First, it's great to see new stuff happening in the solar space, and helping use incentives that are there. I wish you success!
> This domain is a good fit for automation and LLMs—not to generate text, but to (1) structure unstructured documents, (2) interact with legacy government websites where there’s no API, and (3) deal with repetitive bureaucratic language.
This isn't a criticism of what you're doing, but a more general gripe/musing about the wider software and AI ecosystem. I've seen this in my own work too. I feel very unhappy that we are using complex, nondeterministic, power-hungry "intelligent" machines to solve the problem of... unstructured data. Instead of... structuring the data.
I know you can't solve that problem. But nevertheless, wouldn't it be better for society as a whole if "we" agreed to make data accessible in machine-readable ways that don't require human-like agents to piece together the mess?
This is a writ-large version of the joke about writing an email in bullet points, inflating it to paragraphs using an LLM, then the receiver summarising the paragraphs back to bullet points using an LLM.
This is my roman empire, and I go back and forth on my conclusions at least once a day.
On one hand, clarity and structure make a platform that's easy to build and collaborate on. If the system enforces the rules, and the rules are a good model of reality, everyone knows what to expect. Pushing the world forward one ISO standard at a time.
On the other hand, greatness can't be planned. By the time we know enough to make a plan, the really important stuff has already happened. "Everyone" expected solar to always be a somewhat marginal energy source, so why spend a lot of time standardizing formats?
And it's not like this is a just a thing in tech. Buildings used to be fine tolerance artifacts built by craftsman. Now we slap them together prefab parts and just add more caulk until it works.
I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.
Are we losing our attention spans as a rational response to a world that changing faster and faster; or is our lack of attention creating a less stable world?
Ultimately, we make progress not when the code runs fast, but when the humans run fast; but sometimes that means the code needs to run fast too.
And thank you for the well wishes!
> This is my roman empire
Haven't heard this said before, but is this a reference to how often men think about Rome? That's very amusing.
RDF is my Roman empire. It's the original and best Web 3: open-world knowledge graphs. It feels like if the ecosystem around that developed better, it would provide a way to interchange data without having to do Big Standards Up Front.
Any org could publish data under their own schemas, communities could start to converge on the most helpful ones, provide translations between terms, and gradually things would evolve, without having to all agree first. RDF provides a baseline for interop, on top of which specific worlds of knowledge can evolve.
I work in solar software too and every day I am sad that manufacturers provide their datasheets as PDFs. Not even Excel files.
> I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.
Amen to that.