Changes to building and zoning codes over the past half century have made building "the size of house that people bought 50 years ago" illegal in many cases. You can't buy such a house if such a house isn't on the market, and you may not build a new one under current law.

See also "Why minimum lot size reform should be on every city’s housing agenda" by Patrick Tuohey.

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.

Linus Torvalds is a dual citizen. He was born a citizen of Finland and became a citizen of the United States in 2010. (Source: "Linus Torvalds, already an Oregonian, now a U.S. citizen" by Mike Rogoway, citing a post to LKML by Torvalds)

It'd be more interesting to count commits by nationality. I'm pretty sure Torvalds no longer has the lion's share of commits.

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.

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.

Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

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.

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.

That's a strong statement. Can you explain why that isn't also true of human brains? What's the intrinsic difference?