German internet nerd.

Professionally he's running a successful code/security consultancy [2]. This pays his bills, so that nerd-wise he is running his own web server and content management system where everything is self-written, inclusive of his own libC implementation with a focus on bare minimum requirements. [1] He's been around in the German IT community for decades and was earlier involved in Chaos Computer Club (CCC) where he still used to attend their annual congress, which is kind of the "meet and greet" of the German IT community.

His self-hosted blog was/is very popular/controversial. He is pretty opinionated on nearly everything and he's not taking hostages when he criticizes someone. So the "woke" people don't like him, the nazis don't like him, the corpo guys don't like him. And he pretty much doesn't care.

Earlier this year he apparently suffered some critical health condition and went quiet without notice for more than 6 months, I believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietlibc [2] https://www.codeblau.de

Glad he's alive and healthy again.

I appreciate the learning guidance.

Sticking with your analogy -- your townsfolk getting energy for free. As rational people they must include the possibility of free service being over at any time in their planning and act accordingly. Otherwise they're just freeloading.

Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.

It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.

It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.

Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.

More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)

The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.

Am I getting this right - someone has been providing things for free for a long time and now people are complaining that they are relying on getting things for free and the "someone" cannot just change this?

I'm German and in my 45 years of being so have never been required to send a fax. Snail mail yes, but never a fax.

If they can put Twitter links into their article, one would think they can also add links to the website they're writing about.

Thanks OP for adding it here!

Are you seriously asking why individuals are supposed to take responsibility for themselves?

I don't think you understand how this works. People voluntarily do this. No one is forced to. Public power providers exist and work. Balcony solar is added and helps save some cost because you don't buy those 800W from the public utility provider.

People are forced to do it by high household electricity prices which are the direct result of the government policy failure.

In my childhood everyone (like your parents, your neighbors, all the ordinary people) were growing potatoes. Highly decentralized and fully voluntary sustainable food production, sounds like a dream. This happened of course because the state-run economy created food shortages.

I can easily afford my power bill. I still have a Balkonkraftwerk.

Its fun to do, it makes sense and was easy.

And your potato example is also shit. Being able to buffer a higly complex and easily disruptable supply chain for things you need to survive is smart not stupid.

Nobody is forced. It makes economic sense, so people do it. It’s how the economy is supposed to work.

Exactly, like growing potatoes made economic sense to my parents' generation.

Economic sense is largely defined by the economic policy set by the government. No one puts balcony solar in France, somehow their economic sense is different.

France has changed permitting laws to allow small-scale solar, i.e.: balcony solar, the difference is that the nominal output is much lower (350W vs 800W for Germany) which, by policy, makes it less attractive.

So it isn't that France economic policies have made installing balcony solar unattractive, it's the permitting policies which are blocking people from installing more.

You have it inverted, pun intended.

Germany could allow 2000W, or 4000W, instead of only 800W, but you seem to be missing Alexey's point.

Germany has very high electricity prices, even higher than the US (see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...), and this is due to policy failures in Germany. That's what makes these balcony systems so appealing.

I'm not sure that the outcome of having a lot of decentralized solar generation is a bad outcome.

The 800W are to prevent fires. You can’t just arbitrarily raise those limits.

What do you mean about preventing fires? 800 watts at 240 volts is only 3.3 amps. Are you saying there are German houses where you could plug a solar power system into an outlet whose wires would pose a fire risk if they carried 4 amps? Because I think the minimal rating for a German residential outlet is 16 amps, which would be 3520 watts at 220 volts.

While I agree that you can't just arbitrarily raise safety-based limits, not all "safety-based limits" are actually safety-based, and I'm pretty sure you've misidentified the safety concerns in this one.

That's 3.3 amps behind the breaker. So if your wiring is set up for 16 amps you can now draw 19.3 amps before the breaker kicks in. That's within the safety margin. But if you allow PV to feed in more you exceed the safety margins and can cause the wiring to overheat.

Hmm, I guess you're right. If your oven is plugged into a different breaker than the one where you plug in the solar panels, that doesn't happen, but most people won't know which outlet is on which circuit. Thank you for explaining!

caveat - 20 amps on a b16 breaker will take a very long time (minutes to hours) to trip; in practice, you may never see it tripping during normal usage, but yeah your walls will get a bit warmer.

But they stored Google links! /s