The 45 minute builds back in the 1990s .....

Obviously someone never tried compiling the Linux kernel back then. An hour to build was considered fast. It also was a good stability test because questionable computers would almost always crash.

These days the Linux kernel takes 5 minutes tops.

Android is also a beast to build - back in the early days, half a day to build it was common. Even on a high end machine you did a clean build in around an hour and a half. If you got a super tricked out Threadripper PC with SSDs you got it down to around 45 minutes. 64 core builds at the time were impressive. Of course these days we have 128 core PCs, but even Android 14 doubled the build time over Android 13.

Windows reportedly took 8 hours to build in the NT days.

In a little over 20 years we went from build times on things like Linux, GCC, Glibc, and other big projects which took the better part of an hour to just a few minutes. Fast enough that OpenEmbedded Linux builds everything from source - you set up a project and build it and it compiles the cross-compilers, the host libraries, and build tools and then spits out an image you can use in about half an hour.

Of course, the real thing is likely more WFH stuff - because if you walked in the door to the office, you were on the clock. At home, I suppose you could go through all that, but most people I know just close their laptops which puts them to sleep, so they just need to log into the VPN the next day. Hell, I'm super lazy, I just lock the PC and leave it running. It's not like the few watts the laptop consumes is going to kill me - I'm saving tons on gas and other things not going to the office so leaving the laptop plugged in and on isn't going to hurt matters.

Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".

And knowing the Japanese, this is basically the kiss of death to them using Firefox.

As if Mozilla really needed ANOTHER reason to see their marketshare go down even more.

It's like they're purposely tanking their numbers so they can blame "Google monopoly!" for their dwindling numbers, when in reality it's because they're pushing users to alternative browsers.

Pushing away the Japanese like this certainly isn't a good move. But watch as they blame Google for destroying Firefox instead of themselves for pushing users away from Firefox.

Do they really need to give people reasons to not use Firefox?

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

The problem was, selling bricks didn't make Lego much money. They fell on hard times because toys went electronic and the 90s were rough as everyone drifted towards computers.

They basically reinvented themselves - no kid is getting a $400 Lego set - but adults do. And adults love to collect. These sets basically brought Lego back. So while they're limited in a way, they also do sell, and licensed sets are one of their bigger revenue streams.

That said, they do make generic sets, and you can buy bulk lots, but they're more oriented towards kids who do take them apart and build more stuff with them. But they also realize there's a growing crowd of builders who want special pieces so you can order them by the brick, and a growing adult segment that wants to do a build with their kids, but have something on display.

The beauty of Lego is it can be all things. You can build this with your kid, you might then buy them a bunch of random sets for them to play with - they can choose to build the desired outcome, or who cares, open all the bags, and build whatever comes to mind. No one's touching my Enterprise, but if I give you a Mona Lisa set and you use it to make a spaceship, more power to you.

And yes, people do buy sets often to collect pieces - there are sites that value the sets on how much you get per dollar.

No one has any qualms if you choose to buy this set and build something else completely different. Or if you buy 10 of these sets to build your collection of pieces and have absolutely no intention on building a USS Millennium Falcon.

Nah, that's been the norm for the past 30 years.

Vibe Coding is the next Visual Basic. You know the tool that basically runs Fortune 50 or so companies because some middle manager saw a demo version, cooked something up with it, then it spread like wildfire. Eventually it started accruing features in an ad-hoc manner and is now this unworkable blob of an application that someone has to keep running on a mysterious Windows XP machine that no one dares touch. It started using the demo version, then someone's kid found a pirated version so you didn't have to take 3 million steps to install it every month. Eventually someone actually bought a legitimate version.

Attempts had been made to bring it to VB# but it's only been a buggy mess since, so no one's actually moved from VB6, but the timeline is "sometime" and everything has to be made both to the app everyone uses and the failed VB# version they can finally retire that Windows XP machine and move onto Windows Server 2008. Because as we all know, VB# is also end of life.

Oh sure, some new middle manager sees this and is currently vibe coding their way to a replacement for both the Windows XP and obsolete VB# version, but it only seems to work half the time, and features that worked yesterday mysteriously broke today, so those vital reports that barely worked on Windows XP, well, if it worked, it would be wrong, despite even the Windows 2008 version having that working for years.

Now talk about sidewalks.

Fuck the mascot, with a chainsaw running at full speed. Seriously - with all the ways in which you've endeavoured to turn your browser into a steaming pile of crap, it's time to stop wasting resources on frivolous things like "mascots" and get back into the real game.

I still use your browser and your mail client, but I'm damned tired of having to acquire expertise with "about:config" only to end up still tripping over steaming piles of dogshit left behind by baby developers who either have no clue about usability, or who do understand it but hate it and actively undermine it.

Mozilla isn't losing market share because of a "mascot failure". You're losing it because you've spent valuable resources to do aggravating things like making scrollbars difficult to use, removing delineating lines between tabs in the browser, and totally buggering the UI in Thunderbird.

Sincerely, from a long-time Mozilla user who loves what you used to be.

/rant

If you REALLY want to you can set this in pavucontrol in about twenty seconds. Should last until the browser restarts.

Might even work with pipewire if the planets are aligned.

If full AGI AI supremacy was honestly at stake and they were working at full speed for it, I think I could actually respect that opinion. My feeling, though, is that there's lots of beating a dead horse of LLM style simplistic (in terms of synapse behavior) new neural networks which are aiming at replacing workings in repetitive tasks that don't really require intelligence. I'm sure that several companies have real AI researchers actually working on new approaches some of which might pan out at some point in the (possibly very distant) future, but most of them likely already know that their main approach is a dead end for AGI and they just hope to find a way to make big bucks.

Because you are so much better at knowing what people should be allowed to buy than any individual out there, O lord and master.

There's a cushy municipal government job waiting for you in New York City.

He couldn't though.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. - Frank Wilhoit

It's hasn't always been true of all conservatives; even at the end of the last Trump term a bunch of conservative judges showed that they valued the US Constitution over party loyalty. The American supreme court is now demonstrating this principle perfectly though. Biden failed to understand that his only possible way to have any long term achievements was to push much much harder and faster. That was probably the last chance for a moderate Democrat agenda.

I want them to fix the JavaScript related memory leaks in Mobile so I don't have to kill it several times a day. I guess that's too much to ask since this has been going on for literally years.

People expect to be paid for commute time too, at least in the sense that they will want more money if the commute is longer. Work from home made just coming to the office at all something which people want more money for.

$6 billion could do a lot to end hunger in many parts of the world. Instead, Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a hellsite, and told people to have more kids.

Not how it works. Until you cross into their building, not on property, it's just you commuting to work on your own dime.

Trip and break your hip in the parking lot before work? Not work related. I definitely think it *should* be, but it isn't.

I was thinking the same thing. It must have a whole raft of licensing fees on it. If the price keeps enough people out of the market for it then these will turn out to be some of the most valuable minifigs of all time. I wonder what it costs if you buy the same pieces (less the figures) via parts orders.