I find Garmin's sleep tracking "accurate" in that it typically matches how I feel the next day, but that also makes it not terribly useful because I don't really need a gadget to tell me when I feel tired. Mostly I wear the watch to sleep out of inertia and in case I need a flashlight in the middle of the night.
But there have been three aspects of sleep tracking that have been mildly useful:
1. A few times my heart rate variability went haywire and the sleep scores didn't match how I felt, and it turned out I was sick and had not yet noticed any symptoms. Since then it has been mildly useful to have a heads up when I'm probably coming down with something before symptoms show up.
2. You can use their Lifestyle Logging to track how things like caffeine, alcohol, and various nighttime routines affect your sleep. I mean, I haven't discovered anything that's not already common knowledge, but somehow having hard data makes it more compelling. I suppose if I was going to trial any sleep aids then Garmin's correlation would be convenient and save me from having to maintain my own spreadsheet.
3. It alters the suggested workouts if you haven't been sleeping well. Trivial to do manually, but it's a convenient reminder not to overextend.
> Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals?
By "variety" you mean B12 & omega 3? Or is there something else you think vegans need to supplement that omnivores don't? My kids have varying dietary preferences and personally I haven't found it any more difficult to get high-quality supplements than it is to get high-quality animal proteins.
But what "variety of unregulated supplements" most reminds me of is my chore prepping the cow mineral-vitamin mixes on the farm I worked on as a kid. Most farm animals are given a variety of supplements (by my recollection the cows got A, D, E, iodine, selenium, zinc, various minerals...) that have even less regulation than human supplements. And roughly two thirds of beef cattle in the US receive growth-promoting hormones, though we didn't use those on our farm. And much of the dairy consumed in the US is directly supplemented with vitamin A and D. If you consume animal products in the US you're probably already taking poorly-regulated supplements, they've just been laundered through the body of an animal.
(To be clear I don't agree with the grandparent comment that animal products like dairy, meat, and fish are inherently unhealthy, at least for most people. But neither do I agree that they're inherently superior.)
B12 is not produced by animals, but supplemented to them as well if they do not live outside.
B12 is produced by bacteria in dark soil.
Dairy is unhealthy because it contains a lot of hormones that are unhealthy to take, except from your own species and during weaning stage of growing up.
An other reason it is unhealthy is the amount of puss allowed in by the industry. Those animals are sick and have huge udders, too big -> often infected.
Others have drawn the same connection to Dynamicland, but the article briefly mentions "Dynamicland, a project to which Folk owes much of its design and philosophy" and lists Omar Rizwan as one of the Folk Computer founders. Omar was on the Dynamicland staff ~2018-2020, see https://dynamicland.org/2023/People/
I'm watching the second video right now. Really interesting thing of comparing that Oculous and Apple Vision are doing vs what folk computer is doing to put the physical world first.
A weakness I see is the frequent printing and communication using glyphs similar to April tags. The origami buttons are clever tho.
> Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
Agreed, let the ring just be a button that can trigger recording on a watch or phone (among other tasks) rather than squeezing in a microphone and audio transmitter.
> I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE...
Neat! Or maybe a tiny solar cell? Perhaps the button itself is piezoelectric, like a wearable version of the EnOcean Nodon line of battery-free wireless switches -- a BLE advertising event costs less than 100 microjoules which a button press should be able to provide, though ensuring 100% reliability over BLE with such a tiny energy budget would be hard.
Alternately it could communicate with the watch using IR, but the knuckles might occlude line of sight. The button press could mechanically emit an ultrasonic tone, but that requires an always-on mic in the watch/phone and would be susceptible to shenanigans. Maybe pressing the button causes a specific vibration that a watch accelerometer can reliably recognize?
Now I want someone to find a way to make this work... but long term I expect that the real solution will be making hand gestures work reliably 100% of the time with no ring at all.
> There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you?
Testing is a professional skill -- not all blind people are good at accessibility testing, just as not all sighted people are good at GUI testing.
My team has carved out an accessibility budget so that every couple years we can hire an accessibility consultancy (which employs a couple blind testers) for a few tens of hours of work to review one of our application workflows. Based on the issues they identify we attempt to write tests to prevent those classes of issues across the whole application suite, but our budget means that less than one percent of our UI has ever been functionally tested for accessibility.
It comes down to cost/benefit. Good testers are expensive, good accessibility testers doubly-so. And while I personally think there's a moral imperative and maybe a marketing angle, improving accessibility truthfully doesn't seem to meaningfully improve sales. But if the testing costs came down by a couple orders of magnitude it would be a complete game-changer.
I think one path that could be used and wholy underrated is simply sitting with a user while they use/navigate your application. The user themselves doesn't necessarily need to be skilled tester, and you will need to have more session time than a skilled tester, but it does work and can help a lot.
Also, try using your app/site without a mouse. I've found it funny how many actual, experienced, sighted testers don't actually know the keyboard navigation for things like triggering menus, select boxes, etc. Personally, I don't think I could get used to the voice navigation myself, it's not that it doesn't work, it's just kind of noisy. Although, most sites are excessively noisy visually imo.
Completely agree on both counts. We do usability testing, including with keyboard-focused advanced users.
But usability testing with blind users presents some unique challenges. A past org I worked at ran some usability studies with blind users [1] and while I was only tangentially involved in that project it seemed that subject recruitment and observations were much more complex than typical usability studies. I haven't managed to run a usability study with blind participants at my current org though we have discussed ways we could recruit blind users for studies -- our software is complex enough that we'd need someone who is both blind and a prospective user of our software.
For many of the families I know it's less about the quality of movies than the cost and effort of going to the movies.
Going to the movies costs an extra hour for the round-trip to the theater, ~$40 for adult tickets, ~$60 for the kids (2h babysitter or movie tickets), ~$20 for concessions. Whereas watching at home on our 75" TV with homemade popcorn costs a tiny fraction of that, even including electricity and popcorn kernels and the amortized cost of the TV.
As nice as it can be to see a good movie in a theater, it's typically not so much better than watching at home that it's worth an extra hour and more than a hundred dollars.
Depends where you are. In Berlin we have around 20 movie theaters nearby. It costs 14 euros per ticket and the nearest theater is in a walking distance.
Yes we watch a lot of movies home, but there are multiple festivals every year curating interesting content.
> I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work
My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.
Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
For reference, this is referred to as "sortition", and at least the Athenians felt that it was more democratic than elections. The randomization machines they used for picking winners (kleroterion) are quite ingenious.
In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.
Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.
That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity.
The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.
However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
There is no historical precedent for our democratic system. Not Romans, Greeks, or 13 colonies. Why cite them?
Nobody has ever had a system with 300 million people having almost direct voting while simultaneously having no definition of a citizen besides “born here”.
I’m skeptical. The Trump/Fetterman/RFK phenomenon is the fruit of this democracy, not an unlikely aberration.
> but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
But there have been three aspects of sleep tracking that have been mildly useful:
1. A few times my heart rate variability went haywire and the sleep scores didn't match how I felt, and it turned out I was sick and had not yet noticed any symptoms. Since then it has been mildly useful to have a heads up when I'm probably coming down with something before symptoms show up.
2. You can use their Lifestyle Logging to track how things like caffeine, alcohol, and various nighttime routines affect your sleep. I mean, I haven't discovered anything that's not already common knowledge, but somehow having hard data makes it more compelling. I suppose if I was going to trial any sleep aids then Garmin's correlation would be convenient and save me from having to maintain my own spreadsheet.
3. It alters the suggested workouts if you haven't been sleeping well. Trivial to do manually, but it's a convenient reminder not to overextend.
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