mshroyer

I personally think the information is a big nothingburger. But that's quite a different thing from saying it's misinformation.

I'd be with you if the Biden campaign denied the material's legitimacy. So far, at least as far as I'm aware, they haven't.

> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news

"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?

I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.

Regarding the ransomware attack, my point is that Garmin's security design was weak enough to allow it to happen. We were all, apparently, simply lucky that the variant of ransomware used didn't happen to exfiltrate all our health data.

Garmin is notorious for their software issues, and Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments. But more importantly, because Apple end-to-end encrypts users' health data, nobody would be able to access any of it even if they were successfully attacked.

I agree it's nice that Garmin wearables can mostly keep working independently even if Garmin Connect is down.

The Apple Watch Series 6 is rated for 7 hours of battery usage while recording an activity with GPS. That's right at the edge of some hikes I've done, and it would leave a multi-day hike out of the question.

Compare to Garmin: The Fenix 6 is rated for 36 hours of GPS activity recording per charge, or 72 hours in a battery-saving GPS mode.

I may be, and some of the smart watch features do appeal to me. (And if a standalone Signal app were available for the Apple Watch with LTE, that might push me over the edge to switching.)

But for now, Apple lags far behind Garmin in terms of fitness tracking for outdoor activities. That's more important to me, and it's more important to people like marathon runners who are more serious athletes than me. But we're also probably a minority of the market; I don't doubt Apple knows what they're doing here.

A modern smartphone can do anything that a 90s pocket organizer could do and more. But Apple Watch still hasn't caught up to Garmin in many important respects.

They could have made an incremental move in that direction, though. And incremental moves could build up to something more over multiple generations of the Apple Watch.

I expected they'd be coming out with a more efficient SoC for the new Watch, and they did in the S6. But they chose to use the extra efficiency to divert more power to a brighter display instead of provide more battery life.

I really want to like Apple Watch. Apple end-to-end encrypts your health data, so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack). And IMO Apple does a superior job supporting their previous-generation devices: They'll replace an old Watch battery for a low, fixed fee, and to my knowledge they generally make new watchOS features available to older devices.

But I've worn my Garmin Fenix 5 Plus for the last couple years, and there's no way any existing version of the Apple Watch could replace it for me:

- It has a transflective LCD display that, while not as pretty as Apple Watch's, is brilliantly visible in the brightest of daylight.

- The battery lasts more than a week when not using GPS.

- It communicates with all my bicycle accessories over ANT+, so I don't need to take my bike computer with me to record a short ride.

- It has a button-operated user interface, so it's still perfectly usable when I'm sweaty and in the middle of an activity.

- It has a nearly indestructible sapphire crystal.

I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin.

> Unfortunately, my ISP does not support IPv6. This severely limits experimentation with it, since all experimentation is locked behind my home network.

You probably know about this already, but there are free IPv6 tunnel brokers you can use to experiment. I previously used Hurricane Electric's tunnel, back before Comcast had native IPv6 support: https://www.tunnelbroker.net/

> You can blame NYT but at least they have a clear policy, whether you agree with it or not.

Given that NYT has been happy to preserve Banksy's anonymity in their reporting, or that of Virgil Texas, their policy certainly isn't clear to me.

> (2) One router per room, alternating channels between rooms.

That isn't realistic for most people, though.

I love XKCD, but that strip is philosophically and historically ignorant.

Free speech isn't the First Amendment. Free speech is a broad foundational principle of liberalism, and the First Amendment is just an encoding of this principle in the context of the U.S. government. But go back to Mill's "On Liberty" and you'll find that he was just as concerned about threats to free speech stemming from social disapprobation as those from the government.

Anyway, I prefer this modified version of the strip: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECqxDQGVAAAXUgK?format=jpg&name=...

I just downloaded the entire dataset. All the same data seems to be there. Confusingly, this includes the "EventDate" field that she had been asked to remove.

