Disclosure: I'm a PM at ServiceNow. Opinions my own.
High. SoR systems tend to either be where or are closely tied to wherever the work is being done. It's an incredibly disruptive thing to rip out and change all of the process and backend systems that run your business. It's why land and expand is such an effective strategy for these companies and everything is sold as an interconnected economy of scale.
I'm quite a bit more bullish than OP, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the way the market has reacted and the 'new multiple' trend.
There is always going to be a market for a business operating system, we just might be a similar situation to Netflix/HBO last decade, where the race was about which side could shore up their core weakness first: content engine vs. streaming platform.
We're seeing the same thing happen now. Enterprise has the data, business logic, customer base and distribution but it needs to add SotA AI capabilities into the core of the product without just bolting something on. The Ai companies have the models, talent and are agile enough they can turn out demos and compelling pitches abut they're missing the enterprise data, domain specificity and being able to operate with the regulatory and compliance scaffolding that is required to operate in the enterprise.
Both sides are racing toward the middle, but the problems left for the AI companies to solve are arguably the harder ones, especially when the models themselves are rapidly commoditizing or are open source. It's tough to build enterprise-grade infrastructure on top of a layer where your core differentiation is eroding.
There was another comment in this thread about value moving to the agent layer. I'd push back a little on this. An agent is only useful if it has reliable, governed access to the system where the work actually happens. The SoR that builds a credible agent platform on top of its own data and workflow layer has a structural advantage over a standalone agent tryin to orchestrate across five different systems via an API. IMO the strong foundation wins out here.
My opinions are my own … but rhyme with this, particularly the final paragraph, with a twist: the strong foundation with in-house mastery that can sherpa an atelier of agents.
They're not just from AI-generated text. Some of us humans use en dashes and em dashes in the right context, since they're easy to type on macOS: alt+hyphen and alt+shift+hyphen respectively.
On both iOS and modern Android I believe you can access them with a long press on hyphen.
They have their place but I'm really just trying to avoid the AI house style that has emerged. I'd rather have my writing—AI-assisted or not—reflect how I actually communicate rather than defaulting to patterns that have become over represented in generated text.
That’s not really fair. I mean, I definitely use AI all over the place, but I think that the writing aspect is an important part of thinking too [1]. I still try to write things out myself when it matters. There’s something about wordsmithing that sharpens your thinking and that gets lost when you just drop something into an LLM and pull it out without much thought. Sure, I’ll use AI to help refine or explore ideas, but the core work often starts in my own head.
I do write a lot myself, especially when I need to think something through clearly. I use AI tools like anyone else, but I still do the work.
How are em-dashes "slightly" archaic in this context? Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically?
Academic papers doesn't count, literature doesn't count. I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online, or when writing informal texts, purely because there is no key for the em-dash on the keyboard (that I know of).
I posit that the use of an em-dash in online discourse is so archaic that it's a 100% surefire giveaway of AI.
>Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically?
Thousands upon thousands.
>I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online
Meatbag humans whose education failed them don't. Other humans did and still do, from Usenet to Substack, and from Slashdot to Hacker News.
Here's a random PG essay sprinkled with 23 em-dashes:
Way more people, in posts, comments, etc. use en-dashes and hyphens as em-dashes (just because they don't know how to quickly insert proper ones, or aren't aware there's a typographic distinction, but do now the use of dashes for parenthetical statements and asides.
I use em dashes a bunch in both informal communication and more formal writing. Mobile keyboards have em dashes, and I also have the compose key turned on on Linux.
I learned how to type em-dashes on Mac (option-shift-hyphen) 10+ years ago and have been using them with some frequency since then. Picking 2023, here are some comments with emdashes that I personally typed:
To enter an em dash on Windows, hold down Alt and type 0 1 5 1 on your keyboard’s numpad. (Alt 0 1 5 0 for an en dash.) This only works with numpad number keys so laptop users are out of luck.
It is insane that in 2025, this is an accepted way to type lesser-used characters on Windows still, when the Mac has had the Option key typing umlauts and em-dashes extremely simply (an umlauted U is literally option-u, u... Ironically, I'm currently on a Windows machine so I cannot even type it) literally since 1984.
