But when it fails, everything fails at the same time.
It's not that far fetched that if your phone dies, you can't unlock your car, you can't pay for the bus, your insulin pump now lost its controller and you can't call anyone.
> A smartphone is a device you can pretty much guarantee people will keep with themselves
It's a device that many will keep, some might not, some will forget it, and seeing the state of some phones, you can't assume that it will be in good working order. Many apps will also require a relatively new phone, what if you can't afford a new phone?
My current GCM uses NFC and my phone to connect with my pump. I would like to remove my phone from the loop. Just use the pump to connect to the sensor directly.
Could not agree with this more: with a little insulin on board, a quick walk (even 5 minutes) has a profound impact.
Calf raises are absolutely diabolical as well, if you haven't tried them. There's some lore around this that the calf muscles are better adapted to absorb glucose, I haven't dug in other than to verify they do work.
The invention of the CGM might only be second to insulin in improving the lives os T1Ds.
It really is easier, and you can see how this works in any number of countries with universal healthcare. I don’t have diabetes but do have chronic health issues that need constant treatment. Here in the UK:
1. I can reorder prescriptions on the NHS app when I’m running out. They get delivered to my preferred pharmacy or if I was away from home I can specify a local pharmacy. The prescription will be delivered there.
2. Prescriptions normally cost 9.90GBP per “item” (where an item is one type of medicine so may be multiple physical boxes of pills for example). This is a fixed cost and is independent of the type of medicine or how much it costs to the NHS. But…
3. You can get a prepayment certificate for 114.50 GBP per year which means you don’t have to pay per item. I have this so every time I go to the pharmacy I check one box and sign the bottom of a form and my drugs are free. The cert is a simple online purchase and took me about 5 minutes to apply and get accepted for. Zero friction. I have never been asked to show the certificate just state that I have one check a box and sign and we’re done. If I did have to show it, the “certificate” is just an email with a number so not hard.
4. The same app I used in #1 has messages from my GP in it so if there was ever a thing when they needed to talk to me, arrange a blood test, deliver test results etc it’s all in there (and I don’t pay a penny for any of those things either). Everything that’s in the NHS app is also on the NHS website which has excellent accessibility etc so works just fine on Linux for me when I don’t have my mobile device.
5. If you want to go outside the NHS you can go to a private practicioner and get a private prescription. That’s delivered to the same pharmacy you just have to give them this number that gets texted to you with the prescription and pay (a bit) more money for it. I had to do this recently and it cost me 22GBP for an “item”. You can also have private health insurance (I do) which means seeing specialists is easier than on the NHS and there is generally no wait time for tests etc. Private health insurance in the UK is much cheaper than it is in the US.
Bottom line: At least here in the UK the NHS may have bureaucracy internally but that doesn’t affect me at all as a “customer”. My healthcare is super-easy and convenient and far, far less expensive than healthcare in the US. You guys have the worst of all worlds. Both my wife and I have had medical treatment in the US and it manages to be eye-wateringly expensive and simultaneously worse than what I get for free on the NHS.
> I can reorder prescriptions on the NHS app when I’m running out. They get delivered to my preferred pharmacy or if I was away from home I can specify a local pharmacy. The prescription will be delivered there.
We have that too. But that doesn't address the person's main complaint, that they have to consult with a doctor in the first place to get that prescription.
That only really applies to the first time it's issued. Repeat prescriptions can be issued with the NHS app. I've requested dosage changes on multiple occasions and they review it with the request and sign it off.
Any long term condition like diabetes isn't the admin overhead you're making it out to be.
Yeah exactly. Can't speak for diabetes but in the UK there is certainly zero admin overhead for me for my long-term health condition. I'd be very surprised if diabetes is different.
Every now and again I get scheduled for a blood test or a consultation to review my meds. The consultation sometimes happens by phone if mutually convenient and I don't need to actually be tested there and then etc. Repeat prescriptions just get issued and if there is any problem I can send a message on the app.
In the UK diabetes patients get automatically invited to followup appointments by the GP and eye screening tests every <n> months, where n depends on the severity of your condition. Adjustments to medication will happen at those appointments.
It would be one more layer of bureaucracy, I can tell this as an Italian, if you have a serious emergency you are better off paying out of pocket for a private clinic.
