scorpioxy

That's a misleading title. A better source is at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...

Basically, it is 3 hours in the middle of the day and not everyone qualifies. If you have solar, then you wouldn't be paying anything during most of the day anyway. If you don't and you're a working adult, then you wouldn't be home anyway. Just from my observation, there's a lot of solar installations here and the power companies were starting to complain about grid stability and negative prices. The feed-in tariff(what I get paid for exporting my power back to the grid) is now very close to zero and I believe will actually drop to zero next year. Some states are now contemplating charging customers for the export.

So all in all, I think this announcement will have no effect on people's ability to afford the ever-rising energy prices here. The government did start a rebate for solar batteries recently though. And that had a beneficial effect on the prices and uptake for residences. Before that, the batteries would take too long to repay themselves and people were reluctant to install them.

Interesting question. For me, resting was similar to exercising an antagonist muscle. Or oversimplifying it, do the opposite of what you were doing. So if your day is full of focus and concentration and sedentary then do something physical that doesn't require a lot of focus and concentration. Doing something physical all day? Then relax your body by reading a book on the couch.

You'll probably need to experiment to see what works for you and come up with your own answer.

I'm curious, why is that? I've heard that sentence before but usually from people who want to write their own task system and end up partially implementing what celery implements just worse.

Celery is large and complex now and edge cases always show up at scale but that is usually not a reflection of the platform quality. The custom implementations I've seen are no where near what celery is capable of and can cater to so haven't seen the edge cases yet but that doesn't mean they implemented bug-free code and celery hasn't.

After asking about it, the issue always went towards a hand-wavey "performance". What is your experience on that front?

I think about it in the following way; lifting weights is good for your body and strength but muscles grow during the recovery phase. If you don't add in recovery days, your muscles will not be happy and injury is right around the corner. From a narrow point of view of lifting/exercising, recovery is a waste of time since you can only gain if you lift. But if you don't consider recovery as part of the training itself then you're not going to last long until your body forces you to slow down.

Now consider the brain and the mind that doesn't shutdown even when you go to sleep and are supposedly physically resting. Applying the same process used for muscles is necessary. The term used if you don't do that isn't "mind injury" though, it is burn out and corresponding mental health issues("brain injury" is reserved to mean something else).

You need a way to "rest", whatever that means for you. If it's a game of Civ, then great. Reading a good book, extra great. Unfortunately while TV used to be a source of entertainment, I don't believe it is serving that purpose anymore. Why give up Civ if you enjoy it? Limit the time if you think you have better things you'd like to do.

For me, I've incorporated rest and downtime into my life after experiencing what happens when you don't. Having said that, it is still a battle some days if I'm not mindful because we're so used to being "productive" every waking second and actively discourage resting.

I also strongly encourage you try some meditation. It is very simple to do but not easy.

As a non-native English speaker living in AU, I can offer my opinion in case it's helpful.

Of course I can't speak to the person you mentioned but if you said what you did with respect and courtesy then they probably would've appreciated it. I know I would have. To me, there's no problem speaking about and approaching these issues and even laughing about cultural issues, as long as it's done with respect.

I once had a manager who told me that a certain client finds the way I speak scary. When I asked why, it turns out that they're not expecting the directness in my speech manner. Which is strange to me since we were discussing implementation and requirements and directness and precision are critical and when they're not... well that's how projects fail, in my opinion. On the other hand, there were times when speaking to sales people left me dizzy from all the spin. Several sentences later and I still had no idea if they actually answered the question. I guess that client was expecting more of the latter. Extra strange since that would've made them spend more money than they have to.

Now running my own business, I have clients that thank me for my directness. Those are the ones that have had it with sales people that think doing sales is by agreeing to everything the client says and promising delivery of it all and then just walking away leaving the client with a bigger problem than the one they started with.

If you care to elaborate, it would be interesting to know what change made the link no longer unhealthy.

So for Australia, what can someone do?

I don't believe that regulation these days can stand against corporate interests. I have seen this happen many times already. So what can I as a consumer do? The two practical options seem to be either Apple or Google.

Unfortunately, that's been the reality in most places where I was engaged to maintain a platform. Usually in-experienced developers do this and it just sticks and the list keeps growing and tech debt increasing until the whole thing is no longer maintainable or even operational in some cases.

There's never enough time to prune the software just like there's never enough time to consider the long term consequences of any decision. The incentive system is usually set up where the focus is always on the next quarter and the short term. And the result is exactly what you'd expect it to be.

Interesting and still going through the article but I thought a lot of the metals would come from Africa. Somewhere like the Congo. I read a few articles a few years ago about how the conflict there was being fed by the multinationals that want access to the rare-earth metals that the area is famous for. Specifically, the allegation was pointed at telecom and smartphone manufacturers.

