u/lifsbosu

Wife made an offhand comment back in February that I "just wanted them to move so I could feel the money was worth it." Fair point. No idea if the automations were actually earning their keep or if they cycled twice a day and sat idle otherwise. So I set up counters.

Setup was boring. Counter helper per shade in Home Assistant, one automation per counter that increments on any state change of the cover entity. Template sensor on top of each counter with state_class total_increasing so long term statistics picks them up. Logged raw states to InfluxDB since the default recorder only keeps raw states for about 10 days and I wanted to cross reference by hour of day and by which automation fired.

Eight shades total, all PoE cellular from SmartWings, mix of south, west and east facing rooms.

Total cycles across all shades from Feb through mid August: 5,847. I had guessed maybe 2,500. So my wife was directionally wrong but also me not knowing the answer to within a factor of two is a bad look.

Three things that surprised me.

Distribution was way more skewed than I thought. The two shades in the west facing living room accounted for 3,140 cycles between them. That is 54 percent of the total from 25 percent of the shades. Bedroom shade came in at 214 cycles for the whole period, basically just morning open and evening close. I had built out full temperature triggers for the bedroom and it never once fired because that room has an external overhang and never gets direct sun. I just never checked.

Weekend cycles were 40 percent higher than weekdays across the board. I assumed the opposite because we are gone during weekdays and the automations run on schedule regardless of who is home. Turns out we manually override way more on weekends because we are actually in those rooms reacting to conditions. Voice commands specifically doubled on Saturday and Sunday. That shifted my view of automation vs manual, we are not going hands off, we are running a hybrid where automations set the defaults and we tweak from the couch.

June had a spike I could not initially explain. Total cycles for the month came in at 1,412, versus 750 to 900 for the surrounding months. Traced it to a numeric_state trigger on the kitchen shade with no for: qualifier, set to above: 78F. Sensor was oscillating between 77.5 and 78.5 all afternoon in early June and the shade was cycling every four to six minutes. Wife did not notice because she was at work. Added a for: 15 minutes qualifier and it dropped back to baseline the next month.

Thing I took away from all this is that instrumenting your automations is worth doing even when you think you know how they behave. The bedroom shade automation is on the list to just delete since the data says nobody uses it. The kitchen trigger issue would have kept eating motor cycles indefinitely because the failure mode was silent, no error, no notification, just a shade opening and closing all afternoon while nobody was home.

Curious what other people actually track. Cycle counts, uptime, automation hit rate. Feels like most of us set up automations and never actually look back at what they do.

Been running an experiment for the last three months. I do analytics for the CS org at a mid-market SaaS, and one of my recurring headaches is turning unstructured feedback (support ticket comments, cancellation reasons, exit surveys) into something the leadership team can actually read in a QBR.

Historically this was me tagging things in a Google Sheet by hand on a Sunday. This year I started testing AI functions inside spreadsheets as a replacement. Here's what I kept using and what I killed.

Google Sheets =AI(). Workspace Experiments. The universal function is convenient because you can prompt anything, but "prompt anything" also means the outputs drift row to row. I had rows in the same batch where "billing dispute" got labeled once as "Billing" and later as "Financial." No consistent taxonomy. Fine for one-off summaries, not fine for anything I'm putting in a monthly report where the categories need to be comparable to last month's.

Rows. The AI toolbar and prompt-based columns were well designed, honestly better UX than the alternatives. We were on it for a while, until they announced they were sunsetting the product at the end of May and got acquired by Superhuman. That was actually the trigger for me testing the rest of this list seriously.

Julius AI. Technically not a spreadsheet, it's an analysis layer on top of your data. Great for one-shot questions ("what are the top three cancellation themes this month"). But it's not where I live day to day, and I couldn't get it to live inside a sheet the way I needed for the intermediate steps between raw feedback and a chart.

