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.

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

20-25 Pleasant day T-shirt weather

25-30 Getting hot, ceiling fans/AC time

30-35 Hot

35+ very Hot

My own field Materials Engineering has:

"Hardness", "Toughness", Resilience", etc. which all describe different properties.

"Ferromagnetic" or "Ferrimagnetic best believe those are different.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.

The algorithm at the end is written in Algol but I found it pretty easy to understand.

Sure we could store the data by logging the start timestamp and a stop timestamp but our data is stored on a time series basis (i.e. in a Timeseries DB, the timestamp is already the primary key for each record) When you are viewing the trend (such a on control room screen) you get a nice square-wave type effect you can easily see when the state changes.

This also makes things like total run time easy to compute, just sum the flag value over 1 second increments to get number of seconds in a shift the conveyor was running for.

Sure in my example you could just store something like motor current in Amps (and we do) and use this to infer the conveyor state but hopefully I've illustrated why a on/off flag is cleaner.

For example dup(), dup2(), dup3() and pipe(), pipe2() etc

LWN has an article: https://lwn.net/Articles/585415/

It talks about avoiding this by designing future APIs using a flags bitmask to allow API to be extended in future.

https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

You can also view the breakdown of where the grid is sourcing energy from (i.e. what portion of the grid is supplied from solar pv etc at any given time).

I know that some big industrial users (large factories etc) can optimize/spin up production lines etc based on the spot price. Although I'm not sure if they use the same public AEMO data there might be a dedicated api or similar involved.

Most recently I watched a highlight video of Australia vs West Indies test cricket series my home page was endless cricket videos.

A few weeks before that I watched highlights from World Cup Asian qualifiers, for a week or so endless soccer videos.

It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.

Feels like Albanese is walking on eggshells at the moment trying to get Trump not to cancel AUKUS, not ramp up tarrifs etc.