Literally the first sentence on the site is "AWS Proton is the first fully managed application deployment service for container and serverless applications. Platform engineering teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates."
Literally nothing in that sentence explains what Proton really does, how people will use it, or what problem it solves.
What "different tools"? What kind of "infrastructure provisioning"? Code deployments from where, and to what? Monitoring of what? Updates to code, to the infrastructure, to tooling, or something else?
Is it an abstraction service that manages CodeDeploy, EKS, and CF underneath? Is it something completely new?
It is very fluffy language that tries to make Proton sound awesome, but explains absolutely nothing about what it actually does without any context.
Can the first sentence of anything ever answer those kinds of questions? The first sentence gives a fairly clear high level overview of what it does. You can continue reading to find out more specifics.
I feel who have responded to my initial comment want the first sentence to be completely understandable by a layman, but simultaneously technically detailed. Those two goals are frequently mutually exclusive in a short piece of text.
"AWS Proton: A one-stop-shop for managing your CodeDeploy, EKS, and CloudFormation and Lambda assets - providing a single place to monitor the state of your infrastructure and role out updates to your code"
^ understandable (or at least Googleable) by a layman. And it includes at least some technical detail that paint a picture of what the service actually does (if it does this).
To answer your question bluntly: Yes, it is possible to be much more descriptive and still simple with an opener.
As it currently stands, I had to go to the FAQ to see an off-handed note about CloudFormation. No other services, tools, or technologies are specified. I'm just guessing by the buzzwords used to describe the service.
As a professional developer with a very passing familiarity with AWS, that version is still unclear to me. Lambda is the only one I'm familiar with. I can guess something about CodeDeploy. CloudFormation has always been unclear to me, and a quick Google suggests that it overlaps with Kubernetes.
That's OK; I just read this as "not for me". Every time I touch AWS, I get the impression that it's for large-scale deployments of stuff that's way out of my hobbyist league. I'm sure I could get it if I put my mind to it, but I'm just as happy that I don't have to.
The technologies are not just for large deployments IMO, it's the next logical step of leveraging OSS software: composition at the service layer instead of binary interfaces. You can pull down an ElasticSearch image, for instance, to provide search for your application, and write against their REST API. It then gets rolled into an orchestration with your app. You can debug locally against the rest of the orchestration, then package the whole thing using a script and/or some config files and deploy it to a stand-alone server, the cloud, whatever. Set it up once and deploy anywhere without (too much) extra hassle.
What Amazon has done is take these workflows and make them very developer friendly. You can save some time and energy (and money) using EKS over managing your own kubernetes nodes on EC2, for example. Or you can use their native services that provide other niceties. Welcome to the latest form of vendor lock-in!
Piggybacking on @flatline's comment: AWS is great for hobby projects as well. The beautiful thing is that AWS has free tiers for a lot of their services, so you can play around without committing much (if any) money. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/free/
For a hobbyist, lambda is basically always free - so long as you stay under 1 million requests and 3.2 million compute-seconds per month. Super friendly for just playing around with, imo. I barely pay anything for the hobby projects I run in AWS - literally pennies per month.
Much of AWS' praise comes from the ability to scale projects if there comes a need. If your hobby project running on 5 lambdas gets super popular over the weekend and you suddenly need 10,000 times the power - done. AWS handles this kind of dynamic scaling extremely well, and reliably. So well in fact, that you might handle a 10k X increase in demand without even noticing, because AWS is that flexible, until you get your bill and realize that you exceeded the free tier - be careful with this ;) This is why a lot of big-name software companies use AWS though.
However, over recent years, there's been a lot of in-fighting in the community about which AWS services handle which types of projects better/cheaper/more reliably/etc. You can host a static site in S3 with lambda as an API backend and a DynamoDB for essentially no cost. You can also manually spin up an EC2 instance running Ubuntu, and write/deploy that site to the server by hand. There are also half a dozen other services that will spin up that EC2 instance for you, if you'd like to automate that process for any reason.
The confusing part about Proton is that it seems to be an abstraction service for other AWS services, that glues together functionality to make it easier for some niche purpose. I couldn't glean what that purpose is from the landing page, or what Proton is doing behind the scenes to accomplish it. So it's essentially a big ?? for me.
CloudFormation is...complicated, especially for an inexperienced AWS user. It's a power-user tool that you can use to define your AWS infrastructure with code, rather than manually within each service. It's very cool, and very powerful, but you can also get by completely fine without it in most cases. I would not recommend spending much time learning it without having a better grasp on the individual services you are trying to define first.