Zoom Sheets AI functions. Started using this seriously about a month ago because we already had Zoom Workplace and the productivity add-on came in through a company plan renewal. The thing that made it stick wasn't the marketing pitch, it was the function structure. Instead of one universal =AI(prompt-blob) function, there are dedicated named functions with predictable parameter slots: AI.CLASSIFY(range, categories), AI.EXTRACT, AI.FORMAT, AI.REWRITE, AI.SENTIMENT, AI.SUMMARIZE, plus a plain AI for general prompts. AI.CLASSIFY takes the categorical list as a separate parameter, so the taxonomy stays fixed across a batch. That single design choice fixed my main complaint with =AI(). I ran about 400 rows of exit survey and cancellation feedback through AI.CLASSIFY with a fixed six-category taxonomy. Accuracy against my own hand-tagged version came out around 78%, and the wrong-answer patterns are consistent enough that I can spot-check systematically. Things worth flagging if you try it: the monthly AI credits on our plan don't roll over, so batch classification runs eat into the pool faster than casual use does; I also ran into parsing issues when a category label itself contained a comma, so I ended up keeping my labels short and comma-free; and in my tests, multi-theme rows usually came back labeled with only the dominant theme, which handles the 85-90% of rows with one clear topic just fine but leaves the mixed ones under-represented if you care about second-order categorization.

Airtable AI. The schema-first approach is nice, and the AI field type does give you consistent labels within a single-select field. But we're not on Airtable for our main data, and moving 400 rows over just for classification defeats the point.

Where I ended up, more concretely than my earlier "still spot-checking" answer:

First pass on any batch over ~50 rows: named AI functions with a fixed category taxonomy (the classification setup above)

Sanity check: manually review any row longer than average, because those are almost always the multi-theme ones

End-of-month rollup narrative for QBR: Julius, one-shot summarization on the already-classified data

Any raw "what's happening in support this week" one-off question: Google Sheets =AI() is still fine for that

This has actually cut my manual tagging time by roughly two-thirds. Not zero, and I'm still the human in the loop for anything that goes into a QBR deck or a leadership rollup. But the "sit down and tag 300 rows on a Sunday" ritual is done.

Curious how other analysts here are handling multi-label classification at scale without dropping to a full Python NLP pipeline. Specifically curious if anyone's found a spreadsheet-native way to expose per-row confidence scores.

Spent the last two weekends going down this rabbit hole and figured I'd write it up in case anyone else is looking at the same problem.

Backstory: my dad had a bad afib episode this summer and the cardiologist told me family history means I should probably start tracking my own rhythm going forward. I already have a smartwatch for work stuff so I don't want a second full-blown one on the other wrist. I want something slim I can wear 24/7 without babying the battery every single night, and the band form factor made the most sense.

Started with the obvious pick. The Fitbit Charge 6 has ECG, a decent seven-day battery, and the phone integration is genuinely useful for maps and wallet on the wrist. But the subscription situation has actually gotten worse. Since May the app has been living under a Google account, the yearly plan bumped from $79.99 to $99.99, and Sleep Profile plus the AI health coach are still locked behind the paywall. I don't mind paying for hardware. I mind renting features from hardware I already own, and I'm not looking to hand over years of continuous health data to yet another Google product either.

Went cheaper next. The Amazfit Band 7 gets recommended here constantly and I understand why. Around $50, 18-day battery, decent AMOLED, and the companion app doesn't charge for anything. Problem is no ECG. Which kills it for what I actually need. No point tracking HR trends if I can't capture an actual strip when I feel something weird.

The premium smartwatches do ECG well but I'm not paying $400+ for a second wrist device just for rhythm tracking, and their batteries are designed around daily charging, which kills the continuous-wear angle anyway.

So the niche I'm looking for is: single-lead ECG, no subscription for the interpretation layer, battery long enough to sleep-track without daily top-ups, and priced somewhere between the $50 basic bands and the $400 smartwatches. It's a smaller market than I expected.

The screenless direction seems to be where several newer entries are heading. Trade-off is you have to open the app to see any reading, but the battery numbers get significantly better and the sensor pod stays against the skin more reliably than a display module would. I'm coming around to it more than I expected to.

Curious if anyone here has actually lived with one of these for more than a couple weeks. My dad's current device spits out an ECG summary his doctor called borderline useless, so I'd like to know if the newer bands generate anything a cardiologist actually finds readable before I commit.

