If I look at the most useful technologies around me, then Google Maps ranks high. But it wasn't sudden. It was on the desktop first. And then slowly crept through mobile.

LLMs on the other hand, suddenly just kind of appeared.

Except now I have nightmares that the USA will enforce the patriot act and force Microsoft to hand over all their data in European data centers and then we have to migrate everything to a local cloud provider. Argh...

Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?

Our product makes it easy to capture and share knowledge on the factory floor, which is very important when many of your workers about to retire. Interest is enormous. It is a simple SaaS. You'd think selling would be easy. And it is: In the USA. In Europe the mere existence of the regulations (not what's in them) delays us by 6 months at least per deal.

No european executive really understands what is in the GDPR, and eventhough we are 100% compliant, there is nothing we can do to take away this fear. This means that when we talk to European companies, IT and Legal departments always have to be closely involved, leading to all sorts of political games; each department conjures up non-existing risk by talking vaguely about data privacy, just so they appear important. Half a year later when the dust has settled, the executive buys the product, or their mind has moved to other things.

My point is this: What is in the laws is not important to me. What is important is that current perception of laws turn companies into slugs. I want us to mentally move back to 2018 where we could "just buy SaaS" without worrying endlessly about data privacy. I understand hesitency when it comes to cyber security, but that is not what is slowing us down.

One of our workarounds currently is simply never to mention we use AI.

In that context, "Intelligence" is just one part of a collection of useful skills for a band of early hominids. You only need a few great trackers, but those trackers would be grateful if they also had some "meatheads" in the crew that are phenomenally atletic. And who knows; early hominids would mock each other for not being good at tracking, but would they call each other dumb? I somehow doubt it.

This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.

There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.

Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.

In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.

- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.

However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.

Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.

Interestingly, when I visited the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.

I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.

It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.

As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.

From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.