I recently came across a guest essay in the New York Times titled “UnitedHealth Group C.E.O.: The Health Care System Is Flawed. Let’s Fix It.” (original article, alternative non-paywall link).

With a title like that, I was excited. Surely, this was going to have some substance—especially coming from a publication like the NYT. But I was disappointed.

The article offered no real solutions, no clear plan, and no concrete actions from the author or UnitedHealth Group itself. Instead, it was packed with platitudes about increasing transparency, providing individualized care, and building partnerships. These are nice ideas, but they’re meaningless without specifics about how to make them happen.

It made me reflect on something I’ve always found odd about how Americans view public services. Firefighters, police officers, and public education are not built around maximizing profits, yet healthcare—something so intimately tied to life and death—is treated like a business. Why is a police commissioner’s salary capped at $300-500k, while insurance CEOs make $10 million or more? Should staying alive and healthy be considered a luxury?

The deeper issue here is something the article tiptoed around: the health insurance system is fundamentally built on profit incentives, and that often pits the goals of insurers against the needs of patients. Insurance companies make more money by collecting premiums, denying claims, and restricting care. As long as the system has significant rewards for that kind of behavior, it’s hard to imagine meaningful change.

To be fair, profit incentives have driven real innovation in parts of the healthcare industry. In pharmaceuticals and medical technology, for example, companies have developed groundbreaking treatments and devices because they were motivated by the potential for high returns. Even in healthcare delivery, innovations like telemedicine and urgent care models have improved access and convenience.

When it comes to health insurance, the profit motive seems to do more harm than good. The focus isn’t on improving outcomes but on managing risk and cutting costs—often at the expense of patients. This is why we see practices like claim denials, complex coverage terms, and surprise billing. They might help a company’s bottom line, but they don’t serve the people who rely on health insurance to stay healthy.

The system is flawed, but it won’t change until we address the core issue: health insurance companies are incentivized to prioritize profits over patients by denying claims and restricting care. While profit can drive innovation in some parts of healthcare, as long as the system rewards putting dollars over providing the most effective care, it will be corrupted against patients.

I was recently asked to provide my opinions on the current state of the generative AI industry.

1. Who is the winning player and how deep is the moat (and what is the source)? Key differentiator?
   • The winning player is OpenAI, with 180 million active users. Google is close behind with 145 million active users. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has over 175 billion parameters, and the source is a diverse range of text data from the internet, including websites, books, articles, forum posts, and other publicly available written content. Key differentiators are being one of the first to market, one of the biggest models, and high quality of results.
2. What risks are associated with the adoption of AI model training platforms, such as technology obsolescence or vendor lock-in?
   • The risks are unpredictable ongoing costs, high setup costs, data security issues, and ethical concerns.
3. Could you elaborate on the current trends shaping the Gen AI market, particularly those that are influencing decision-making processes at the C-suite level in smaller companies? How do these trends differ from those affecting larger corporations?
   • The current trends include higher demand for personalization and increased usage across different industries. In terms of decision-making processes at the C-suite level in smaller companies, the trends are about trying to find a good cost-return balance, versus a larger corporation, which would be less concerned about costs and more about security and long-term success.
   • A significant trend that is common across different sized companies is the desire to jump on and maximize benefits from Gen AI as quickly as possible.

After 6 amazing years at Datadog, I’m moving onto new adventures.

For much of my time at Datadog, I worked with very smart, kind, and collaborative people. For whom work meant more than a line on their resume, and their coworkers are more than just people with whom you spent 8-9 hours almost every day.

I’m very grateful to have met and worked with them.

? Highlights of my journey at Datadog:

• Getting to work with the amazing Solutions Engineering team
• Fulfilling my dream of becoming a Software Engineer
• Implementing cutting edge ML solutions, and helping design, code, and launch brand new software
• Learning meaningful leadership lessons

I’m excited about my next adventures. I’m hoping to put my experience and skills to meaningful use. I’m taking a small break and looking into starting my own revenue-generating initiatives.

For anyone still working at Datadog, I’d love to stay in touch. Please feel free to connect with me here on LinkedIn or reach out to stay updated on my journey or discuss potential collaborations.

To my fellow Datadogs, thank you for your support, your camaraderie, and everything.

We have (had?) a tradition in Solutions Engineering to recite a haiku for big events like promotions or departures, so here is mine:

Six years of yaml

Also code, friends, work, projects

Forever grateful

I had a tiny wood making project over the last two weeks, involving making a more comfortable place for my cat to poop.

