saved is distributed across the community, for both those that directly benefit and those that can't (eg renters, apartments etc). The general benefit is of greater value than the individual savings.

Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.

They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.

That's what is happening, the daily supply charge has been bumped up as well as the $/kWh during the other periods.

But it will still have the desired effect of shifting usage patterns, especially for people with rooftop solar and/or batteries and/or EVs.

We have a very large penetration of rooftop solar (due to government subsidies) and now home batteries as well.

There's definitely been a shift in the market "after sunset" when the coal "baseload" and gas peakers used to make their money.

The batteries are flattening out those spikes dramatically.

Using "on pace to miss its own forecast" is a weird way of phrasing "OpenAI made it up to bullshit the rubes".

Not to mention that being "on pace" is usually a term that means "keeping pace with".

When FSD actually works 100% (or as close as possible), manual driving will become obsolete, we're 5-10 years away.

how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?

No one seems to be worried about the fact that a vibe-coded app or conversion or rewrite is not copyright-able. It is not a derivative, it's a machine translation, without a human author.

So if that is released to the public, it's in the public domain, no license is applicable.

Thanks, interesting, I like making my systems as stand-alone capable as possible :)

What is the primary difference between using an Unbound auth-zone (as described in the RFC) compared to localroot?

What would be the additional load if everyone ran a local caching recursive resolver like unbound?

It would need to be built into iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/MacOS but what would be the disadvantages?

I can see greater load on root servers but caching is specifically designed to reduce that.

I can see potential problems for CDNs and equivalent geo-based resolvers.

But are they really that bad?

Aren't we reaching the point where there is no "solution" in terms of density and physical dimensions?

It's like the speed of light being a constant, or the Planck length being the smallest that can be subject to standard physics.

Quantum computing, which is a complete change in the actual physical model of computing, appears to be the only alternative.

They effectively funded the legal defense against SCO that was trying to claim ownership of the IPR to Unix/Linux.

They bought and funded (and still fund) Redhat which funds Fedora and GNOME and Wayland and systemd.

That's the current reality and people are realizing that they are being ripped off in their local communities, which will result in an already beginning backlash against datacenters and particularly AI datacenters.

I don't think this will change in the US, because your governments have been totally corrupted and you have much bigger problems than datacenters.

It will/is happening in more enlightened/democratic jurisdictions.

Space based data centers make no economic sense compared to land based.

The only reason is to remove them from local/regional, and potentially national/international jurisdictions.

Oh, and of course, the other reason is to give SpaceX to have a reason for xAI to be part of its structure.

Starlink makes sense, LEO comms using a mesh makes sense.

LEO/geosync satellite data processing doesn't.

I suppose you could condense the evaporated water somehow by using a chilled umbrella or some other ridiculous contraption above the cooling tower, but why would you do that?

Specifically to reduce the ongoing demand for water.

DCs need to get to net-zero on their energy requirements and their water consumption.

They are already losing their political license to operate because they're not.

That's independent of the noise and other impositions on the local communities.

For a DC to be politically acceptable it must be:

* Net zero emissions on energy consumption, preferably powered by renewables in addition to the existing local supply.

* Net zero on water consumption, especially fresh/drinking water from local supplies.

* Low to no noise or other pollution.

For those of us that use metric/SI units, 90F is 32.22C/305.37K.

Don't the US Military and NASA use metric now?

Extract the nth grapheme from a string of Unicode codepoints. Codepoints are 32-bit values.

Take into account that some Unicode codepoints work together to combine to form a grapheme which then links to a glyph for display.

If you use UTF-8 internally, you will be expanding out to full 32 bits when scanning the vector anyway.

So if memory isn't an issue (and most of the time it's not), indexing a vector by codepoint (ie 32 bits) makes more sense from a processing POV.

Both Linux and MacOS followed the Unix implementation, both of them are derivatives of Unix, so why would that change? Unix derived from Multics which chose LF.

The issue is that none of the print carriage movement ASCII characters should be used internally to indicate "end of line", because each of the chosen possibilities are used separately to indicate different carriage movements.

The logical decision would have been to choose one of the "separator" characters to indicate "separation of one line from another" and then allow the I/O drivers to decide what to send/receive to/from a particular device.

For an OS that was being created specifically to process text, having the equivalent of CR being separate to LF to allow for overprinting would/should have been a requirement.

I'd say Multics/Unix was technically correct, except this was still the wrong decision for I/O ever since.

The Record Separator is the logical character code to use to indicate the end of a line of text and print position characters, assuming that a line of text is a "record".

Storing them as 32 bits wide in memory means you can at least index by a codepoint (if not a glyph).

We're literally talking about two decades before that.

If it's purely binary data, then you can't.

Otherwise you need to have some sort of escape mechanism, exactly like quoting strings in CSV. In fact, there's an ASCII code "ESC" for entirely that purpose. :)

The problem is that those characters are non-printable, which means if you're just dumping the file out somewhere, you can't see them.