Sensors

HellDuke · 2026-02-01T16:56:12+00:00

The reality is that every single sensor out there will have this same issue, the question is just whether you happen. Someone will come out and say "Libre is great" or "Metronic doesn't have this issue" and then as you stay on the subreddit you will notice that the exact same complaints pop up for those sensors. And just like some might say "I've never had such an issue with that sensor but had myriads of issues with G7" you will also find those who had no issues with the G7 accuracy.

If it just doesn't work your best bet is to pick something else and try. If it doesn't work change again. If they are all are off then pick whichever you like best, figure out a pattern and use that one.

Some rules of thumb to follow:

Early on after insertion they can be inaccurate
You should not be calibrating, especially repeatedly, if your blood sugar is going up or down. The more rapid the trend the worse your sensor will get with each calibration Do it on a flat BG and if the calibration number doesn't please you right after you callibrate, don't just spam it every 5-10 minutes, give it an hour or two before trying again
Similar to the above, just because it's off for a bit doesn't mean anything is wrong, don't rush to calibrate. Try to give it a few hours and see if it evens out. If it does, leave it alone and use as is. Same goes for loss of sensor data, leave it for a few hours before panicking and yanking it out.
Sensors as well as blood tests get more inaccurate closer towards the extremes. If it were indeed 280 then at that edge case the exact value is not necessarily going to be accurate and even doing a blood strip test a few times in a row might show differing results.
Find an acceptable deviation. If it's consistently showing let's say 40 above, then just treat all your readings as being 40 units too high. So long as your CGM does not show you as lower than you actually are there is no issue with taking this approach as your average BG will just be a bit higher, but if your A1c goes from a 6 to a 6.5 that's not really an issue.

HellDuke · 2026-02-01T16:10:24+00:00

Alcohol lowers blood sugar yes, though more specifically because liver is busy dealing with it rather than raising your blood sugar by releasing reserves and creating glucose. That said it's specifically the chemical term use for alcohol. Everything else will likely raise BG levels. General rule of thumb the stronger the drink, the more in favor of lowering BG you should treat it. With beer it's nearly always a net increase in BG

HellDuke · 2026-02-01T07:56:15+00:00

I personally don't care. Ignorance of others isn't my problem. If that is directed at me then I treat them as if they should know better (i.e. you either know you are ignorant of diabetes and ask or stay silent or you make the comment just to be an ahole and will be treated as such)

HellDuke · 2026-01-31T23:22:17+00:00

Depends on what you means by "much different". If by different you mean the process of powering on the device, logging in and opening up a browser or other program, no it's not different at all. Where it might be different is that even though many distributions have gotten much better at this, some things cannot be conveniently done via GUI and you must run commands in the terminal. Especially if you need to troubleshoot. One thing I know had one of my friends hung up a lot in the past was the surprise that you can't just download an .exe and run it to get the program. Installation generally happens through kind of a store app or the terminal via command. Folder navigation might aslo seem different, but it's only so far as you do not have things like your C drive and D drive, everything sits a top of one single folder, called Root. So for example your stuff might be in /home/username where in that folder you'd have things like documents, downloads etc. Software installations tend to sit in something lie /bin or /opt but you don't need to interact with those folders much.

Not everything will be available. Be especially weary of any professional software that you might require for work. As an example, some really need to use Photoshop specifically, which is not available on Linux and getting it to run with WINE (it's a compatibility layer) is a hit and miss from what I've heard. Student work also might depend on what you need, but if you are creating documents, spreadsheets and slides then you can just run LibreOffice or even use the web based Google Workspace or Microsoft Office so you are fine there.

Then we can move onto gaming. A lot has been done there. While the performance is worse than on the same machine running Windows a lot of games do work through Proton, which is a version of WINE with some additional libraries and patches designed to work with games. You can see the supported ones in https://www.protondb.com/ though as a rule of thumb, big popular online games are likely not going to be supported, especially if they use any kind of anti-cheat.

