This! People underestimate the extent to which lawyers are negotiable also. “I’m not paying that” is a surprisingly effective method; they’re often willing to compromise on payment terms, work at-risk subject to a successful outcome, significantly reduce their rates, etc.
In my experience, most people underestimate what's negotiable across the board. Especially those making enough to do most of their business with mass-market operations, like big-box stores and retail service providers, that profit by doing many, many standardized transactions every day, with minimal discretion or even personal involvement.
Below that, lots of haggling and informal trade often help people get by. The costs of that process can be another burden on the poor. At the high end, it's worth involving people with discretion on the sell side. Additionally, sales are often one-off and customized. They may also bundle a bunch of different items and benefits without clear line-item breakdowns.
When hiring a lawyer, I'd nearly always recommend getting terms down in a written and signed engagement letter before work starts. That is very much a negotiation, but it's fine to ask questions and comparison shop.
If you're starting with a call, it's perfectly normal to start by asking whether initial consultation will be billed or not. If it will be, ask the rate. If it won't be, expect some limits on what can be discussed. The best lawyers I know aren't cheap or easily tricked into giving free advice on consultation calls with speedrunners, but they are up-front about what they charge for and how.
I actually really like Elasticsearch. It’s very powerful, there’s a healthy ecosystem of tools (increasingly for OpenSearch too), and the query language makes sense to me.
Sure it’s computationally expensive, inefficient even, but for many use-cases it just works.
I’d add that for production deployments, AWS has developed a new instance family that enables OpenSearch data to be stored on S3 [1], bringing significant cost savings.
From my limited interactions with document-intensive sectors (i.e. legal), I think they’re sorely lacking something like this.
When the same document is edited by two separate individuals and diverges, it is a nightmare to reconcile the two.
I truly wish (i.) Microsoft Word was a nicer format for VCS, or (ii.) Markdown was more suitable for “formal” legal texts and specifications — probably in that order (!)