It's fully managed (meaning Amazon maintains it?) application deployment service (so, like CodeDeploy?) for container and serverless (again, CodeDeploy?). It allows you to connect and coordinate (?) all the different tools. I use AWS, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, Terraform, CloudWatch, etc. I don't understand from these two sentences where this falls into this, or if it's somehow meant to sit on top of it, etc. Like the GP, I came to this thread to see an explanation of what this actually means.
>Platform engineering teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates.
Perhaps it's just confusing to people like me, who don't work on "platform engineering teams". The sentence is just too packed with terms I have no analogy for.
The best analogy I came up with is "It's like kubernetes and jenkins had a baby."
Nah, I worked on a "platform engineering team"/DevOps for a year and I have no idea what this service does or what it's for. I have a vague inkling, like I could make a guess, but even thinking about that makes my head hurt.
Probably relevant tho is that I left after a year and am no longer doing DevOps because C/C++ low level mathy or systems oriented coding is fun, and actually makes sense to me. :)
I don't really see the problem with that - you probably aren't the target audience. Good tools will frequently be specialized. You could probably understand the initial blurb for React or some library in whatever your speciality is that may just be confusing to a "platform engineer".
Reading this I think Proton == Waypoint for AWS services only. Still a lot of work to manage infra and cobble everything together and geared more towards platform teams at larger companies vs. everyday developers and startups.
My daughter (now 12) played a lot of Roblox, and mostly it was fine. She seemed able to avoid the shadier parts and, as a parent, you trust the child-friendly features.
However, controls are subverted (for example, by using special characters to get through language filters), and my daughter fell victim to exploitation that moved from Roblox innocence, to instagram, porn, and one-on-one calls. Fortunately we caught it (in time?). Police traced it back to international gangs that prey on the innocent. The trail, at least for us, went cold as there is a request to police in a country (we were not told which) by ours (UK), that is unlikely to be followed up.
Roblox was a big thing for her, and the events that started there were traumatic for the whole family.
Roblox is extremely popular and a really good platform. I'm not going to go on a crusade to try and chance peoples' minds, but Roblox is not as kid-friendly as one would think. It suffers, as all digital social platforms do, with uncontrollable, mis-understood, and untraceable actions by bad actors, that are used for nefarious purposes.
There is only so much you can do as a parent and it's not easy knowing the right answer without hindsight, but personally as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.
It's definitely a problem with scale as far as community moderation, however even when creeps made attempts at me online I knew to report, block and move on. I think our fear over exposing our children to topics of sexuality prevent them the chance to develop the appropriate sensibilities to avoid being targeted.
There's not an easy solution, but I hope that being open with my children about the kind of vile people in this world and the tactics they use to trick and manipulate others will instill enough common sense that I don't have to hover over their Roblox sessions. I'm curious if in hindsight you could have educated her better, or if you think it just didn't stick.
Assuming you're male... it's not that there are zero predators seeking male children, but the threat does seem to be asymmetric. (I may be wrong about this! It a supposition based on my experiences and what I've heard from others.)
> as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.
Same situation and I was groomed repeatedly (luckily mostly, though not entirely, ineptly). Perhaps not a coincidence that I'm a girl...
> I knew to report, block and move on.
Or that girls are often sexually precocious and may _want_ pseudo-romantic attention from older men, while being too naive to see the risks to them. That was certainly my case.
Overall I don't think it's as simple or easy as you're making it out to be.
I didn't mean to oversimplify, just didn't want to get too longwinded. I agree with the points you make. That's why I think it's a difficult problem, because I realize not everyone thinks the way I do and I want to learn how to distill that knowledge into others.
Assuming that sexual precociousness is a natural feeling, which as a male I certainly felt in my youth, is there a way you think you could have safely satisfied or otherwise dealt with those feelings appropriately, or did it come down to a misunderstanding of power dynamic or that you were being manipulated? Did it stem from a lack of closeness with the existing male figures in your life?
Clearly we both found that prohibition does little to stop the fortuitous, so instead of trying to control and track my children's internet habits I hope I can just address these issues directly and just raise them to be sensible.
It seems to me like there's a lot I can do as a parent. I control the endpoints. I can use certificate pinning and a proxy to read https traffic on the network. I can get passwords and accounts and monitor contacts.
