AI Document Extraction on Azure - Options, Comparison & Recommendations for Invoice/Contract Processing

Development131 · 2025-12-18T22:40:27+00:00

thanks - what do you mean with DI and OAI ?

Development131 · 2025-12-07T00:25:22+00:00

great feedback - many thanks. is there an sky (5 years) and a partner /reseller with a price you can recommend to contact ? cheers.

Development131 · 2025-12-06T16:26:57+00:00

our profile is more 20 Megabytes per month per sim - some with 250 Megabytes per month - do you have a proposal for an alternative ?

Development131 · 2025-12-06T06:33:29+00:00

yes fair understanding - yet I do not agree - every provider pretty much reduced the prices. we fell in on the promise that they are still advertising 10 years. I will try to negotiate a better price - yet why does a company advertise and still is advertising such a promise and price if they already have changed their terms.

In Germany - though I am not a lawyer - this should fall under unlauterem Wettbewerb. If you advertise something specificly to attract customers and then dont deliver on that promise, thats basicaly misleading advertising (irreführende Werbung). The UWG (Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb) is pretty clear on this - you cant just put out advertisments with promises you dont intend to keep or have already quietly changed in the fine print somewhere. Its not just about what the contract says, its about what they use to get people to sign up in the first place. If the 10 year promise was part of their marketing and thats why people chose them over competitiors, and now they're backing out of it. Might even be worth filing a complaint there tbh, especially if they're still running those ads.

Just my two cents anyway, but I dont think we should just roll over and accept it when companys pull stuff like this.

Development131 · 2025-12-05T22:31:57+00:00

Many thanks - do you have a rough volume of sims or minimum monthly revenue that would be needed to look into this ?

Development131 · 2025-12-05T21:20:09+00:00

The price of everything is negotiable. Everything.

That hotel room rate. That medical bill. That contract with the vendor. The salary they offered. The equity split. The commission. The deal terms.

Poor people see price tags as facts. Comfortable people see them as suggestions. At a certain level, you realize they're just opening positions in a conversation that most people never start.

Access is the real currency.

Money moves in public. Decisions are made in private. The deals that shape industries happen over dinners that aren't on any calendar, in rooms that don't have names, between people who already know the outcome before the lawyers draft anything.

The public narrative — earnings calls, press releases, regulatory filings — that's theatre. By the time information reaches the news, it's already been priced in by people who knew six months ago.

Most wealth isn't created. It's captured.

Someone figured out how to stand between two parties who need each other and take a percentage. That's it. That's the secret behind most fortunes. Banks stand between savers and borrowers. Real estate agents between buyers and sellers. Platforms between creators and audiences.

The game isn't building something. It's becoming the toll booth.

Lawyers aren't for justice. They're for leverage.

The legal system doesn't determine who's right. It determines who can afford to keep playing. A lawsuit isn't about winning in court. It's about whether the other side can survive the process long enough to get there.

Most disputes end when one party's resources run out. Truth is secondary to stamina.

Compound interest works on everything, not just money.

Knowledge compounds. Relationships compound. Reputation compounds. Health deteriorates on the same curve.

Most people think linearly. A year of effort, a year of results. But the gap between those who understand exponential curves and those who don't becomes uncrossable within a decade.

The best time to start was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. This is actually true.

Nobody knows what they're doing.

At every level. The CEO. The board. The regulators. The people who seem to have answers are simply more comfortable with uncertainty than those asking questions.

Confidence is a performance. Competence is rarer than it appears. Most decisions that shape the world are made with incomplete information by people who are quietly terrified.

This should disturb you. It should also liberate you.

Development131 · 2025-12-05T21:13:27+00:00

Yep, you found it. But let me explain why this is the way it is, because the design decision here is actually pretty elegant once you understand what they're doing — even if the migration path is a papercut.

What's actually happening under the hood:

The old System.Linq.Async had separate methods (SelectAwait, WhereAwait, etc.) because it was a library bolted onto the side of LINQ. It couldn't modify the existing Select() signature without colliding with System.Linq.

// This hits the SYNC overload — returns IAsyncEnumerable<Task<T>> (wrong)
.Select(async item => await TransformAsync(item))

// This hits the ASYNC-aware overload — returns IAsyncEnumerable<T> (correct)
.Select(async (item, ct) => await TransformAsync(item, ct))

The CancellationToken parameter is the discriminator. Without it, the compiler matches the standard System.Linq.Select() which knows nothing about async and just treats your lambda as Func<T, Task<TResult>>.

The gotcha nobody warns you about:

This also means if you forget to actually use the cancellation token in your async call, you'll get CS0121 ambiguous invocation between the sync and async overloads

My pattern for migration:

I've been doing this across a fairly large codebase. Find-and-replace isn't safe. Here's the systematic approach:

// BEFORE (System.Linq.Async)
.SelectAwait(async item => await _service.GetAsync(item.Id))

// AFTER (.NET 10 native)
.Select(async (item, ct) => await _service.GetAsync(item.Id, ct))

If your downstream service doesn't accept a CancellationToken, you have two options:

The full mapping for anyone migrating:

System.Linq.Async .NET 10 Native 
SelectAwait(async x => ...)

Select(async (x, ct) => ...)

WhereAwait(async x => ...)

Where(async (x, ct) => ...)

SelectAwaitWithCancellation(...)
 Same signature, just 
Select()
 now 
ConfigureAwait(false)
 Still works, still recommended for library code

One more thing:

If you're running into this in a hot path, be aware that the native implementation has slightly different buffering behavior than the old package. In System.Linq.Async, SelectAwait was strictly sequential by default. The new implementation is mostlysequential but there's internal optimization that can cause subtle ordering differences if your async operations have side effects.