Been at this Japanese MNC in KL for close to 4 years now, regional ops role so cross-border trips are basically constant. SG, BKK, JKT, Tokyo, sometimes HKG. Easily 2-3 trips a month, each 2-4 days.

Flights and hotels are booked through the company's travel vendor portal so they get billed direct. Everything on the ground (taxis, client meals, supplier gifts) goes on my personal card and gets claimed back. Standard hybrid setup for MNCs here.

Thing I've noticed over time is that every trip I come back from, the MYR reimbursement is a bit less than what my personal card got charged. Ignored it the first year because the amounts felt small. Then I started tracking it in a spreadsheet just to see if I was imagining things. Turns out it's consistently 1-2% short, sometimes closer to 3% on JPY or IDR trips.

Just to make it concrete. Trip to Jakarta a few months back. Hotel came out to around IDR 4.5 million over 3 nights, taxi and meals and a couple of client dinners maybe another IDR 5 million on top. My CIMB card statement showed the MYR equivalent as about RM 2,180 (Mastercard daily rate plus the 1% conversion CIMB adds). I submitted the claim in IDR because that's what the receipts show. Finance reimbursed RM 2,135. Gap of RM 45.

Part of that gap is my card's FX spread which I'd eat under any policy. But a chunk is the company itself. Our expense system only accepts receipts in original currency and converts to MYR using a monthly locked treasury rate published on the 1st. Card statement can be attached as proof but the reimbursable figure is calculated off the IDR receipt, not off what my card was charged. So the drift between the 1st-of-month rate and the actual transaction rate, plus whatever conservatism sits in the treasury table, falls on me.

I raised it with finance once. They said the locked rate averages out over time. Doesn't quite. When MYR weakens between the 1st and the transaction date my card gets charged more MYR for the same receipt, but reimbursement stays anchored to the older rate, so I'm short. When MYR moves the other way the gap narrows, and a few times I've come out ahead by a few ringgit, but not enough to offset the losing months. The treasury table itself also has some conservatism baked in, so even flat-FX months I'm 0.5-1% down.

A few colleagues ran the same numbers and got the same result. When we raised it as a group last year HR said changing the policy would need a global treasury discussion. Which means never.

The weirder part is our SG office doesn't have this issue as badly. Their finance apparently reconciles the FX drift monthly and true-ups people if it exceeds a threshold. Same company, same treasury team, somehow that practice hasn't crossed over to KL. When I asked why we can't do the same here I got "different local policy" which isn't really an answer. Actually a friend at a European MNC in KL told me his side moved off Concur to a regional tool called Helios last year. Because it pulls daily interbank rates at submission, the FX drift disappears. He did say the rollout took most of a year, and their year-end consolidation still needs manual treasury reconciliation back to group HQ. Solvable problem, ours just doesn't want to touch it.

My workaround now is to route everything through vendor invoicing where possible, and stay out of the FX chain. Ground expenses still have to go on the personal card so I just accept losing 1.5%. Almost 4 years in and it's one of those things you stop noticing until you open the spreadsheet.

I was diagnosed with PCOS at 24 and I'm 31 now, so seven years of trying things, dropping things, and trying to figure out what was actually helping versus what I was just hoping was helping.

My endo offered metformin twice and I declined both times. Not because I'm anti-medication, I just wanted to see how far I could get with other levers first. My HOMA-IR last summer was 3.8 which is firmly insulin resistant territory, fasting glucose was 102, and my cycles were anywhere from 38 to 70 days apart.

This year I finally got serious about it.

The biggest behavioral change was fiber. I went from maybe 15g a day to 35 to 40g consistently, which sounds small but was genuinely the hardest part. I started tracking it the way I used to track protein.

Walking after meals turned out to be the highest-leverage thing. Twenty minutes whenever it was feasible, not exercise really, just movement. My fasting glucose dropped about 8 points within six weeks of doing this consistently, which I didn't expect.

I also dialed in supplements. Tried Thorne berberine first and the GI side effects were rough at doses where I could actually feel a difference. Switched to a probiotic that uses dihydroberberine paired with a B420 strain. Also taking inositol separately because the combo products didn't have the dose I wanted.