Whether I should do that is more of a question. But I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that children will be able to escape digital surveillance.
My point is that I can't track my childrens' every moves, MITM them, while simultaneously teaching them about the dangers of the surveillance state and the value of cryptography. So I have to rely on the same means we used before the internet, which I feel is something of a dying body of knowledge.
Sadly I believe these kinds of things happen and are increasing in frequency on all apps/games/sites that allow for user generated profiles / messaging.
I have seen an increase in the use of these methods the last 5 -6 years or so especially.
We had an influx of these types of social engineering / personal data collection with later demands of money or nude pics (and often times both) - some years ago.
Looking into negative link attacks to disrupt google search results found some sites teaching people how to use chat systems for ill gotten gains - from selling fake pics to blackmail, begging for money for sickness - all sorts of things - posted right on public forums and with links to dozens of sites in which these methods could be used quickly.
As to where I think there is less of this on fbook for some reasons - fbook is sometimes employed as part of the scams.
long stories short - I think roblox is not necessarily more dangerous for teens than discord / snap / IG / etc.
I've had several talks with kids about safety in using internet connected things - about how sending a pic can give up your location, and sharing articles from the news about sextortion and such. These got very detailed when questioned, and I don't think it should be a 'one time "the talk" either.
Explaining how some simple social engineering can take two seemingly innocent data points and locate someone for kidnapping or whatever - like casually throwing in 'what school do you go to' - and 'parents aren't home till Xpm' can lead to bad things - and one might not notice those inquiries / data sharing while in the middle of game.
technology evolves, the attack surfaces do too.
I've had the opposite happen with similar results - a kid extorting adults, that led to international request for police help - even with data proving ip and the ISP coordinating data - no resolve - and that kid keeps coming back and ruining stuff for others thanks to wealthy parents and unlimited VPNs, very hard to block.
In short I think roblox is no less safe than other portals aside from fbook. If 99% of [app/game] people are nice - and one percent are looking to leverage your honesty for ill gotten gains - the apps with the most people will yield extortion opportunities that are worth the time to exploit it seems. Especially from places where $20 goes a long way for some reason.
What's a good way to detect this early? Just from the pattern you shared it sounds like a good idea to check who they're talking to on instagram to catch any new contacts and review them.
I'm personally trying to decide whether I want a digital panopticon for my children where I won't be surprised by anything like this, and being more laissez faire. I enjoyed unrestricted and unmonitored internet traffic growing up and quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, my wife did too but had a significant negative experience.
I’ve forbidden Instagram on my daughter’s phone. It condenses everything that is terrible about modern society: the incessant pursuit of (largely fake) outward success and related promotion of idiotic and unhealthy role models. I don’t know how long this will last (she’s 11) and there is only so much one can do (does she use filters to make tons of pics trying to look “cute”? Sadly, yes), but I’ll do what I can.
Obviously she’s also had all the spiel, both from parents and teachers) about not trusting anyone online who they’ve not met beforehand, about not sharing pics of private parts for any reason, and I’ve started pointing out that “the internet does not forget”, and that innocent-looking material passed to trusted parties might well be used against her later on.
In a way, it’s horrible: as a kid I was free to do anything I wanted, worst that could happen was prank-pwnage on the worst IRC channels; and I met a few interesting characters I may have not encountered otherwise. It’s the digital equivalence of letting 6-year-olds roam free outside, something that was natural 40 years ago and sadly could be very dangerous today. “This is why we cannot have nice things.”
I agree that instagram is too much for young people. Probably too much for some older people too. I also agree that there are some horrible implications from this technology - even though I'm generally more techno-optimist, it's harder when trying to think through how my children will interact with the internet.
One tip I've read regarding the spiel your daughter has heard from both parents and teachers, is that it's also important to let your child know she can come to you if she does make a mistake in this regard. Apparently some predators will, if they can get naked pictures or something like it in the first place, use that as leverage to exploit the child further. It's good to let your child know not to share naked pictures, but I think it also needs to be clear that if they do they can still get help from their parents.
This is terrible. But being 12 years old, she’s in the 6th grade. By next year, she’ll be in junior high school, and once you get her an iPhone, then there’s no more holding back the floodgates.
I'm curious what you mean by this. What makes something safe for children or not? (This is an honest question from someone who doesn't have children and so doesn't really know.) It's interesting that a game would be "safe" on one platform but not another.
