We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
Payback - I never factored that in or even thought about that.
I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.
The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.
The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).
All these coding agent workflows really drive home how important a solid test suite is but who’s actually writing the tests? In my case Claude Code keeps missing key scenarios and I’ve had to point out every gap myself.
Also reviewing LLM generated code is way more mentally draining and that’s with just one agent. I can’t imagine trying to review code from multiple agents working in parallel.
Finally I’ve shipped a bunch of features to prod with Claude writing all the code. Productivity definitely went up, but my understanding of the codebase dropped fast. Three months in I’m actually struggling to write good prompts or give accurate estimates because my grasp of the code hasn’t really grown (code reviews only help so much).
Curious if anyone else has run into the same thing?
Can anyone explain why tiling managers are useful? Seems like a waste of space to me. I prefer having my various windows all over the place and just alt-tabbing between (or using other means of opening the right app). I highly prefer having the app I am working on to be in the center of the screen, so that is what makes sense for me.
They're useful to let you not have to think about positioning windows with precision.
If that doesn't feel useful to you, then maybe a tiling wm isn't right for you. That's entirely fine.
My wm has an "escape" in that I can define floating desktops, and by default I have one, mostly used for file management, because there are things where I agree it's better to have floating/overlapping windows.
It doesn't really matter if it's a "waste of space" - I have two large monitors, and 10 virtual desktops to spread windows between (I'd add more, but I haven't felt the need). To the point where my setup, by default, centers the window with large margins when I have just one window open on a screen because it's more comfortable (and I'm just one keypress away from fullscreening the app anyway).
Most of the time I use tiling because I like not having to care about the layout beyond those defaults.
But I can also configure specific layouts. E.g. I have desktop dedicated to my todo list, a list of done items, and notes, and it has a fixed layout that ensures those windows are always in the same placement, on the same desktop.
Maybe it's also due to differences in personality. I like to focus on one or two things at a time. And on second though, my argument about wasting space probably doesn't make sense. Perhaps I'm thinking more about "information overload".
In my day to day I have a couple terminals (each with 4-5 tabs, some are running screen sessions), two browsers (with max 3-4 tabs open), music player, at least 2-3 IDE's open (JetBrains), Notes, mail client, Slack. This is across two monitors.
If you've tried it and it doesn't fit, that seems fine, it's all just personal workflow.
For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.
My laptop has a small 11.1'' screen, so using a traditional desktop with smaller windows is not practical for me. Plus, not having the windows overlap with each other by default gives a more structured workflow.
unrelated to the comment: I wrote this answer 3 times, but the damn process killer on Android kept deleting it so I had to re-write it each time. if I sound mad, it is because I am.
+1 for AeroSpace. I have been i3/sway user for about a decade and was really missing similar experience on Mac. All the previous ones came with gotchas or were nowhere near the usability of i3/sway.
AeroSpace is almost there, it has a few quirks and annoyances and is missing some features but it's close enough that it's now my daily driver for client work requiring being on a Mac.
Highly recommended and hopefully it continues to evolve. Also hoping that the churn in macOS is not going to kill it for some unexpected reason.
As far as Hyprland, I tried it and when I got to a setup that I felt comfortable I realized that I had basically replicated my Sway setup with no added benefits so I just switched back to Sway. I'm not much into ricing anyway. I mostly want the chrome to stay out of my way.
That said, for people unfamiliar with i3/Sway, Hyprland could be a great way of getting into tiling so I'm definitely rooting for them!
As a "Linux at home - macOS at work" user, I can't stand Window management on macOS. It is so inefficient and hard to manage.
AeroSpace tiling window manager finally changed my work day from constant struggle to only occasional struggle with macOS. I use it with sketchybar which is not yet perfect, but it could become quite good and performant with some work on it.
I currently use Gnome on Linux, not a tiling window manager, and I would gladly go with Hyprland, but about a year ago while I was trying it out, it crashed quite a few times so it clearly was not ready for production use back then. Will give it a shot again.
Finally someone emphasized upon the cognitive load of AI-assisted coding.
It definitely makes me faster but it's consistent prompt->code-review->prompt->code-review->scratch->prompt-code->review cycle which just requires extreme focus.
We setup a solar on in our home in Pakistan back in 2023. Our primary driver was cost since it was getting extremely expensive during summers when the ACs were on. We expected to get the return in 4 years but inflation went so high in subsequent years that it took just 2 years.
I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.
At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON
And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.
I love your brother's site, so much. It looks like the web counter is still working, and that I'm not the only person from here checking it out, so I hope angelfire is ready for a bit of a "hug".
How are the odds for bringing your remote employees to US using the L1 visa? They've worked for us for more than 5 years in management role.
Also the startup got acquired sometime ago, does that impact the L1 application?
If these employees manage other employees now and will manage other employees in the U.S., then the odds are high actually. Conversely, if these employees aren't managing any employees and won't be managing any employees in the U.S., then, unless their work is highly complex and technical, the odds are low. Does the acquiring company also own the company abroad?
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.