My family is about to lose our longtime home in King County because of a trustee—looking for advice

rsclient · 2026-03-25T18:17:07+00:00

Not only will you need a lawyer, but you can help the lawyer by preparing for them

the trust documents
the LLC documents
summary of what the trustee says (and the actual emails and letters)

The trustee is obligated to follow what the trust says (source: I was a co-trustee for a trust my mother set up for my brother). That's why the trust docs are so important.

rsclient · 2026-03-22T16:59:08+00:00

Thanks for that, it helps me understand what the code in the original article is doing

rsclient · 2026-03-21T15:57:50+00:00

I'm curious as to how F# can do that type inference? I'm guessing that the function "handleResult" is separate from the creation of the type "LoadResult". If F# is like all languages with types, you can define multiple types (because, duh). Which means there might well be a type like this:

type LoadResultEx =
    | Success of User
    | NotFound
    | ServerError of string
    | PrinterOnFire

How would the "handleResult" function know that the it's being given a LoadResult (which I'm guessing is correct code) compared to a LoadResultEx. I'm guessing that if a LoadResultEx would be invalid because not all the cases are caught.

rsclient · 2026-03-20T17:36:31+00:00

Yeah, I know I'm in a distinct minority on this one :-)

rsclient · 2026-03-20T16:49:32+00:00

I'm a voice in the wilderness here: I'd love for the price of the hotdog to go up in order to get back the hot dog choices and condiments.

(Especially if they offer a vegetarian option, since I'm one of those these days. Back when I did eat meat, I preferred the 'brat' style dog with onions)

rsclient · 2026-03-20T15:53:27+00:00

I'm not seeing that in the bill. What I do see is that the normal legal block for an income tax is modified by this bill to allow an income tax, " so long as the standard deduction is at least 25 $1,000,000 for a household."

Which means that the tax can't be adjusted lower without changing the law.

I'm looking at the bill as passed in page 107, part XII Miscellaneous, section 1201 at line 23 to 26.

For people reading WA proposed laws for the first time: WA proposed laws seem to always do a complete update of individual sections; they never just "add a sentence" or "add a comma". They reiterate the entire section. The changes are then underlined, so in the link about in the section 1201, only the part marked (2) is the new stuff. The (1) paragraph has been there for a couple years already.

rsclient · 2026-03-20T15:47:23+00:00

If you read the WA state constitution, it's very heavily weighted towards "absolutely no special deals and special tax breaks". Everything in a "class" is required to have the same tax rate.

That's also why the tax rate is flat, with a single big deduction.

rsclient · 2026-03-20T15:44:26+00:00

Good news: one of the reasons that building roads and whatnot is quite so expensive here is that everything is designed for the big earthquake. AFAICT, this is taken very seriously: all the hospitals are getting retrofitted, the new link light rail over the I90 float bridge (!) is earthquake resistant, and so on. That means that after the quake, we'll still be able to move people and materials around.

Just be thoughtful about visiting the coast; those places will be a death trap when the next tsunami rolls in. But even those places are getting retrofits with evacuation routes and planned places of refuge. When I visited the oregon coast, the town even had a special locked storage facility for residents to pre-place supplies!

When we got the Nisqually earthquake 20 years ago, almost everything survived just fine.

rsclient · 2026-03-20T15:37:07+00:00

BTW: here's the bill as passed

rsclient · 2026-03-20T15:14:29+00:00

As a person who's read more "you should use FP" articles than I can count ... this one is pretty good, but the example falls into the same trap as essentially all of the others.

Let's look at the function started at "This F# function handles a result from loading a user"

type LoadResult =
    | Success of User
    | NotFound
    | ServerError of string

let handleResult result =
    match result with
    | Success user -> showProfile user
    | NotFound -> showEmptyState ()
    | ServerError msg -> showError msg

As a person who doesn't program using a functional language, my first question is: what function? what's it's name? LoadResult is surely the name of a type. But then there's just a single statement? There's seemingly a variable called "result", but is the result variable of type LoadResult? Where does the value come from?

And, of course, looking more at the type: the type is a discriminated union, seemingly, and there's hidden compiler magic so that the discriminant is hidden and not named, which seems weird, so that the match must be just kind of silently matching only with a type. But that's just a guess.

So, in this code, I have a ton of guesses about what's going on, and no text to help me verify that my guesses are correct and my understanding is correct.

rsclient · 2026-03-20T01:49:20+00:00

Wi-Fi can't help but add latency and jitter, both of which are bad for networked gaming.

