I need to move my personal blog (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/) over there still, sadly HN auto flags any submissions from any hashnode domain so I've been unable to submit any of my blog posts for consideration!
Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
But for awhile Bose's headphones had the best noise cancelling out there.
Their old ads were super irritating though, and many people (such as you and me!) are still irritated about them decades later.
> Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
A minor nitpick: while Apple entering the ANC arena certainly set fire under the existing mainstream brands to improve their ANC headphones, imo Bose started facing serious competition on that front even before Apple moved in.
I remember Sony releasing their MDR-1000X par being the first crack in the wall. I specifically remember this, because I picked up those headphones in favor of Bose options at the time.
P.S. Yes, the naming scheme on Sony's side is atrocious, because MDR-1000X is the first gen of their very popular WH-1000XM line of ANC headphones that people treat as a flagship ANC headphone pair (with the most recent one being WH-1000XM6).
I had forgotten about Sony. They were indeed going back and forth with Bose on who could make the highest quality ANC.
I actually had a pair of Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones and they had a really good BT implementation, super low latency and the ANC was really good. Sadly they developed a persistent hiss in one earpiece.
"Bose blows" is typically in regards to their price/performance, and especially with how they marketed themselves throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
Bose used to advertise that they were the best sounding speaker out there, while also running advertisements that made claims which violated the laws of physics.
For the same price as a Bose system you could get something much higher quality. Bose was selling at luxury prices w/o luxury quality. They got away with it because compared to the cheap garbage most people listened to, Bose's stuff was nicer. Their quality was mid to upper mid tier, and the build quality was generally good.
But people got irritated by a decade ads saying a tiny speaker is more powerful than a proper speaker setup.
Now days Bose makes good quality noise cancelling headphones (and I suspect they made more revenue selling NC headphones during the open office and then COVID era than they ever did selling speakers in the 90s!) and they brand car stereo systems.
Their noise cancelling headphones are good, even if the ear pads wear our way too fast.
Pretty much no one has a home hi-fi setup anymore, everyone just has a sound bar. I do have a hi-fi music setup, people are rather shocked when they come over that I even bothered. I got it for $2k on Craigslist years ago, the setup cost someone a small fortune when they were brand new. IMHO buying new hi-fi gear is pointless, Speakers made in 2005 sound just as good as speakers made in 2025, the laws of physics haven't changed any!
Speakers often use materials that degrade over time unfortunately. For example electronics in the crossover, foam, glue, and depending on the environment paper.
Chatgpt helped me solve a side effect I had with a medication just by suggesting a changing to dose timing. Solid improvement to my QoL just from one small change. My doctor completely agreed with the suggestion.
When I got worried about an exercise suggestion from an app I'm using (weight being used for prone dumbbell leg curls) Chatgpt confirmed there is a suggested upper limit on weight for that exercise and that I should switch it out. I appreciate not injuring myself. (Gemini gave a horrible response, heh...)
Chatgpt is dangerous because it is still too agreeable and when you do go outside what it knows the answers get wrong fast, but when it is useful it is very useful.
I started tracking everything I ate, every single bite.
The average western diet may over consume meat, but I have to work my butt off to hit my protein goals for strength training.
A slice of bacon has 3g of protein. 150 calories though. Eating enough protein through bacon isn't the best of ideas, even if someone is doing a ketogenic diet!
60-80g of protein is about right for a man who has a moderately physical job or who exercises some small amount. 100g is the minimum for putting on muscle and getting stronger.
The average western diet over consumes everything, it could do with less sugar, less processed foods (which are hyper palatable and don't satiate hunger), and more pure protein.
Because American men average around five nine and given the average lean muscle mass needs on that frame size, something within 60-90g (which is a huge range!) will work for most American men.
Like if someone is a 6 foot 10 body builder, they know their needs.
Also the suggested range of g/kg ranges from .8g/kg to 1.2g/kg, which is also a huge range, but that is primarily for building strength, not maintaining.
Given the goals here are "rough guidelines on eating healthy", I'm fine saying most men should aim for 60-90g of lean protein a day. That isn't exactly a hot take.
you don't need to do anything. why try? sit at home and watch tv.
i can hike elevation all day which is great for backpacking, i look great with a shirt off, and i can stand up from the couch without using my hands.
yes, im taking it a bit far at this point, but really that just means eating the average american's protein intake and then a protein shake or two on top
That question is, honestly, kind of stupid. It is akin to asking why eat healthy or why go outside in the sun.