Learning about the conflict that has been going on for quite a while, makes me believe that something is fueling that fire. Didn't expect to see Spain as step 1.

A similar thing happened around 2 years ago that, from memory, affected the trains and 000(the Aussie 911 equivalent).

Yes, a similar thing happened for the major outage prior to this. The same thing is happening for the many data breaches that are occurring. It is never the decision maker's fault, always some poor employee that doesn't get a chance to present their case.

I was in similar meetings where such decisions were made and possible consequences were brushed off with "we just need to get this done as quickly as possible".

This won't stop until there are serious consequences for the businesses.

I use orgmode within emacs. Be careful that if you go down this rabbit hole, it can consume a lot of your time if you let it. I eventually stopped trying to optimize my productivity when I discovered it became another form of procrastination. I am OK with letting things go and not trying to be on top of all of the flood of information. These days I just iterate on my current system to help organize my life but not in a second brain way.

I don't know if anything is winning. I do have my preferences and others have theirs. I can tell you that reading on a tablet and reading on a phone are distinct experiences, even for text-only material.

Looking around, the younger generation doesn't do any reading on their phone. I see a lot of scrolling so probably social media or tiktok. The older generation doesn't do any reading on their phone as I see them carrying paperbacks. That's for the people who are still reading books(physical or digital) which seems to be diminishing every passing year.

Photography, is a different area. The more capable cameras on today's phones have sort of killed the mid-range market of cameras. As an amateur photographer, I haven't used my mid-range DSLR in a long time now and keep it for when quality of the image matters.

You're not the only person, but it depends on what it is I'm trying to do. Reading on a phone for example is possible but it's a struggle due to smaller screens. Trying to write anything besides a few words for a short email is an exercise in frustration. Games are not enjoyable due to the exclusive touch interface and small screen and so on. Calendar, task list and communication are what phones do best though. There are some specific mobile applications that are also very useful for me.

I think when phones started morphing into computing devices(aka "smartphones"), functionality was being shoved into them that didn't quite fit. Things started to change when the UI/UX process for mobile software was re-considered and the builders walked away from the desktop UI/UX but on phones to what we have today.

"Hate" is a strong word though. I tend to use separate devices for separate functions and stopped trying to find an all-in-one device. That made it OK but I tend to use only a few apps on my phone or tablet compared to others.

That's a good question that I sometimes ask myself. But if you want the money, you have to do what it takes. There's a limit of course and lines that I do not cross(illegal, unethical etc). There were plenty of times where I had to say that this is not going to work and chose to end the relationship with a handover. During those times, the technology wasn't the problem.

I wonder if COBOL projects these days, being brownfield by nature, are less political and stressful than brownfield web development projects.

Might be a good idea, though word of mouth and networking is how I get work and SEO has stopped being a useful avenue for a project pipeline quite a while back.

There's definitely a lot of politics involved in such projects. So I've learned that a break is necessary between major engagements to decrease the risk of burnout.

The environment that creates "rescue" projects is usually not one where long term thinking is prevalent. It would be a pet project of someone who's still there or someone who left but where the ultimate decision maker is still there. Either case, you need to walk on egg-shells and be mindful that dealing with the technology problems is the easiest part of such an engagement. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've learned that lesson the hard way.

They would try to hire and/or build the team they need to move forward, if they have the money.

Knowledge is usually not the problem, it is the shortcuts(or short-term decisions) that got them to a place where they can no longer operate the platform they need to survive. Often this is the cause of prioritizing velocity over anything and everything else. This is choosing the do it fast and do it cheap options with the assumption that it is always correct. That assumption of course is almost never true.

By the way, most cases where I've seen this there's usually an investor involved and they need to impress them.

I have been taking on "rescue" projects for a while through my business. Previously, the barely-functioning code was usually being generated via outsourcing agencies but it seems the new source is now going to be LLMs.

I imagine it will be the same set of issues really. Just a different way of cost cutting measures. There can be good reasons to take shortcuts but, in my experience, the problems start when you're not mindful that there's a price to pay for taking these shortcuts. Whether it comes from managers, employees or outsourced personnel, it's the same result.

I haven't thought about advertising it as a separate type of service(for vibe coded platforms) yet but maybe I should. The Australian software market is small so haven't been hearing much about the results of those experiments.

I'm guessing it is due to the advice that getting a job is a "numbers game".

When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.

A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.

After noticing people I know use an LLM service, I was thinking that people are routinely sharing a lot of private information with these services that would be a goldmine for advertisers(or worse).

