Sharing my own anecdata: my Oura ring shows that on days I drink, RHR is 10bpm higher and HRV about 15ms lower. Exercise has a huge impact on sleep quality too.
My theory is that when you're young, your body has a much wider margin for error. A few drinks or sloppy exercise routines never seemed to impact my work. As I've aged, the margin has shrunk, and now there's a measurable effect that I can no longer ignore. Aging is in itself a handicap, but now after too many drinks, the next day both my cognitive sharpness and motivation to even care about shoveling bits around a network have declined.
Now I need to actively stack the deck in my favor, rather that engaging in behaviors that further handicap myself. So that means exercise, a sleep routine, zero alcohol most days of the week, reducing stress, all that goddamn stuff I never had to worry about ;)
Another way to think of it is this: at 40 or 50, can you afford to be lugging around a 20% RHR penalty all day? That will surely come home to roost, probably in the form of atherosclerosis. Remember the most common clinical presentation for a heart attack sufferer is not chest pain, but being dead on arrival.
I bring this up because it's worth nothing that our bodies and minds are remarkably good at covering up problems until far too late. When you get those early warning signals (high RHR, feeling of cognitive decline, etc) trust your body, be proactive, and employ countermeasures.
My having an Apple Watch opened my eyes on how much alcohol affects my sleep, and thus everything else. Even as little as a single drink can have a disruptive effect that night. A real bender might take a couple of days for the effects to completely wear off.
Last year for unrelated reasons I wound up not drinking at all for a few weeks. All of my heart & sleep metrics were improved by large amounts. When I zoom out for the full year view it's obvious immediately when that was in the aggregate data.
In terms of how this knowledge affects my behavior? I'll still tie one on at about the same frequency. But the casual "sure why not, I'll have a beer" is gone. Whenever I'm about to consume alcohol I think about if the amount of enjoyment I'll be receiving is worth the downside & act accordingly.
Yeah that's a great point, the data really makes you pause and say "is this worth the cost?"
The other wearable that has had an extreme impact on my lifestyle has been a Dexcom CGM through Levels. I could write pages about this, but in some ways it has been more impactful than anything else. Knowing how your body reacts to particular foods, and seeing the immediate feedback is super eye opening.
And it extends into sleep as well, looking at what your blood glucose does overnight based on stress, exercise, what you ate, when you ate it, it's quite amazing to see how this subsystem in your body is reacting.
I'll never forget the first time I ate sushi (which mentally I thought of as a "light" food, even a snack) only to see my blood glucose rocket past 200 mg/dLf.
You can also see the effect of alcohol here. Not just with carbohydrate heavy beers, but with the fact alcohol itself suppresses your blood glucose levels, since it causes your pancreas to spike insulin, which disposes of glucose. So it's yet another way alcohol causes a disturbance in your body's attempts at homeostasis.
Alas, a CGM through levels is quite pricey because of US healthcare bullshit about giving CGMs to people without a diabetes diagnosis, but doing a month or two of CGM once per year I think it's a great investment (approx $200 for three sensors which last a total of 30 days)
Is the Oura a good purchase? I've been really eyeing the health benefits of the Apple watch but there's no way I want a portal into the digital world that's a flick of the wrist away. It's bad enough with the phone pickups.
In terms of wearables, it's quite unobtrusive because it's literally just a ring. There is no display to become distracted with. The inside of the ring will glow when it's taking measurements (red for blood oxygen, green for heart rate) so that might surprise you when the lights are out, but that's about the extent of how "intrusive" it is.
The battery life is very good, I typically get several days to a single charge, which is far better than the Apple Watch. But most importantly it's comfortable to wear during sleep - indeed it takes the majority of its measurements only while you're sleeping. YMMV but there's no way I can wear an Apple Watch to sleep, while the Oura ring works perfectly. I've worn the last two generations of Oura ring and would definitely recommend.
