I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.
Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.
In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.
Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.
Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.
This game-theory phase seems to go hand-in-hand with totally myopic grift/gig/hustle thinking too. There is no product but the confidence act needed to win each moment.
Chalk up yet another echo of the 1920s Gilded Age? Between all these economic spasms and the simultaneous tilting towards fascism, I think there is way too much historical rhyming going on right now...
Yeah, even in Linux we were doing these things with X Windows bit depths.
8 bit psuedo color, so the color palette switched with every focus-follows-mouse window boundary crossing. 16 bit direct color with banding but no more palette psychedlia.
This was equal parts to make it faster and to allow for higher framebuffer resolutions with limited VRAM.
This analogy is ironic to me. For most people, building a dream house and verifying it means hiring someone else who is accountable for it being built to code etc.
This is exactly the naive gap that is happening with AI. There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability. The AI vendor tries to sell it like magic but with a disclaimer that is is merely entertainment. The user tries to pretend they are reviewing, but often is just implicitly trusting the tool to do right by them on things they have no real capacity to evaluate.
> There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability.
It's a great example of a project that needs accountability, but there's also thousands of other projects that need absolutely no accountability.
It's all relative to the stakes. The lower the stakes the less informed verification is needed.
The real trick is being informed enough on the boundaries to know where it matters. In the construction analogy, you need to be informed enough to know that a house is a bad idea since there are safety concerns. However building something small and non-load-bearing is probably fine to "vibe".
Eg there's no expertise needed to judge a garden trellis or 2 foot picket fence. It either works or it doesn't, and if it fails down the road there's no harm.
Are these "device chargers" for BEVs like electric submarines or something? ;-)
In the broader SF Bay Area, our recent PG&E bills for a 50 year old single-family home without air-conditioning is under $150/mo, with a couple fridges, electric clothes dryer, and a half-dozen laptop class computers. That's averaging about 8-9 kWh per day (250-280 kWh/month).
Last winter, our bill ramped up to over $400/mo for a few months, due to heating with natural gas.
Asymptotically, every billing system is a stock market and telecom. ;-)
My biggest career horror was realizing how much the medical informatics concepts have been structured around billing and insurance rather than scientific, biomedical requirements.
If you have cared for someone with dementia, this isn't so surprising.
It isn't a monotonic decline with memories disappearing forever. It is like wave upon wave of changing capacity at different time scales. The general trend is deterioration, but there are frequent periods that can almost seem like remission.
There is a well known daily cycle referred to as "sundowning", where the sufferer tends to come unraveled later in the day. The next morning, they'll be more functional.
Later in the progression, you can see much higher frequency variations. Like periods of disorientation and confusion interspersed with periods of lucidity all within a single sitting or conversation.
In those periods of greater lucidity, recall of the past can be more accurate. General listening comprehension, speaking, and logical thought also seem more normal.
Edit to add: I sometimes wonder if the belief in terminal lucidity is one of those logical fallacies which support lots of superstitions. Are we just fixating on the final wave in this chaotic wave train, and forgetting all the other waves that happened before it? Or is it that more caretakers are engaged and observing these waves towards the end, e.g. because the patient is known to be in the terminal phase..?
> It isn't a monotonic decline with memories disappearing forever.
Last time I visited my grandpa he was really far gone. The day we arrived and subsequent two days he didn't even recognize his daughter, my mom, or even recall he had one. He'd sit in the bedroom and watch the garden, and ask "who's that guy" every 15 minutes or so, as he'd forget about me in the livingroom.
The last day we visited before flying home. I entered first, and this time he sat in the living room, and as he saw me enter the hallway he exclaimed my name. We reminisced for hours in fluent English, his third language and my second language, as I wasn't so good in his and my moms native language. He recalled lots of details, some even I had forgotten but I confirmed later.
Raised with my grandmother with Alzheimer for all of my childhood she called me by her long dead brother's name.
Walked out the door one day said "See you later grandma" and she said "Have fun ______" and called me by my real name, called my older siblings and said go spend time, she died two days later.
Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.
In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
reply