And this is for every aspect of society, I feel like all this burocracy is just made for people that liv e off the state, I get home at 6pm, offices are not even open, I have to take half a day off work to stand in a line every time...
Having lived in France, Germany, and Australia I can report that there’s a lot less bureaucracy in those systems than in the US system. Like telecom, the participants in the medical system put up tollbooths because they can.
Why would it be bureaucracy? In places with universal healthcare, you go to the doctor, show your card, then go to your appointment. Go to the pharmacy with your script, show your card and pay whatever is left to pay, if any.
That's it. No open enrollment, no surprise bills, no trying to figure out which ppo or hmo works best, no wondering if it's in network or not or any of that BS.
The apparent fear of universal healthcare many Americans seen to have is incredible.
And to call it out in a thread where someone has literally shared that they're forced to attend a pointless appointment at an exorbitant cost like that isn't itself some form of wasteful bureaucracy. But if the time and money is going to a corporation instead of the government it's better :/
The US has managed to combine the worst aspects of universal/socialized health care with the worst aspects of an attempted free market system. It’s quite an achievement.
It works as intended. It's a part of cutthroat capitalism. The goal here is to make sure that basic service is unevenly distributed so that people who don't have it are motivated to work extra hard and get it.
There’s no “cutthroat” about it. The system intentionally removes as much competition as possible. It’s cushy, taxpayer-funded socialism for the rich. (Also known as corporatism.)
At this point, China is doing capitalism better than us in its consumer industries. They actually have real competition, so fierce at times that the government worries about what it calls “involution”, or destructive competition (which Marx predicted as the end state of capitalism). Of course, its healthcare system is not run through capitalist competition like its consumer industries; it is fully state managed.
Some real competition might actually help if we’re going to keep pretending to be capitalists. Or we could move from socialism for the rich to socialism for the people. I don’t really care which as long as we move on from the current dysfunctional system.
> In places with universal healthcare, you go to the doctor
NHS experience: you might have to wait two weeks to see the doctor, and it will be a ten minute appointment. (Which in this case might be fine.) If you can use a nurse things tend to be much easier.
The NHS relies on heavy triaging - so, for primary care, emergency cases will be seen immediately (either at a hospital or at the nearest GP surgery with an available slot), urgent will be seen same day (at your usual GP surgery), and non-urgent medical problems (eg. back pain that isn't getting worse) might take 2-3 days.
But everything else (eg. discussing blood test results, medication reviews, mental health issues) will get dumped into the "routine" appointment bucket and, yes, will often take 1-2 weeks.
You do hear occasional horror stories about the triage process, but my experience has been pretty reasonable. For example, I lost my voice last year but had no other symptoms - so I expected to have to wait a few days to be seen. But I was treated as an urgent case since it affected my ability to work, and got an appointment that afternoon.
I've had a checkup with the NHS once or maybe twice in my life, and it was not with a doctor. (I'm not saying that it should be, maybe a nurse and a blood pressure check is all you need?)
There's actually less bureaucracy involved for the patient. In Germany, you normally don't do anything at all, just let the doctor's assistants read your card, then go to the pharmacy, let them read your card and get your medicine. Sometimes you have some copay of around 5 Bucks.
From what I read, healthcare had always been super complicated and bureaucratic in the US. Nobody here knows what "network" or "deductibles" even mean.
Going to the doctor or calling an ambulance is similar to calling the police in some sense. You don't think about "network" or cost when calling the police, right? We do neither for health care related things.
Btw. getting down voted for an honest question is a bad thing in my opinion. People should talk to each other and ask questions.
Insulin being expensive is the most weird and disturbing thing. It's just crazy. Don't they have Canada just in front of them to learn from their neighbors just how ridiculous this is?
I love this bit from the documentary "Behind the Curve (2018)." One of the scientists poses the following question: "What evidence could I show you that would change your position?"
If someone can't answer that, it's probably not worth arguing about.
Acetaminophen has a quirky effect if you’re on a CGM. It makes your interstitial glucose read higher than your blood glucose.
Context: I’m t1 diabetic.
I was recovering from an injury, and I switched from ibuprofen to acetaminophen. But the whole time I was on it, my sensor glucose was reading 50-60 mg/dl higher than my blood glucose. This is really bad on a closed loop system as my pump kept trying to lower my blood sugar, but it was pushing me into hypoglycemia (50 mg/dl).
