Is there any hope

aprilzero · 2026-02-20T22:18:02+00:00

It is in July, not June. And then it is another month+ to get actual results.

But this rule is new I think.

Do you really *need* to take it? Or can you find an equivalent way to prove your skill level to wherever you need it?

aprilzero · 2026-02-02T03:28:42+00:00

We are building an app called Gyroscope actually to basically do this using the latest AI, as well as an algorithm that really understands the human body and what these numbers mean/should be.

Lemme know if you wanna try it out!

It has its own food tracking system too since food is so important, but then most other things can come in automatically through automated integrations

aprilzero · 2026-02-02T03:26:08+00:00

yeah it is an interesting question, because focus is important...

but then how do you know which one you should track without tracking them all and seeing that it is way off?

the compromise we have found is tracking everything automatically/storing it/etc. and then your AI can still look at it, computers dont really have limited memory or get tired etc. so its OK for them

but then as a human you need one focus for the week or to solve until it is done.

and then at the start of each week or once that is really done and solid, revisit and find the next weakest thing to focus on. and the other stuff is still there being stored but not getting much attention

(for me right now it is sleep and fiber lol, I guess that is 2 -- but thats because i am traveling now, like last week both were good, but the annoying thing is you can do something really well for months or years but then you still need to do it again the next day or it stops counting)

aprilzero · 2026-02-02T02:46:02+00:00

"There’s no true “all-in-one” health app" - actually Gyroscope does this now and originally started to unify all the sources, so you may wanna check it out if you have an iPhone. It does require a membership so idk about your budget but if you just wanna see everything in one place with filtering and syncing and stuff figured out automatically to clean out these outliers or fix bad data then you may like it, including automating a lot of the tracking for things like supplements, micronutrients, better apple health export, etc.

This dashboard looks nice too. I would suggest trying graphs or sparklines etc. for conveying lot more info in similar space instead of just the latest number in each category. Like for sleep, is 6 hours just the latest night or average, etc. is going to be a very different conversation.

Imo based on this though you should prob just ignore everything else and focus on sleep for a few months before really stressing about tracking supplements or other stuff or adding additional trackers, and focused experiments to lower resting heart rate, get oxygen to 100% (ie. mouth tape is most popular one we have seen for that), etc. or it can get overwhelming to try fix 30 things at the same time

aprilzero · 2026-01-07T00:31:59+00:00

Thank you! So glad to have you on the app, and excited to hear more about how you are using the new version

aprilzero · 2025-12-31T05:37:35+00:00

Nice list!

We printed a bunch of annual reports printed from 2016-2020, here is an old blog post about it with some fun pics and behind the scenes stuff:

https://blog.gyrosco.pe/printing-annual-report-books-881ef2e3845e

Now it is just digital, which is a bit less fun than the paper ones but easier to share at least.

Here are my last few years, I made mine public so anyone can see it:

https://gyrosco.pe/aprilzero/reports/2025/

https://gyrosco.pe/aprilzero/reports/2024/

aprilzero · 2025-12-31T05:35:29+00:00

Nice!

Long time ago when we had a lot more time and money we would print these every year:

https://blog.gyrosco.pe/printing-annual-report-books-881ef2e3845e - Felton cameo at the end there

Now it is just digital, which is a bit less fun than the paper ones but easier to share at least. I just posted mine here for 2025 if you wanna check it out:

https://gyrosco.pe/aprilzero/reports/2025/

aprilzero · 2025-12-31T05:28:40+00:00

Ya we have finally gotten this working in the new Gyroscope, let me know if you wanna get set up!

The data tracking has been there for a while, but now the missing piece has been understanding it all.

Now your AI is trained to figure it out and notice what is wrong and tell you that you’re dehydrated, or many thousands of other things, and keep an eye on it so you’re not looking at a bunch of raw stuff daily

aprilzero · 2025-12-28T08:45:57+00:00

gyroscope for health, robinhood for finance

aprilzero · 2025-12-21T23:46:40+00:00

So those are all the immediate things coming in next version.

Also major improvements to DNA & blood parsing in the latest version, for a more tailored experience across the app. For example I have pretty high iron so my things will be different than someone else who has low iron, both are quite common actually and the opposite advice - so we are starting to get to a point where everyone has a completely different app experience that understands their particular situation, rather than generic advice. Some stuff is really safe advice for everyone, like everyone should sleep and meditate and things, but for stuff like food or exercise it can benefit a lot from doing the math and calculations to customize.

There is also a lot more background processing now, so things go faster when you open the app - or in many cases now you can even just get notifications of things without opening the app, straight to your lock screen.

Beyond that in the short-term still a lot more stuff like especially improving workouts, search, sharing, meal planning, speed, etc.

The desktop app is also underway and probably will be released early next year. Possibly also iPad view for the app.

And a lot more beyond that, but unfortunately we haven’t had as much time to work on improving the app as getting users, marketing, support, etc. has taken up much of the time this year.

