zukzuk

It was not a subscription when I did it a year or two ago, but I guess the one-off model may not have worked out. I work in this field and the economics of doing something like this with a D2C model in Canada are not great. People are just not used to exchanging money for healthcare.

There are easily accessible direct-to-consumer startups in Canada that do this sort of testing.

I did mine a while back with Nia Health. Every marker on the OP’s list was included. You will have to pay out of pocket, but the cost was not unreasonable when i did it.

We have two unavoidable necessities in life — food and healthcare (and housing, but i’ll leave that out because it’s an odd fit in this analogy).

The food system is basically a free market (with some weak safety regulations). The apparent end-state of this free market that America has arrived at is tragic. Sure, people like me are free to select healthy, nutritious food at reasonable prices, but at a population level, 70% are overweight and 30% are obese, with all the risk and disease that comes with that.

This is where free markets (in necessary goods) tend to end up. Perfect for ensuring the concentration of capital, disastrous for the average consumer (and never mind the “externalities“…)

I don’t know about “normal”, but I’d argue it’s pervasive.

We seem to associate certain behaviours and patterns with categories of identity, and changing those behaviours in yourself implies an acceptance of that “other” identity.

I remember this distinctly about 20 years ago when I thought about not eating meat anymore. Choosing not to eat meat was easy, but “becoming a vegetarian” felt alien, and took some mental effort. I didn’t see myself as “one of those” people.

I suspect it has a lot to do with how important group identity is to us, as social primates, and how we tend to package one behaviour with a bunch of others. It’s like doing pushups will suddenly make you a “jock” (and maybe the irony is that, to a certain degree it will, as these thing tend to turn into slippery slopes).

The people that use these UIs are already imprecise and non deterministic, yet that hasn’t stopped anyone from hiring them.

The potential advantage of using non-deterministic AI for this is that 1) “programming” it to do what needs to be done is a lot easier, and 2) it tends to handle exceptions more gracefully.

You’re right that the approach is nothing new, but it hasn’t taken off, arguably at least in part because it’s been too cumbersome to be practical. I have some hope that LLMs will help change this.

This is a massive problem in healthcare, at least here in Canada. Most of the common EMRs doctors and other practitioners use either don’t have APIs, or if APIs exist they are closely guarded by the EMR vendors. And EMRs are just one of the many software tools clinics have to juggle.

I’d argue that lack of interoperability is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare system here, and getting access to data through the UI intended for humans might just end up being the only feasible solution.

Almost every sushi restaurant in North America sells “crab” that contains 0% crab. Very few people seem to make a fuss about this.

The cost of employment is not comparable to the cost of a particular good. Employment has much more complicated implications on the economy and on society. A minimum wage is set in part to prevent a desperate race to the bottom, and to (try to) ensure something approaching a living wage. It’s a blunt and often ineffective tool, but viable alternatives are scant. The free market won’t solve this one any more than it solves the problem of healthcare.

My company builds software for medical office assistants, and our clients are typically doctor-owned clinics. We have literally the same problem, but one step down the ladder. The doctors are making the purchasing decision, but MOAs are the direct users. And ironically enough, we have often run into the same problem. Doctors often don’t see the value in software that solves their subordinates’ problems.

In case of preauthorized charges, a closed credit card account can still be debited, and you’re ultimately liable for repayment.

Yes, this is a ridiculous state of things, but such is the world we live in, here in North America anyway.

You must be brushing up against a very different cohort than I.

Sure, there are some very smart and aware gen-zs, just as there have been in every generation. But on average they are as ignorant as anyone else, with maybe a bigger than average bias for apathy.

What do you have against em-dashes!?

Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.

In this scenario, I am your girlfriend, and you are my boyfriend (or from my perspective you are my wife ).

For what it’s worth, I’ve found that if I try to go to bed too early — as my wife often insists — I wake up in the middle of the night. This happens constantly enough that I really try to avoid being in bed before 11pm.

Watching from the sidelines, I’ve always wondered why everything in the life sciences seems to assume unimodal distributions (that is, typically a normal bell curve).

Multimodal distributions are everywhere, and we are losing key insights by ignoring this. A classic example is the difference in response between men and women to a novel pharmaceutical.