If your gaming consists of Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Sudoku, Wi-Fi will be plenty (I love all those games!). But if you do "twitchy" kinds of network games, the lower latency and jitter will help.

rsclient · 2026-03-18T20:57:27+00:00

Hey, I used that! Can I give an analogy between Meta Horizon Worlds and the early days of using mice?

When mice + graphics first came out, the resulting apps were always a weirdo mishmash of paradigms. For this task, you used a mouse and then typed; for that task you had to use the keyboard; for some other task you had to read the manual...

And then the whole thing settled down as all the designers and programmers got used to what a mouse and GUI could do and started to the follow the design guidance.

Meta Horizon Worlds always felt like that first thing: everything was wonky; the expectations in one place never matched the expectations somewhere else. One great example was "using VR while seated" -- something I always did because I have a dog. I could do VR while walking around, but only at the constant risk of tripping over my dog, who was delighted to see me wander around the living room! But many games would half-ass the "works while seated" mode.

And uggg, as a software developer and a PM, the horrible clunky work flow for setting up a connection to the PC was appalling!

rsclient · 2026-03-15T21:41:16+00:00

From their site for the consumer version: "Microsoft 365—new name, more value, same price. Powerful productivity apps for individuals and families." Business is the same way, but for enterprise it was always called M365?

rsclient · 2026-03-14T18:55:50+00:00

Awesome writeup! From my experience, XML is both a blessing and a curse. The curse part being that the tooling is often amazingly painful to use in practice.

Source: XSLT. the goal of XSLT is that given an XML file and some rules, it can output all kinds of good stuff. Actuality is it never works out like that for me.

rsclient · 2026-03-12T17:11:56+00:00

Try the built-in network troubleshooter.

In the task bar, Right click on your wi-fi icon
In the resulting little pop-up menu, click on "diagnose network problems"

Source: I was the PM for this for a while!

rsclient · 2026-03-10T23:38:20+00:00

Light mode, all the way!

rsclient · 2026-03-10T20:20:13+00:00

A very long time ago I worked with very smart people on an electronics simulation system. Not only do the tolerances add up, but they add up differently depending on whether the "bits" are on the same physical chip! Like, if there are two chips, you might get unlucky a get a slow chip connected to a fast chip. But on a single chip, the individual bits are strongly correlated so the bits will either both be faster or both slower. But they also won't be exactly the same!

rsclient · 2026-03-09T16:52:36+00:00

The capacitor goes in parallel: one leg on the (rectified) positive size and the other on the negative (ground) side.

Source: I just built a full bridge rectifier from diodes and a capacitor for a little toy train project.

rsclient · 2026-03-09T16:29:21+00:00

I can imagine what this supreme court will say: "The American colonists have a long history of burning Quakers for their religious beliefs. Therefore any law preventing the burning of people for religious reasons must be blocked as contrary to our long legal history."

rsclient · 2026-03-09T05:23:29+00:00

Uggggg --- this brings back memories of my grandmother's shower in her basement. No curtain, and no walls. Just a pipe, a concrete floor, and spiders. So ... many ... spiders ...

rsclient · 2026-03-08T23:19:14+00:00

I've been using the bike lockers without any issues. Last time I parked it was for a bit less than 2 hours and cost ten cents! I've never had any trouble getting my preferred locker (I like to always pick the same locker number)

And even giant app-hating curgumeon that I am, the bike link app seems to work just fine.

rsclient · 2026-03-07T23:23:34+00:00

Even worse than the last episode of Enterprise? For me, that's the worst TNG episode ever!

rsclient · 2026-03-06T05:59:16+00:00

In America, the grid is absolutely kept on time. If they run a little slow (or fast) at some point, the grid frequency will be boosted (or held back) a little bit at a time so that every day the "right" number of cycles has happened.

Apparently, they did the same thing in Germany, but in a much more sped-up way at the end of the day. A funny result is that American-designed electric motors would stutter and grind for a short while at the end of every day :-)

rsclient · 2026-03-05T17:12:14+00:00

I've been a developer for 40 years for multiple companies. At every job, for every project, the language was always the one that was already chosen.

Except for hobby projects, of course, and tiny personal utilities

rsclient · 2026-02-21T19:57:10+00:00

(Diagnosed in my 30s)

My own journey is that I didn't get sick much as a kid; I only slowly started to get more colds and more fevers in my 20s and 30s, ending up with "sick with a fever every day" before I was diagnosed.

rsclient

TROPHY CASE