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Typically, Kiwis would leave after graduating university or in their mid-20s. That Kiwis 30 - 50 are leaving now is a relatively recent phenomena (18 -> 43K in 4 years).

Did you really name your breakaway republic Sealand'); DROP TABLE Countries;--?

The Australian ETA process, on the other hand, actually can only be done via an Android or iOS mobile app: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

I was so stunned I was like, surely this must violate some government rule around universal access and service? But I guess not.

What's more, the app is so buggy reddit is filled with support cases of people not being able to complete the process in time and sometimes having to forfeit hundreds of dollars worth of tickets: https://www.reddit.com/r/AusVisa/comments/1jh2olm/having_an_...

The advice literally boils down to, some models of iPhones don't work so go borrow a friend's phone of a different model and pray that they can process your application for you.


That link clearly says you don't have to use an app.

If you are unable to use the app, you can apply online through ImmiAccount for another visa that suits your needs.

This triggered me because I've been to Australia tens of times (albeit not since 2023) and have always used my Immi account. I just logged in to check and sure enough I can still lodge an application there, no app required. Ironically I would prefer an app and will use it for my next visits because I've always found the Immi site cumbersome. But the site is still there.


For a different visa, not the ETA.


Ah. I’ve always used the subclass 651 eVisitor, without realising it was only for some European countries (or that it was different to the ETA).

The other "helpful" suggestion is that, if you can't use the app, you can apply for a regular full-blown tourist visa (Subclass 600), which costs $145 and takes weeks if not months to process.


Let me guess you have to be an Australian citizen (inmate?) to have the right to sue and then you won't have standing?


You have to be onshore to get the case in front of Admnistrative Tribunal (ACT)


Sure, if we’re in the business of making arbitrary requests, how about every data center operator has to bring 1 Epstein accused to justice for every data center they’re allowed to build?

The hard part has never been the “what”, it’s always been the “how”.


> The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete once the agentic tools become good enough to allow domain experts to fully iterate on solutions on their own.

That’s been the argument since the 5PL movement in the 80s. What we discover is that domain expertise an articulation of domain expertise into systems are two orthogonal skills that occasionally develop in the same person but, in general, requires distinct specialization.


It never worked because a lot of times, domain experts are stuck in their ways of doing things and the real innovation came from engineers learning from domain experts but adding their technically informed insights on the recipe to create novel ways of working.

A Lotus 1-2-3 vibecoded by a Product Manager in 1979 would probably had a hotkey for a calculator.


Yes, 4GL and 5GL failed, but authoring Access applications should be a breeze now.


Eh, it is what it is.


Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...


This was also confirmed by a Valve developer recently about a bug in HL2:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@TomF/115589925206309168


Also in their VR titles Valve made all doors swing in both directions because that feels more natural to players when there is no haptic feedback from not being able to push open a door.

The scale difference mentioned in gp isn't just doors though but any structure you can pass through. Many games houses with larger interiors than exteriors and video game ventilation ducts are comically large.


That's an impressive bug hunt. Same code, different behavior. I can't imagine how much time the guy spent on finding this one. And how much satisfaction once he finally nailed it.


Yep, that it's AAI.


At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.

Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.

This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".


I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair


Yes, but that is part of the point: a chair being built is mostly distinct from a chair being designed (there is of course a small amount of design that is done while building). Software is designed at a much higher percentage while being created (or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states).

You also don’t often learn why you don’t need a chair while building one.


> or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states

Yes, what I mostly emphasize with this mode of thinking is that the act of building software is primarily there to transform people (you try a thing, it doesn't work like you think it would, that inspires you to try another thing) and the software at the end of it is largely a byproduct.

If you have the right people-state, producing the software is trivial, it's how do you port the right knowledge into their brains in the first place and and software should be just another tool in your toolbox towards that aim.


Perhaps sometimes and in an ideal state, but most folks who code learn a lot and make a lot of design decisions while producing software.


Chair makers do not make one chair - they make one for the whole family. Then they make more in a very similar style for the next family. There is very little new design in a chair - it has all been done.


We don’t order bespoke-design chairs because construction is expensive, so we adapt to available chairs. In a world without construction-related scarcities and mostly design expenses (think sci-fi with that so far unachievable ability to manipulate the reality on molecular level), a chair can be feasibly created for specific personalities of yourself and others in given circumances, possible context in which you might use it, the interior it would fit in, etc.

In software, this kind of construction scarcity does not exist. Once you design a chair, you can instantiate it to your heart’s content.



True, except when the chairmaker has to make many times the same chair it becomes less relevant.


Having been in this situation more than once, recreating a concept from scratch when you've already coded it once takes ~20% of the time. This also tracks with my long term empirical observation that roughly 80% of a software project is maintenance, testing, debugging, monitoring, fixing bugs, planning, refactoring, etc.

Sitting down to an editor and typing out ascii charachters is the smallest and least consequential part of software development. And that was _before_ LLMs enter the equation - now it's not even strictly necessary. The software industry needs to get over its obsession with coding as an activity, and with code as an asset. Code is at best a necessary liability. Software systems are what we should be focused on.


Early on in Uber's life, I went to a presentation they held where they showed there was a U shaped curve by income of who used Uber. Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.

So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.


> Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.

This is information that suggests that Uber does not compete with public transit


When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.

I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.


Just a guess but she probably would have taken the buss back if you weren't there? Like, she wouldn't want to bore you waiting for the buss or try to time it shopping with a kid.


I think it was the weight of the shopping. My food would have increased what needed to be carried, but I was too young to be much use carrying it.

The point is taxis supplement and can replace public transport for low-income or unable-to-drive people in some situations — not necessarily every day.


The cost of owning a car dwarfs the cost of an occasional taxi ride.


Unless you're truly car sharing with a bunch of other people going the same way, I don't see how that makes sense. You have to wait for the car to arrive and you're paying a premium for it.


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