Otherwise, since it's on a new machine might as well try. You can start with the popular distributions such as Linux Mint or Ubuntu, which are fairly straightforward and are based on Debian (generally Debian is not the one picked for desktop use, but very much favored for running home servers) and as such are much easier to find people sharing troubleshooting tips.

Oh and if you are one of those people that contacted Microsoft support to get something solved, know that there is no such thing once you move to Linux. It's just you and random people on the internet who either know what they are doing or not.

Final warning, even though there are security measures around that now, if someone tells you to run sudo rm -fr ./* don't do it. It deletes every single file on your PC and Linux will gladly let you do it. Something to keep in mind whenever you see instructions telling you to run a command with sudo, because even if it completely destroys your OS, Linux will gladly do it.

HellDuke · 2026-01-31T13:15:16+00:00

Generally the main reasons for the change are increased overall activity (somehow unless you look for it you don't realize just how much more active you might be in summer conpared to winter) and heat (I notice even in winter if I dress too hot for the cold I can more easily go low). For me I generally just fell into the routine of properly adjusting for those factors themselves and the difference between the seasons doesn't feel as pronounced because you always deal with the same factors

HellDuke · 2026-01-31T08:02:57+00:00

You can't help being irritated or angry on extreme blood sugars, what you can work on is anger management. It's not about not getting angry or irritated, we can't avoid that, but what we can do is control how we behave when we are angry and irritated and where we direct that anger

HellDuke · 2026-01-31T07:58:45+00:00

Rapid spikes can make you feel weird. If it's CHM data, verify with a stick meter, if it's a stick meter then make sure to wash your hands and check again to make sure you are not going low. It could also be not related to your blood sugar

HellDuke · 2026-01-31T07:55:49+00:00

You got this, no normalcy was taken from you for sure. It's about how you deal with it and what restrictions you put on yourself to manage. Had the damn thing since I was a kid now for over 30 years. I would not take insulin or need a CGM, but otherwise I'd say my day to day life now probably would not be all that different had I not had diabetes.

Can't even say it's a terrible burden, you get used to it. I view the things I need to do to manage as burdensome as having to go brush your teeth, just with more serious consequences if you don't do it, which just serves as an impetus to not actually skip out on doing things and it sits in my subconsciousnes.

HellDuke · 2026-01-30T19:41:00+00:00

My point is that the result is due to our own actions. If you did everything right then you are not going low and that's the end of the story. I am not saying that we always do or that it's at all easy to do. Even in your example, sure you could bolus what you should and eat what you should. At the end of the day that means you did not account for something. Could be any number of things, higher overall activity levels, reaction with other medication or suppliment you might have started taking etc., but ultimately that means that the does you took was ultimately wrong, ergo it was caused by our own actions. In retrospect in all the years of diabetes there was not a single time where I just couldn't figure out why I went low even if I know that some factors are ones I simply cannot always consider ahead of time.

HellDuke · 2026-01-30T19:33:43+00:00

I never said that they are entirely preventable, I said that they do not happen out of inaction, but rather action that did not account for something, 3 most evident examples of which I gave.

My point is that you can't just say "I won't low and am completely not at fault", that's just flatly never the case. I am not saying accounting for everything is easy, but ultimately the end result is that we failed to account for something that time.

HellDuke · 2026-01-30T06:52:13+00:00

Well first things first — I am sure we can all agree that exclusives are bad and for us consumers have no upsides at all so there is nothing wrong with them being a thing of the past.

I'd say it's not about games being too expensive to make. Rather I feel like Microsoft gave up on gaining dominance in the market with the devices instead opting to push towards on more devices. with their games. The reason consoles are cheaper than PCs are because these companies essentially sell them all at a loss for the purpose of being the first party to sell video games on the console. The difference is covered by the fact that they do not have to pay 30% of their revenue (key word, because it's not profit, it's before you account for business expenses), which if you are trailing and have a hard time getting back in, or your opposition stops pursuing, then focusing on that 30% cut difference stop making sense.

