The Australian parliament is weird but it kind of works.
Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.
The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.
The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.
I think it is very difficult to secure internet voting, someone can stand behind you and twist your arm or otherwise coerce you to vote for their candidate. Much harder to do when there are observers and witnesses at the polling booth.
I've lived with deg C my whole life it is what I'm used to, the way I experience weather is in 5 degree increments - I live on East Coast of Australia. My Internal rule of thumb is:
Below 10 deg C - it is cold, Heavy jacket weather
10-15 Typical winter weather (at least where I live) light jacket
15-20 Spring/Autumn weather long sleeves no jacket required
The issue is people trying to use these AI tools to investigate complex data not the throwaway UI part.
I work as the non-software kind of engineer at an industrial plant there is starting to emerge a trend of people who just blindly trust the output of AI chat sessions without understanding what the chat bot is echoing at them which is wasteful of their time and in some cases my time.
This not not new in the past I have experienced engineers who use (abuse) statistics/regression tools etc. Without understanding what the output was telling them but it is getting worse now.
It is not uncommon to hear something like: "Oh I investigated that problem and this particular issue we experienced was because of reasons x, y and z."
Then when you push back because what they've said sounds highly unlikely it boils down to. "I don't know that is what the AI told me".
Then if they are sufficiently optimistic they'll go back and prompt it with "please supply evidence for your conclusion" or some similar prompt and it will supply paragraphs of plausible sounding text but when you dig into what it is saying there are inconsistencies or made up citations. I've seen it say things that were straight up incorrect and went against Laws of Thermodynamics for example.
It has become the new "I threw the kitchen sink into a multivariate regression and X emerged as significant - therefore we should address x"
I'm not a complete skeptic I think AI has some value, for example if you use it as a more powerful search engine by asking it something like "What are some suggested techniques for investigating x" or "What are the limitations of Method Y" etc. It can point you to the right place assist you with research, it might find papers from other fields or similar. But it is not something you should be relying on to do all of the research for you.
One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.
I'm an engineer I think there is definitely some pain points translating math to code.
I've written some nasty numerical integration code (in C using for loops) for example I'm not proud of it but it solved my issue. I remember at the time thinking surely there must be a better way for computers to solve integrals.
I work at an industrial plant, we use "edge" to refer to something inside the production network.
As an example the control system network is air-gapped so to use ML for instrument control or similar the model needs to run on some type of "edge" compute device inside the production network all of the inferencing would need to happen locally (i.e. not in the cloud).
>There are no "higher level details" in software development, those are in the domain of different jobs like project managers or analysts. Once AI can reliably translate fuzzy natural language into precise and accurate code, software development will simply die as a profession. Our jobs won't morph into something different - this is our job.
I'm the non-software type of Engineer. I've always kind of viewed code as a way to bridge mathematics and control logic.
When I was at university I was required to take a first year course called "Introduction to Programming and Algorithms". It essentially taught us how to think about problem solving from a computer programming perspective. One example I still remember from the course was learning how you can use a computer solve something like Newton's Method.
I don't really hear a lot of software people talk about Algorithms but for me that is where the real power of programming lives. I can see some idealized future where you write programs just by mix and matching algorithms and almost every problem becomes essentially a state machine. To move from state A to State B I apply these transformations which map to these well known algorithms. I could see an AI being capable of that sort of pattern matching.
I suspect it is to do with the amount of pedestrian traffic passing through an area. When you have a high population density there is an increased amount of foot traffic in the area you can charge less per individual serving because you have a higher overall volume of traffic.
Where I live in Australia the cheapest food tends to be Kebabs which congregate around pubs. There is a high amount of students walking (stumbling) home after a night out etc so they can afford to be cheap since they get so much foot traffic coming through.
I'm an Australian in my 40's almost everyone in my immediate circle (family, friends, work-peers) has an Android, at least in my world iPhone is a minority.
I grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.
I lived through that time as well by 1999 it was pretty clear Google was "the best" search engine site. Alternatives like Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista etc. were on the downswing.
I can remember the characters in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer talking about Google (not sure if that counts as household awareness but it was getting there).
1999 was the time of Napster, it was a completely different internet it really felt like a Wild West.
Personally in my experience office hours were not that helpful, I was working fulltime at a factory while I was attending university, I simply did not have time to hang around professors offices (My Manager allowed me time off to attend lectures but there was no allowance outside of that), if I needed to study for exams I'd have to take annual leave for example.
Email was single best method I had if I needed to ask professor anything, some professors would reply promptly and some would take weeks to answer an email.
Even if Students don't work fulltime many of them rely on part time jobs (at least here in Australia) - for example one of my housemates worked as a delivery driver for a freight company and another worked in a call center. I think sometimes the professors assume students have more time to spare in the middle of the day then they do.
I am Australian. When I was assigned Jury duty in 2016, my Company continued to pay me (I think this is a legal requirement if you are a full time employee), I showed my manager the letter from the court and I was instructed to enter a leave request via usual HR system we use - there was an option for Jury duty.
I was also paid by the court for attending jury duty (a physical check that arrived in the mail a few months later). It was not very much money (I think around $20 per day) - this money was supposed to cover things like Transport, parking fees and meals. In my case the trial was called off after 3 days so the check was for around $60.
Maybe if you are part time or on a contract it is different.
Assuming you mean Dota 2 I haven't played for some time but it used to be somewhat common 3 or 4 years ago for people to run scripts to instantly cast hex as soon as opponent appeared on their screen this effectively gave people inhuman reflex times.
You could tell they were cheating because if you watched replay from the cheaters point of view their mouse cursor would jump from current position to hovering over the target instantly and then immediately jump back to cursors original position all within a frame or two.
In Linux's defense even the corporate issued Dell laptops at my work running Windows 10 struggle with projectors. I see it daily in meetings people have to randomly mash the function key until display gets mirrored to projector properly, need to plug / unplug projector repeatedly until it works. People hit fullscreen in powerpoint and projector display just disappears and have to go through plug in unplug again dance.
From everything I've seen a projector "just working" seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Yes the churn is an issue especially in desktop environments but relatively painless all things considered.
I don't think there has been a single inflection point for me there has been steady incremental improvement.
If you want to think about how far things have come I started using Linux in 2001 with Mandrake. Around 2.2 -> 2.4 kernel switch. So much has changed since the bad old days. I don't want to throw out a "back in my day we walked up hill in snow both ways" style rant but...
-All we had was EXT2 and we liked it...
-You had to manually configure modelines for your video card changing display resolution was more or less a crapshoot
-Apps would exclusively lock the sound card which typically meant the first thing you opened would be only thing capable of playing sound. But you could pipe things to /dev/dsp and have the speaker emit random beeps that was kind of cool
-window manager used to crash a lot and you'd lose all the title bars for all the windows this happened fairly often - cntrl alt backspace is still in my muscle memory years later.
-Printers were basically impossible to configure.
People complain about changes like ASLA, pulse audio etc but I think there is a lot of rose tinted glasses being applied to how things were before. Sure some things aren't perfect but neither was their predecessors and on the whole they fixed more things then they broke.
Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.
The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.
The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.