I have both a MBP and a Windows workstation hooked up to a 4k monitor, and the difference in high-DPI support is night and day.

macOS and mac apps support high-DPI essentially flawlessly. On Windows even system dialogs have blurry text, as do many third-party apps (such as Mathematica until the very latest release).

Why is the April section of the "removal of intervention" curve below the "with intervention" curve? Particularly since there are actual "hospitalizations" data points plotted along the former?

or iProtection

On the contrary, contact tracing (plus widespread testing) will be necessary in places where outbreaks are eventually brought under control and life slowly starts returning to normal.

Of course, many places will need extensive lockdowns to reach that point.

I agree this is bad, but I don't understand why it is. Not an iOS developer but I was under the impression apps can run in the background to maintain Bluetooth connections.

Assuming Apple's policies are in fact preventing them from running in the background, does Apple have a mechanism to grant them an exception for this use case? Does someone have a contact at Apple who could reach out to them?

This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until it's actually needed for contact tracing.

Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the US, I'd much rather use a protocol like TraceTogether's Bluetrace that goes out of its way to preserve privacy, than adopt an actually-privacy-violating centralized approach where the government simply gathers everyone's location data and processes it centrally (Israel's approach, for example).

I was thinking along similar lines. Maybe it's possible to use BLE for this (don't know if the standard PXP profiles would be applicable or you'd need something else).

You could also have app-level 24-hour rolling identifiers to prevent non-infected people's contacts from being correlated over time, even locally—if that would make people more comfortable using such an app. (The app would have to keep track of all its previous identifiers; if the user is found to be infected, all their previous identifiers would be marked as such in the database.)

Some challenges off the top of my head:

- What polling rate is needed? (How do disease experts define a "contact"?) What's the battery impact?

- What fraction of the population has BLE-capable phones?

- What fraction of the population keeps their phones physically on their person as they go about their day?

- Can distance be roughly inferred from RSSI? Does the mapping of RSSI to distance vary much depending on the transmitting radio / phone model?

- If you live in an apartment, you might be identified as a "contact" of your neighbor even if you never breathe the same air, etc.

Also, if an affected region locks down well enough and long enough (cf. Hubei: https://miro.medium.com/max/6812/1*pwPIo7U6pBahMZhopHYbMw.pn...), the number of actual new cases per day may fall to the point where containment becomes feasible again.

These are ubiquitous in the US too. You'll find them in most Hope Depot or Walmart locations.

For me, one reason is that One Medical's doctor/patient communication platform is secure and provides a solid customer experience.

This might sound like a nit, but the previous primary care doctor I went to in the Bay Area emailed me a follow-up message in the form of a Word document—which mistakenly included several pages of someone else's medical information, too.

I can't make the sense of the author's graphs. Is he plotting daily boardings on both the X and Y axes simultaneously? Aside from bus vs. streetcar, what do the varying colors mean?

> battery life, lack of always-on display, and the lack of useful tactile buttons.

Have you looked into Garmin's watches? Granted, they're expensive, but these are some of the main reasons I love my fenix. (In addition to it functioning as a very capable bike computer.)

> But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!).

Only if we restrict "all platforms" to mean Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Building and porting Electron appears to be a horrific experience [1], which limits its cross-platform utility. It's only recently that someone pulled the heroics of getting Electron 4 (!) into FreeBSD ports; I still can't run VS Code on OpenBSD.

Meanwhile I've yet to encounter an OS with an X11 display where I can't run a Qt app. So I certainly wouldn't hold Electron up as a paragon of cross-platform support.

[1] https://deftly.net/posts/2017-06-01-measuring-the-weight-of-...

Props to the engineers and PMs who implemented this feature. Well done.

Recent Garmin watches and cycling computers also have "incident detection" and can automatically send an alert to your emergency contact(s) after a fall. (I don't think any current Garmin models will directly dial 911, though.)

> Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "organic" foods are more nutritious than conventionally farmed foods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946

Ah sorry, that was a dumb reply on my part