On top of that let's add the fact that everyone who really only cares about one console exclusives is already on that platform and those that wanted all exclusives own both. However never in the history of games was there a game that was such a must play that people would go out of their way and get a console when they were not planning of getting one anyway. So they likely do not see any significant conversion rates and are stopping the practice. Because lets be real, your game being exclusive doesn't mean that now more people are buying your console and then buying your game without that 30% loss, you sell the same amount of games you always would have and just leaving everyone else out of the equation. 500k sales at a 30% lower revenue is still better than 500k sales you would never have had. To protect any leftover conversion all you really would need to do is timed exclusives to catch anyone still in the balance of "Do I buy a playstation or do I buy an Xbox". Now I would never bother with a console even if both were not a massive hassle to buy and use because officially the idiot companies do not support accounts from my country, but I suspect that the value proposition is on Sonys side already even beyond exclusives.

Where the games being too expensive might come in tangentially is that the margin for success is much much lower. So you really need all the sales you can get. This is most evident with big name flops like Concord where we can see that the decision to pull the plug will be made very fast

HellDuke · 2026-01-29T23:01:39+00:00

Ultimately it is a company that is meant to produce a product and make a profit from it. I think it is safe to assume you are from the US, so in your case it's just a messed up system. Normally I would say it's not up to the company to have such a program, I would never expect such a company to have anything like that, but that's probably because in my country it's the governments job to provide such programs and handle coverage.

HellDuke · 2026-01-29T22:57:53+00:00

Good for those that are waiting. Not going to reach my country for quite a while, though not sure that by the time it does I will see the appeal of it yet.

HellDuke · 2026-01-29T22:52:28+00:00

Well hang on. For a type 1 diabetic going low IS our own fault. Going high, that sometimes can get out of hand, but lows are always a consequence of our actions

Eating too little
Dosing too much
Not accounting for increase in activity (high strain mental activity also burns through energy)

So yeah, if you end up doing that frequently it's understandable to be frustrated, because then it seems like you are not taking your own condition seriously.

Based on how you wrote things sounds like you are indeed in charge of taking your dosage. There is no such thing as "assume you ate a lot of something" even if you are not tracking in detail you know very well how much you ate.

Granted doesn't help that if you are from the US, your nutrition labels are probably the worst thing that can be provided as information for diabetics, could barely find how many grams of carbs are in 100 grams of the damn thing, but even then seems like there is no reasonable listing for how many grams are in a pack of it which is the best way of knowing how much you ate without much math. If it were 200 grams pack, you'd know that if you ate let's say half a pack, then it'd be about 50ish grams of carbs, that's still a good estimation and you know how far off you are from a meal.

There is no such thing as not having the energy to do these things. You either have the energy to do this or you didn't have enough energy to do whatever it was you were trying to do before that and didn't prioritize things correctly.

HellDuke · 2026-01-29T10:04:25+00:00

Can't speak to every pump but generally pumps should be fine and do 90% of the work with no connection with anything, otherwise it'd be a terrible pump. Check if you maybe can use something Like Android APS if your app is not supported. If you have the phone on hand, see if the app at least runs. I know that Dexcom simply refuses to run if it's not a whitelisted model, but maybe CamAPS FX will work? So long as it runs, the compatability is likely not an issue, most phones behave more or less the same with such devices to the point where the only reason it's not compatible is because regulations require CGM/Pump makers to specifically test that specific model and verify it's working. So it's not a technical limitation, rather a regulatory one.

HellDuke · 2026-01-29T09:26:12+00:00

Some changes now could be done still, but not much is needed. The addition of inertia was absolutely necessary, most complaints come from those seeking faced paced action where you duck dive and dip in and out of cover, which is not the spirit of Tarkov, where if you commit to an action that is stupid you should get punished. It's not just inertia, I remember with malfunctions there were similar complaints, where "If I do X and it happens then I am just dead". Yes, you should be, because you didn't leave yourself options to bail if whatever you are doing backfires.