My family is German (I'm firstborn American) so this was a huge sell for the Mac way back then
Sad to see that Windows is still stuck in the PS/2 days here
If you install Power Toys, you get a feature called "Quick Accent" which gives you a shortcut to get basically any symbol quickly. Hold down the key that's the most like the one you are looking for, and press space. A little menu pops up where you can cycle through all the variants.
So `- + space` brings up a menu with all the "dashy" characters. There's 12 of them!
There is also `Win + .` which brings up an emoji menu, where you can also access the symbols list.
The compose key works well on Linux. Typically mapped to right alt, compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen produces an em dash. (hyphen-hyphen-period produces an en dash.)
Given the compose sequences are mnemonic, I’d prefer it over Mac every time. Compare Compose+<< and >> for «» to Opt+[ and Opt+Sh+[ on Mac. Which may or may not work depending on locale.
MS Office will insert em-dashes automatically in most documents, so in fact there are a lot of Word docs and Outlook emails that contain them.
I sometimes specifically try and trigger them: if you have a piece of text and go back to insert a hyphen, it won't em-dash until you've followed it with a space, another word and then another space. I now sort of end up doing '- x ' and then backspacing so that the word following the x now follows an em-dash.
They exist to provide clarity. The are not hyphens, or en-dashes, they're em-dashes. The fact that some people have forgotten how to use them (or perhaps not been taught), does not make them "archaic", it makes those people who find them as such to be ignorant of basic sentence structure and punctuation.
I think if you're under the age of 30 and you suddenly start using them, you're showing your GenAI a little too much, but the answer is not to get your AI to stop using them, but for us to teach people why they exist and to use them more often when and where they are appropriate.
I’ve used em-dashes in all sorts of online forums for decades. It’s on the Mac keyboard, and there are also tons of tools that automatically convert double or triple dashes to a single long dash. They were never uncommon.
Surely this is an absurd exaggeration. I've been using em dashes everywhere (online comments, email, chat) for ~25 years now. I'm not unusual in this regard; everyone who cares about punctuation probably uses them liberally. They're not hard to type; on macOS you can hold down Alt and Shift while hitting the `-`, and on Android you can long press on the `-`. Maybe they're used less by Windows users?
Even just looking at my HN comments, 381 of my ~1200 HN comments so far (so >30%) have em dashes. This includes my very first comment on HN from 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602094) and several that have multiple em dashes in them:
Medicare administrative costs are around 2% of total program spending [1] compared to typically >10%. While what you're saying on the surface may be true from the numbers you are comparing, the fact of the matter is that healthcare costs are becoming more and more expensive during a time when many are experiencing a cost of living crisis.
The US gets a bum deal on costs and outcomes and while we can argue on which specific changes will move which specific needle I think it's clear that one of the major differences compared to the rest of the world is that running healthcare as a for profit enterprise has failed to deliver on the promise of good outcomes for as affordable a price as possible both on an individual and country wide level.
> While what you're saying on the surface may be true from the numbers you are comparing, the fact of the matter is that healthcare costs are becoming more and more expensive during a time when many are experiencing a cost of living crisis.
Which has almost nothing to do with the amount of profits derived from private health insurance - that's only ~1.2% of spending.
Maybe it used to be ~0.8% - that delta is not moving the needle.
But has everything to do with the need to take a closer look at the entire system and how we can do things better.
I feel like focusing on this part of my comment vs. the bum deal part is disingenuous since non-US countries have figured out how to do it for cheaper with better outcomes without the main focus being the up and to the left drive for profit that our current system mandates.
If there is a silver bullet, the first step would be getting rid of the for profit mechanisms.
Instead, because despite data linked in this thread that profit margins are only a few percentage points, Healthcare is an incredibly lucrative field that extracts a lot of money into the private market without delivering results commensurate with the cost to the public.
Add to that lobbying making it incredibly simple and cost effective to influence policy (which comes out in the P&L as a cost of doing business and so isn't tracked as profit FWIW), we are stuck with this situation despite overwhelming evidence that it's a bad deal.