Turns out this is a common effect, but a relatively new discovery that no one told me about.
As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.
People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
The point is that Europe is not much better when one goes outside the regional capitals of each state, or district, depending on how each country is organised.
Most towns and villages are also not great examples of infrastructure, especially in the southern countries.
I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.
UK transport is much worse than the continent. London is fairly well served but elsewhere not so much, especially not the countryside. The trains are very expensive (even with an old person's railcard) and the buses are often irregular or non-existent in large areas of the countryside.
I am aware, having spent some time in Bristol and Cardiff, in various occasions.
That situation is very comparable to many places in the continent, some of them even worse.
Also here that are many small towns and villages that an hourly bus is already something, and naturally there aren't stops scattered all over the place, or worse, offer no protection from weather.
Well there's a big gap between something like London, a very dense city, and actual countryside. There's also a big variation in will. Where I grew up (Metroland, just beyond the end of the Metropolitan "underground" Line) the services are (other than the afore-mentioned London underground) abysmal because providing services costs money & people there want lower taxes. But where my mother lives today, near Bingley, there are enough buses that I get confused as to which one goes closest to her house when I visit.
The difference in London is also in large part because London was allowed to retain a unified transport system when Tories dismantled other systems because ideologically their position is the Invisible Hand of the Free Market will fix everything.
> to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Which is also, to some extent, the reality in the US as well. Some number of the "city centers" have better public transport and/or walk-ability [1] available than what is available just outside those city centers.
One big difference in the US is the massive land area difference as compared to Europe means there is a huge amount more land area (and therefore population) with little to no public transport or walk-ability available and a car becomes mandatory rather than optional in those areas.
[1] It's not perfect, I'm sure there are plenty of city centers in western states where even the city center itself is so spread out that walk-ability suffers and that a car tends to become more necessary.
Which is the same in small European towns and villages, there are only a couple of buses, many of which stop around 8 PM, and tend to occur once an hour in most cases, if not less.
Basic stuff like taking kids to school requires having a car, or being lucky to have some kind of Bus service collecting the kids, for some school levels, and doesn't cover stuff like taking them to other after school activities.
Want to go to the big commercial surfaces? They are all outside the town center and seldom have bus connections.
I’m an American and my vision, fully corrected, is right at the legal borderline to get a license without restrictions. I’ve never “failed” a vision exam at the DMV; one time the clerk even said, “good enough”. (Don’t worry, I never drive, I only keep my license up to date for serious emergencies).
A serious emergency isn't going to be helped by someone with very little driving experience. I don't follow your reasoning. If it was a serious emergency who would care if you had a license?
People think about things differently. It may be that for OP, "but I don't have a license" would cause a second thought and waste time in an emergency. They may be self aware enough to head that off.
A police officer would. The penalty for an accident might be negligent driving.
The penalty for an accident without a license is, at minimum, driving without a license. You're also not likely to be covered by insurance without one either, even if you're not at fault.
Take a person who has marginally acceptable eyesight, who never drives, put them in an emergency situation where they need to drive and you've got a recipe for much higher odds of having an accident.
Given that getting a license is an option, and it conveniently doubles as a photo ID, and there's really not a reason to not get one.
This is one of the strangest internet myths. Every single state in America will issue a photo ID which is fully equivalent to a drivers license for every purpose other than permitting you to drive.
Also, you don't need "Real ID" to fly no matter what they say. You don't even need a photo ID at all (although they'll force you to waste time if you don't have one. I found this out when I lost mine but still had to travel.)
This depends a lot on where you are. I've lived in York, Darlington, Leeds, London, Oxford, and Liverpool for decent periods and used buses in all of them regularly. Only Darlington was really unpleasant for buses - they were often every half an hour and if one came early and you missed it you would be left in the cold for ages without information.
Oxford was great (though cycling was even better); Leeds, Liverpool, and York were perfectly fine, with regular and reliable services; London's are famously efficient.