With search engines, if you search for something like "car" then it is difficult to know if your interest is in the mechanics of cars or stories about cars or just want to look at pictures. Without building a profile about you, it is difficult to know that you are interested in buying a car. But with LLMs, the prompt would probably look like "I want to buy a brand new car that has the following features..." which is quite a clear sign of your intentions. Perfect for context to what information to present to you but also perfect for targeted advertising.

The picture gets even darker when you realize that by sharing so much private information, it is not difficult to guess when you're in a vulnerable state and would be the easiest to manipulate to make unnecessary purchases or lead you to where ever the highest bidder wants you to go.

To me this is scary stuff but to most people I know, they don't even consider this as being a problem. So since the whole AI sector seems to be a gold rush, I have no doubt in my mind that this is where we're heading.

SEEKING WORK | Melbourne, Australia | Remote

I am an experienced full stack software developer with 15+ years of experience across the board dealing with dozens of languages and frameworks. Most of my recent work involves working within the Python ecosystem with Django as the framework of choice for web development. My experience includes working directly with customers and managing small teams to launch products and services. I also enjoy working with Linux servers and production infrastructure.

Reach out if you need help with any of the following:

  - Defining requirements and setting priorities
  - Prototype, POC and MVP development
  - Turning prototypes into production-ready platforms
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  - Optimizing performance
  - Decreasing technical debt
  - Maintaining legacy applications
  - Conducting due diligence
  - Technically managing your small team to ensure delivery

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss details.

Technology: Python/Django, Javascript/React, Javascript/Vue, PostgreSQL, AWS

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Email: alaa@codedemigod.com

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Nothing against Fedora and the rpm-based platforms but I prefer the debian-derived distros. My preference is due to Debian feeling like a community project rather than being driven by corporate interests. Ubuntu was doing for a while but that started changing a few years ago.

In my experience, corporate users have moved on to using containers(or VMs) for their development environments.

It's a tricky thing to solve. One the one hand, you don't want your system to stop working due to an update but also want to keep the software you use updated, both in terms of security and functionality.

Mark Shuttleworth talked about this many years ago before snaps were introduced as a solution to this. The idea at the time was that a rolling release distro is too much of a hassle to maintain and even the 6-month cycle was getting to be too much. So he talked about having a stable core with a long release cycle and rolling releases for software that need to be frequently updated, both desktop and server software. The idea was great but the details of the execution left a bitter taste for many users.

Installed trixie a few days ago and test driving it and it's been going very well. Coming from Ubuntu so it wasn't a big change but initially I went with Ubuntu many years ago due to its reputation in making Debian a more user-friendly distribution. I can say that my experience with trixie was quite friendly. This may have been the case for a few releases but I was invested in the Ubuntu platform so didn't see the need to switch.

Was bummed to see firefox at version 128 as I've been missing features from the more recent versions. I don't know how I'm going to address that yet as I prefer not to add external apt sources, if I can. This is on a desktop system so somewhat recent versions of software is desirable.

What do other people do for desktop systems? Go with testing/unstable or just another distro for desktops?

There's a part I didn't understand. How did the model know which companies are vulnerable to attack? I get the part where the LLM was used to analyze documents and create "malicious" software but the biggest missing step seems to be the first one. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but usually that's either targeted at a specific company or you do a port scan on IP ranges to find any target and proceed from there.

My feelings exactly. For a while I thought I was missing out and then I started learning how(and why) it works and I thought it was interesting but greatly over-hyped, exactly like bitcoin was.

I tried to follow the hype and generate an application but it took a lot of time and it did generate something but not something that works with many subtle bugs. Now it may be that I needed to prompt it better, but that response also feels similar to how Scrum is always "done wrong" when it doesn't work. The result started getting better when I got more and more detailed with my prompts and then I realized that I am about to start writing code as a prompt and I may as well write the code myself.

So I still think it's an interesting tool, and it will automate away certain industries but no where near what the advertising is implying.

No problem. Now that you mention it, I find it incredible that many people I know wouldn't be able to tell how much they're spending on what. Not even ballpark it. This is the first thing to start with and is incredibly easy to do, if you choose to. Whether you call it FU money or emergency or something on the side or whatever, you at least need some numbers.

And we're not talking about wealthy people here but the ones who complain that there's nothing left when there's an interest rate increase. I don't know maybe it's the crowd I hang out with. Or maybe they are actually wealthy and just don't want to say it.

Sure, I wouldn't advise taking any expensive vacations or anything of that nature. But what caught my attention were the terms "pants-on-fire emergency" and "I would be interviewing 24/7". I mean I get it would be a stressful situation and may cause anxiety or panic but having those strong emotions could also lead you to end up working in a bad workplace which would make your mental health even worse. I am not judging, but those words just left me wondering what am I missing. And this is speaking as someone with a family to support.

I agree with the zen masters description though. I wouldn't be so zen about it either.