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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

For example, sometimes I would take a medicament mechanically while doing something else and just a few minutes later, forget if I took it or not. Solution: say loud to myself "I'm taking a pill".

My solution for this problem: I have a cron job which sends me an email every morning. If I see that email, I

1. Take a pill out of the bottle and put it on my laptop keyboard

2. Delete the email

3. Eat the pill.

This sequence ensures that even if I crash and lose ephemeral state (err, I mean, get distracted) I can immediately recover by looking at my laptop.

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I prepare a week of pills in a 14-slot pill case (mon-sun w/AM & PM). This results in a very simple decision: if the pills are present for the current timeslot, take them (with the sole exception of Sunday night post-refill, which is easily checked because the box is full). I also get at-a-glance evidence of any missed dose. When the case is empty on Sunday night, I refill all the slots.

Process requires careful consideration when crossing the international date line, otherwise has proved robust, and does not require a laptop.

Yeah, I've considered that. But I always have my laptop, whereas a pill case would be an additional thing to bring when I'm travelling.

Obviously for anyone who has gone for more than 24 hours without checking their email in the past 20 years, the tradeoffs might work out differently.

It's a rare and exhilarating experience to go without that most basic form of messaging, but I was off the grid completely on a remote shore in Alaska for a week last year. I also cross national borders quite regularly and therefore have contingency plans in case some overzealous/corrupt official decides to separate me from my communication devices.

And of course one is not exempt from natural disasters, or the periodic collapse of civilisations.

This has a serious security flaw.

Reproducing the security flaw:

1. Create a plausible enough distraction 2. Place pill on said keyboard 3. Pharmaceutical intervention Complete!

Perhaps, this is a general flaw in the choosing of a visible, non-access restircted (presuming) place to keep the pill (also no verification if it's the correct pill).

How would you solve this problem?

1. Trivially, restrict access to this place (lock your cabin or something) or use a pill box for which you've the keys 2. Verification of pill - camera surveilance of keyboard(has its own issues lol, perhaps, if angle it such a way that you're not keylogging yourself) - weight sensitive plate on keyboard (mission impossible anyone? :D) - edible hologram on pill - SHA engraving on pill (manual verification becomes is time consuming and is not cool) - encode hash in pill weight: Have a delicate weighing balance, alter the weight of the pill by addition or removal of a neutral substance, program the balance or use an sdk for balance to auto verify this; (note SSH keys required) - Ah! laser engrave a qr code on to pill; laser engraving can be reasonable automated (presumption), verification via smartphone i.e. check the hash or qr code is a shortlink to a verifiable hash (I'm reasonable happy with this solution, moving on)

QR code on a pill sounds interesting, then you can scan the pill with your smartphone to find out if you've taken it yet.

Future improvement: We can embed the scanner inside the tongue, so it can directly tell you if you're on or off schedule (perhaps by emitting a bitter vs sweet taste).

Unless you lose state between step 2 and 3.

Then you're left with a pill on your keyboard and no email, so presumably you're supposed to take it.

If you discover a pill on your keyboard and an email, you should delete the email and take the pill.

I think this ensures at-most-once pharmaceutical delivery, but I haven't investigated formal proofs of Bicameral Generals with memory loss.

This can be addressed with a two pill commit protocol.

This is a two-phase commit protocol already. Placing the pill on my laptop constitutes logging the transaction, so that it is guaranteed to be completed even though it hasn't taken place yet.

How can we make the pill transaction atomic?

What if there's a network issue that prevented the email from being sent?

Then I notice that I'm not getting any email. The cron job runs on my mail server.

What if it malfunctions and the email gets repeatedly delivered? :-p

ahem... A "buffer overflow" is what happens. :P

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