Nope. Go look up the actual data, don't just go on vibes.

Yes, in 1980 the median house was $65k and it's $430k today... but the median hourly wage in 1980 was $7 and it's $30 today (which, BTW, represents a ~10% inflation-adjusted wage increase -- wages haven't just "kept pace", they've increased). So a 1980 house cost 9,300 hours, and a 2026 house costs 14,300 hours, that's an 53% increase, but when you look at the way everything else has gotten cheaper -- food, clothing, entertainment, etc., it's really not that bad. Go do some research on what percentage of household income went to food and clothing in 1980 vs today. And the median new house size in 1980 was about 1600 square feet and lacked a lot of amenities like attached garages and central air, while the median new house today is 2100 square feet -- 30% larger! -- and that's actually down a little from a few years ago. So compared to 1980 you get 30% more house, and a nicer, better-equipped house, for 50% more money.

As for your claim that dual-income families were rare in 1980, according to the BLS, 51.8% of American households in 1980 had two incomes, and 49.6% do today. If we restrict the analysis to prime working-age families, the numbers look different (47% in 1980 and 66% today), but it was hardly "rare" in 1980 and it's far from universal today.

I don't think that would make much difference.

At least in the US, young people are wealthier than they ever have been. Housing prices are relatively higher, but not that much, not if you buy the size of house that people bought 50 years ago. If you also reduce eating out and other expenses to the levels that were normal a couple of generations ago, make kids share rooms like they did then, etc., it's perfectly feasibly to have a family on a typical income -- depending on where you live, even a single income.

What's changed isn't the economics, it's people's willingness to make the compromises needed. But the compromises are not just economic; they aren't even primarily economic. Raising children is a lot of work, takes a lot of time, and a lot of patience, and limits your freedom. I think many people today are unwilling to make those compromises, too.

I don't give a shit about movement to the right or left, not right now. I just want basic competence and support for the rule of law, because those are the things we've totally lost under the current GOP. A bit of compassion would be good, too. What I wouldn't give to have Dubya back.

1st gen Paperwhite is in the list of devices losing support. DeDRM effectively neutered on it, since you will no longer be able to buy/rent books for it after May 20.

That was actually my thought. It wasn't until I got to the mention of Twitter than I figured out they didn't mean X11.

I did think switching from X11 to Wayland was a funny thing to post publicly about. And a funny thing for /. to pick up.

DeDRM only works for Kindles 4 and earlier, which is the biggest reason Amazon is discontinuing support for them. So as of May 20, there is no practical way to decrypt Kindle books and back them up any longer.

Obviously there are some other reasons for dropping support including the fact that older Kindles don't support formats like epub with more advanced layout and formatting options. But it still stinks.

Sadly I don't know of any decent alternative to buy ebooks at a reasonable price that I can back up to my local calibre library. I guess one alternative is to keep buying Kindle books, but then download them from the usual grey market online libraries. Anyway I'm going to make a list of books I want to buy and get them bought before the May 20th deadline and then import them into Calibre from my Kindle 3.

Someone gave a nice tip about picking up a Kindle e-ink screen driver so I can at least use the screens for projects.

I think you give him too much credit. I don't think his "messaging strategy" has any design, nor is it a strategy. It's just Trump saying whatever shit bubbles to the top of what sometimes passes for a mind. And it's random and changes every four hours because he's random and changes what he believes every four hours. Or every four minutes.

I don't think he even "learned" to act like a reality show... I think this is just who he is and who he always has been, albeit with an added layer of growing dementia. He was moderately successful on reality TV not because he figured out how to be moderately successful on reality TV, but because his normal personality, style and complete lack of ethics, morality or consistency just happens to be perfect for reality TV.

That's part of the reason they are discontinuing support for these devices. It's nearly impossible on the newer Kindles to backup your purchases. They really are just rentals. Hence I'll be spending no more money on Kindle from here on. It used to be Kindle plus audible was actually pretty fantastic and affordable and both were easy to decrypt and back up.

I think after this moronic attack, they now know they don't actually need nukes, at least not until the world loses its appetite for oil, or finds other sources that make Gulf state production irrelevant.

Also, even if this fallacious claim were true, it wouldn't actually support Arrogant-Bastard's claim, which wasn't about the state of AI now, but a claim about "intrinsic properties", meaning it would be true forever.

Nonsense. LLMs point out my mistakes all the time. And I point out theirs. At this point there's more of the latter than the former, but both absolutely happen all the time.

Not as much as you might think. Definitely not as much as at most companies.

I think it depends less on workflow and more on screen layout. If you run your browser maximized on a landscape-mode display, there's a lot of horizontal real estate that isn't very well-used, while vertical space is at a premium. So it makes sense to move tabs to the side.

On the other hand, if you don't maximize your window but keep it as narrow as possible (so you can see other windows) but just wide enough that sites render well, then you'll probably prefer them on top.

On the gripping hand, if you're like me and run your browser full-screen on a portrait mode screen, then you have gobs of vertical real-estate and tabs on top definitely makes sense.

(I have three monitors, a 32" (landscape) in the center, which is where my IDE, editors, and "focused" work lives, and a 27" portrait orientation monitor on each side. The left one has a full-screen browser window for work stuff and the right one has a full-screen browser window for personal stuff. It's fantastic.)

Mmmm.... if anything it's "what the Google engineers want emphasized". Executives at Google have surprisingly little control over technical decisions. For nearly all of Google's existence it's been an almost completely bottom-up driven company and while in the last few years management has been trying to exert more control it's a very, very slow process.

It's actually the engineering-driven culture that produces Google's infamous tendency to abandon products. Stuff gets built because some engineers think it's a good idea and convince their managers to let them run with it. Then eventually it gets boring and engineers tend to wander off to other teams in search of something interesting. If the product has managed to achieve significant userbase and/or revenue stream (and keep in mind that both are measured on Google scales; so anything less than 100M users or $1B/year is "not signficant").

In a top-down company products don't get built until they have significant executive support, which requires a fairly detailed plan, which gets executed and adjusted, and if an exec's project is in trouble it will get support. At Google products kind of wander out the door and into the world and if they happen to be a hit, great, if not, well, unless there are legally-binding contracts obligating the company to support something, it just gets shut down. Even with the projects that the executive leadership are really excited about (like AI!), their influence is mostly limited to shoveling resources at it.

Anyway, the point is that execs likely have little to no influence on Gemini training beyond setting very broad guidelines, and even those might not have much effect.

Web sites are within their rights to deny access without showing advertising, but the browser is running on my computer and I can have it manipulate the data how I want. That's why I no longer use Chrome or any Chromium-based browser since Google deliberately blocked Manifest v2 extensions such as uBlock Origni.

Firefox is the only browser that has uBlock Origin now. And vertical tabs of course. There's so much to dislike about Mozilla and horrible Firefox UI choices, but as far as safety goes, it's the only game in town.