But hey, here we go.
1. Intense physical exercise is the only known way to increase IQ. (Admittedly pure strength training is not the best for this, HIIT workouts are better)
2. Muscle mass is a huge factor in the early death in seniors. Basically people who lack muscle mass are more likely to fall over and fracture something, at which point they are much more likely to die.
3. Lean muscle mass, up to a certain point (e.g. extreme body builders have worse mortality numbers), decreases mortality across the board.
4. I like living w/o pain, and you can choose to either have your joints take the load or your muscles take the load.
5. I enjoy being able to move my body and be active in the world.
6. I'm vain and I like to look good.
> most people don't.
Most people in America die of a heart attack. Most people in America are obese and have troubles moving around. Most people in America don't read books. Most people in America don't enjoy mathematics. Most people in America don't go to art museums.
People should have aspirations to do more than average.
This is very true, and something that people pushing keto (myself included) had to learn the hard way.
There are satiety indexes for different foods but they are not universal. I can eat almost unlimited carbs and never feel full. I'll eat multiple plates full of bread or a thousand calories in french fries and then move on to the main course.
6oz of lean meat and some salad and I'm good with 500 or so calories on my plate.
I honestly don't get how potatoes supposedly fill people up. I have made twice baked potatoes before and eaten an easy 2000 calories of them along side thanksgiving dinner.
In contrast right now I'm eating clean and doing a body recomp. Eating clean is super satiating, for me at least!
> I have made twice baked potatoes before and eaten an easy 2000 calories of them along side thanksgiving dinner.
Try plain boiled potatoes. I bet you feel like stopping long before 2000 Calories. Tasty things are tasty and often easy to eat an unhealthy amount of.
This is the thing that makes any conversation about broad categories of food difficult—there’s just a huge range of ways to package those carbs, and people eat a ton of “hyper palatable” foods. A few hundred calories of Smartfood popcorn with a day’s worth of sodium and addicting flavors is quite different in my experience than, say, a few slices of chewy, crusty sourdough bread.
Authors and publishers have written on this topic extensively. Blog posts about it periodically gets posted to HN.
Most of the cost to publish a book is upfront. Editing, laying, cover art, diagrams, etc.
It costs less than $2 to print a book in bulk quantities.
Margins suck. That is why publishers go out of business all the time. Margins aren't any better on ebooks. It costs money to maintain a digital store front.
For an example of the costs of digital distribution in another field, look at Good Old Games. They are a digital distribution platform and they barely break even / turn a profit. (A bit more complicated since they also do some of the porting work)
Digital distribution has super low per unit costs but huge upfront costs.
If that were really true then the practice of taking cuts from the cost of copies to pay everyone involved would still be working, but it isn't. And there appear to be differences between media, for example daily papers are different from novels are different from songs are different from albums and so on.
Newspapers always made their money from commercial and classified ads. Craigslist killed journalism decades ago, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace are the modern successors to CL. Google adwords finished the job.
Newspapers subscription prices only ever covered a small % of the overall costs.
Spotify is a complicated racket, there are some very good video essays exploring who is making money off of Spotify (it isn't Spotify and it isn't the artists!), a but the rabbit hole there goes deep.
I've never had a pixel phone last more than 3 years before it stopped turning on, all the way back to Nexus devices.
I'd stop buying them but everything else is bad in some other way. It is hilarious that the official Google phones have the fewest ads and forced app installs.
I have no idea how the 2 major smart watches (android wear, apple watch) have such horrible battery life. Microsoft Band had a 3 day battery life that would've been 5 days if we weren't forced to use a trash accelerometer that drained our battery by a crazy amount.
That aside, Android wear being a complete OS is a waste of power. There aren't any useful apps for it that take advantage of the watch running a full OS.
I'm also miffed that OS updates have dropped by pixel watch's battery life from 3 days down to 1 and a half.
Good on Pebble for taking a reasonable approach to watch OS design. I presume apple decided they are minting money with a 2-ish day battery life so why bother improving things, but it is sad that most companies don't care about doing the right thing anymore.
I take it you don’t have a garmin? You can play music directly from it (spotify, YouTube music, etc apps). You get phone notifications, can respond to text messages, make payments, and newer versions include LTE. They are absolutely a smart watch.
My Enduro 2 lasts around that long, with about 1.5-2 hours of daily GPS tracking for running, part of 4 hours total exercise tracking per day, and underlying background fitness data collection (HR, respiration, temperature etc. including sleep).
