Not the OP, but my experience with Lyme 25+ years ago in New Jersey was similar. I took oral and IV antibiotics over multiple years. The antibiotics I recall taking are Claforan, Ceftin, Augmentin, Penicillin, Ampicillin, Rocephin, Doxycycline, Azithromycin.
While my symptoms would often improve during/after a course of IV antibiotics, they would always return. I don't ever recall thinking that one of them was what cured me. It was more like the symptoms gradually tapered off over years. I do, however, credit my MD's willingness to aggressively treat the symptoms with my eventual recovery.
Interestingly, both my MD and his wife (also an MD) had Lyme, as did at least one of their children. My advice to people who think they have Lyme is to seek out a physician that has experience in treating Lyme and a willingness to do so. At the time, there was a lot of pressure in the medical community to simply give two weeks of oral doxycycline and then tell the patient that they have to live with whatever remains.
These are the two that sound familiar to me. Doxycycline in particular.
The bite was ~3 years ago for me. I still have the mark on my ankle. It was red and raised until about 6 months ago. Now it just looks like a faint bit of scar tissue.
> I took oral and IV antibiotics over multiple years.
This is not a standard or reasonable treatment for Lyme. Antibiotics will kill it in a standard course. It sucks that you still had issues afterwards. Did they do additional blood tests?
I do not. It was one of the generic broad-spectrum antibiotics. One of those "take two then take one daily" if I remember correctly.
The doctor I went to was equally perplexed. He basically said "you never go to the doctor but you're here. I don't think you have lyme but I don't know what you have. I'll give you an antibiotic and see if it helps."
Brand name for azithromyclin, similar to doxycycline. Both are antibiotics used for a wide variety of conditions where bacteria are known or suspected.
Azithromycin and doxycycline are completely different chemicals; the former is a macrolide, the latter is a tetracycline. Both are used for Lyme (and various other infections).
Agreed. The whole piece was emotional, but just reading that statement took it to irrational.
I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that the author still doesn't know what the feature does and it could still pleasantly surprise him. It may just need an additional dialog explaining what to expect next.
I assume the feature gives you desktop notifications when the package transitions between tracking stages, and even if that's all the functionality it provides it'd still be more useful than manually checking the tracking website yourself.
It also shows the package tracking information on the Home tab as a card. The flow that the Notebook tab tells Cortana what to pay attention to and the Home tab shows information about the things Cortana is paying attention is a subtle one, but I suppose one UX designers would assume people pick up that Notebook acts like a giant Settings area and Home is the focus area.
Also, there is a happy path where Cortana does pick up things like tracking numbers from email automatically without having to manually enter them into the Notebook. Though it's easy to miss that happy path, because it also surfaces primarily as cards on the Home tab. (Though Outlook.com now has deeper, more direct, integration than that, showing the tracking cards directly above the email; Outlook (OG) has something like that in Preview, though not yet Cortana connected, and the Windows Mail app looks like it will pick up the feature eventually, too.)
I'm going to generalize a bit here and say that "smart" features have decreased usability, as aside from single-focus products (e.g. Mint) no one seems to priotize deep discoverabity when the "smart" path fails.
Example A: MS trying to funnel all system settings through the search box. If that can't find it because I didn't type in the correct "1996 adventure game"-style keywords, I now have Control Panel (legacy), the Settings app (Win 8+?), and a hodgepodge of single-purpose Metro-ized settings pages.
It's basically the command-line probelms all over again, but with english instead of commands.
It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.
A GUI with a 1-1 mapping to command line arguments sounds like heaven. Of course this exists for something like GVim, but I had no idea commercial software of any kind was doing it. That makes scriptability possible!
Yeah, AutoCAD is old so you have a lot of people with old command-line habits. I first used it in like '94. Loved the command-line and gui hybrid it used. Commands were composable too, like the "line" command would then ask you for where the first point was and you could use locator commands like "midpoint" or "endpoint" which in turn would take an existing line object as a parameter to select the origin of the new line. Haven't touched it in over a decade though, no idea what it looks like now.
I disagree with you for a number of reasons, but it starts with I think you have "smart" mixed up as search boxes are the epitome of "dumb", even if a lot of work goes into them behind the scenes to make sure they anticipate what the user wants.
Google proved many years ago that average users are more than happy to use a search bar as their primary user interface to everything. I've seen so many users that to go to any website never use bookmarks, addresses, shortcuts, anything, just type it vaguely into a search bar, and that's been some of their norm for a decade or more.
