> How is that different from any piece of software that an employee will want in any sort of enterprise setting?

Open source is different in exactly that, no procurement.

Finance makes procurement annoying so people are not motivated to go through it.

Can you elaborate on “huge”?

At work I need often smaller, short lived scripts to find this or that insight, or to use visualization to render some data and I find LLMs very useful at that.

A non coding topic, but recently I had difficulty articulating a summarized state of a complex project, so I spoke 2 min in the microphone and it gave me a pretty good list of accomplishments, todos and open points.

Some colleagues have found them useful for modernizing dependencies of micro services or to help getting a head start on unit test coverage for web apps. All kinds of grunt work that’s not really complex but just really moves quite some text.

I agree it’s not life changing, but a nice help when needed.

You need to ask a contractor to check your roof orientation and potential shade sources (trees, big mountain? You should be aware about those already). Other factors are pretty much not relevant. Also remember that light, not sun shine, matters. Light clouds might still allow the panels to work very efficiently.

Transport is heavily dependent on infrastructure. If you have a train between city A and city B but you can get to and from the train station without a car, this is not going to work.

But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.

High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).