Latest labs: HOMA-IR is 1.9, fasting glucose 89, hs-CRP dropped from 4.1 to 1.8. Cycles have been 31 to 34 days for the last four months which is the most regular they've ever been. Energy is also way more stable than it used to be, which I think matters even though there's no number to show for it.

I'm posting this because I lurked here for years when I was first diagnosed and reading update posts kept me going. Insulin resistance is genuinely movable for a lot of us. The levers are boring and they take consistency but they work.

Was cleaning out the bathroom cabinet last weekend and found my prescription bottle tucked behind the floss. Hadn't touched it. Had to count back to figure out when I last took one.

Background: chronic gastritis diagnosis spring 2024 after a post-viral GI thing that never fully resolved. H. pylori negative twice. Endoscopy showed mild non-erosive inflammation, nothing dramatic. Started on pantoprazole, switched to omeprazole 20mg because I kept waking up at 2am feeling like my chest was on fire. Tried tapering off three separate times over the past year and a half. Every time I'd be back on it within 10 days. Rebound is real.

What I'd been doing on my own: training consistently again, dropped about 4kg over the spring, no alcohol on weekdays, last meal before 8pm. Standard stuff every GI doc tells you. None of it had been enough on its own.

I'm not going to pretend I know which of these finally shifted things. Weight loss probably matters. The earlier dinner cutoff probably matters. Gastritis maybe just takes time to settle and I happened to hit the back end of that curve. Acid suppression maybe bought the lining time to heal. No idea.

But I haven't woken up with reflux in over two months. The bottle in my cabinet is still mostly full. And for the first time since this whole thing started I'm not scared of fully coming off the PPI.

i don't know if this is a question or just me venting at the void but here goes.

been pretty serious about this for like a year and a half. lifting, walking a lot, sleeping decent, eating mostly like an adult. dropped a meaningful amount of weight by now, my arms look different, legs feel different, face actually changed. my last bloodwork was honestly the most boring it's ever been, which i'll take as a win.

the stomach didn't get the message.

specifically the part right around and under the belly button. the rest of me clearly responded to all the effort. that part is just sitting there. body scan back in march said the deep abdominal stuff hadn't really moved from where it was when i started, even though i'd lost a chunk of weight by then. waist tape is barely different, hips came down way more.

what bothers me isn't the aesthetics, it's that this is supposed to be the easy fat. every podcast, every article, every doctor: "the belly fat will go first because it's the most metabolically active." cool. mine apparently isn't subscribed.

i think i've kind of maxed out what diet and training are going to do for this particular thing. the things i haven't really touched are the gut side and maybe stress/cortisol. cortisol i can't tell if it's a real lever or wellness astrology at this point. gut i actually don't know enough about.

been reading some stuff on whether what's living in your gut affects where your body actually parks fat, separate from how much you eat or how much you move. sounds plausible and also exactly like the kind of thing that turns out to be 30% real and 70% supplement marketing once you actually look at the studies.

probably going to try something in that direction for a few months and see if anything moves on the next scan. open to hearing from anyone who's actually been on the other side of this where the last stubborn part finally shifted, or whether i should just make peace with this being where my body wants to live.

Moving into a small unit next week. Bedroom is around 110 sqft, west facing so afternoon turns the place into an oven. Already settled on 1HP, not asking about sizing.

What I'm stuck on is brand tier. Walked into Senheng yesterday and the guy quoted Daikin FTKE 1HP at RM1,155 promo with install, which honestly is not as bad as I expected for Daikin. Same evening my flatmate sent me a Lazada link for a Comfee Gusto 1HP at RM1,099, also 4-star CSPF, sits under the Midea group from what I dug up. She has had one running in her old studio for about a year and says it just works, no drama.

What's pulling me back is the cousin factor. He went Haier three years ago because it was the cheapest 1HP on Shopee, compressor died after the second hot season, service guy ghosted him after one visit. So now I have this paranoia about anything outside the safe tier-1 brands, even when the math says just go.

