My wife is an OR nurse and jokes her primary job responsibility is counting. Frequently when surgery is going long it's because someone threw out or dropped something that was supposed to be accounted for and they won't close the patient up until that's found, even if that means sorting through the garbage.

Not to mention the people that choose to rent. We can argue over how much landlords deserve, but they should generally be providing a service as well - maintaining the property and shielding the tenant from some of the risk.

I wonder if in this hypothetical "no renting" scenario we'd see complete home maintenance service companies take their place. It would be an improvement - you can fire them without moving, but I don't think we could expect them to be any less exploitative than landlords are now.

I worked on the LM side of this team ~8 years ago, and it sounds like they learned some lessons since you had to deal with them! The ML team was still in house and working on all sorts of projects, and there was a sizeable software team working on the software around this.

One of my most valuable lessons working there as a green engineer - you can figure out more in an hour sitting down with the end user then months of meetings before then.

I highly recommend this as well. Coming at this with a background in mechanical engineering, ie, familiar with formal definitions of control systems, feedback loops, delays, etc, this book did a fantastic job showing how all those same concepts apply to nontraditional systems without requiring any deep technical knowledge of control systems.

I've been toying around with the design of a kitchen management program with a lot of overlap in functionality with your program, so that's very cool to see! One feature I had been really interested in having is a nice interface for a version controlled recipe. I want to be able experiment with a recipe and document results and personal preferences.