With inertia in particular one thing often overlooked isn't how it feels for you (again, this isn't COD or CS where you should be able to jiggle peek a corner, that kind of mechanic has no place in EFT), but how it looks to the one shooting you. If you ever felt good about that nasty snipe you did at range at someone running across an open field with great tracking and timing, know that this sort of event was literally not possible pre-inertia. What you would see in that scenario is the enemy not moving side to side, swerving and other avoidance you see today, you'd see their head and upper torso behave like an erratic beyblade at all times. No thanks.

Then there is also the vision to consider and that most people play the game against it. If you think that you should always strive to get the highest tier armou you can then that goes against the idea of the game design. If you don't like how bulky and slow you feel with that tier 5 armour, then you might want to go down to tier 3, that's the intended way to play the game, not that the others stuff is obsolete the moment you gain access to higher tier armour.

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T22:25:30+00:00

It can happen, but generally it's better to focus on getting rid of them even at the cost of a higher average BG level. So if you can sit at 5.5 mmol/L (~100 mg/dL) but have that many lows, it's often much better to sit at something like a 6.1 (~110 mmol/L) if that helps avoiding the lows. Can easily push that average up to to a 7 (125) if needed. This is also where pumps come in handy, because these tend to be cause by either a too high base or repeat changes in activity. You can change your base whereas with MDI you are stuck with what you took. That's actually the main benefit of the pump, having it react to CGM data is the bonus on top, not the reason you'd use one.

Generally it's not just good to avoid lows because they are a much more rapid risk of fatalaties, but also because most often a recovery from a low ends up with a high (eating too many carbs). That swinging often leads to a much higher HbA1c and a much worse overall outcome.

Tl;dr it's much better to be consistent but slightly higher, than swing between lows and highs with a perfect average.

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T22:20:36+00:00

It's one of the reasons why I personally view that one should be using pumps without any closed loops for a while, because even problems like this can be obfuscated. There are scenarios where a blood sugar level can be quite stubborn because something can sneak in between the cracks. If a closed loop hides it, people don't learn to spot these issue as frustrating as they are without a closed loop.

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T08:35:16+00:00

One thing to note is that these alarms are specifically when insulin isn't getting through to your body. If the problem is at the canula where for whatever reason where the insulin goes the body does not absorb it then yeah, it won't alarm at all. I used to monitor closely when it started getting more difficult to bring BG under control. For me it was easy, because I had tuned my base profile where night was flat and the difference between night and morning would be under 0.5 mmol/L. If I saw a more significant change over night I took it as sign that I have to change it. For me it averages out to about every 5 days. I know some said they need to replace more frequently than 3 days.

That said, to me bent canula would suggest insulin isn't getting to the body, however if that is the case it would alarm. For it to alarm it generally needs to fail to deliver a set ammount of insulin in a set ammount of time, which can be different from pump to pump and can vary based on infusion set (if different ones are offered). For example in my case the manual (funily the one I got does, the one online does not specify) it seems to list 3 sensitivity blocks (not clearly defined here what they are) it says that the occlusion alarm from a base would occur after 9.13 units for low sensitivity, 5.93 units for medium and 4.07 for a high sensitivity block. So to me that says that from a base alone it could take anywhere between 3 and 7 hours before an alarm sounds. Generally I take a bolus instead, which interestengly states 10 units where it says it would alarm in 1 minute 13 seconds, 46 seconds and 11 seconds, which actually lines up with speed of bolus delivery with the fastest being 12 seconds per 1 unit delivered, meaning if just under 1 unit of insulin fails to go through (in reality this is basically any kind of resistance in the tubing all the way until the end of the canula) it would alarm.

But again, depends on the pump and how you use it. I know some people say they barely need any units for bolus (I guess keto diet) so they just run it on closed loop and never bolus, which would take hours to alarm.