Roblox isn't so much a "game" as a platform for making games. Think Gmod. As a result, the more "creative freedom" you have, the more the often teen+ aged developers do what people that age do with creative freedom.
Maybe spam messages, cuss words, obscene figures and stuff
Games on PS4 are way safer. It's like a restricted platform.
Comparing Rocket League's chat on PC and PS4 is enough to know the difference. While playing on your PC, you can quickly abuse/spam the other player because you have a keyboard to type on. Because PS4 only has a virtual keyboard, you don't have enough time to use the controller to type whatever you want. You have to use some preloaded custom messages like 'Nice Shot', 'Excellent Save!'
This is a great question - and something that I think people need to be more aware of. As another commenter pointed out - safe for children could be an issues where blackmail and extortion / sextortion could be an issue -
for some parents, finding that on a PS3 while playing mine craft that another person created a giant penis on the screen would make that game 'unsafe'. (I had that happen some years ago - had not idea what to say)
I've heard kids playing call of duty online that cussed and degraded people worse than some x-rated movies.. (and I've also played and heard a kid say 'gosh darn it, they got me'.
anything with chat, anything with user generated content, can be abused to be 'unsafe' in some ways - determining what level of outrage one could encounter / and how uncomfortable one would be is a thing.
editing to add: what some others in the thread have mentioned about kill / guns / cops / etc in some of the games are also a thing for some parents and 'safety' - some might not see any of that in some games / levels that people play in roblox and assume it's not a thing.
I'd also mention some of my associates would have concern that some are based on things outside the game that may include certain levels of cross dress and other things. What is 'safety issue' for some may be a bonus issue for another - so yes, defining types of safety I think is important.
I think the focus needs to be on preventing blackmail/extortion/cyber.
I'm not worried about my daughter or son seeing a crudely constructed penis on the screen, I'm worried about someone sending them age-inappropriate or dangerous private messages. I was consuming sexually explicit content by age nine or ten, had my secret copy of Grand Theft Auto, etc. and at no point was I in any "danger" other than running against the Puritan sensibilities of my guardians.
I remember thinking that the fact that my male Sims couldn't wear female clothes as unnecessarily restrictive, but looking back if my guardians had seen me playing a game as a male wearing a dress, they would have destroyed the game in front of me immediately. "Unsafe" is a considerably relative term.
Predators will attack anywhere that children gather. Children gather in Roblox, and predators targeted Roblox.
The features that make something more or less safe are the controls put around preventing that from happening, minimising the risk, being very clear to parents about what's expected of them, having excellent moderation, and having excellent reporting.
The PC version of roblox fails all of these somewhat.
Many parents today are simply a bit too trusting of products aimed at children. This thing isn't going to expose my children to predators; my kids aren't going to learn about gang rape from this game; this toy isn't going to record audio or video; etc.
I don't necessarily think parents need to ban Roblox, because that means you can't teach children about how to keep themselves safe or what to do if they're not enjoying something happening online. But I do think parents need to be aware of what happens.
Good comment. We are very glad that Xbox/console has the chat and messaging (essentially Xbox has it disabled) controls. We only let our 8 year old daughter play Roblox on Xbox One for this reason.
Thanks. My kids would probably play it on their iPads (we don't even have a PC). Most of their iPad games offer in-app purchases already or force them to watch commercials. It's the messaging that concerns me most.
My kid play on her tablet or iPhone (mostly). I notice there is a chat window, but don't think she pays much attention to it. She and her friends use facetime for in-game communication.
My number one concern is predictors so I'll address that part.
You can turn off "chat" with anyone other than your child's friends. You're kid can be in a group chat with their friend and other strangers, which I'm not delighted about.
Downside #1 is that anyone can send a friend request and your child can accept them. Whenever I go into my kid's account I do a friend review - "How do you know this person?". My child also always has a dozen pending "friends" requests from as-far-as-I-know complete strangers which I decline for her.
Downside #2 is that Roblox can have odd restrictions if "chat" is turned off - you can't give your pets names "Adopt Me" for example.
(I have a 10 year old daughter) While nothing is completely 'safe', I feel that Roblox does a better job than just about any other platform I've looked at in making a safe and still social online environment for kids. The biggest problem is players trying to scam each other in in-game trades.
The worst we've experience is that my daughter lost a pet worth about $5 in real money to a scammer. And while it was pretty traumatic for her it was also a very teachable moment that let us talk a lot about trusting strangers on the internet. We also regularly monitor what she does spend a lot of time talking about being safe on the internet.
