Decades ago there was what I have read was an extremely effective Government department called the ’Commonwealth Employment Services’ but that was disbanded and contracts handed to private firms for excuses like “efficiency” that (surprise) didn’t end up panning out.

I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!

I was fascinated with these and read them many times cover to cover over the years. Practical Things to Do with your Microcomputer was always my favourite, as well as the robotics one. I also found the machine code one interesting but never really grasped it until later.

I think the ideas in them (as well as some other computer books and magazines I had) really helped steer my interests from just being interested in computers and software to being more interested in hardware and embedded systems, which is where I work today. These were very important in hindsight in shaping my interests!

I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).

Somehow I have zero hope the bill she is proposing as a replacement could be any better than the absolute horror that the OSA is though...

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.

I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.

The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.

It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.

(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or

(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or

(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.

Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!

This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)

The actual root cause is that we're allowing LLM companies to completely disregard copyright laws for their profit. Whether the LLM companies scrape the Web Archive or the original source doesn't change the copyright infringement implications in any way, and cutting off the web archive doesn't practically change anything (because as I understand, LLM scraping is already prolific all over the web).