It makes sense for Microsoft to front-and-center the search box because that's what users use the most. That's what Google has been doing for its entire existence. It's about as dumb and simple a UX as possible.
Beyond that it's a "Why not both?" situation. A search bar isn't very discoverable, but it is easy and typically "does what the user wants", eventually, depending on how much effort goes into the "man behind the curtain". But you can have search and try for a discoverable UX at the same time. The Settings app many deride is something like Attempt #15 at making Windows settings discoverable. For better or worse, with as many settings as Windows has, making that discoverable is a herculean task, if not a sisyphean task. Every attempt has annoyed some people. The Control Panel has always been painful to use. The Settings app tried for a somewhat clean break and of course there are ton of opinions on it, because it moved cheese and its so different (though is it really?) from the Windows 3.1 Program Manager folder some people seem to expect still frozen in perfect amber from when they first learned to use Windows... There's no pleasing everyone, and there's no perfect path to discoverability or usability.
There's no "smart" path on either side; one requires currently unimaginable tools to read people's minds based on tiny text fragments they through into the void of a search box, and the other to anticipate every users needs and somehow make them all discoverable exactly when the user needs them. (One requires telepathy/telempath and the other prophecy, perhaps.)
I mentioned a "happy path", but that's extremely subjective. (One user loves it if search works great; another if they know just what to click; a third if they have a good CLI to automate it; etc.) It's also clear that there are many more fewer happy paths, than paths in general, and nearly impossible to "pave" all the really good paths for people.
I used "smart" because ML / AI seemed overly charitable for what was going on behind the scenes. And it's certainly distinct (or tries to be) from "you must type in exactly and only the name of the thing you want to find".
The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?"
Strictly heirarchal menu items were an initial GUI effort I remember, begat ribbon "everything available behind the scenes / set up your own menu bar", begat "let us find it for you".
The issue being there seems little thought in intelligently mediating a discovery action, to wit that I can describe the thing I'm looking for but the system lacks a representation in which I can do so in.
Magical search box discovery affords no such path, because the functioning of the system is deliberately obscured from me. I simply have to try guessing another key phrase associated with the thing I want.
And therein lies my gripe: I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.
The driving guideline behind discoverability in a ribbon (and to a lesser extent the Settings) is to balance a combination of the most common tasks and the most powerful ones front and center. The answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the ribbon?" is sometimes "Maybe there's a more common way or a more powerful/capable way to do it" because sometimes "it's no longer meant to be discoverable". (Though sometimes its simply it was underestimated to be a common need, maybe because its primary users opted out of telemetry.)
Personally, I think most of the ribbons are extremely discoverable, but obviously your mileage may vary. I agree though that the search boxes for ribbon functions should offer a "teach me to fish" moment of maybe somehow helping you see how you missed that option in the ribbon. Office at least uses the same icons consistently between search and the ribbon so you could potentially get used to the landmark and eventually figure out the sign posts along the way (and Help documentation still exists and is also in the search results).
> I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.
The Ribbon (and most everything else in this post-Ribbon era) was extremely influenced by user telemetry to figure out what users were actually using day-to-day. It was designed in coordination with user studies to observe how to make it as discoverable as they could. It didn't just come out of thin air in some ivory tower specification, it was prioritized as much as anything else by telemetry from users.
Similar for Settings, I'm sure the things that are moved into the new application and out of the old Control Panel are being prioritized by telemetry. It never surprises me that the users that most often complain about their "favorite" most commonly used settings not getting migrated most often don't have telemetry on.
I'll shortcut my rant about the focus on cheese and moving thereof by noting that we're talking about two different things.
If any option is buried in an archaic path, that's not a well-formed system of discoverability to me.
I could care less that the top 90% of functionality is front-and-center, because I'm still going to use the remaining 10% once a week. And if it takes 100x as long as finding something on the ribbon and requires non-intuitive logic (because see previous comment about deprioritizing deep discoverability), then that's what I'm going to remember.
I'd say the Office ribbon is still sort of hierarchical, just laid out differently. tab -> section/group -> item -> submenu/subdialog.
If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.
As for Windows Settings, it's unfortunately weird not for some principled or philosophical reason, but just because they're still not done reimplementing all the features and use cases they want from Control Panel into the new framework.
In spite of my nitpicking I agree with your general point.
> If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.
Am I using it wrong then? I don't dive into Office if I can avoid it, but just yesterday there was some Powerpoint function I needed that didn't appear on the ribbon.