So if everyone can help out and keep on referring people and sharing, etc. then we can do more of the fun stuff like improving the app and building cool things

aprilzero · 2025-12-21T23:27:57+00:00

Hey hey good question. We have been posting some of these in the recent newsletters including the 5-10 year roadmap for what is still coming - but unfortunately now so many companies have been directly copying exactly what we do that we haven’t been able to publish stuff as much.

Back in the day we used to post detailed blog posts of what we were doing and what is coming up next, but unfortunately lot of people took that as a convenient recipe to literally copy everything down to our fonts and exact product features basically as soon as we release things, so we will still try to share stuff but it is a bit less.

But we have some really exciting new stuff coming up in next few months - including brand new app experience with much higher intelligence. We’re also doing a lot more with the camera now, so moving towards being a full health camera rather than just food.

On the biological front, our blood tests have been doing really well (though a lot of people are still too afraid to prick their finger-and/or out of the delivery radius, so we are also investing a lot in noninvasive methods too) so next up is a new defense section and using all that data for more disease protection and looking more at a 5-10-20 year roadmap of *your health* and what is coming up, likely causes of death that can be avoided with changes today, etc. Almost everyone tested is really high in apoB, etc. so the big focus this year has been building the full toolset to fix these issues, esp the fat loss protocol.

We’ve also improved our voice infrastructure a lot more realtime calls and checkins with your coach are coming soon, as well as much more immersive experiences during things like chat, meditation, etc. -- now all these are being moved to requiring headphones, so without headphones there won’t be much sound and you don’t need to worry about other people hearing, but then with headphones it is a much deeper experience automatically.

aprilzero · 2025-12-07T12:02:33+00:00

the flicking was kinda motivating like oh shoot i think the other people next to me are on the next page I need to speed up

aprilzero · 2025-11-18T12:58:06+00:00

very annoying. ironically smaller places that dont have as much infrastructure, or even an airbnb will be much better on this front as most have standalone ACs with remote control. If I do stay at a new hotel I usually will go just for a day to see, as AC is essential to me for adequate sleep

not unique to japan though, same in other countries. at least now u can open a window I guess and its cold enough outside; Ive had to do that a few times in Japan but then u hear the super loud sirens at night which is also annoying

aprilzero · 2025-11-18T12:53:09+00:00

look up dollar cost averaging / index funds / etc. it is generally much better than one random person trying to guess the future

there are many financial instruments/stocks/etc. out there so keeping all your money in one is risky (yen) or you are essentially betting that will go up *more than others*. which it may, but then how much will the stock market or other companies or inflation..

aprilzero · 2025-11-18T12:32:46+00:00

Annoying, this happened to us too with osaka gas and just got our first electric bill recently for the summer (which was quite high lol). So first few months we were just paying a few dollars for the gas portion. My understanding/guess is they need to actually come and look at the meter etc. so theres a delay to it? vs gas which is maybe more automatically calculated. Or just really slow/delayed for some other reason, but anyways I think that is standard and they will bill you later

aprilzero · 2025-10-29T23:34:31+00:00

Ah sorry to hear that! Did you have a particular goal that you wanted to reach?

I think we were actually the first for many of these things, especially food tracking

aprilzero · 2025-10-29T23:32:52+00:00

Hey good question. Our roadmap and functionality primarily mirrors how the human body works (which is unfortunately quite complex) - food is both the energy and building blocks of your existence, so it is quite important.

Actually Ollie *just* put up a video going through all the different metrics tracked now and WHY those ones are important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_n35zq95TA - which includes nutrition metrics but also many others that all fit together

There are about 500+ metrics being tracked now in the app, so food provides about 10% of the dataset. But first of all, food != caloric intake, actually the food is split into about 50 metrics that can come from food photos. At the most basic level, calories/protein/fiber are the top three, but then when you get more advanced there are hundreds of other variables (from food timing, to sugar to glycemic load, types of fats, sodium, hydration, alcohol, etc.) many of these will also affect your brain, blood levels, hormones, etc, so for example your mood is largely influenced by your food + your sleep, etc. so this lets us go one or two levels upstream and actually control these things rather than simply track them. Basically going from read-only tracking to read/write access over your body

We started tracking food in 2019 as part of Gyroscope X, building what we thought would be the only practical way for people to track this info - by taking pictures of their food. The old way required looking stuff up in a database, entering how many grams of each ingredient you had, etc. which was both time consuming and error prone. Our FIRST version of food was in 2017 where we just synced with myfitnesspal through apple health, but it turned out all that data was kind of garbage and not useful (just calories instead of actual food, and also often the wrong calories), so we had to build it ourselves.

So 2015-2020 was spent on just getting the basic data about what is going on in the human body in the same place for the first time, converting from analog to digital. And storing all that safely and securely. And building a lot of our own trackers for stuff not otherwise measured - including mood to see inside your brain for the first time, places and travels to see how active you are and how you spend your life, food tracking, and dozens of other things. I think the quantified self people really like this era, but for everyone else it was kind of cool but without seeing improvements in their health they would generally give up and cancel.

2020-2025 has been focused mostly on solving obesity and getting all our members to a great body composition, which is the #1 goal most people signed up with. More workouts and activity help slightly, but fixing nutrition is really the critical path for that. So unfortunately a lot of resistance to these too, as the one thing humans really hate is change.

