I only really bike to work and occasionally to Woodinville.
The Eastrail page has a decent map of full-separated bike trails (not just separate lanes), although it's annoying that some of the trails are "highlighted" in grey.
The green trail north/south through Kirkland, and all of the grey trails following 520 and then north up to Woodinville are bike paths (not bike lanes, totally separated). They occasionally cross roads but it's infrequent. My house is (intentionally) along the 520 path so I can bike to work entirely on small neighborhood streets + the bike path.
I guess my post is targeted to people who already know they want to bike but don't know if they want an e-bike. I should mention that not everyone is going to be happy biking here though. Kirkland is pretty good for biking if bike lanes are good enough for you, and Redmond is weird but mostly fine. Bellevue is mostly suicidal to try to bike through (except along 520).
I also updated the title since I mostly don't talk about Seattle.
Thanks, I updated this to mention both SMT and hyperthreading.
Do you have any trouble with keyboard/mouse noise? I had a Blue Yeti and coworkers said it was distractingly loud when I was typing or clicked my mouse. The quality was excellent but needing a boom arm for calls was excessive.
For WiFi, the biggest issue is that if two devices transmit at the same time, they'll interfere ("collide") and both packets will get dropped and need to be retransmitted. Unlike phone networks, on WiFi there's basically no coordination, so this interference is random and increases birthday-problem style as the network has more devices connected or has more traffic. There's an exponential random backoff protocol to prevent infinite interference, but exponential backoff means exponentially increasing latency.
You can also get interference from devices connected to other WiFi networks on same channel (so just being in a busy part of town or an apartment building can add significant interference).
WiFi's base speed is also limited to the slowest device on the channel, which has to do with the oldest supported protocol version, hardware, and distance. On a public network, you have a fairly high probability that at least one device is old and/or really far from the router, which drops the speed for everyone and makes the interference problem worse (since slower speed means each packet takes longer to send and therefore has more time when interference can disrupt it).
There's a lot of stuff that interacts, so it's possible to have 15 (or even more) people on calls on the same WiFi network, but you'd need:
- A router fast enough that most of the theoretical bandwidth isn't being used (unused bandwidth = lower chance of interference).
- Everyone to be close enough to the router.
- Everyone to be on reasonably modern devices.
Spaces that really care about this will use a bunch of high speed short-range access points (wired together) coupled with software to drop slow devices. It's common-ish at conference centers, but not coffee shops, and even then they're usually targeting acceptable latency/bandwidth for web browsing, not calls.
But yeah, in some cases a voice call on WiFi will work fine even with some other people on the network, but I wouldn't trust all of the necessary stars to align consistently on a public network.
Re: your headphones
I don't know much about non-headset mics. I don't like them because they pick up background/room noise while a mic right in front of your face can filter to just your voice better. I imagine some of them sound fine in a quiet room though.
My guess is that your headphones just don't have a good mic. I'm picky about my headset since most mics are an afterthought.
1Re: overall bandwidth
128 kbps audio sounds fine and video quality is much less important than audio. A typical video call uses 720p video at 30 fps, which Twitch says you can stream at 3 Mbps (and pro streamers probably care more about quality than most people do). I basically wouldn't worry about bandwidth unless you use a physical whiteboard or otherwise need really good video quality.
1Re: latency and WiFi
Most sources talk about one-way latency, even though round-trip is what actually matters (how long it takes for you to react to something you heard and for the other person to hear your reaction). I'm guessing round-trip is technically harder to measure since it includes the human-thinking delay.
Twilio says users start to notice one-way latency above 100 ms, and VOIP providers target under 150 ms. Traditional calls are below 20 ms though (similar latency to talking to someone across a large room). As a lower-bound, musicians get thrown of by ~30 ms of latency.
Note that people can adapt to latency but they do that by having less productive conversations: If you can't naturally do things like interrupt each other, you'll have a less-interactive conversation. I suspect 150 ms is too optimistic.
Bluetooth's AptX codec adds ~40 ms if you're lucky (they market this as "low latency" since the older SBC codec adds up to 200 ms of latency). If I'm understanding things right, two people on a cross-country call using bluetooth headsets are already hitting 140 ms in the best case. I don't know if there's a good way to measure this.
WiFi is harder to quantify since it can add relatively small delays, but the problem is that it's inconsistent (because of interference and being too busy). If audio packets show up inconsistently, the software needs to add buffers to keep everything showing up at the same time. I don't remember the details, but when I last worked on low-latency applications, Also if you chain WiFi routers together you get multiple channels of possible interference and a new layer where you can lose packets. I would expect coffee shop WiFi networks to be bad because they're frequently overloaded and have tons of interference (if they're in a dense area). Home WiFi might be ok in a low-density area.
1Chronotherapy is the idea that time of day matters for things like taking drugs or getting vaccinations, and chronoimmunology is a related field for how your immune system varies in effectiveness over the course of the day. I've been wanting to write about this since there's definitely a best time of day to take drugs, get vaccines, and do social activities without getting sick... but unfortunately I don't really know what that time is.
Some studies say your immune system is most primed to prevent infection right as you wake up, and other say mid-day. Of course half the studies are in mice. Maybe it depends on the disease and the chronotype? See this review.
One study says that vaccines work better in the morning (for older patients). Another says there's no difference. Maybe this has something to do with the particular vaccines, or maybe the populations (different circadian rhythms, more powerful circadian rhythms). Weirdly, our priors say vaccination should work best mid-day but most people don't even try that. See this review.
I find this all really interesting, and there's probably a practical takeaway, but I don't know what it is. I guess we can be pretty confident that you shouldn't get vaccines in the middle of the night.
Maybe someone can convince Elizabeth to look into this.
I found another downside to using the LessWrong editor today: It's really easy to publish drafts by accident, and if you move them back to draft, you're stuck with the original publish date (like with this post that I un-published and then re-published).
I have trouble hitting the exact right amount of warm clothes to bike in. When it's sufficiently cold, I always seem to end up either too cold or too hot (and then I sweat and get cold).
I also don't like biking in the rain, since I can technically wear waterproof pants, but they're not comfortable so I need to change at my destination (and potentially change again when I leave).