Had to pull out the "everything" right/left boxes, add it to the ribbon, and then I could use it.
I know they've been trying to fix that with context, selected-object specific tabs that appear, but it still has a ways to go.
I'm curious what that function was? In PowerPoint especially the last time I used something that wasn't on the ribbon was years ago. What were you trying to do?
I am not sure about Cortana but I am sure that other project product managers (e.g. Skype) should be fired. They have historic popular issues. Basic negligence, not bugs.
Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.
It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.
In Atom (one of the first public releases), I had this plugin that used CSS animations to fade the cursor in and out. It took ~100% of one core to do this. That’s right, in order to fade a color between white and clear, in 2017...
I don’t use that plugin anymore. Electron is dope because it actually delivers on the “one UI across all OSes” but the number of abstractions and the performance hit for this is staggering. It’s not that it needs to be this bad — I don’t think that there’s some specific problem in the technologies, it’s that it /is/ bad in practice. But whatever, my home desktop has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, ~2GB/sec disk reads, and 100mbit internet, so it works with about the same responsiveness as a normal app under Win95 on the hardware of the day.
I believe the answer is because their talent has left and now there are inexperienced comp science grads, UX designers and marketing left and nothing else.
It works for me on Windows but has the annoying habit of popping up s notification for each and every message that arrived while that client was offline. It does not matter if I had already read it in another client. And the notifications come one after the other with some 5 seconds of delay. I cannot find polite words for how annoying that is.
So the article that you linked focuses on cancer, and even the claim about testosterone links to another article on the site that also focuses on cancer and not on testosterone.
Turning to the article's sources, you find [1] source for the testosterone claim. And the summary at the beginning of that study states the following:
"Vegans had higher testosterone levels than vegetarians and meat-eaters, but this was offset by higher sex hormone binding globulin, and there were no differences between diet groups in free testosterone, androstanediol glucuronide or luteinizing hormone."
So higher overall testosterone, the same amount of free testosterone. I think this is a perfect example of selectively reporting on scientific studies. The author of that article may not technically be wrong, but it encourages spreading bad advice when you repeat that claim over and over again without the caveats mentioned in the actual studies.
It's worth noting that it's even in the title of the study: "Hormones and diet: low insulin-like growth factor-I but normal bioavailable androgens in vegan men". There's no excuse for misrepresenting that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the original author was not arguing that we should eat meat for our protein.
They were suggesting that if you get your protein from plant sources, you should make sure to hit a complete amino acid profile and you should understand that digestibility is also lower for plant-based proteins.
I don't completely agree with you about the "essential amino acid myth".
While true that plant proteins are not “incomplete”, it is also true that some aren’t absorbed as well [1] and are lower in certain essential amino acids than others. The article/video that you linked suggests that the essential amino acid profiles don't matter, even from plant proteins, because you get more than you need anyway but that's not true for everybody.
Importantly, if you're someone who is physically active or looking to gain muscle mass! When you're physically active, your body _does_ use almost all of the protein that you give it (at least, all of the protein it's able to absorb through digestion). And if you give it a deficiency in certain essential aa's that it can't create for itself, you can see less muscle growth. In that case, it is important to either stick to some of the more complete veggie proteins or to consume a combination of proteins that satisfy a complete amino acid profile.
I'd be happy to see research to the contrary.
I'd also encourage anyone reading to consider a vegetarian or vegan diet. Cutting out meat is pretty easy, even if you have to complement proteins for bodybuilding, and it's one of the best individual contributions you can make to inhibiting climate change.
Your comment gives me an idea: perhaps YC should make all the video pitches public when their companies get funded. It would be both entertaining an educative
So I'm late to the digital currency game. What are the regular use cases for digital currency? Who accepts it? Is it mostly for person-to-person trading?
Depends on the currency. Bitcoin is largely just currency, but things like Ethereum introduce concepts such as smart contracts. Here's an article explaining Ethereum, but obviously there are tons of cryptocurrencies now that all work in their own way.
The utility is that it's a trust-less transfer of value between two parties. Essentially, it's like being able to send cash, anonymously if you chose, to someone else, without an intermediary, in a way that everyone can see and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of.
It seems to me a lot of it is tied up in speculative investment. But there are some vendors who accept it and some countries (eg: Japan) where it's more popular and widely accepted.
