I was a CAD manager for various multi-disciplinary engineering firms in my early career, I can attest to some of the accounts regarding various CAD systems already mentioned.
One not mentioned that comes to mind is E-tap, used by electrical engineers. Well into the five figure territory once all the various bells and whistles were added.
However the most expensive software I ever saw in the wild was some little known simulation platform for a mathematician running predictive models (it also did this with 3D graphics, so both senses of the term) on mine/rail/port operational scenarios. That was into low six figures a seat and five in annual maintenance.
That's not it at all.
In fact, in most of your stated cases it's the opposite.
If you read the bill and understood governance of the scheme and the technology underpinning it, you would see that it actually addresses some of the very fears you are projecting onto it.
> If you read the bill and understood governance of the scheme and the technology underpinning it, you would see that it actually addresses some of the very fears you are projecting onto it.
The bill explains the "governance" at length. It does not explain the technology. In fact it reads like a wish list of what they want the technology to do.
To me it falls into the same trap as a recent Prime Minister, when he said: “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”. Counter example: when Uber came here, it was illegal. So they had inspectors catch Uber rides and fine the drivers for not having licences. Problem: to catch an Uber you had to install the app, and once a inspector prosecuted one driver they knew who were and via the app where they were. After that happened oddly there were never any Ubers in the vicinity of the inspector. Outcome: the law lost to the new reality crafted by technology.
One thing they definitely haven't come to grips with is their monopoly on punishment is gone. An example of that assumption is how the law treats a signature. You can use anything you want as a signature, even an X. In fact the worst signatures I've seen in my life come from lawyers - some are barely more than a straight line with a few dents. That's worked for centuries because you can dispute the signature is yours. When you do, a huge expensive machine springs into action that does a pretty good job or validating if you really signed the document, punishing those who falsely sign. But now ID fraud is most perpetrated by people outside of Australia's borders, people who can't be punished by the law. Technology has broken an assumption that's been true for 1000's of years, and as a consequence we are seeing an ever increasing tidal wave of ID fraud sweeping the country perpetrated by people who are beyond the reach of the law.
So yes, there are lots of words in the act addressing the fears. But to me they read like empty pronouncements: "we ordain the problem goes away". There is no hint they have a clue about what it will take to make the problem go away or any realistic plan to make it happen.
Perhaps your response is it's not the Bill's place to proscribe the technology. Perhaps, but the whole point of the Bill is to introduce an ID scheme, and the assumption it is centralised around what they call the "Australian Government Digital ID System". Choosing a single source of truth for proving your ID is a technological decision.
For some reason governments love to centralise things. Mygov and the tax office did that, creating a honey pot of every citizens personal information guarded by a single ID scheme - mygov. I've personally spent days on the phone trying to get Mygovid to work because some government departments insist you use it (contrary to the assurances in this very bill). It didn't work because they insisted I use one email address as my true name, despite the fact most people have several email addresses that change over time (and mine did). So they invent work around and kludges to fix that, which of course created lots of social engineering loopholes. So far the outcome is they've lost billions to ID fraud perpetuated by hacking their first attempts at ID schemes.
And now they want to fix that by inventing a bigger one???
There's a system that already exists in Australia (TDIF) based on OAuth and OIDC, but it's not legislated and lacks regulatory oversight. This uplifts and codifies this to a federal level and adds some additional governance and oversight in a similar way to the Consumer Data Right (CDR).
It's Authentication/Identity. But really it's a federated system of consent where you can allow one authoritative holder of some information about you to transmit it to another. Simple E.g. omitting many details but say some federal government agency (A) wants my driver's licence number. because I use the same identity for both (A) and my state department of transport (B) I can tell (B) it's ok to send it to (A). (A) and (B) are both in the "network" which is governed by a central Register (R) and verifies each to each other so they can securely share data over standardized channels. The central register does not get involved beyond legitimising (A) and (B) to each other. The benefit is for a lot of cases the specific information stays with the relevant party, you just consent to when one needs to borrow some from another.