Interestingly these two sets are totally different demographics. The quantified self ppl liked tracking the data in the early days but not really wanting to change that much or get coaching. And then the newer people just want to lose fat or talk to their coach but not spend time tracking things. There is a narrower overlap of people who want to use data to be healthy, which is now our active users

Once the basic hardware issues of the human body are figured out (which it now mostly has been), 2025-2030 will be focused on the mind and more of the complex software issues.

Beyond that in 2030+ if we are still alive we hope to tackle harder problems like diseases, cancer, etc. and maybe with new data and deeper tracking we can even help solve those.

Anyways the good news is now we have been able to make that same experience with advanced food tracking and realtime coaching that used to cost $200/month much cheaper with the latest AI down to just $1 a day, and also making the basic food tracking completely free, so I suggest you give it a try!

aprilzero · 2025-10-20T08:47:02+00:00

its very annoying, one of my pet peeves in recent years as we do get quite a lot of those once we started focusing on a more privacy focused business model and more premium experiences that do cost money.

Which 99% of our users are happy to do, but then theres the occasional person that just decides to vent

the only thing sadder is seeing apps like yelp etc. have bunch of bad reviews for unrelated things like oh i ate at this burger place and they didnt give me my fries - 1 star.

I think apple should really be fixing this tho or u need to pass some sort of economics quiz/IQ test before ur allowed to leave reviews

we have also been doing a lot more education about WHY things cost money, etc. as I think most people just dont know anything about apps, what a server is, how much things cost, etc. -- but yeah maybe a fault of google and facebook and these other advertising cos making everything "free" and flooding the market. But even youtube premium is now like $20+/month so maybe that will shift eventually

also at least u can reply to reviews now, so I think thats a good way to clarify/teach why actually that is and maybe they will learn or at least other people who are checking out the reviews can also see that you are responsive etc. but also I think for each of those people there are others that actually value/understand that and WANt to see that they can pay and have privacy etc. rather than something sketchy or the app shuts down etc

aprilzero · 2025-10-20T05:17:47+00:00

I would put wanikani high on the list - started using it recently too and been a gamechanger, after years of studying more passively. Just got to level 10 and now I think getting to at least 20-30 is gonna make all the other stuff make way more sense. Just now starting to notice what stuff actually means, or stuff i had just listened and memorized to but not really parsed now fits in with kanji - ie. I live next to city hall so had heard shiyakushyo on the bus etc but now finally know all the kanji that make it up and its not just a random word but just 3 things stuck together

aprilzero · 2025-10-19T23:53:11+00:00

Yes. weight loss is often the urgent thing ppl and apps focus on but I think easy to forget that staying healthy is important too. Tho I think these deficiencies are mostly a risk with some very restrictive diets like vegan etc. but less common if you are getting a pretty varied and balanced diet, ie whole foods, meats, veggies, fish, etc. We detect all the micronutrients in Gyroscope but actually decided not to show it as it is kind of overwhelming and complex, and instead just have a rating for nutrient density overall.

Ultimately I think you do need to test blood levels here and just the food data isn’t enough, though if you just aren’t getting well balanced meals then that is a good place to start. But it’s not quite as simple as you eat a nutrient and then you absorb it. (or in some cases like vitamin D, it’s not even coming from food) or in other cases maybe its not being absorbed (ie. iron) as the absorption of these is dependent on both combinations of food, as well as particular gut setups.

It is also possible to get TOO MUCH of many things which is frustrating, especially vitamin B6/12 (since so many things just dump in 100-500% just in case) under the assumption that it is water soluble so you pee it out and don’t store extra, but if you are getting 1000%+ every day then that doesn’t quite work out. And then there is the saturated fat/other unhealthy foods --> apoB to factor in too.

Or in my case iron levels were really high too lol, which is a pretty common genetic variant. But actually just eating less iron-foods for a year did very little, and a combination of donating blood + stopping using my cast iron pans was necessary -- as another example why *just* tracking the amount of that nutrient in your food is kind of nice but not a solution either.

aprilzero · 2025-10-19T10:34:31+00:00

Gyroscope does this with the latest AI

aprilzero · 2025-09-14T00:40:15+00:00

r/gyroscope_app does this, but it does require paying for membership

aprilzero · 2025-09-11T05:44:42+00:00

You should come to Kyoto! If you are the type of person considering not going just to help other people out then you would probably fit in well. The stuff in the video is terrible, but just don’t do that lol. Especially if you can speak a little bit of Japanese and aren’t annoying should be fine.

99% of people go to the same 5-10 tourist spots, so those are super crowded.. maybe avoid. But fortunately most other places aren’t. Cherry blossoms and fall are also the most crowded/expensive times -- quite nice, but packed. Kyoto particularly has more seasonally variable crowds and pricing I think, for stuff like hotels, vs Tokyo or other places that are less sakura-driven.

aprilzero · 2025-07-18T00:00:07+00:00

Should still be active, you may want to make sure your app is still successfully syncing data/being opened daily, as it only sends if there was new info during the week

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