npad

I was a crypto skeptic for many years. If you look at crypto purely from an engineering lens, you'll always find it wanting. What I didn't understand was that crypto is as much of an economic and political project, as it is an engineering project. If you think decentralisation and trustlessness are valuable, you should think crypto is important. If you don't care for decentralisation then being negative on crypto is a consistent position.

They have LPs. LPs need an exit.

"For a long time" was the qualifier. I was talking about the 70s and 80s when Japanese imports were disrupting the market.

Interesting, yeah those are good points. I can certainly see it reducing the severity of disputes in theory.

In practice though I'm skeptical. I've read a little about the history of UAW. They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game. Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.

I want to be pro-union but it's hard when you observe their real world behaviour. All too often they slowly strangle their company, making it less and less competitive and innovative and ultimately dooming it to defeat by new entrants who aren't yet encumbered by unions.

I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.

Microsoft doesn’t own Spotify. It seems there were rumours they might be acquired by MS around the time of the IPO but nothing came of it.

The Queen is on the other side of the note.

Whenever I’ve had to build PDF features I’ve found it tedious, and thought it should be easier.

Paperplane is basically an API layer on top of autoscaling servers running headless Chrome.

There are a couple of features that make this a little different to other solutions out there: automatic uploads to S3 and the ability to queue up batches of documents and be notified via webhook when they’ve been converted to PDF.

If you’re looking for a solution like this or are already using something similar, it’d be great to hear any feedback!