Check who used to own your place and who owns that lot now and see if any names line up.
I still receive occasional postcards from real estate mogul wannabes for a property out in Colorado (I'm in PA). The previous owners of our house moved to Colorado after they sold us their house, and I assume their name is linked to our address in some gray-market/online DB. Why they wouldn't just send purchase offers direct to the house in CO instead of what they think is the owner's primary address (ours) I don't know, but I'm sure they fire off thousands of these things and don't really care how many are accurate.
Compliance and tooling are a big part of it, but the places where the big public cloud providers shine is the PaaS offerings that you don't need to write yourself.
In Azure, for example, it's possible to use Entra as your Active Directory, along with the fine grained RBAC built in to the platform. On a host that just gives you VPS/DS, you have to run your own AD (and secondary backups). Likewise with things like webservers (IIS) and SQL Server, which both have PaaS offerings with SLAs and all the infra management tasks handled for you in an easily auditable way.
If you just need a few servers at the IaaS level, the big cloud platforms don't look like a great value. But, if you do a SOC2, for example, you're going to have to build all the documentation and observability/controls yourself.
M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
Google Workspace with Chromebooks. No windows endpoints getting a virus or ransomware or some other malware. It's all about the bubble you're in. Mine, windows isn't even needed anymore for games because SteamOS is sufficiently there for the games we play.
Agreed, the 'new' outlook destroyed everything that was good about outlook. Which wasn't even all that good by the way, it was just the best but that says more about the competition than about outlook itself.
Tool manufacturers include all kinds of annoying safety devices to attempt to prevent injury, or at least to give them some cover in a lawsuit.
Table saw blade guards and riving knives are an ironic example here: I've yet to hear a story of a woodworker that lost a finger on a table saw that wouldn't have been able to avoid that injury if they kept one of those safety devices on the saw. Everyone thinks the annoyance isn't worth it, since they are an 'expert', yet it happens frequently.
Right, but none of those safety devices invalidate the underlying purpose of the tools. Disk encryption is used, for many people, for privacy. Uploading the keys to Microsoft defeats a lot of that.
If you bought a table saw and the "safety device" is that it won't run, I would imagine you'd be pissed too.
If you want a laugh, ask the LLM to draw the schematic of a basic circuit (like towards the end of a Forrest Mims III book.)
I've been 50/50 with vibe circuits recently. Gemini 2.5 gave me some really wrong designs of an advanced crowbar circuit I was playing with, but recently 3.0 Fast gave me excellent advice on an adjustable load with a hodgepodge of parts.
This sounds similar to how in C#/.NET there are (at least) 3 methods to reading XML: XmlDocument, XPathDocument, or XmlReader. The first 2 are in-memory object models that must parse the entire document to build up an object hierarchy, which you then access object-oriented representations of XML constructs like elements and attributes. The XmlReader is stream-based, where you handle tokens in the XML as they are read (forward-only.)
Any large XML document will clobber a program using the in-memory representations, and the solution is to move to XmlReader. System.Text.Json (.NET built-in parsing) has a similar token-based reader in addition to the standard (de)serialization to objects approach.
More importantly, you have your data in a structured format that can be easily inspected at any stage of the pipeline using a familiar tool: SQL.
I've been using this pattern (scripts or code that execute commands against DuckDB) to process data more recently, and the ability to do deep investigations on the data as you're designing the pipeline (or when things go wrong) is very useful. Doing it with a code-based solution (read data into objects in memory) is much more challenging to view the data. Debugging tools to inspect the objects on the heap is painful compared to being able to JOIN/WHERE/GROUP BY your data.
Yep. It’s literally what SQL was designed for, your business website can running it… the you write a shell script to also pull some data on a cron. It’s beautiful
Parts/materials costs in contractor quotes are often padded so they aren't completely overshadowed by the labor portion. In any job where there's specialized knowledge or license restrictions (HVAC) or risk (walking on a roof), the floor for labor rates is usually 2-4x the materials cost.
But, the real issue is that almost nobody pays cash upfront for their solar install. Between incentives, loans, and/or predatory PPAs, the prices lose touch with reality. See healthcare, college tuition, housing prices, etc. for similar scenarios where credit or third-parties distort the market.
You don't really have that many competent solar installers in most locations in the US. I basically gave up trying. I'm sure they exist, but if you don't want some financed/leased/etc. financial-product-as-a-solar-install your options dwindle.
It's entirely obvious that most of these places make money off the financial engineering, not the installation part.
I'd sign a competent contractor today for my quite marginal installation plans if I could find someone I'd trust to build something decent and to my specification.
They also tend to devalue the house as it's more difficult to get insurance, and many potential buyers are used to shitshow level of installs and/or dealing with a more complex close due to the seller needing to pay off loans/leases/etc.
A lot of these plays are also companies setting up complex financial engineering schemes that boil down to government subsidy arbitrage.
Solar doesn't make sense for me financially (yet), due to location and PoCo rates, but I'd be tempted to be my own contractor and sub out the tasks.
Any roofer could do the panel install, and would do a far better job than a solar hack that had 3 days of training. Electrical would be an electrician.
I still receive occasional postcards from real estate mogul wannabes for a property out in Colorado (I'm in PA). The previous owners of our house moved to Colorado after they sold us their house, and I assume their name is linked to our address in some gray-market/online DB. Why they wouldn't just send purchase offers direct to the house in CO instead of what they think is the owner's primary address (ours) I don't know, but I'm sure they fire off thousands of these things and don't really care how many are accurate.
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