When I first started taking stimulants for ADHD and was trying to get the right dose I was confused because nothing was happening at first but finally reached a tipping point where it was working, but it was like a more intense version of my normal hyper-focus I would get at 8pm after "warming up" for 12 hours, after a couple of days it settled in between where I get the easy ability to switch attention without getting annoyed, or not realizing.
Yes, this. I've been trying to find a general way to automatically semantically chunk various legislation for a while now. Partly so as to diff various versions/amendments, but also to graph connections to other referenced legislation.
Most of the time I end up having to just take half an hour to manually regex and format plain text.
A particular case I have is where there is a draft bill put out for industry/community consultation. Quickly diffing the releases is the goal but for now usually relies on one (preferably two) subject matter experts to read the whole thing top to bottom to build an understanding. I don't think these would be available via the means you've secured. They are usually hosted on a relevant government entities website as PDFs
One last question/comment, have you considered adding some additional reference info like the federal list of entities?[1]
> A particular case I have is where there is a draft bill put out for industry/community consultation. Quickly diffing the releases is the goal but for now usually relies on one (preferably two) subject matter experts to read the whole thing top to bottom to build an understanding. I don't think these would be available via the means you've secured. They are usually hosted on a relevant government entities website as PDFs
It's possible that they're in my database. I have included the as made version of all bills on the Federal Register of Legislation. However, if they haven't had a first reading yet, then probably not.
For processing PDFs, I recommend using `pdfplumber`, which is what I used to build the Corpus. Happy to discuss further if you'd like.
> One last question/comment, have you considered adding some additional reference info like the federal list of entities?
Do mean adding additional metadata? At the moment, I've kept the number of metadata attributes as low as possible. Every attribute added equates to more work to keep it standardised across all the jurisdictions and document types. My plan is to slowly add more attributes as I have time. I'd really like to associate a date with documents but even that is a hurdle. I have to decide what date should be the date of a document (is it the time it was issued, the time it was published, the time it came into force, the time the latest version was issued, etc... and what happens when a document doesn't have a date? should I extract it from its citation? how do I preserve time zone information? etc...).
I've used a number of pdf libraries in python and C# over the years, none have worked reliably as needed (that's just pdf I guess), but haven't used pdfplumber, I'll be sure to give it a go, thanks for the suggestion.
Yes, additional metadata. Totally understand it adds in a lot of complexity but could help for fine-tuning an LLM.
With regards to dates, not a lawyer, but for Federal I would go with "Start Date", it's always the day following the End Date of the previous comp. The Date of Assent (well the year at least) is in the title, but also the first start date. The registration date can be either before or after the start date depending. [1][2]
The tricky part is when sections have different commencement dates that are detailed in the text. I don't know anywhere that is easily accessible. And, if you think about it, usually the most important information for say businesses being regulated.
I wouldn't worry with timezone per say, it's relative to each particular state.[3] i.e. why polling closes in a federal election at 6pm in each state rather than coordinated with ACT.
Being able to break down exploratory questions or define work to be done and communicating that clearly is 80% of general consulting.
Sure, you're aligning your approach to a machine, but it's not completely dissimilar.
I struggle with delegation in general, even taking the time to delegate to LLMs, mostly because I work faster intuitively and expressing myself clearly just takes longer. With the benefits of semi-repeatable results, personally, I've found the most benefit working with GPT3 & 4 over the last 6 months has been getting better and more conscious in describing what I'm after.
I like mTLS, I've worked in scenarios where both mTLS and OAuth are used separately and together, but if the comment here is suggesting certificates will be less complicated than OAuth then I would say I spent an equal amount of time banging my head against the wall with regards to learning and wrangling both, but maybe that's just me, would appreciate anyone else with experience in both to add their take.
One not mentioned that comes to mind is E-tap, used by electrical engineers. Well into the five figure territory once all the various bells and whistles were added.
However the most expensive software I ever saw in the wild was some little known simulation platform for a mathematician running predictive models (it also did this with 3D graphics, so both senses of the term) on mine/rail/port operational scenarios. That was into low six figures a seat and five in annual maintenance.