The question I cannot find a straight answer to is whether a Daikin entry FTKE running mostly overnight is meaningfully more reliable than a Comfee Gusto over a 4-5 year window, or if at the 1HP entry tier the price gap is mostly brand premium. If anyone here has actually downsized from a tier-1 to Comfee or Midea and regretted it, that's the data point I am missing.

About 7 months into Actual now and the one category I still can't figure out a clean system for is personal fun money. Everything else has rules, groceries get tracked per trip, bills are scheduled, savings goals are set. But the $150 I give myself each month for random stuff (coffee, impulse buys, random apps) just turns into this messy pile of $4 and $7 transactions I never bother categorizing properly.

I tried being disciplined about it for a month and it made me hate opening the app. Felt like I was auditing myself for buying a latte. So now I basically just fund the envelope and check the balance before spending, but my transaction list is chaos and reconcile week is painful because none of the amounts match cleanly.

The one thing that accidentally helped was loading my Starbucks and DoorDash spending onto gift cards through Snaplii at the start of the month. Two transactions instead of like fifteen, and whatever cashback I get just stays in the app as credit toward next month. Not a budgeting tool obviously but it collapsed a bunch of noise out of that envelope. Only annoying thing is some retailers have a $25 minimum load which is more than I'd want to commit for certain stores.

Still trying to figure out whether it's better to just let fun money be a black box or force myself to track it properly. The perfectionist in me hates the mess but the realistic version of me knows I'll quit if it's too granular.

Used the same debit card for almost 4 years. Worked across two countries in southeast Asia, was the closest thing I had to a constant.

Moved to Portugal two weeks ago. Suddenly there's a 1.5% FX fee on everything I buy. Monthly fee kicked in too because I don't qualify for the free tier anymore without a local salary feeding the account, and the ATM cap is half of what it was.

The local bank route isn't quick either. The non-resident process wants paperwork I don't have collected yet, so in the meantime I'm bleeding money on coffee and groceries.

Went through a version of this last time I moved too. The setup tax of relocating is starting to feel heavier than the move itself.

How do you all handle the card layer when you actually live across countries long term? Not interested in the private banking version. Just the boring problem of wanting one card that doesn't quietly get worse every time my address changes.

My AGMs are about three years past their honest life and I'm finally committing to the LFP refit this winter while we're at the dock. House bank, 12V, 35ft sloop, full-time aboard since last spring. Average draw, fridge is the big one, plus instruments, lights, water pump. Solar carries us most days at anchor, genny tops up maybe twice a week when it's overcast.

Where I'm getting stuck is on cell sizing. Went into this assuming I'd go big and simple, two strings of 280Ah or 304Ah cells, call it done. Then I started digging through old threads on the cruising forums and saw a Sinopoly rep telling someone never to put cells larger than 200Ah on a small boat. The reasoning was that 100Ah was preferred, 200Ah was the upper bound he'd accept, and anything bigger wasn't structurally designed for offshore vibration and shock. Whether that's a real engineering concern or product positioning, I honestly can't tell.

The DIY solar crowd defaults to 280Ah or 304Ah without thinking twice, but most of those installs are in stationary cabins or RVs that don't get slammed into a square wave at 2am. Smaller cells (100-200Ah) means more cells, more interconnects, more parallel strings, more electrical complexity, and arguably more failure points. Bigger cells means simpler topology but if one cell decides to swell or go thermal on a boat, you can't exactly walk down the street while it sorts itself out.

Compression case is going in either way, that part's settled. BMS will have low-temp cutoff and shunt monitoring. Boat stays in the water year-round but it's temperate, no freezing storage.

Mostly just trying to figure out if the cell size thing is actually a marine-specific concern that matters in practice, or something the forums have inflated past its real-world importance. Still chewing on whether to commit to the bigger cells or split into smaller ones.

Between morning huddles, QI reviews, and compliance check-ins I'm documenting like 6 meetings a week. Writing up action items after each one eats 30 minutes minimum and half the team doesn't even read them. Started recording my non-clinical admin meetings instead and letting a transcription tool pull out the notes. Saved me hours. Just keep it away from anything patient-facing obviously.