This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.

That's unusual. Most applicants are sending out dozens or hundreds of applications for a sub-20% response rate.

The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.

And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.

>... oura lets me know when I do not.

Does your body not do the same? I really want to like sleep tracking as a feature, but I find that my body already has built in sleep tracking, and the tech version doesn't give me any actionable advice on how to improve my sleep that my biological sleep tracker isn't already giving me.

The only thing my body tells me in the morning is.. "dude coffee now". I have no problem falling asleep, but I usually wake up pretty early. I feel ok with 6 hours of sleep, but I don't think that is optimally healthy. I don't worry about it a lot, but I look at sleep duration, heart rate, hrv, and sleep debt. The details motivate me to pay attention to sleep hygiene. If I ignored it, I don't think I would sleep enough.

I could see how it would be helpful for people who don't necessarily know they have sleep apnea. I also recently read about someone who quit smoking weed, and their sleep tracking changed dramatically while they detoxed. With my Garmin, that and the Stress tracker usually let me know 1-2 days ahead of time that I'm getting sick, before I even feel it. My sleep quality plummets, and my physiological stress is at like 80%+.

How would you know if you never tested your intuition against the metrics?

Absolutely nuts that this thing wouldn't be engineered so that at least a swelling battery causes the exterior to split so that the swelling is directed out rather than in.

It is understandable in some narrow sense because you want the outer surface to be nick-resistant, so you need to make it out of reasonably thick metal. Plastic rings would look terrible after a couple of weeks.

But it's really hard to justify the big picture. It's hundreds of bucks + a monthly subscription for... what, exactly? Why does this need to exist? If you really want to gamify your pulse and sleep patterns for some inconceivable reason, a phone or a wristwatch can collect the same information in a more practical and safer way.

Thinner skin, so you can in theory get better sensor readings. And you don't have to convince people to give up the watch they already own. Selling somebody who owns a $4000 watch another watch is an uphill battle that requires Apple watch levels of sophistication, selling them a ring is a lot easier

I also find the cost of the Oura outrageous. But getting the $450 smart ring instead of the $20 smart ring from aliexpress is the buyer's choice. It doubles as jewelry, and some people are willing to spend on that. And the software quality is certainly better than with the bargain bin option

> Selling somebody who owns a $4000 watch another watch is an uphill battle

I’d wager the future lifetime spending of someone who owns a $4000 watch on other watches is at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude greater than the general population.

I agree with you, but I believe the person you responded to meant that someone with an expensive mechanical watch doesn’t want to wear a smart watch in place of their mechanical watch (and double wristing looks silly). As someone with an expensive mechanical watch who wants to wear that instead of an Apple Watch, I agree with them.

I think the parent is talking about wearing two watches. But I'd guess that the overlap between people who like expensive (almost always synonymous with mechanical) watches and who want achievements for sleep patterns is pretty minimal. It's almost like a statement of two different life philosophies.

You cannot lift weights with that ring, but you can with a whoop. That, plus the battery life (no display) makes it very practical. Just my 2c as a whoop user

Some people just do not like wearing a wristwatch. I would sleep with a ring i would not sleep with a wristwatch

> It's hundreds of bucks + a monthly subscription for... what, exactly?

Once upon a time I thought this kind of thing would be needed for accurate hand tracking for VR applications, in lieu of a full glove, but it seems to not be a major use case.

Perhaps you could reinforce both the outside and the inside, so any swelling would be directed parallel to the finger?

Or have a cut in the outer ring with an insert filling the gap. A partial ring is easiy to bend outwards, but difficult to bend inwards.

I feel the same way about my Garmin watch's sleep tracking, but one thing I haven't been able to do is use that data effectively. It's an accurate after the fact representation of my sleep, but it doesn't tell me anything that my own body isn't telling me in terms of how I should adjust my sleep patterns/habits.

Do you find you change your behavior at all based on the sleep tracking?

Yeah, I found its made me much more aware of and focused on eating early, getting to sleep early, staying on a consistent sleep schedule, etc.

Giving off strong edited-by-AI vibes, but still an interesting article. A large chunk of the premise seems to rest on cities expanding though and I have to wonder whether that's really the case over the timescales a newly built waste processing system will operate on. Most of the developed world is already below replacement fertility and it seems quite possible that the world population will peak within my lifetime.

The author also seems to drive an EX30. My mom bought one a year or two ago and I can attest that it is easily the shittiest software I have ever experienced in a car. Every single thing is half-baked. I'm sure that there are plenty of cars out there that can do this better.

This is correct (I'm the author the post). The EX30 could be a great car but the quality of the software really lets it down. Prior to this I owned a Tesla and while it was way better, it still had the occasional failure to recognise my iPhone as the key and wouldn't let me into the car. Maybe 1 in 10 occasions compared to 5 in 10 with the EX30.

What I don't understand is, isn't this what "thinking" is for? It can be as verbose as it wants while it's thinking as far as I'm concerned, but why can't it keep the verbosity there? Why does it always spill into the actual response no matter what I do?

I'm pretty sure this is just the LLM "thinking out loud". For some reason even when it has thinking enabled and does a thinking step before generating output, it still has to explain what it's doing to itself in the output, which often leads to it correcting itself in the output. I've pretty much stopped letting LLMs write code directly in large part because I cannot get them to stop injecting comments talking themselves through how the code relates to the chat the prompted it in ways that no human would ever write and will make no sense to anyone re-reading the code months later.

This is going to vary by age range, right? For anyone over the age of ~35, the percentage has to be way, way higher than the full population, regardless of technical capability.