Being scammed is kind of a right of passage on the internet right? I lost my Neopets account to a scam and sadly still fell for a scam on Runescape years later. I learned from both experiences though.
TBH I wished I looked this up a long time ago, by default if a child creates an account it doesn't put them through any kind of "get a parent" workflow. (Contrast with signing up for a child Xbox account or Google account).
I have found it safe for the kids on all platforms. There seemed to be a fair amount of censorship in the chat to protect kids from most of THOSE awkward conversations.
That being said, some of the popular games are shooters, murder mysteries, that, while not gory, do have you shooting (lego-minifig-like) people.
I would say watch some gameplay videos and see what you think.
Our other two (younger) kids loved it... past tense here because we had to cut it off for all because it was too emotionally traumatizing for the 11yr old, plus some of the content was questionable.
You can turn off chat.
The games can be... err... interesting. People shooting guns at each other and other such things.
Just keep an eye on it.
Remember the crap you saw/did on IRC as a kid.
You can turn off all ability for the child to chat in games and lock those setting behind a Pin #. Then you don't have to worry about inappropriate messaging etc. After than, it's about as safe as an online world can be, which is to say there's assholes everywhere, and Roblox is no different. If you're playing a capture the flag game, it's possible to have another player grief you with spawn camping etc.
"You can go a long way if you avoid stupid mistakes."
I find this true whenever I decide to take on a new endeavour. If you can learn from someone else's mistakes, you're better off than 80% of the competition in ANY MARKET.
So many people have an idea to make money, look at the competition, and give up. But if you keep going just a bit further, you find out that most of the competition, which looked so daunting at the start, is actually awful.
Yep, agreed. Most of this advice is useful even if you're just building an open source project that you're passionate about, and your post helps a lot.
Nobody wants to build a product in vaccum that has no users, no matter how brilliant the idea.
My other two cofounders are building an open source tool - https://www.chatwoot.com/. I'm sure they have used a lot of wisdom from this experience too.
I don't even try to make sense of bitcoin trends anymore. You might as well try to interpret shapes is clouds. Bitcoin has been in an upward trend since early September for no discernible reason (to me at least).
> Bitcoin has been in an upward trend since early September for no discernible reason (to me at least).
I think it's mainly due to purchases from institutions that believe that Bitcoin is a safe haven asset during the lockdowns. The spiel is: it's protection from currency debasement due to Central Banks everywhere printing out at low interest rates for the pandemic.
- Square spread 50MUSD worth buys @ 10K USD early October [1]
- Microstrategy spread 425M buys from 9-10K USD around August - September [2]
Was hanging at 10-11 and shot up (eh) after Square invested 1% (50m) of their assets. Has been a steady rise (dont know trade terms 'scuse me), I:m assuming it might stay or jump a few more k. Disclaimer: I don't trade.
It's also been the summer where DeFi 10x'd, so no surprise BTC has gone up a bit now that folks can earn interest on their BTC by providing wrapped BTC liquidity on Ethereum.
I guess a lot of people knew, from PayPal engineers to journalists. Your comment seems to imply that it was unethical or illegal for those people to trade on the private information but I disagree, "insider trading" does not apply to Bitcoin ethically or legally.
I am using it to proxy (think API gateway) all sorts of network-bound things [0]:
1. Content delivery (downloads).
2. Analytics (metrics and logging).
3. Proxy misc HTTP requests.
I planned to move web-hosting to Workers too but Netlify is just too smooth and I don't see a reason to do so currently, though the recently announced free analytics product (for websites proxied through Cloudflare) might tempt me to do so anyway.
[0] The 50ms time-limit is for cpu-time and not wall-time. The latter doesn't seem to have any documented limits and so works great for "streaming" network-bound workloads.
> Reminds of software development estimation. You start out with a rough "ballpark" idea of the task and say it will take about 10 days. Then you actually start the task and realize how screwed you are.
Every time I wrap up my quarterly planning, I'm always reminded of this and how futile it is to make ballpark suggestions when the only thing you have is a one or two sentence idea.
The relatively small company I work for makes me fill out some forms by hand, because they receive them from vendors as a PDF. So I print it out, sign it, and return it to my company by hand.
If someone could make a service that lets you upload a PDF that contains a form, and then let users fill out that form and e-sign it and collect the results, and then print them out all at once, it would be great.