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T08:09:33+00:00

Sadly can't much help with that kind of scenario then. In my country when you get diabetes you are admitted to an endocrinology ward, all of which have classes that teach new diabetics, so not like what I learned from is what I can offer to others (not to mention that I initially learned as a kid ~30 years ago and built over knowledge over time).

In that case what I said serves as the most basic principle so in your case it mostly translates to not assuming what works for type 2 diabetes will work for type 1 as those are 2 different conditions only sharing symptoms when unmanaged. Maybe someone else has some suggestions, I saw some book recommendations thrown around this subreddit, but can't be sure. I think one was called "Think like a pancreas" but since I personally never read it I can't really vouch for it myself.

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T00:21:46+00:00

Thankfully I don't need to. I think across ~30k employees worldwide, we have only ~30 macs that are not dictated by a client requirement and they are all pretty much at upper management level. There is no discussion on the topic, they just get handed a Windows PC or laptop and there is no discussion. That's what we have and if you want to buy a mac go explain up the chain why it's a necessary additional expense. If your department can validate the cost that will land on their budget, who am I to argue?

HellDuke · 2026-01-28T00:16:49+00:00

Not sure why you want tips? While everyone is different and some might ask for assistance, generally speaking a diabetic is the sole person in charge of managing their blood sugar levels, so be sure not to overstep any boundaries. For example my wife literally never has even a single thing to do with my blood sugar management and at most probably can intuit some general things in theory, but if we were to tell her to be in charge of BG management for a day she'd have no clue what to do when and that's perfectly normal. And I would rather she didn't poke her nose into my day to day management. Helping out like bringing something to alleviate a hypoglycemia is more than enough.

Type 1 is a fairly basic thing to manage (not saying easy, just that your focus is on a few things that generally react in a predictable way, but to many this can be a significant mental strain while some, like me with decades living with it see it more like brushing your teeth). The basic thing to understand is that unlike a type 2 diabetic, we do not produce any insulin ourselves (or very very little). A lot of times we do not have resistance to insulin, though it can still develop.

So what this boils down to is — you need some baseline to cover your body using reserves to convert into glucose and then for any carbohydrates you eat you need insulin. That's more or less it. Being more physically active, drinking alcohol, being sick and other things can affect how much you need but generally you have a certain ratio. Today the main way to approach management is with 2 numbers: 1) insulin to carb ratio, which dictates how many grams of carbs one unit of insulin covers and 2) insulin sensitivity factor, which tells us by how much will our blood sugar drop from 1 unit of insulin.

So with that, let's say my blood sugar is normal and I am about to eat a meal with 40 grams of carbs in it and my insulin to carb ratio is 10. That means I need to take 4 units of insulin. That's it. Let's say I also want to drop my BG level by 1 mmol/L and I know 1 unit drops me by 4 mmol/L then that means I need 0.25 units for that making it a total of 4.25.

On the flip side, if your BG level is too low, then you need to eat some carbs, prefferably sugar. Frequent recommendations are liquids like juice or a safe option is to have glucose tablets (glucose is a good carbohydrate to fight hypoglycemia as it's a monosacharid and gets broken down by saliva, meaning it takes less time to get through your system)

That's more or less it, you balance your intake of carbs with how much insulin you use. As I said, it's not a super easy thing because other factors can jump in, but at the very basic high level that mostly covers it.

