SaaS’s competitive advantage is not tech but distribution.
Just because the stock market dips, and a bunch of media outlets ascribe this to AI doesn’t mean that AI ‘caused’ the dip.
If people really think non-tech businesses will start running their own software organizations and maintain all these tools themselves is an idiotic assumption at best.
The “building” of software has never been and will never be the bottleneck.
I’ve found that task isolation, rather than preserving your current session’s context budget, is where subagents shine.
In other words, when I have a task that specifically should not have project context, then subagents are great. Claude will also summon these “swarms” for the same reason. For example, you can ask it to analyze a specific issue from multiple relevant POVs, and it will create multiple specialized agents.
However, without fail, I’ve found that creating a subagent for a task that requires project context will result in worse outcomes than using “main CC”, because the sub simply doesn’t receive enough context.
As someone mentioned already, list prices are completely fictitious. Their purpose is to anchor medical payers during reimbursement negotiations and satisfy PBMs (see below).
The allowed price (the price that the payer pays to the drug company) is much, much lower, 70-90% or so in many cases. Thus, juxtaposing OTC and list price is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
That being said, US drug prices are 2-4 times higher than they are elsewhere. In fact, the US market essentially subsidizes international drug markets, where it is much more difficult to charge higher rates due to regulations and lower purchasing power. This also means that, even if the allowed price in the US were known in this example, it would still have to be PPP adjusted to be compared.
Prescription card coupons such as those you get from GoodRx et al apply only to cash prices. These are sometimes lower and sometimes higher than what you’d pay out of pocket with your insurance. to compare, you’d basically have to ask the pharmacy to ring up a drug twice, once with cash price + coupon and once with insurance price.
“Copay assistance” are programs by drug manufacturers, PBMs, or employers to defray the cost of drug prices. This is usually done for specialty drugs that are much more expensive and can often only be purchased from a mail order pharmacy designated by the payer. For example, United Health (left pocket) will only cover the drugs if you get them from their Optum Specialty Pharmacy (right pocket).
As for numbers, here an example: I’m receiving a monthly specialty drug that my insurance is billed ~$9,000/month. In order to arrive at that figure, the drug company proposed, say, a $50k/month list price, and my insurer countered with $9k, using the size of their member pool as leverage. Of course, the drug manufacturer knew they would arrive at approx that figure, which is why they started negotiating that high. Well, sorta. The PBM gets compensated based on a % of the “savings” (spread between list price and final price), so naturally, they want as high as possible a list price, because 5% of a big amount (in my example: $50k-$9k = $41k) than 5% of a smaller amount. Because the PBM often has most of the leverage, the drug manufacturers (most of whom actually dislike PBMs) have to go along with this stupidity.
How much of the $9k I pay depends on a variety of factors, including my insurance plan, which has a specialty drug tier. This means the drug is not handled via the cost sharing accounting mechanism (deductible/copay).
Now, through that specialty tier, my monthly responsibility is set at approx $1,300. I’m not privy to the math behind this, because my insurer has outsourced all drug-related administration to a PBM, which is only loosely regulated and doesn’t even have to issue explanation of benefit statements that would normally disclose the full accounting.
Of the $1,300, I pay nothing, because the drug manufacturer provides me with a copay assistance card. Again, they must keep the list price high to placate the PBM.
I’ve simplified a few things here. For instance, there are now alternative comp models for PBMs. But for those, PBMs have also found ways to manipulate the system in their favor (eg colluding with drug manufacturers). There’s also often a wholesaler involved in the “value” chain.
But by and large, this is roughly how it works…
And yes, individual market plans are substantially inferior. Not only do they have lower actuarial values and higher cost per $ of coverage (which is unavoidable, because they are not risk pools) and narrower networks, but they also usually have built-in mechanisms to further prune away coverage in many subtle ways (they have that in common with self-insured plans):
- more prior approvals,
- “step therapy” (must first not tolerate cheaper drugs before can receive pricier drug),
- not covering the pricier drug tier at all, etc.
These things shave some dollars off the premium, which appeals to price-elastic consumers and employers.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Germany has a written legal code. This could mean that punishments are more strictly classified than under a, say, precedence-based common law system. Changing the classification could move these kinds of crimes into harsher punishment bands.
The law being written does not prevent changing it[0]. Someone changed the written law once to add these weapon-specific provisions, they can do it again. And unless the optimal provisions for date rape drugs are identical to those for weapons, they probably should do it again.
[0] It might actually be easier to change a properly written law. I hate our stupid precedent-based system in the US.
If aliens land in Germany on a field and a peasant shoots them with his shotgun, he would have committed no crime in my opinion. No murder, since Aliens are not humans. It would not be illegal hunting, since aliens are not animals. Illegal discharge of a firearm?
That is definitely not how German law would deal with the situation in practice. Aliens would certainly be considered people and protected by the law, even if they weren't humans, and they would definitely still be animals.
Shooting an alien robot though, then you would have something legally problematic. Ownership? Is it so advanced it's a person? But you'd probably get something like those Star Trek episodes with legal weirdness rather than any no-crime-without-law reasoning.
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected.
You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).
GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):
Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law.
This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):
Lex scripta – there must be a written statute
→ Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.
Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise
→ “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.
Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant
→ This is the killer.
→ Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused.
→ German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).
Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act
→ Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
Ah. Yes. You are right. I had to read the law. I can understand the choice to write 'human' there, it becomes very clear, assuming there will be no aliens.
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected.
You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).
GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):
Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law. This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):
Lex scripta – there must be a written statute → Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.
Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise → “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.
Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant → This is the killer. → Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused. → German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).
Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act → Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
You can't write a law for every possible situation. And many laws were introduced because they were committed, and they realized, there is no law to punish the person.
English common law had many good ideas. The US criminal system may be a mess, but the underlying ideas are good. Not everybody can be Norway.... ;-)
It may not be a sustainable business with current business models. But if cures came with a "post-scription" model where the cured patient paid, say, 0.5% - 1% of their income to the drug company in perpetuity, then incentives are aligned. (Of course, administration is a problem here.) As someone with an incurable disease, I would happily pay for a cure in such a way...
Thank you! I was just about to rant about this and decided to scroll to see if anyone had already called this out.
The article is quite embarrassing - it’s ok if you don’t know how P&L statement and balance sheet work, but writing an entire blog post without ever feeling the need to verify basic terminology is either very lazy or very ignorant…
Yes, HIPAA compliance is on the roadmap and should be out in a few weeks. We spent a lot of time on healthcare/sensitive data use cases.
Google Document AI and Watson SDU seem to be an afterthought for IBM/Google. The accuracy and configurability often fall short when you want to use them in a production setting.
Comparing to other legacy document processing companies, I think there are a few areas where we differentiate:
1. We handle end-to-end workflows from integrating with data sources, defining the transformation, and automatically triggering new runs when there’s an update to the data.
2. We built our entire stack on LLM and Vision transformers and use OCR/parser to check the results. This allows the mapping and tasks to be a lot more robust and flexible.
3. We have validations, reference checking, and confidence score metrics that enable fast human-in-the-loop iteration.
Just because the stock market dips, and a bunch of media outlets ascribe this to AI doesn’t mean that AI ‘caused’ the dip.
If people really think non-tech businesses will start running their own software organizations and maintain all these tools themselves is an idiotic assumption at best.
The “building” of software has never been and will never be the bottleneck.