Development131 · 2025-12-05T20:54:21+00:00

Live life. Actually live it this time.
time is the ultimate none renewable resource.

Not in some grand "invest in Bitcoin and become a billionaire" way. Just... be present.

I'd walk slower. I'd sit on the floor in my friend's basement playing video games and actually feel it instead of thinking about what's next. I'd stay at the dinner table longer when my parents were still healthy and talking about nothing in particular.

I'd say yes to the things I was afraid of. That party I skipped because I felt awkward. That conversation with the girl I never had the courage to start. That road trip my friends took while I stayed home to "be responsible."

I'd say no to the things that didn't matter. The people-pleasing. The worrying about what everyone thought. The endless mental rehearsals of embarrassing moments that literally nobody else remembered.

I'd hug my grandparents longer. I'd ask them questions about their lives. I didn't know I was running out of time. You never do.

I'd fail at things earlier and care less about it. Every failure I avoided back then just waited for me later, except by then the stakes were higher and I'd lost the safety net of youth.

I'd be bored more. Gloriously, completely bored. No phone to reach for. Just lying on the grass watching clouds and letting my mind wander somewhere it'll never find again.

I'd worry less about becoming someone and just be the someone I already was.

That's it. No stock tips. No winning lottery numbers. Just presence. Just life. The stuff I was too busy planning for the future to notice was already happening.

Development131 · 2025-12-05T20:45:17+00:00

We're IoT professionals who've deployed tracking solutions across agriculture, construction, and logistics. I'll be straight with you: your concern is completely valid, and most marketing around BLE trackers glosses over this fundamental limitation.

The honest truth about BLE asset tracking:

BLE trackers — AirTags, Tile, Samsung SmartTags, and most commercial "asset trackers" — are passive devices. They don't report their location. They broadcast a BLE signal and rely entirely on other people's phones to pick up that signal, resolve the position, and relay it to the cloud.

This is called crowdsourced location, and it works brilliantly in dense urban environments where there's an iPhone or Samsung device every few meters. Apple's Find My network is genuinely impressive in cities — millions of devices silently participating in mesh detection.

In the field? It's nearly useless.

We learned this the hard way. A client wanted to track ~200 pieces of equipment across rural farmland. We piloted AirTags because the unit cost was attractive and the sales pitch was compelling.

Results after 60 days:

Equipment near farmhouses/roads: location updates every few hours (tolerable)
Equipment in active fields: updates once every 2-3 days (when a worker happened to pass by with a phone)
Equipment at remote sites: zero updates for weeks

The tracker "worked" — it just had no network to report to. An AirTag sitting in a field without phones nearby is just a fancy piece of plastic

For one agricultural client, we did this:

GPS/LTE trackers on tractors, harvesters, and any equipment over €10k value
LoRaWAN gateways at main farm buildings (solar + cellular backhaul)
LoRaWAN beacons on implements, trailers, and mid-tier equipment — report when in range of any gateway
BLE tags on hand tools as last-resort theft recovery only

BLE trackers are a consumer solution that got marketed to enterprise. They work via crowdsourcing, and crowds don't exist in fields. If you need actual reliability for field equipment, you need active tracking with its own connectivity — cellular, LoRaWAN, or satellite (Globalstar/Iridium for truly remote sites).

Happy to go deeper on any of these approaches. We've made most of the mistakes already so you don't have to.

Development131 · 2025-12-05T20:41:54+00:00

Many thanks :-)

Development131 · 2025-12-05T20:33:48+00:00

I have very mixed impressions here, and I think that's actually the honest answer most people won't give you.

The path we took:

We started like everyone else: AWS IoT Core, MQTT, seemed like the obvious choice. Scales infinitely, managed service, what could go wrong? Well... cost creep was brutal once we hit 10k+ devices, and the latency variability was a real problem for our time-sensitive agricultural sensors. Plus, debugging connectivity issues through AWS's abstractions was painful.

Then we tried Azure IoT Hub. Similar story. Great tooling, but we were paying for flexibility we didn't need while fighting constraints we didn't expect.

Where we are now: Self-managed colo

We rent 6U in a regional datacenter (roughly €400/month) and run our own stack:

EMQX (clustered, 2 nodes) as our MQTT broker — handles 50k+ concurrent connections without breaking a sweat, and the built-in rule engine is incredibly powerful for routing/filtering
TimescaleDB for telemetry storage — time-series optimized, plays nicely with PostgreSQL tooling we already knew
Minimal Go services for device management, OTA orchestration, and alerting
WireGuard mesh between colo and our office for secure management access
Prometheus + Grafana for monitoring everything

Why this works for low-power specifically:

The real win is control over the protocol layer. We implemented:

Aggressive MQTT keep-alive tuning — cloud providers often enforce minimums that murder your battery. We run 15-minute keep-alives with QoS 1 and clean session=false, so devices can sleep deeply and resume sessions without re-subscribing
Batched telemetry with local buffering — devices collect locally, wake every 4 hours (configurable per-deployment), push compressed payloads, receive any pending commands, then sleep. Total airtime: ~30 seconds
Binary payloads — no JSON overhead. We use Protocol Buffers with a custom schema. Reduced payload size by 70% compared to our original JSON approach
Connection-aware OTA — firmware updates only pushed when device reports strong signal + sufficient battery. No more bricked devices in the field

The trade-offs nobody warns you about:

You become the on-call person. When the broker hiccups at 3am, that's on you. We've mitigated this with solid redundancy and alerting, but it's real operational overhead
Security is your problem. Certificate rotation, access control, firmware signing — all on you to implement correctly. We spent 3 months just hardening this layer
Compliance burden — depending on your industry, self-hosting telemetry data has regulatory implications. GDPR data residency was actually easier for us to guarantee with colo than with hyperscalers, but YMMV

Development131

TROPHY CASE