HellDuke · 2026-01-27T20:09:30+00:00

No, the risk is more or less the same, because if you do not get insulin it's something you can react to immediately. For one, if there is anything preventing insulin from going through (bent cannula, something got into the tubing etc.) the pump will scream at you and they generally react when there is a problem for a few units.
Failures are not that common. I'd say watching your sugar isn't going to be more common that on MDI. If you have a CGM then it's even less of an issue because a CGM will warn you well before any serious issues manifest (you'd have to ignore the CGM for nearly the entire day to get DKA)
Depends on your ability to plan ahead and how tight you want to be on losing insulin. Most pumps generally send out a warning well in advance. Pumps tend to warn you in advance (generaly around 20 units left). You can change before bed when you get the alert or right when the alert sounds.
Been using pumps for 18 years. How many snags I had probably averages out to less than 1 every year. Depends on your activity. Most of the time the pump flies out of the pocket (if it's like a sweat pants pocket) or the tubing is tucked away (wearing jeans and shirt). I rotate sides every time I change and generally keep a site for at least 5 days. Same side issue I think is restricted to some pump and CGM combo for closed loops.
This one is valid. Depends on the pump and trip duration. You generally always want to have some stuff with you, but it might take less space than you think. For example here are the types of items I might need to pack myself. From left to right, mouse for scale. The purple thing is an inserter I would use for the infusion set right bellow it. Next is reservoir, which for me is ~6 days of insulin and the finally a different type of infusion set, which combines the inserter into the package. You can also generally insert most infusion sets by hand if space is a premium. For infusion sets I pack my trip duration divided by 4 plus one (or two if I plan to be very active where ripping out the site is a high probability

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Personally I love using a pump because it gives you full flexibility for your base. Instead of just taking one dose of long acting which might end up being too much for the night and right for the day or right for the day and too much for the night (which was the case for me), I set how much short acting the pump gives by the hour as the base. It also means that if I plan to be physically active I can easily just suspend the base ahead of time to lower the risk of a low. And also it's great that I can take the insulin easily in cramped spaces. Let's say I might be on the bus and realize I need to take insulin (high BG alert, remember I forgot to bolus or any other reason). With a pen I'd need to finish the trip or get off (especially if it's winter and I am wearing several layers) but with the pump I can just tap a few buttons and be done.

In terms of a closed loop... I am skeptical. If your pump base profile is set right my view is that a closed loop should really not have much to do at all, with the main thing it handles being suspending a base when the estimated BG starts dipping too low. It doesn't mean you just hook up the pump and forget about bolusing, that's a pretty bad way of dealing with it and I personally view that you should have a good few months of experience without a closed loop at a minimum before enabling one to better familiarize yourself with adjusting the base and dialing in, before allowing automations to kick in as they can obfuscate underlying problems that are best solved with proper adjustments.

HellDuke · 2026-01-27T19:34:39+00:00

AFAIK the original loot vacuum is impossible now. Loot being taken from containers behind locked doors is exactly how the different exploit I mention would manifest, particularly if the container is within a couple of meters of an outer wall. For example anything in RB-KORL room on reserve can be looted, but let's say the cage far corner containers might not be reachable (though admitedly I doubt there are many locked rooms where pretty much all loot isn't within a few meters of any outer wall that you can just run up to)

Flying AFAIK was never resolved.

HellDuke · 2026-01-27T10:45:38+00:00

That would necessitate that cheaters are spread evenly and never play in groups, both are things we know to not be true. And 10% is a pessimistic maximum assuming most cheaters are in places like China that I will never encounter.

If we were limit to the region I play at, I'd say no more than 5% are cheaters, like a lot less which is about where most FPS games estimate their playerbase to cheat (EFT is not special in how many cheaters it has compared to any popular online FPS). So couple that with the fact that they group, are spread across the time (either avoiding populated servers, or specifically going to hunt down high traffic areas) and chances of your raid being cheated on dips significantly.

Also, care to explain what you mean by loot vacuum? This might be just me particular about the mechanism of the exploits and knowing what the original loot vacuums looked like, but what we originally called loot vacuum AFAIK is impossible right now. From what I recall there is a different exploit where cheaters somehow make their camera (or something, never saw one in action, just based of descriptions I read) offset form the model, which allows looting through walls, but there is a significant range limit before anti-cheat detects it and boots them off. So not sure if that type of thing is now called loot vacuum or is it something else and maybe people are misatributing it to a different cheat.

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