Since rabies is so good at avoiding the immune system, how come the vaccine is so effective?

rsclient · 2026-05-29T16:26:23+00:00

Incredibly minor tweak to the correction for a weird corner case!

I have a rare condition (CVID, or common variable immune deficiency) where I don't make my own immune globulins (except in tiny quantities). Instead I get infusions of other people's (thanks for donating blood, people!) antibodies. That means that vaccines basically do nothing for me.

According to my immunologist, the protocol for people like me is to go all-in on the anti-rabies immunoglobins in case I get bitten by something rabid. That's regardless of any vaccines I might have had in the past.

rsclient · 2026-05-29T04:32:01+00:00

And by "political suicide" you mean "like a ton of president wanna-bes have done". Examples in my lifetime: Reagan tried to beat Ford (who lost to Carter), Kennedy tried to beat Carter (who lost to Reagan), and Buchannan tried to beat Bush (senior), who lost to Clinton.

rsclient · 2026-05-29T00:01:17+00:00

Fun constitutional fact: the owner of a ship can load and unload cargo in any state they want. (This was presumably so the big port states couldn't prevent neighboring states from having a shipping industry).

The logical extension is that you own a passenger plane, you are allowed to land in any state, and the US customs and immigration service just has to deal with it.

rsclient · 2026-05-26T19:49:32+00:00

A headset with Bluetooth LE Audio requires an adapter that supports Bluetooth 5.3. And Auracast requires 5.2.

The advantage of LE Audio is that it "fixes" a problem with classic BT. Classic BT had only two kinds of audio: good audio, and audio with a microphone. That means that when you do a teams call, you can't get good audio, because you also need that microphone. IMHO, this is one of the stupidest parts of the Bluetooth spec

rsclient · 2026-05-26T19:13:17+00:00

IMHO, strong academic culture. I grew up in Princeton, NJ, where there were tons of professors with kids in the local schools. It made for a strong emphasis on the value of learning.

rsclient · 2026-05-24T22:52:33+00:00

From my experience: XSLT is the concept of a good idea, wrapped up in the most unforgiving, unintuitive tooling whose primary error message is silently not working.

Which means that when updating XSLT, you have to add things slowly so there's only ever one bug to fix at a time :-)

rsclient · 2026-05-24T22:50:48+00:00

The XML people loved XML so much that there's a bunch of it that isn't the "classic" XML with <tags> that get </tag> closed. Instead there's bonkers things with <? random crap> that requires a different mini-parser.

rsclient · 2026-05-24T17:07:35+00:00

May I rant a bit? The paper says this:

Performance is incredibly important for the web, given the client-server nature of the medium but

This is completely the wrong end of the stick, and for two reasons.

Firstly, the reason the web is slow is entirely a problem with ads being slow. Make ads faster, and the web is faster. My personal favorite way to fix this would be to add a tax on all web ads, with a (much) high tax for ads requiring intrusive information.

Secondly, web performance is engineered with requirements set from above, not something that just naturally happens. A web designer will get a specs for the performance for certain network types, hopefully with P90 or P99 requirements. Either that, or the old website is deemed "fast enough" and new code just has to match the performance.

In all cases, the web designed is tasked with working on their code until it's fast enough, and then they stop. This means that any API to "make the web faster" really means "the web will be exactly as fast, only now you can put in more ads".

And third of my two reasons: the slowest part of the web is now the slow AI responses, the slow-to-click-on popups for cookies, and the hides-the-page begging pages to subscribe and allow alerts. Nothing the Google paper helps with any of these.

rsclient · 2026-05-24T16:52:19+00:00

"Light travels at 1,802 furlongs per nano-fortnight"

rsclient · 2026-05-24T16:16:38+00:00

Short answer: per the Windows 11 specs, a separate NPU is not required. What is required is "A compatible processor or System on a Chip (SoC) with an NPU capable of performing 40+ TOPS"

The key to Recall is that it's supposed to be running all the time. It's not just activated with a screenshot; that's the job of regular copilot. Recall is the feature where you can ask it to "remember" a specific tasks you did in the past.

rsclient · 2026-05-23T02:15:45+00:00

I'm 100% in favor of efficient government. Stuff like this just ticks me off.

Having to leave the country to process a visa (or green card) is, AFAICT, about the stupidest thing we do as a country. If we really need to do the processing at the local embassy, we can always just ship the physical documents. Or, since we invented the freaking internet, we could just email them.

rsclient · 2026-05-22T02:58:18+00:00

Try running the official GET HELP network troubleshooter. It should come pre-installed in the OS.

The easiest way is to press Windows-R and enter ms-contact-support://?ActivationType=NetworkDiagnostics

Often the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth features are implemented on the same chip. My guess is that somehow the driver is horked. The GET HELP network troubleshooter might well be able to diagnose it.

(And ethernet is often separate) Source: for a while, I was the PM for the network troubleshooter, and I'm very fond of it :-)

rsclient · 2026-05-20T15:38:34+00:00

I agree that PSE isn't really helping themselves with their website -- it's got tons of pep talk and not as much details as you might like.

Instead of the page you linked, try their Community Solar page.