It’s certainly not the case that scientists are not aware of this fact, but there seems to be a strong bias to arrange studies to fit into normal distributions by, for example, being selective about the sample population (test only on men, to avoid complicating variables). That makes pragmatic sense, but I wonder if it perpetuates an implicit bias for ignoring complexity.

Attempts at commercialization in technology seem to often happen twice. First we get the much-hyped failure, and only later we get the actual thing that was promised.

So many examples come to mind… RealVideo -> YouTube, Myspace -> Facebook, Laserdisc -> DVD, MP3 players -> iPod…

UiPath may end up being the burned pancake, but the underlying problem they’re trying to address is immensely lucrative and possibly solvable (hey if we got the Turing test solved so quickly, I’m willing to believe anything is possible).

A house I lived in during the pandemic had a pergola covered in wisteria vines over the south facing windows. In the summer the vines would leaf out and block most of the hot sun, and in the winter the leaves fell away and let in a ton of light.

Worked great, looked great, and smelled great for the two weeks of bloom in may.

Sagan’s Demon Haunted World was probably the reason I ended up going into the sciences!

Okay but what's the alternative? Seems like the real problem is not the tool, but the thing the tool operates on.

Have you considered a Garmin watch? It works well enough (for me anyway) for showing and dismissing notifications from my iPhone. The battery lasts well over a week, and the biometrics and fitness/training stuff is way ahead of anything Apple has to offer. And most of the Garmin watches are indeed round.

Apple was able to make it work in most "developed" countries (do we have a better term for these countries now?). I guess they're just better at the regulatory game?

My cat has been in the feline equivalent (Solensia/frunevetmab) for about two years, and although it had a huge positive impact for the first 12 to 18 months, it seems to have suddenly completely stopped working in the last little while.

One theory is that the immune system eventually starts attacking the monoclonal antibody med itself, another is that as in humans, the OA progression might accelerate under the drug.

The big catch is that vegan diets seem to be protective against the progression of Parkinson’s disease: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11516224/

As is often the case, the truth is probably a lot more nuanced than “x causes y”.

"politics" is quite the euphemism for "military invasion, violent aggression, and war crimes"!

A lot of “economic sense” depends on where you draw the boundaries of your externalities.

If you exclude environmental impact, basic human rights, animal welfare, and social stability, a lot of really short-sighted and destructive setups suddenly start to make “economic sense”.

I'm probably prone to this, with every single predisposition you listed.

I can't overstate how much getting fit helped me. I absolutely still get burned out, with the same depression, anxiety, and existential malaise, but the lows are never as low, and it is always much, much easier to bounce back.

I don't know how much of it is a purely psychological sense of resilience you build up by regularly putting yourself through difficult physical stressors in small doses, and how much of it is from physical changes that (presumably) improve your autonomic function and balance... but whatever it is, it's been life changing, going on about 10+ years now, depending how I count it.

Or LuLu if you want a free, open alternative to Little Snitch.

Same with Dog Strangling Vine in Europe vs North America.

I volunteer every week helping with ecosystem stewardship here in Southern Ontario, and DSV is absolutely out of control in parks and forests. It spreads like wildfire and wraps itself around anything and everything, choking out most other plants and creating mass monoculture.

Meanwhile, in France, where I just spent a week hiking, you see the occasional vine here and there, minding its own business, acting like a well-behaved member of the forest community.

We're about to get walloped. Very decent chance of seeing auroras tonight as far south as California.

I can't remember seeing a solar forecast like this, at least not in the last decade: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast

Incoming solar wind simulation here: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/wsa-enlil-solar-wind-pred...

I don’t think this is a fair characterization. The reason git is confusing is that its underlying model doesn’t resemble our intuitive conceptual model of how it ought to work.

This was classic Torvalds — zero hand holding. But he gets away with it because the way git works is brilliantly appropriate for what it’s intended to do (if you just ignore the part where, you know, mere mortal humans need to use it sometimes). I ended up writing my masters thesis a decade ago about the version control wars, and I (somewhat grudgingly) came away in awe at Torvalds’ technical and conceptual clarity on this.