If anyone is interested in doing this sort of thing themselves, I make an iPhone app called Reflect meant for this exact purpose
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
I put my whole life into a single database
171–180 of 239 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#172In my experience, tracking objective things like "nutrition" and "sleep hours" is immensely useful to reflect on what went wrong, and tracking subjective things like "mood" or "stress" is useless given hedonic adaptation or heavy swings that make problems obvious, and not need tracking. What's key is be able to visualize metrics easily on the data and frictionless data entry, I've got a decent setup with iPhone Actio…
The language you use to describe this is fun, I make an app for self tracking called Reflect and would love your opinion of it, even if it doesnt suit your needs exactly.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is that everyone alive today and in the future is footing the bill for that indifference. It's nice that you don't care, but it's not something I'd brag about.
I too don't want to be a martyr hermit who don't travel and consume just to cur my CO2 emissions in half, while someone else generates 10x of that living a full life. That's just dumb, and I consider this whole movement rich people telling poor people that they should be considerate and sacrifice themselves. If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
> If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
That's a fallacy; people care about the planet precisely because of children. I don't care about the planet for its own sake; I care because of the humans who inhabit it and their future lives.
Also, humanity spent 100,000 years without flying around the globe, and I doubt they were all living hermit martyr lives.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people don't spend a lot of time wistfully considering their CO2 usage, myself included. The religious zeal by which people feel the need to tell me about the ever-warming planet is honestly more off-putting than most actual religions. Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
The thing is that everyone alive today and in the future is footing the bill for that indifference. It's nice that you don't care, but it's not something I'd brag about.
I don't feel it's properly engaging in good faith to say that I don't care. I don't specifically care, in the "feeling shame" sense that the GP had mentioned. As I pointed out, we all have a limited number of things we can realistically care about.
The fact that I happen to care about other things more than this specific flavor of global catastrophe is morally OK.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful. I don't see any shaming. It was all matter of fact, free from judgement.
What do you think was the purpose of the comment? Do you think that comparing someone's CO2 emissions with the average and pointing out that it is much higher is value-free, just a totally neutral observation for no reason? That the commenter is fine with it? Or even that it's a good thing?
No, it does not mean the commenter is fine with it. Regardless of their feelings, the commenter had the good sense not to include any shaming.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#176The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
A counter example: I've been wearing an Apple Watch for close to 10 years. I've tracked my weight as well along those years but nothing crazy like OP. The Apple watch tracked plenty. I had some strange symptoms and two doctors insisted I had a weak heart and potential heart failure. This was shocking! Turns out I do have a really "weak" rhythm, but heart failure is when your heart is progressively getting worse in it…
This is the obvious "benefit" of hindsight. Yes, you accidentally had access to data that provided historical patterns you exactly could use.
But, for anyone who does, there is another 1000 who do not when something hits them: many illnesses develop gradually, and all of our tests (thousands of blood tests, scans and imaging tech...) would benefit from having historical data when we were "ok".
Similarly, you probably did not have more data than what Apple provided to help narrow the problem you still had, right?
And if everyone was put under so many tests, we'd actually be "solving" a bunch of non-issues for people over-reacting to small deviations from "normal" range.
Apple watch helps you with a few parameters — not to be discounted — but I don't really see it as a counter.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit. I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting. Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not wo…
About 9 years ago I had a run-in with stomach cancer. After a few months of chemo and a 7 hour operation I was eventually declared cancer free and have been ever since, but still have to live with the consequences of the treatment and be vigilant for any signs of it returning. I still suffer intermittent stomach aches, especially in the early hours of the morning, and had a terrible time trying to decide if they were…
Yes, when you have an obvious reason to track some data, do it: I do not think anyone questions that.
Proactively capturing and tracking everything you can to prep for any future is too much work that would really steal your time from, you know, actually living a life.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#178[flagged]
How hard was setting up the bank CSV dumps ?
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#179A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying. Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more. Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful. Air travel works for people if the benefits outweigh the costs. The only thing that changes behavior is to change the costs. And even if costs were 10x there are still plenty of people who will fly tons, because it would still be economically productive. There are always going to…
> If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more.
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
First, none of us have any power to "tax it more" so this is a dead end of discussion. Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime). This happens all the time, because laws don't fully align with morality in a culture. Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#180It's all nice and all, but I'm just sitting here thinking "How can one afford all this flying around"?
Spoiler alert. You're reading a rich guys humblebrag site.