I had a similar epiphany a few years back when I started wearing a step-tracker/sleep monitor.
It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done.
I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.
I've found one very interesting thing from these trackers - namely how even small amount of alcohol destroy sleep quality metrics. One beer is enough for my sleep scores to drop by like 20-30% and it's consistent and reproducible for me every time. Whether it actually matters - I don't know, but it made me drink much less (from maybe once a week to maybe once every two months) which is good outcome I guess.
Eh, I found several interesting things from various tracking tools. Take a nap? Sleep is destroyed this night. Exercise in the evening? Same. Not something I’d pay attention to without noticing the chart afterwards.
There’s also the motivation factor. I’m not sure of the total %, but I certainly did some exercising just to fill the daily goal. Nothing life-changing, but for the price of a cheapo apple watch se once every 5 years or so, more than worth it.
It’s not unlike simplistic time tracking on my iphone. I spent a lot of time on bullshit websites. Obviously I knew it was happening, but the sheer magnitude was surprising. It’s akin to acute pain letting you know there’s a health problem vs something brewing in the background that you are vaguely aware of, but have no motivation to truly care about - one is far more noticeable than the other
Being aware, and being aware that you are aware are very similar things that are subtly different.
I was aware that alcohol affects your next day, even a little. That's because people always say that alcohol is bad for you (surprise surprise). I heard this, so you could say that I was aware. I generally thought about this as "a hangover is bad for you." and was somewhat dismissive of the "even a single drink has a bad effect" mantra.
I did some experimenting, and slowly realized that even a single drink can indeed have an impact on the next day. It's not a hangover, but an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness. I am now aware that I am aware.
Same. I had a Garmin for about 6 months and I eventually just stopped wearing it and sold it. Knowing how many steps I took today, checking it several times a day to see if I was meeting my goal, knowing how many vertical feet I skied.. none of this data ended up meaning anything to me.
The best use I got from my Apple Watch was to use the companion app of my gym routine tracker (to track current loads and personal best) and play music so I didn't have to bring the phone to the gym.
That was it, I got extremely annoyed by notifications so over time just disabled them. Also for some reason the heart rate monitor glitched a couple times, got alerts about my BPM at 180+ while I was sitting on the couch.
Eventually I just stopped using it and now sits in some drawer.
I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
I've had a flurry of activity working with emacs, breaking out some things that were previously "Steve stuff" inside my local configuration into real packages.
One thing that I've been very happy with has been "org-people", now on MELPA, which allows contact-management within Emacs via org-mode blocks and properties. It works so well with the native facilities that it's a joy to work on.
I've been learning a lot of new things while I've been expanding it now it has a bigger audience (e.g. "cl-defstruct" was a pleasant surprise).
No when people attend courses, paying money for the privilege no less, and get told "Now open a pull request" they don't care about your project - they care about getting their instructor to say they've done a good job.
> started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new
That's a fun thing to do when you move cities, or countries.
I spent several weekends riding every single tram line in Helsinki with my son. We'd pick a number we'd not yet done and ride each both ways to the terminus.
Get out at the end of the line and see what was nearby, have a cake, then come back home.
We had a map from the local transport company and we'd put stickers on the lines we'd done, and the last stops.
A good way to see different neighbourhoods in the same city.
Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
I was actually aware of that; the problem with BASIC, at least with my research with homebrew C64 is that BASIC is ridiculously slow. It’s fine as a basic command line but for games I would likely not get anywhere near the performance I need.
What I am working on is stretching the NES pretty hard. Honestly I probably should do it in assembly but I like the idea of using a high level language to do it.
Does the cost matter? Many countries subsidize healthcare, so there's either no charge or a token payment which doesn't even pretend to cover the cost of treatment.
Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.
The cost absolutely matters. If something costs tens of thousands of € per month for a long time then it will either not be approved or will be used very rarely. The cost is not irrelevant because the insurance does not have infinite money. They need to decide which cures, medicines, operations they fund. They can spend 1000€ to cure 100 people of something or to spend 100k to maybe cure someone with an experimental treatment.
This is one of the issues with the modern cancer cures, thst they are very specific to the cancer, the patient, need one off lab work for each patient and this makes them very expensive and not affordable to many. Despite having public healthcare the managers of it still need to decide what to spend their limited funds on.
The treatment cost for the newest hep C drugs have dropped dramatically since they were introduced. Started around $100,000 for a course. So six-figure price tags don't keep "cure"-level drugs from getting approved or introduced. The cost of the existing not-a-cure treatments also added up fast, after all; as they do for many cancers.
You're right about the specificity - Hep C is a bigger-population target than a lot of cancers are - but a lot of the new approaches are looking to be inherently more "personalized" to compensate.
> Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.
I think it matters because oftentimes insurance companies won't cover treatments if a cheaper form of treatment exists. It doesn't matter if the old treatment is less effective or a much worse outcome for a patient. This is especially true for "new" treatments.
Cost is always relevant, given that the amount of money in any healthcare system is limited and someone must decide whether to pay for patient A or patient B.
It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done.
I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.
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