As someone who thought smart homes were just a gimmick but now has a reasonably complex HA setup; these are some of the things I use it for:
* Controlling items I don't have easy access to:
* AC in baby's room (as well as checking on temperature) while baby is asleep
* Subfloor ventilation fans and set up clever timers for them (I'd have to crawl under the house)
I also have a motion sensor connected to a light for the hallway which has logic that is a bit more clever than the out of the box motion-controlled-lights (e.g. it stays on if people are in the vicinity).
Other than that, the rest is pretty much gimmick:
Every blue moon I will change the light in the living room to bright purple for fun.
> most people choose public transport over driving
Is that true? I was surprised when looking at the actual stats (most people in Sydney drive to work), but maybe there are many more people working in places other than the CBD skewing this.
When I was cycling in from Balmain, there were a huge number of cars stuck in traffic getting into the CBD every morning. Despite it only being an easy 15 minute cycle (or a 15 minute bus ride) from the peninsula.
Yes, there are a lot of people working in places in Sydney other than the CBD, and yes, a much higher proportion of those people drive to work.
And yes, there are still enough people who drive into the Sydney CBD in peak hour, to cause massive traffic (and to keep the carparks, aka parking lots, being very lucrative businesses!). Nevertheless, they're a minority - more than 75% of people commute to the Sydney CBD on public transport [1].
Also, re: traffic from Balmain in peak hour. Plenty of places you can be going to, eastbound on the Anzac Bridge, apart from the CBD! I'd say a significant number of those drivers would be heading north of the harbour to work (eg North Sydney, St Leonards / Crows Nest, maybe Chatswood, maybe Macquarie Park), and they'd be bypassing the CBD thanks to the Western Distributor (could also be connecting to Cross City Tunnel to eg Bondi Junction, also Eastern Distributor to Randwick / Waterloo).
I vaguely remember hearing about it but never tried it out. Not sure when it was canned. The software part sounds very interesting but could also be sold to existing transit companies and government agencies to improve their network.
We do it similarly and it's pretty easy to tell if someone knows their stuff, especially as the assignment is just a platform to dig deeper in the face to face interview.
However, the coding assignment was a really good filter and allowed us to dismiss the majority of candidates before committing to a labour-intensive face to face.
I haven't interviewed anyone since AI took off, but I am assuming that from now on the majority of candidates that would usually send us crap code will send us AI code instead; thereby wasting our time when they finally appear for the face to face.
Yes, but we had that problem before when somebody would farm out coding assignments to a friend. I couldn’t say yet how it’s impacted the coding assignment’s effectiveness as a filter yet. We still do get crap code just sometimes it’s obviously AI generated.
So this sounds just like PayID in Australia or what was payM in the UK (which got shut down a couple of years ago due to lack of use), minus the QR code generation part.
It's used between private people to make it easier to send money to one another without having to type in bank account details, but never really used to pay businesses (except under the table).
How come this is so popular in Brasil for paying businesses vs using a card or your phone to tap and pay (which seems more convenient)?
Brazil has massive amounts of fraud so credit cards are very inconvenient, card cloning and websites leaking credit card numbers is a huge problem. Banks are super aggressive about blocking cards if they see suspicious transactions. Tap and pay is popular in Brazil as well, but only for physical transactions. For online small purchases PIX is definitely the best option.
PIX (and similar systems like Sweden's Swish/BankID), don't have fraud protection, once you send the money it is gone with no contest possible. But when you send a payment with PIX there is 0 risk your account's money will get highjacked, at most you lose your one transaction.
But PIX is also accepted in many physical places because it has smaller fees, with some stores and informal commerce not accepting cards. I used to work at an IT service provider in Brazil around 2012 and one of the projects my company did was monitoring of those card machines. They actually kept GPS information of the machines and blocked them if they were moved around. Those card machines are surprisingly expensive in Brazil (or at least they used to be).
> once you send the money it is gone with no contest possible
That's not true; PIX requires your bank to provide a way (called "MED"[1]) for you to request a reversal up to 80 (!) days after a transaction. It can only be used in case of fraud, and it may take up to 7 days for the bank to analyze the situation and deny/allow your request. If it's allowed, you'll get the money back in up to 4 days.
