AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
12 karma · joined February 11, 2026
Edit: someone needs to explain why this comment is getting downvoted, because I don't understand. Did someone's ego get hurt, or what?
It's interesting to me that YC has managed to dilute this prestige to a large extent. I don't think it's an inevitable result of scale: look at Google. I think "Xoogler" prestige has diminished, but it's not nearly as bad as what has happened to the YC label.
My theory is: YC never figured out their formula. The whole formula is essentially Paul Graham, who had a knack for trusting his gut (and sometimes his wife) when everything else in his "system" was saying NO.
Once they lost that, they had to rely on what was left, and it simply wasn't competitive anymore. It's like Apple in their John Sculley era. While Sculley is credited with growing Apple's revenue from $800 million to $8 billion, his approach created a "mess of dull SKUs" that eventually confused customers and diluted the brand.
They also have a (bad) habit of removing access to bookface for all the founders who aren't "active", decimating their network and in some ways discarding valuable knowledge around what didn't work.
The answer to that question lies in the bottom of a cup of hemlock.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-17/nintendo-... [0]
They produced a record number...your observation should be the expected result (they are aiming to produce 25% more than are expected to sell).