Use cases (Escaping currency controls,Cannot be seized by government, Asset Speculation, Purchasing legal and illegal things, Money laundering, Donating to people like wikileaks)
Many of these things are no different than holding large amounts of normal cash(of any currency really) or something such as gold, with the exception of their being a ledger of all trades that have occurred. Also bitcoins can certainly be seized by the government should they size control over any accounts you hold coins in, take your computers, ect (it's just harder to do so).
Also I think your missing the biggest use case, abet one that isn't frequently discussed, and it is that crypto currencies are by far the best digital payment solution when it comes to the time it takes for transactions to clear. There is no dispute process, and there is no waiting on the fed for their ACA system to clear your transactions. However, I think a lot of people prefer credit cards for cash back and to have the option to charge back, but certainly cryptos are better for sellers (and potentially will give discounts to those who use them in the future).
>crypto currencies are by far the best digital payment solution when it comes to the time it takes for transactions to clear
Isn't paypal much faster than crypto currencies at doing the same? The normal banking system is quite slow (in part for good reasons) but the digital currencies that came before the crypto currencies are much better at this already, and better than bitcoin will ever be.
If your definition of clearing is that they can't be reversed then nothing that isn't a crypto currency allows it. That's not the usual definition of transaction clearing though.
Coinbase uses the term 'digital currency' to -- I believe -- placate NY regulators & to support their regulation moat.
You're correct: if crypto currencies were digital currencies there would be no advantage. However, crypto assets are decentralised & resistant to censorship. The power shifts away from the nation state (& Trump), & toward individuals.
As a nitpick the proper term is "cryptocurrency", not "digital currency". A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally.
Makes sense. Coinbase's website is plastered with the term "digital currency" so that seemed the safest to use since I'm not too familiar with that market :)
They do that for their benefit, & for the benefit of their regulator bedfellows (I think). The SEC, for example, dare not mutter the word 'crypto', confirming that Bitcoin et al do actually exist!
> A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally.
How would a non-digital cryptocurrency work? While signal scramblers, an analog equivalent to digital cryptography, did exist, I have a hard time imagining an analog blockchain.
Are you confusing digital with electronic? Ones and zeros carved into a tree are still a digital record. Digital refers to the fact the you operate on a set of discrete values, in contrast to a continuum of values. Medium is irrelevant.
Just to be clear. I do agree with the argument above that "cryptocurrency" is a much more fitting term than "digital currency".
I suspect there are chemical compounds that when reacted can perform analog arithmetic. If you used that to create signing, hashing and propagation logic I dare say analog cryptocurrencies could exist.
There are some vendors who take it; the New Mexico Tea Company for instance—and I buy tea from them because it's good tea, not because they take Bitcoin (I usually use a credit card to check out anyway).
I have also used it to transfer money to friends, because being able to do that in-browser without involving Paypal seemed pretty great. I would like to get my family using it for this reason too, but most of them are not tech savvy enough to handle it (and some probably would have trouble with Coinbase's verification).
While downvoting this is warranted, this is certainly true. To catch up on the biggest news that has come out of Bitcoin, I'd suggest reading on 'Silk Road' and Ross Ulbricht. Wired has a very good 2-set long form on this[1].
If you don't want such a verbose story, Ars Techica follwed it well too[2]
By volume, sure, AlphaBay was definitely a bigger successor, but Silk Road was unprecedented. Something like AlphaBay was inevitable after Silk Road (Next was Hansa, but turns out was already a honeypot by that time).
Silk Road was the first to bring forward the notion of how cryptocurrencies can be used for something much more malicious than coffee. The news it made, and with a face to the organization made it a bigger story, and with Federal Officers involved in a related crime, I will maintain it is a much more important story than AlphaBay.
On a sidenote, AlphaBay isn't the all secure operation you think it was, the 'admin' used a clearnet personal email address for some sort of welcome message, and several other stupid mistakes (check out the document posted a couple days ago in detail and a link to a forum in the comments).
There will be another market which will be bigger than AlphaBay. Currencies with more privacy oriented features are coming baked in, so it will be harder to catch them too.
I did not say that at all. Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
>>> isn't the all secure operation you think it was
>I did not say that at all.
You didn't, but I said that to show that it didn't earn it's place as the bigger competitor, it was just bound to happen no matter who braved it.
>Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
Mostly agree. But I don't think there's anything illegal about cracking the tor network, AlphaBay's servers or one of its admins' computers. There was probably a warrant for whatever they did, especially since it was at the international level involving multiple agencies. It might also be a vulnerability in the tor network, but I bet we would most likely never know.
I'm actually surprised to hear such an accurate description from someone else, as my Googling has turned up very few matches so far.