Kaiser Permanente, Providence Health, all the insurers in the BCBS franchise except Elevance, and many others are non profit.
Yet they are unable to provide lower premiums than UNH/Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humana/Centene/Molina.
Kaiser is a full vertical, you buy insurance from them, you see their doctors and nurses in their outpatient clinics and hospitals, you get medicine from their pharmacies. So why is everyone not choosing Kaiser?
Edit to respond to below since posting limit hit:
UNH had $371B in revenue, not profit, therefore it is irrelevant. If the claim is UNH is excessively profiting, then profit margin is the only metric relevant to the discussion.
Kaiser's managed care organization IS non profit, so it is relevant here. It clearly shows that the managed care portion of the business is not sucking out outlier amounts of profit, because Kaiser's premiums are not different to UNH or any other MCO's premiums. Also, Kaiser's annual revenue is $100B or so, not $4B.
If a managed care organizations being for profit or non profit was the straw that was breaking the camel's back, then it would show up as non profit managed care organizations being able to offer much lower premiums.
>say that for profit is the way to go because if Kaiser can't do it then nobody can.
I am not claiming for profit is the way to go (or the opposite). I am saying, within the confines of the US healthcare system, for profit managed care organizations are not THE source of higher healthcare costs.
Kaiser had an income of 4.1B in 2023 vs. UHG's 371.6B in an industry of 4.8T [1]. I'm not sure the point you're trying to make or why it's relevant unless you're asking me to read between the lines on the efficacy of Kaiser as a non-profit vs. their for-profit counterparts (which is what seems to be the case).
edit: I think I missed the last part of your comment in an edit, so to attempt to answer my own questions, it's not a fair comparison beyond just the almost 100x size difference to compare a different business model and scope, provider network, risk pool and geographic presence yet ignore every other developed country in the world and say that for profit is the way to go because if Kaiser can't do it then nobody can.
I think this is a statistical artifact. Medicare preferentially selects the cohort of customers most likely to demand services from providers (that's the premise of the program). Fixed fees in, floating costs out. If you extended Medicare to 30 year olds, that 2% would, mechanically, soar; the same inputs from customers, but drastically lower service delivery.
The same statistics are similar for Medicaid too but also missing the forest for the trees in that for profit seems to be the main differentiator with the US vs. other parts of the world. There are plenty of models around the world that show this works and it works well.
First it's the government can't do this, then it's the government wouldn't do this because of this reason while ignoring that the US healthcare system is spending more than any other country and missing the mark on outcomes. Every other developed country in the world has figured this out. While not perfect, they're paying less and broadly getting better outcomes.
This is my issue with M4A: it seems clear from the numbers that the problems in our system --- and I think they're grave --- are almost entirely on the provider-side, and Medicare has, if anything, locked us into those cost structures. If anyone's curious why there's a scarcity in physician care hours in the US: Medicare rate limits the number of new doctors allowed into the system every year, through the residency funding system.
Agree that it's not perfect, but I do feel that we could take 60-80% of the money we're currently spending and fix this and any other issues that come up and get in the way of improved outcomes like the rest of the world does.
I don't know why what you're describing happens, but my money would be on some triage that needs to happen due to limited funding since so much of our spending goes into private healthcare solutions.
Fair, don't think I disagree with you on these points. I just believe we can do significantly better. In a similar vein, I believe:
* For profit motives get in the way of cheap, effective healthcare. Maximizing shareholder value leads to higher prices, overutilization of expensive proceedures and prioritization of profit generating services vs. preventive care or basic health care needs and improved outcomes.
* Incentives are currently heavily skewed to the point that providers and insurers are more likely to treat symptoms rather than address root causes or preventive measures leading to a cycle of chronic illness and higher long term costs.
* Access to healthcare should not be tied to socioeconomic status. Employer sponsored insurance and high out of pocket costs create significant barriers for lower income individuals and families, dragging the average down (i.e. the system is fine if you can afford it).