If the bank denies the request (i.e., if they conclude there was no fraud) you can always sue the transaction recipient; you'll have access to all necessary information since they must be registered with some financial institution to be able to receive a PIX transaction.
So it's not as easy as a credit card, but I think it's fair for a free payment service.
Oh I didn't know that, the Swedish system doesn't have anything like that as far as I am aware. But credit card fraud reimbursements are relatively straightforward. The PIX one seems more complicated, but the chance of being defrauded on PIX transactions is much smaller as well.
as in you can't get your card cloned and then a bunch of transactions show up.
The pix revolution is for very small business: food stalls, mom and pop shops, seasonal sellers, street vendors, independent and informal professionals (plumbers, electricians, etc).
Brazil adopted banking cards very fast and I remember using them virtually everywhere in debit or credit mode as early as my first card in 2008, I never had to carry money around. But they require two things that are a problem in a Brazil sized country with a Brazil density and infra structure: cell coverage and equipment. So small towns, small shops, independent professionals, etc would not have them or even be able to use them sometimes. Even today there are lots of places with internet but not cell coverage (radio, fiberglass or other infra but no cell tower).
This was changing on its own recently, many companies launched new machines that are cheaper and allow more small vendors to accept cards (+ working over the internet). This is still worse than the free approach of pix (for normal people) and a potentially lower fee for companies. Plus it allows people to buy with something they will have on them way more than their wallet, their phones.
I was in Brazil last week and I had to use pix only a few times to pay: parking (beach lot), tire fix (very small shop on the road) and thats it, everywhere else I used my credit card. Even though they accept pix, its not that huge of a difference for traditional business as far as I can tell, the payment terminal will also facilite pix transactions.
I remember most banks having it when it first came out, I used it a couple of times to pay friends but few people knew about it.
It was pretty simple and worked well, especially compared to having to give bank account details.
That being said, I am in Australia now which has a similar system and I'd say 95% of my friends just give me the bank details instead of saying 'just use PayId with my phone number'.
Air France, Lufthansa and BA all have carry-on included in the fare.
If by "any European airline" you specifically mean Ryanair, then yes. We can expect people to pay if they did not print their boarding pass themselves.
The majority of airlines operating in Europe and the majority of flights taken are on low cost carriers where this is the norm. It’s not just RyanAir there’s dozens of them.
While the above is true, I'd say the majority of what passes as journalism these days has none of the above and the writing is below what an AI writer could produce :(
It's actually surprising how many articles on 'respected' news websites have typos. You'd think there would be automated spellcheckers and at least one 'peer review' (probably too much to ask an actual editor to review the article these days...).
Mainstream news today is written for an 8th grade reading ability. Many adults would lose interest otherwise, and the generation that grew up reading little more than social media posts will be even worse.
AI can handle that sort of writing just fine, readers won't care about the formulaic writing style.
But I think there's a difference between someone who 'teaches' you and someone who is at a high enough level to discuss ideas or issues with you.
For example, in my first job I 'learned' the most not from the senior engineers around me but from another new grad who was just as curious as me.
We would discuss issues we're having, brainstorm solutions etc.
It was not so much that I learned from him, but that I had another brain of similar competence that I could fling ideas at.
Not having such a person makes your job more difficult (as you might find yourself in a rabbit hole and desperately need someone else's perspective) and much less enjoyable.
Imagine not having a competent dev in your team to review your code.
As someone who has driven in many different developed countries in the world (and been a passenger in many developing countries), California highways often feel like those in developing countries but it's combined with a much higher travelling speed.
I think the only other country where I regularly got jolted up (nearly hitting my head on the ceiling of the car) was India.
* Controlling items I don't have easy access to:
I also have a motion sensor connected to a light for the hallway which has logic that is a bit more clever than the out of the box motion-controlled-lights (e.g. it stays on if people are in the vicinity).Other than that, the rest is pretty much gimmick: Every blue moon I will change the light in the living room to bright purple for fun.
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