People said the same thing about Obama (cult of personality), who was also elected for a second term despite a number of big broken promises, including closing Guantanamo Bay, cutting the national deficit, passing cap and trade, creating a public health insurance option in the ACA, comprehensive immigration reform, and fostering bipartisanship
If you want to compare Obama and Trump insofar as “presidents generally don’t do 90% of what they say” that is valid but to imply their admins are/were anything alike beyond that would be ridiculous. I’m assuming that’s not what you mean but I just need to throw that out there.
The only other obvious comparison is the typical expansion of executive power we’ve (unfortunately) come to expect, though like the previous comparison, with Trump it’s different by orders of magnitude.
>If you want to compare Obama and Trump insofar as “presidents generally don’t do 90% of what they say” that is valid but to imply their admins are/were anything alike beyond that would be ridiculous. I’m assuming that’s not what you mean but I just need to throw that out there.
Yes you're right, I absolutely did not mean to imply that. I just forgot to say "orange man bad" as a signoff. Thanks
The most humble meters come free in a kit, since you're really buying the test strips, and they all have onboard memory and an optional app.
It's extremely unlikely the owners of those meters would even be able to use any other app. There's no standard for the device data sent over bluetooth to the app. There's no USB port. Beyond 90 days of data (many meters have 99), A1C is preferred. Reverse engineering to support alternative apps is also unlikely since there are always new devices to hack.
SugarTrack, and other apps like it, sit in a weird deadzone. The most likely users either have a nicer meter that already does offline export, or they have a crappy meter but prefer the official app or tracking their stats on paper anyway (in their food journal). Again, the app is always optional unless it's from a super sketchy brand that isn't even cheaper.
There's no room left for doing weird somewhat low-tech things in principle anymore. The market has moved on. The most common layperson user wants integration across all their health apps. The most common nerd user buys the nerd device. The manufacturers have known this for at least a decade.
SugarTrack is intentionally just a simple log. It doesn't try to replace the glucometer, connect over Bluetooth/USB, or automatically import readings.
My motivation wasn't really to replace existing apps. I built it because this is the workflow I actually needed.
For example, my mother is 70 and isn't comfortable using apps. Someone else usually has to help her take the reading, and I need to keep track of the data for her. I wanted something where whoever is helping can simply open her phone, enter the reading, and have everything relevant in one place — readings, meals/photos, medication, notes and A1C.
There are definitely more sophisticated solutions out there, but they aren't always practical or available for everyone. In some places, CGMs and connected meters aren't covered by insurance, aren't readily available, or simply aren't realistic to use.
So SugarTrack is deliberately boring: no Bluetooth, no USB, no account, no cloud, no subscription. Just a simple log that stays on the phone.
It solves my particular problem, and I figured there are probably other people with a similar situation.
> It's extremely unlikely that owners of these meters would be able to use any other app.
I've been using Xdrip+ for 2 years now with the Dexcom CGM instead of their proprietary app. Works great and gives me the ability to export my data or sync it with a self hosted database if I so please. Why would I trust a corporation with my private health data when they have continuously shown that they will sell it or lose it to a hack the first chance they get.
You might want to consider using a self-hosted database to store your data. Telemetry Blocklist (free) can help prevent any apps from phoning home, but it's not specific to this use case. If you're concerned about data security, you might want to explore other options for storing your health data offline.
Thanks for the advice.
XDrip+ doesn't require internet access, and if it did then my GrapheneOS phone has a toggleable network permission for each app that I could utilize if I was worried.
I wanted my data stored and backed up on an external database that I then backup nightly as part of my Proxmox homelab.
With an external database I can build /use other tools to pull data from the database for that I would not be able to do from a phone app.
"Kimi decompile this proprietary APK and find the communication channels used to communicate with this model GCM. Let me know what software you need to to install to achieve this "
The world is your oyster if you have some self motivation.
This is your honest recommendation? You might want to re-read how this thread started.
The issue isn't anyone's ability to reverse engineer a glucose meter nor their "self motivation" to do so.
The issue is how outdated the expectations of some devs can be. The typical consumer will never use these apps because the whole topic is washed up. Software maintenance is a much steeper hill to climb than it used to be. Throwing an LLM at that just makes it more Sisyphean than it already was.
You can have fun, but this isn't helping anyone else defend their privacy. That angle is starting to become as embarrassing as the advice to save the planet by riding a bike.
I don't care what the typical consumer wants nor what the expectations of some Devs are. I was just letting people know that private solutions exist that work and if they are self motivated they can probably expand them to include their sensors if it's not already included.
Yeah, this is an interesting thought exercise, and there’s a cleverness to it, but I prefer defaulting to UI that reasonably mirrors the data model and only obfuscating when inclusion creates confusion.
I suspect it’s an equally imagined user goal to simplify light/dark mode settings as it is to ensure users can explicitly set “system default”.
Becoming another individual’s whole world changes your own, for better or worse.
I was a “such is life” type of person when experiencing tragedy, and fairly ho-hum during joyous moments. With kids, something changed, or “rewired”. I tear up at Bluey episodes and lose sleep due to irrational fears of an early death and not witnessing moments in my kids’ lives.
Right there with you on unexpected tear-stream moments, fears, but also all those happy moments you can't anticipate.
In past year I've watched my older (8) start competing on a cheerleading team. Immense tear-streaming joy watching her light up in front of a crowd and build confidence. I was immediately overcome the first time and always feel a strong swell of emotion.
I tried to use Wave to collaborate on a blog post with friends, rather than emailing each other critiques.
They thought it seemed to complicated and stuck with email.
I’m haphazarding a guess that maybe Google didn’t stick with it because, if I recall, most if not all of their services were free and this one probably cost a lot to run without a clear monetization strategy. If it didn’t increase the size of a captive audience, and they weren’t willing to show ads in the product itself, and they weren’t going to get better data from users to inform their ad services elsewhere…why run it?
I thought it was used as a vehicle to have users agree to a much more “we can do whatever we want with your data” tos. From that standpoint i guess it was successful, everyone signed up.
The “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why” trope exists for a reason.
I’ve worked with a range of engineers in terms of their curiosity. In my experience, the ones who cared enough to ask or push back on decisions were exceptions, not the rule.
This doesn’t mean they weren’t curious people. It just means they weren’t curious about The BusinessTM or The MarketTM.
> “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why”
I suspect that insofar as this exists, it's because when junior engineers question the utility of the requirements or user stories, they are told specifically to stfu because nerds don't understand business. Over time, the message get received?
That said, I've very rarely seen an engineer like this. In fact, I frequently encounter the opposite: the sterotypical asperger's who doesn't know when they're being rude with their probing.