100% recommended as a non-obtrusive sleep tracker. But it's a bit bulky as a ring (and... it's a ring) so I can't recommend it to the same degree for day-time wear.
I don't get to exercise my dusty algorithms knowledge nearly enough to follow this nearly as well as I'd like. Are we talking about the bin packing problem and approximation ratios? So, is the intuition here that when the ratio of bins to objects goes up, the worst-case performance for the algorithm goes down into the toilet?
Slightly younger old-timer here: I feel I've gone on the full spectrum on .emacs files and keybindings, at least for emacs versions commensurate with my own vintage.
In the early 2000s I used emacs while writing C++, I was writing Lisp macros without any idea what I was doing just purely so I could avoid using one of the bloated Motif IDEs[1] or vanilla `vi` on SPARC boxes. No vim here, thanks, and the nice IT folks at the investment bank didn't permit you to install your own software, so emacs was a fantastic end-run around their rules. We used `pine` for email because somebody had done the leg work to get it working with the corporate Lotus Notes servers, but I got email working in emacs too. Somehow. Having to actually use your windows box was either a sign of weakness or an encounter with insurmountable corporate policy. Anyway, it never occurred to me to customize the emacs key bindings. At that stage in my career I assumed some godlike personage had chosen those key bindings for a reason, and I had better just go with the flow.
Then I left emacs behind for too many years, but rediscovered it through spacemacs, which let me put off learning what I was actually doing for a few years more. Then on to doom emacs because it would make it "faster", then I finally had my epiphany and realized I would have to do this myself. Emacs of all things should not be slow, there is no excuse for it to be slow on these supercomputers we take for granted. So my config is now tangled from an org mode file to keep it nice and organized. When I add a new thing and it becomes slow, I stop immediately and figure out why. And I kind of stick to the original emacs keybindings where possible.
I have no idea what people are complaining about when it comes to RSI. My only non-negotiable change is to reassign (at the OS level) caps lock to control, simply because ctrl is such a small target on most keyboards, which are apparently made for FOLKS WHO NEED ALL CAPS way more than you or I use ctrl. Scary thought. I would argue RSI is going to come from the R part: repetitive. You spend most of your time, even when coding, just typing strings over and over. Likely the RSI suffers never learned to touch type and so the real strain comes from well established bad habits. Try using an Ergodox-EZ ortholinear split keyboard, you'll soon learn whether you're truly touch typing or not. I can't see how emacs shortcuts would be the source of pain. Maybe if you're typing on a 2000-era Sony Vaio or Nokia handset and never learned to touch type? Reminder: old curmudgeon talking here, I may have just got lucky.
If you like emacs keybindings and happen to be using macOS (which out of the box in most text fields supports the basic emacs key bindings anyway), a kind soul has put together a KeyBindings.dict that extends support even further: https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/9670905
Mentoring newer engineers, it's remarkable how many of them are at the terminal holding down the backspace key, waiting for individual characters to be deleted over long seconds. The idea of using option-b or ctrl-a to move backwards blows their mind. Ctrl-k to delete everything forward of point is also revelatory. It's curious that they get stuck in this rut, totally dependent on the shell day to day, but wholly accepting of these inefficiencies. Yet their forebears - who actually wrote and hacked on these shells, if anything went overboard giving you ways to do everything they could conceive of with the bare minimum of keystrokes. How many of them know you can hit ESC-t to transpose the two previous words in bash? (M-t in emacs for the same).
I'm tempted to blame the children but honesty if you give a child a claw hammer and they point at the end with the V shaped prongs and say "what is that for?" you will explain it to them, or they will eventually figure it out. Maybe its purpose will never occur to them, but it's a rare user of hammers who has driven nails but never encountered the need to reverse that operation. How exactly do we design software such that someone notices the existence of option-b and how much time it could save them?
Maybe it's all the fault of the mouse? Better yet: Windows and the mouse!