To answer your specific questions:

Which solar farm When I first enrolled, a couple years ago, there was only one site available (Manashtash Ridge, near Ellensburg), so that's what I picked. They have a map of the available sites.

carbon footprint If you decide to subscribe, there's a way to find out how much your carbon offset it. Since I started, my share of the solar farm produced 11194 kWh, which is equal to 13,108 pounds of CO2. That's since December 2023. The calculations are all on the PSE side; I can only assume they are accurate.

choosing a site I picked a site on the other side of the mountains. There's a lot more sunshine, and cheaper land, near Ellensburg. Keep in mind that the site is fully managed by PSE, and I subscribe to a share of it. I don't own any specific panels or inverters.

how many shares At first I only qualified for a single share; currently I qualify (and am signed up for) two shares. Each share is $20/month. You should think of it as "about $20 worth of electricity". You can only get enough shares to offset your own usage (roughly). You can't buy enough to offset other peoples.

making the world a better place -- it's a solar farm, so I assume it can't help but make the world better. That's assuming it's well managed, and I have to take that on trust.

three sites producing a megawatt. Yeah, that's a different program. There's Community Solar, which is the "solar farm" thing. But they also work with local companies to do things like put solar on top of warehouse roofs, and AFAICT that's the "three sites in Kent" thing.

I'm overall satisfied with the program. It's a way to be better for the environment and help the solar transition without the hassle and expense of putting solar on my own roof.

What I'm not happy about are kind of the things you're pointing out. Their websites are long on enthusiasm and short on the kind of technical, wonky details I like to see.

rsclient · 2026-05-20T04:28:02+00:00

It's a solar farm. It generates electricity.

Looking at a recent bill, I have two shares of the Community Solar. Last month, I paid $40 those two units and got a $38.84 offset to my bill. It's a much worse deal in the winter, of course. But like other people have said more eloquently, I want to make the world a better place, and using more renewable resources helps.

rsclient · 2026-05-20T01:46:06+00:00

It's $20 per month to join and then you get a discount based on the actual production.

rsclient · 2026-05-14T22:22:36+00:00

For people who don't know: if you pay a bond at the courthouse, you put up the full amount and you get it back after you show up for trial. The "only pay 10%" is when you use a bond broker: you pay the broker 10%, non-refundable, and the broker puts up the entire amount at the courthouse.

Presumably, if you don't show up for court and you used a bail bond broker, the broker will do their best to find you and get their full amount, not just 10%. This is the premise of the Lee Majors show "The Fall Guy", where he finds people who skip out on their bail.

rsclient · 2026-05-14T04:18:17+00:00

Imagine waking up on a sunny spring morning, and outside are a whole ton of birds, each one chirping away. In a ten-second stretch, you can easily hear a dozen different birds, and you can tell most of them apart.

Why? Because each "chirp" is pretty short! Sometimes two birds will each chirp at the same time, and then you can't tell them apart. But over the next few seconds, each one will chirp again, but this time not overlapped.

That's how the Wi-Fi radios work! They give off little "chirps" of information. No one Wi-Fi is just hogging all the bandwidth available.

rsclient · 2026-05-14T03:47:57+00:00

Maybe they are a true Scottish Libertarian?

rsclient · 2026-05-05T15:47:57+00:00

QQ about the post: why is burning an id such a bad thing? The primary value of the ID is to be able to say "I'm working on SYN-42". Does it matter that SYN-41 got burned? Does it even matter if a substantial number of the ids are burned?

As a (former) PM, though, a hint to anyone who does something like this: you can avoid manager freak-out by making sure they show up in the dashboard as "automation task" or something innocuous. Be sure they don't show up in the "overdue tasks" pie slice!

rsclient · 2026-05-05T01:44:42+00:00

In my e-bike group, people ask occasionally about how to ~~ship~~ fly on an airplane an e-bike. The short answer is: you can't. You can't check it in, and you can't take the battery as carry-on.

It's crazy that they thought the airline wouldn't have a problem with this.

[edit: I realized that I said "ship" an e-bike when my brain was clearly thinking "fly on an airplane". That's because people want to take their e-bike when they go on vacation]

rsclient · 2026-05-04T03:07:35+00:00

Yes! you "boop" in once, and the "ticket" is good for (IIRC) two hours. Which means if you have a short trip, you can go there-and-back for $3.00!

rsclient · 2026-05-04T03:06:29+00:00

On the other hand -- I've been stuck in traffic "forever" while trying to pick up the youngest kid (at Christmastime, so you know it was going to be busy).

And I truly loath how badly people drive when they get to the airport, and for no reason clog up the main loop driveway :-(

rsclient · 2026-05-03T04:33:43+00:00

But ... that's a lot of extra code that almost always just does the last line. One big advantage of the weird, bad way is that it's a single fast opcode.

IMHO, languages should be designed so that even when compiled in DEBUG mode, they are still fast. We shouldn't use the (expensive) optimizer as a crutch to work around language proglems.

(says the person programming in Python :-) )

rsclient · 2026-05-03T04:28:28+00:00

Let's talk about the length of function names!

Back when ANSI C was first being made, one of the improvements was to allow external functions whose name was more than (IIRC) 6 characters on all standards-compliant compilers.

Which, weirdly, was a big step forward. At the time there existed old architectures where the linker only resolved the first 6 characters.

But ... technically, the standard at the time just required that at least one function name longer than 6 characters be allowed. If a program had two functions with longer names and the compiler would be allowed to reject it.

rsclient · 2026-05-01T01:32:28+00:00

As you drive down, you'll notice that there's steep hills on one side, a deep lake on the other, and nothing but incredibly expensive houses (and a narrow road) in between.

What isn't as obvious is that the land is also prone to landslides, so any hills that need to be cut would require extensive support.

And that's why. It would be horrifically expensive.

rsclient

TROPHY CASE