It's not a billion dollar idea but there are a lot of little companies that would save a lot of time using it.
There are quite a few services that should be able to solve this problem (turning a PDF into a web form and collecting signatures.) Here's a few of the services I'm aware of:
(I know about all these because I'm working on a PDF generation service for developers called DocSpring [1]. I'm also working on e-signature support [2], but that's still under development, and still won't be a perfect fit for your use-case.)
I used Xournal for a couple years in college. It was perfect in how simple it was to mix handwritten and typed notes or markup documents. The only thing is that I wish it had some sort of notebook organization feature. It would have been nice keeping all of my course notes in one file, broken down by chapter or daily pages. Instead, I ended up with a bunch of individual xojs that did the job but made searching for material take longer.
Coming from a documents format world (publishing), there are a lot of cases like this.
In theory it sounds like it should be straightforward but it hinges so much on how well the document is structured underneath the surface.
Being that these tools were primarily designed for non-technical users first the priority is in the visual and printed outcome and not the underlying structure.
One document can look much the same as another in form—uses black borders to outline fields, similar or same field names, etc, but may be structured entirely differently and that can be a madhouse of frustrating problems.
It can be complex enough to write a solution for one specific document source. Writing a universal tool that could take in any form like that would probably be a pretty decent moneymaker.
My first intuition, though, would be it may be more successful (though no less simple) to develop a model that can read from the visual of the document rather than parsing it successfully.
Out of curiosity, what exactly are non-technical people doing with PDF's, and why does there need to be a universal tool in the space? What would the tool do with the extracted data?
All kinds of things. PDF is the unifying data exchange format for a lot of businesses who use computers at some end to manage things and need to exchange documents of any kind without relying on the old "can you open Word files?" type problems.
There is a wide world outside of consumers of SaaS products for every little niche problem.
Sometimes they are baked in processes that still use PDF's to share information, sometimes they're old forms of any kind, sometimes even old scanned docs that are still in use but shared digitally. A lot of the businesses that carry on that way are of the mind that "if it's not broke, don't fix it" which is quite rational for their problem areas and existing knowledge base. They might be a potential market at some point for a new solution, but good luck selling them on a web-based subscription SaaS solution when a simple form has been serving their needs for 30+ years.
OP's problem of the PDF being the go-between to digital endpoints is more common than you might think.
The universality I was referring to was the wide range of possibilities for how a given form might be laid out. And old documents contain a lot of noise when they've been added to or manipulated. Look inside an old PDF form from some small-medium sized business sometime. Now imagine 1000 variations of that form one standard problem. Then multiple that by the number of potential problem areas the forms are managing.
Also like OP said—it's not sexy, but it's very real and having an intelligent PDF form reader and consumer would be a time-saver for those businesses who aren't geared to completely alter their workflow.
The tool could do anything with the extracted data. If it allowed you to connect to any of your in house services (like payroll or accounting) either with a quick config/API or a custom patch, or Google Drive, or whatever without complications like online-required and web accounts especially. No whole solution like that exists to my knowledge. At least nothing accessible to the wider market.
Thanks for the comment, this is really interesting. I guess i'm still confused what people actually do with these PDF's though. Are people looking at a PDF sent to them and manually entering that data somewhere else (like payroll or accounting), so this tool would take that data from the PDF and pump it in there automatically?
Thanks again, I just want to make sure I understand.
I assume you mean a drawn form as opposed to a true PDF form. The former would be difficult to parse automatically into inputs.
OTOH, a PDF form works exactly they way you’d like. Maybe there’s a small market in helping convert one to the other for collecting input from old paper-ish forms.
Something like that would work for signing, but the hard part is "turn this pdf into an online form". That way after a user finishes a form, you can perform some basic error checking like, did they fill out everything, is this field a valid format, etc. After 100 employees turn in a multi-page printed out form, someone has to go through it and make sure they signed everywhere, filled out all the fields, etc.
Again, not sexy, but it is so stupid I have to fill out a direct deposit form by hand and turn it into my company, who checks it, then hands it off to the payroll vendor, who has to check it, just to enter the damn data into a form on their end.
Since this bubble is largely being driven by private investors it seems like the broader economy won't suffer but will instead benefit from investors losing their interest in stupid games.
The next presidential election, despite being an absolute circus, should keep things split no matter who wins. This makes political stagnation a reliable bet for the next 2.5 years, possibly even longer. Normally a good sign for markets as little new regulations/change will be occurring.