* Administrative complexity in the current system massively inflates cost. The fragmented nature of private insurers, billing systems and out of network shenanigans results in massive inefficiencies and expenses that contribute nothing to patient outcomes. I am confident this comes out to more in savings than the %age profit that is referenced in other places in this thread.
Medicare would not have 2% overhead if it served 30-year-olds.
Swing and a miss. Medicare does cover 30 year olds, you just have to be sick enough to qualify. So in fact Medicare covers the least profitable young folks.
Edit since responding to your prolific bad faith arguments got me throttled:
Your argument is that younger people would magically add to the overhead incurred by Medicare. My point is that Medicare's low overhead already includes younger people who are more likely to use expensive modes health care more frequently than the typical younger person. And even then Medicare denies claims at a much lower rate than for-profit insurance companies.
But somehow, adding more, healthier younger folks to Medicare would add to the overhead?
Nah.
Edit since I might as well address another bad faith argument:
Medicare rate limits the number of new doctors allowed into the system
every year, through the residency funding system.
Congress controls that funding. Medicare is the administrator. At best your phrasing is disingenuous.
I think the issue here is that you don't understand my argument. Fixed prices, floating costs. Do the math. Your point would make sense if 30 year olds paid something differently than 65-year olds.
You don't need more than 3-5g per day (about 15mg per pound of body-weight) to see the maximal effects. There is a loading period where you take 2-4 weeks to saturate, many take an increased dose to get there faster but if you're going to be doing this consistently, after a month of daily usage 3-5g is all you need.
Because like always, the punishment for the rich playing games with our lives is a negligible fine 1/10000th the profit they make selling your information to anyone with a buck.
Setting the musician's prowess aside, that guitar synth engine is remarkable at rendering the subtle tone nuances of the continuous controls given by the Seaboard.
He's presenting this to his company. I don't think this video was originally intended for mass consumption, but I am glad it was made available.
So this is the CEO presenting to a group of people who know him and his presentation style, I think at that point much of the stuff you're complaining about can be thought of as humor or house style, especially when you consider that Joel worked at Microsoft on Excel. Context matters.
As someone who watched the live stream of the original presentation from the Stack Overflow lunchroom I can confirm that the video is missing some context. Definitely a bit of house style and a throw back to some old school memes, but overall an informative and humorous training session that I am glad was made public.
Joel usually gives great presentations, and recently he even started personally editing our internal company update videos (and complaining when we don't show appreciation by up voting them :-) because the first one was a bit dry.
I made this account 1979 days ago, have 230 karma and have probably averaged over 7 visits a week. Some people just spend way more time reading than commenting.
High. SoR systems tend to either be where or are closely tied to wherever the work is being done. It's an incredibly disruptive thing to rip out and change all of the process and backend systems that run your business. It's why land and expand is such an effective strategy for these companies and everything is sold as an interconnected economy of scale.
I'm quite a bit more bullish than OP, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the way the market has reacted and the 'new multiple' trend.
There is always going to be a market for a business operating system, we just might be a similar situation to Netflix/HBO last decade, where the race was about which side could shore up their core weakness first: content engine vs. streaming platform.
We're seeing the same thing happen now. Enterprise has the data, business logic, customer base and distribution but it needs to add SotA AI capabilities into the core of the product without just bolting something on. The Ai companies have the models, talent and are agile enough they can turn out demos and compelling pitches abut they're missing the enterprise data, domain specificity and being able to operate with the regulatory and compliance scaffolding that is required to operate in the enterprise.
Both sides are racing toward the middle, but the problems left for the AI companies to solve are arguably the harder ones, especially when the models themselves are rapidly commoditizing or are open source. It's tough to build enterprise-grade infrastructure on top of a layer where your core differentiation is eroding.
There was another comment in this thread about value moving to the agent layer. I'd push back a little on this. An agent is only useful if it has reliable, governed access to the system where the work actually happens. The SoR that builds a credible agent platform on top of its own data and workflow layer has a structural advantage over a standalone agent tryin to orchestrate across five different systems via an API. IMO the strong foundation wins out here.
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