Due to spending more time in a chair than being active I have a bit more interactions with Gravity than most. :) This has led to fairly significant sleep apnea, which is most easily tracked via monitoring of O2 saturation.
The Apple watch data isn't really useful for this at all as the frequency of monitoring is just too low. There are a bunch of ~$100 devices that you can get from Amazon that do a fantastic job monitoring O2 Sat for a night and have nice integrations into Apple/Android.
I do wish the CPAP's offered this type of integration - that is, they had a Bluetooth receiver to which I could pair an O2 sensor, and have the data coupled with my breathing analysis. This would be nice to have in OSCAR (the open-source analysis package) or even in Apple Health.
Instead, the manufactures like ResMed treat this data as a walled garden and try their hardest to require everything to go through a Sleep Doctor who pays them a non-trivial data subscription.
I'm with ya. I've owned 4 (Model S P100D, Model S Plaid, Model X, Model Y) over the past 10+ years. When the lease on my Plaid expired, I couldn't bring myself to get another one.
I took a long look at the Taycan as the used ones are "almost" sensibly priced but the first 2 generations are simply not great cars. The new 2025 (3rd Gen) is much nicer but the pricing is doesn't make sense.
Hopefully 2-3 years from now brings a much bigger diversity of performance electric cars. The BYD sports cars look very interesting.
The key engineering point here is about failure modes. If the failure mode is a brick, then the engineering and design team behind that switch has failed.
The failure mode for a smart switch needs to be a "classic" switch. This applies equally to garage door openers, showers, door locks, and the rest of the smart devices.
Note: I'll give a bit of a pass to smart window blinds as a selling point is lack of strings and cables and the therefore look cleaner.
This seems like the classic boom/bust cycle of capitalism and government. One upon a time, CA had things like free education through the UC and CSU system, and a tax rate that seemed similar to other states.
With the adoption of Prop 13 they eliminated much of the property tax revenue, and then ratcheted up the income and sales tax to pretty much max amounts while only collecting property tax from new(ish) home buyers. The Trump tax cuts then penalized upper-middle-class tech workers, all while continuing to reduce benefits. Utility deregulation has led to rolling blackouts during potential windstorms, and poor forest management has brought about some big fires.
Other states are also in on the zero-sum game that is bidding tax breaks to get companies to relocate.
This seems like a normal cycle of capitalism. If CA wants to change the game, they could consider options like the return of low-cost (free) schooling for CA residents, normalizing their property tax structures, or opening a single-payer healthcare system to CA residents.
Is there wide agreement it is misbehaving and ought to be changed “somehow”? Perhaps it could be modified.
There are other ways to achieve the basic objective without creating the same side effects. For example, Colorado’s TABOR has a very similar objective with a very different mechanism that slows property tax growth but does not pressure people to stay put in their current home.
> Is there wide agreement it is misbehaving and ought to be changed “somehow”?
No, voters overwhelmingly support Prop 13 in general, and feel that property taxes (which in fact are extremely low by national standards due to the Prop 13 nominal rate limit even before considering the Prop 13 assessment increase limit) are high in California. (What's actually high is property values, as a result of both Prop 13 and development policy -- and the development policy is itself, in part, due to incentives created by Prop 13 which align with those created by homeowner NIMBYism.)
It has been tweaked before, and you could maybe pass tweaks again that would enhance revenue in general, but by and large the basic structure is going to be very hard to change.
Prop 13 has been modified several times since being passed; its not impossible that it would be modified in a way which would increase overall property tax revenue, but procedurally its basically impossible for that to be relevant to the short-term funding shortfall.
I think a modification that separately tracked the prop 13 basis and a current price and charged taxes on the current price for anything that isn’t the owner’s primary residence could plausibly tax — after all, no one would get priced out of their own home as a result.
These images all reenforce only one thing - that Reuben Wu is a fantastic photographer. For him the iPhone is just a tool, much as a knife for a chef or a keyboard & monitor for a developer.
You're not wrong but on the other hand, if the knife can't cut, that will hamper the chef.
Also Wu had this to say, “The iPhone 15 Pro is the best camera available for its size, and while it can’t replace bigger dedicated systems, it can create images which still push my own artistic vision and display them at gallery quality and sizes, and I was shocked how good the prints were.”
Only one thing? Not so fast young cowboy. They also show that the phone is capable and even if a Huawei or whatever has a better camera, it is possible to create fantastic photographs.
While I agree with what you say and it's a worthwhile point to make, it's still notable when a tool can be used in such a way by an artist. Wu could have taken amazing photos with an iPhone 1, but he (most likely) couldn't have taken these specific images due to resolution and exposure performance/control differences.
Seems like a sunlight rich area such as the Nevada high desert is about as energy friendly as one could imagine. The main requirements seem to be water, sulfuric acid, and (of course) power.
> There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.
For my own yard, in Washington State, I've interacted with a half dozen arborists and landscapers. Every one of them has been an expert in local species, has had concrete suggestions about what to plant and how to maintain, and is generally very excited to engage on the problem at the homeowner level.
There are any number family group chats that leave my sister out of things. She's the only Android user out of about 20 people. If she's on the threads then pictures, videos, and reactions are all broken. This is 100% deliberate by Apple, but the bias against Android users is real.
People should stop treating California as the bastion of the Democrats, since it really isn't. There are 49 other states, many of them blue, that have none of the problems california has. California has been a state that struggles to govern for it's people since it was first created. It was a conservative stronghold for decades, and was no better under republicans. It seems more like there's something in the water, or rather that californian corporate interests have always been above the people there.
Conservatives scream about california because it's a useful red herring. California's stupidity is not limited to democrats, but conservatives really like to push that california is bad BECAUSE of democrats, the classic correlation causation thing.
Democrats often try to play the same dumb game with Texas, and that should be similarly rejected.
The Apple watch data isn't really useful for this at all as the frequency of monitoring is just too low. There are a bunch of ~$100 devices that you can get from Amazon that do a fantastic job monitoring O2 Sat for a night and have nice integrations into Apple/Android.
I do wish the CPAP's offered this type of integration - that is, they had a Bluetooth receiver to which I could pair an O2 sensor, and have the data coupled with my breathing analysis. This would be nice to have in OSCAR (the open-source analysis package) or even in Apple Health.
Instead, the manufactures like ResMed treat this data as a walled garden and try their hardest to require everything to go through a Sleep Doctor who pays them a non-trivial data subscription.