[1] I'm sure you can empathize with a feeling of horror that once upon a time, Motif felt bloated and slow. Perhaps we are doomed to always be at war with slow abstractions, independent of the hardware capabilities.
Basically, it's not uncommon to find things running 1.5x faster on M1. Even outside of benchmarks, everything is perceptibly - dare I say it - snappier.
Interesting results re: emacs. Your tweet says you’re using emacs-plus, presumably via brew? Are you running emacs with Rosetta or is it an arm64 build?
In my mind, a media organization censoring a story that could aid Trump just days before the election is acting for the greater social good. I don't feel that optimizing for Greenwald's personal value system at this particular time would be the right tradeoff for America as a whole. Greenwald having the satisfaction of doing the right thing while the rest of us endure the rule of a strong man hell-bent on becoming America's Putin is not a fair trade.
It sucks that we don't live in a society where "The Truth" - if it could only be exposed to sunlight - would stand taller and brighter than everything else around it. If Greenwald wants to cosplay Walter Cronkite, and who wouldn't, he has to understand the impossibility of that in our current context. Everything is turned into spin for the disinformation machine. Everything is distorted, filtered, weaponized, super concentrated, and targeted directly to those it will anger the most. Truth has no power and no legitimacy in this context. Have we not learned anything from watching Trump these past four years?
We have to solve that problem before we can enjoy the benefits of truthful journalism. A problem for which we have to take some responsibility, since our technology is being abused to create this wretched hellscape.
It sucks and it isn't the world in which I want to live. I have young children myself. They will grow up with no Walter Cronkite, no trusted source of information. They will grow up in a world where truth is disconnected from reality. It's broken, and we can't ignore that, no matter how much it hurts us personally.
I ordered two of them (one by accident, LOL) two months ago. Haven’t heard anything since. No order updates. Emails to their sales team have gone unanswered. Not sure if my case is typical but that might have been $450 I never see again …
You'll get it. PINE runs on almost zero margin, they collect money right around when the production run is starting, and then you'll get your product when it's done being build, tested, packaged, and shipped.
Both my orders (PineBook Pro and PinePhone) took a while to arrive but I got them both.
I'd be a bit more patient with COVID, also they pleaded recently in one of their newsletters to ask on the forum, rather than overwhelming them with emails.
Also, HK has some restrictions on shipping until June 7. You'll get it. They're a small company, give them a chance.
They ship directly from China (Shenzen specifically), and there can be delays sometimes. When I ordered my pinebook pro, the Hong Kong protests resulted in a slight delay. I think the lockdowns in China are causing delays currently. They pushed back the release day of one of their new hardware platforms, the hardrock64. It is sort of lame that they haven't been transparent about shipping dates, but I think your goods will come.
You’ll definitely get it, but I ordered one way back almost when they first announced then and it took months to finally get here - they are very fair with pricing and it’s super cool how open source it is, but they aren’t fast :) plus with covid, it could take even longer. They definitely will ship you the laptops though.
I don't think I got stung with that. It's a bit random with getting stuff from the U.S. - sometimes you get stung with import tax and a stupid handling charge and sometimes you get lucky.
Edit: looking at other comments, it probably came from China which tends to be better for not getting caught with import charges.
When they started accepting orders last February/March, I thought it was clear that they wouldn't be shipping until May. I too ordered one and am eagerly awaiting it! While I agree that email updateds would have been nice, they have posted on their website updates:
(aside: fascinating example of a US military slide deck, like a 90s fever dream made in Harvard Graphics)
Here’s also a Voices from DARPA episode, which suggests they’ve been funding research since at least 2012: https://blubrry.com/voices_from_darpa/30975140/episode-17-gu...
In terms of ensuring designs are not tampered with seems like watermarking is the direction they’re exploring.
Another fascinating concept was the “silicon odometer” to ensure recycled chips aren’t reintroduced into the supply chain.
Asianometry has a fascinating video on that issue: https://youtu.be/7epnv43jGV8