I got a litter box enclosure from Etsy 1-2 years ago but the size I got left my cat a bit too little vertical space. So I found a shelf in my buildings basement, ordered a jigsaw from Amazon for $35, and made four little raisers for each corner. Turned out pretty okay I think.

One of the things I struggled with a lot was organizing all the ideas and things I want to do.

There’s always 1000 things I want to do, another 100 things I _need_ to do, and probably 1-3 things I _can_ do (because of available willpower, energy, etc).

For example, this morning I wanted coffee and a shower. In the bathroom, I realized I “needed” to trim the bathroom mat’s decorative tails because the roomba kept getting jammed on them. I also knew that the apartment was a mess and should be cleaned up a bit.

Anyway, I was able to do all of those things, but thinking about them, as well as all the other things I wanted to do, was de-motivating as it felt kind of overwhelming.

Currently the way I usually deal with this kind of thing is I open up my ongoing “Daily Plans” Apple note and add “coffee, shower, bath mat, clean” to the top and it will help me get those things done. Often, after adding these and doing them, I might not remember/care enough to remove them from that note.

This results in that note becoming very very long, and stressing me out, because it makes me wonder if I missed any important todos in it. In the last couple of years, at some point I will just skim it and accept that I might have missed important things and archive it. That’s why the current iteration of this note is called “Daily Plans 2022 After August.”

I’ve been trying to utilize a slightly more prioritized version of this with a google spreadsheet, but it hasn’t worked that well because I hate using google spreadsheets on my phone.

I’ve looked at various todo apps and other prioritization methods that might work for me, but never really found anything.

So in the last few months I’ve been thinking of a new cross-platform app to help me with this, and this morning I wrote up a description and posted it on upwork (https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~013e843563e016fa31), the website I use to hire developers to build apps for me.

Does this idea resonate with anyone?

The current working app name is RomanDo. It’s very egocentric, I know. Does anyone have better name ideas :)?

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• Russian translation of this blog post 

I absolutely hate what’s happening in Ukraine, to both the Ukrainian and Russian people who are there, and to Russia’s reputation.

Recently I saw a message from a Russian friend of a friend, asking why the USA can “flatten [Iraq and Iran] into a pancake,” but Russia has to “quietly watch as extremist and terrorist activities occur at its borders.”

They said no one can clearly explain the difference between “democratic” and “authoritarian” abuse.

I found a New York Daily News article, which I thought was a pretty good explanation of some important differences between the Ukraine and Iraq invasions. I think it is a decent response to that person’s question, so I decided to publish a Russian translation.

I encourage you to read the whole Daily News article, but the main differences it mentions are:

1. Saddam Hussein was a dictator with a history of murder and violating several United Nations Security Council resolutions. Zelensky is a democratically elected leader with public support.

2. The war in Iraq was conducted by a coalition that had 31 member countries at the time of the invasion, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Spain and Turkey. Vladimir Putin found one on-and-off ally in the dictator next door, Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenka.

3. There was large support of the war by the citizens of Iraq when it initially began.

4. The US tried to justify the invasion in the United Nations (UN) before it began. The Iraq invasion was never condemned by the UN. The Ukraine invasion was near-unanimously condemned by the UN, and Russia never tried justifying it to the UN.

Despite the reasons above, most Americans quickly regretted supporting the invasion of Iraq. 

My question to the person, who is arguing that there’s no difference between these 2 invasions: why are you still supporting the war in Ukraine?

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Original message from the Russian friend of a friend

Below is a google translation of their message. I apologize if it’s difficult to read.

There is no need to distort – on the Internet a huge number of people are fighting not for Putin and for a “special operation”, but for primitive common sense.

Not a single, I emphasize, not a single newborn “quasi-pacifist” can answer the most elementary questions, such as why the United States and NATO can bomb Yugoslavia and “roll into a pancake” Iraq and Iran, while Russia (and any other countries) should silently look at extremist and openly terrorist activities at their borders.

No one can clearly explain how “democratic” violence differs from “authoritarian” violence and why the first is possible, while the second is categorically impossible. In a word, either the equality of all and everyone is complete, or only “the right of the strong” and the right of war.

A little unusual of a post for this blog, but recently, my recurring lower back pain soreness and pain has returned. In order to address this soreness, I found an incredibly helpful set of stretches on youtube from a channel called Activ Chiropractic. By doing each stretch for about 10 seconds, a lot of my soreness and pain goes away.

In order to make these stretches easy to reference, I made a screenshot of each stretch and a single image with all the stretches combined. Since it’s been so helpful to me, I figured I would share it with the world on my blog.