Antisocial behaviour isn't honestly that common in my experience, though I'm sure that varies by location. Had some aggro in London once, and again on a London night bus. The football special to the LNER stadium in York was properly boisterous, and quite threatening to the poor away-supporting family on the lower deck, but that at least carried a copper to make sure nothing stupid happened. Other than that, I've only ever really seen loud schoolchildren - who can be annoying but have never caused difficulty for anyone outside their group. I've honestly seen worse behaviour on the tube (and been the object of it on Cross Country Trains).
Unfortunately, I've encountered antisocial behaviour on many occasions on buses. Had one guy sit opposite me and proceed to insult me about my clothes. I went over to the driver to complain (I had said nothing and this point) and the driver threatened to throw me off. Also had people hit me on buses and trains. And witnessed someone sexually harassing another passenger — he stood rubbing his crotch in front of her and asked her to "finish me off".
Football fans are often bad. Especially on trains. I hate getting a train full of them.
Football fans are a bit odd. If you spend a lot of time in football crowds you get much more adept at telling when things are going to kick off and when people are only being obnoxiously loud. Both are annoying but only the first is actually dangerous. But the second can definitely make people feel unsafe. And given that you can't easily get off a train if you feel threatened it's a big problem.
When I was younger I got assaulted on the street five times, and it was always in improbable places and for no obvious reason. Some people are just shitty, some of the time.
I know it doesn’t work everywhere, but I’m happy there are services like Uber and Lyft when I get older. I could see myself using those services a lot when I am no longer able to drive.
Nope, even best countries in the world with great public transport like Switzerland have tons of remote places basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
Guess what, mostly old folks live there and all this applies there. Its just not financially feasible to cover everybody. Proper full self driving should fix this, nothing less I am afraid.
> basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
This sentence is hilarious from an American perspective. There are central business districts of major US cities that are less connected to public transit than the most remote rock at the end of a steep canyon in Switzerland.
A bus that ran 1x a day on any day of any week would be a drastic improvement for nearly all of the US.
Its not mutually exclusive - most of the world thats not in stone age has better public transport than US, I guess everybody knows that and its not by accident but for good (well bad but logical) reasons.
That some PT is still not covering somebody's full needs for long term living is understandable too I presume, especially if its few days gaps in service.
Proper self driving is furthest away from being able to handle these cities as well, don't see these driving in Sicily before 2040.
Many of these older people don't even know how to use a smartphone so even a 'perfect solution' will take some effort.I still have to help my grandpa with landline calls because he never had one himself (I live in one of the most developed countries in the world).
Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.
i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.
the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.
There is a lot of variance amongst third party/clone tags. I had some grey plastic losanges for a while they were junk and all ended up in the trash. Now I have a bunch of Hoco tags and they’re decent (especially for the price)
Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.
i've got the"ATUVOS Air Tracker Tag Card Wallet Tracker", purchased november 2023 and it's still going strong.
but i think there's some available now in the card form factor that have rechargeable batteries, and that's what i'll buy when i have to replace this one.
The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
yes, apple has a LOT of hidden complexity. Another example is their dongles - many of them have significant processing power, like video conversion chips inside the shell.
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google
That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
I've never had any 'not work'. Sorry.
My Huawei Freeclip 2 are fantastic and a very different form factor Apple doesn't offer sadly. Great for urban walks and listening to podcasts while still being able to hear your surroundings.
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).
And it works every. single. time.
Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.
Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).
I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.
It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
I've had Bose 700s, Sennheisers, Anker Soundcore, and probably other bluetooth earbuds and none of them come close to the simplicity of the Airpods. The Bluetooth handoff and pairing is insanely easy and works within a second or two. I've never once had to go to Bluetooth settings to force it to pair.
This is the opposite of my experience. AirPods refusing to connect, randomly disconnecting, pressing "pause" on my phone only to have "play" instead invoke Apple Music on my Mac, and so forth. There are tons of "smart" features built into these that make the experience worse than I've had on normal, bluetooth headphones.
When it works, they at least connect with little friction. That's nice. The real value is in the very good noise-cancellation and battery life.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
I have been trying to make more friends in the real and virtual world the past two years, and I have been pretty successful. Most of my new friends come from the following: Volleyball, MtG, or a writing group.
Really, I think that it comes down to make making or joining a space with a shared activity and moderating out the crap.
The problem is most communities are losing those spaces in favor of private social clubs. That's what we need to fight.
Anthropic didn’t want to give the tech to DoD without some sort of limit, and that was the retribution.