As I write, it's at 37% with 6 days left of charge. And it charges 0 to 100% in around 2 hours.
I used to use a fancy Movado / Android Wear watch that without word of a lie could die before 8pm on almost minimal use. It was an absolutely redundant item to own.
Yup. Garmin battery life is insane. I keep seeing people comment how they charge their watches on a near daily basis and that's just insane to me.
I charge my fenix 7 solar maybe once a month. My use case is about 10 hours a week of activity tracking, usually trail runs. This goes up to about 20 hours a week in the summer but i dont recharge much more often. I use garmin pay and occasionally listen to podcasts on my watch while running. I also use the on-watch maps quite a bit on my trail runs.
I get notifications for text messages, phone calls, and emails on my VivoActive 6. There are also good apps; for instance, the built-in (free) golf app is great. Battery lasts over a week, too. So far, I'm pretty happy with it and don't feel the need to get an Apple Watch which requires charging every day.
Oppo and OnePlus have around 10 days with a full Android Wear system using a clever hybrid technologie running another low powered OS when Wear is not required.
The market is very different nowadays than when the Pebble came out.
Withings smart watches are kind of insane with 30 day battery life, but the subscription farming in the app is infuriating.
All I want from a smart watch:
- Waterproof, wireless charging, at least a week of battery life
- Automatically track exercise and sleep, let me update the data if needed.
- Track my fitness trends over time, looking at you resting heart rate
- Optionally, learn a couple of recurring patterns to improve automatic exercise assignment. If I hike twice a week and you see an exercise session with a consistent heart rate profile you better believe I am hiking
Not just subscription farming, you cannot use the latest mobile app versions without agreeing to data mining. Their business model now is literally collecting user health and usage data to resell to other companies and of course for AI training. Avoid.
Garmin are pretty decent. I have an Enduro 2 which lasts a fortnight on a charge (currently 37% with 6 days of charge left).
It's waterproof. Unfortunately no wireless charging (proprietary cable) but it charges 2 weeks worth in about 2 hours.
It doesn't automatically track exercise, but it does collect a lot more (and higher quality) data than Withings for activity. Automatic sleep. The app has the trends and such, and there's no subscription (they recently added some AI stuff you can pay for but which is optional).
Pixel fan here: I think the Pixel Watch 1, 2 and 3 were a big disappointment in terms of battery life. I was barely getting 1 day out of them, many times less than that. Pixel Watch 4 has significantly improved the situation. Now I routinely get at least 3 days out of it (and this is the 4G LTE variant). Still someways to go, I think the holy grail is one week, but at least it is now quite usable.
PS: why is this even an issue? How hard is it to make straps with batteries in them..
For what it does, the battery life of the Apple Watch 11 is not that bad. It typically lasts more than 48h for me and charges very quickly. Putting it to charge when taking a shower is enough to not have to think about battery life.
Fair, but that means you have to bring a special purpose charger with you anytime you go somewhere for more than ~36 hours. For me, that's the bigger issue. If I could charge inductively on the back of my iPhone, for example, I wouldn't mind as much.
I hear you, personally grabbing the charger for overnight stays hasn't been a problem but there are a few compact/inexpensive third-party dongles that are like the official charging cable but without the cable[0]. They can be stay in a car, laptop bag, etc. and charge the watch from an iPhone or another usb-c power source.
Huh interesting, I guess that would help somewhat. But for me, I prefer to pretty much never have to worry about charging my watch.
As a kid, I had watches that didn't need new batteries for years. As an adult, I was willing to trade off some battery life (down to a week or so) in order to get notifications my wrist, music controls, and activity tracking.
Although I can see some benefit in being able to see my Uber status in real time, or other app-related functionality, I am not interested in charging a wearable every day or two. I don't want to have to worry about whether I'm "using my watch too much" to be able to make it through a short trip, or until the end of my second day.
I know some people have different preferences on this, but for me a watch should be something that doesn't require any maintenance for weeks at a time.
Samsung had this reverse charging from the phone but they also dropped that function with the watch 7 :(
Having said that I did use it but it was terribly slow and both the phone and watch heated up too much. And the positioning was very finicky. A whole charge would last 3-4 hours where the official charger is 30-40 minutes.
Power banks with watch charging also exist and cheap aftermarket charging pucks. Not as fast as the included one but not bad.
I need to move my personal blog (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/) over there still, sadly HN auto flags any submissions from any hashnode domain so I've been unable to submit any of my blog posts for consideration!
reply