In 2018 Oracle's Larry Ellison bought the historic Cal Neva Lodge on the scenic north shore of California's Lake Tahoe for $36 million. Then in 2019 Mark Zuckerberg bought a $59 million compound on Lake Tahoe's west shore.

But now a wave of techies are moving in, reports Outside magazine, "freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: 'Zoom-towns.'" "It's the wildest time," says realtor Katey Brandenburg, who works on Tahoe's Nevada side. For her and other realtors around the lake, the autumn of 2020 felt like winning the lottery. "I paid off a lifetime of debt — 28 years of loans, college, credit cards, and cars — in three months."

All told, 2020 saw more than 2,350 homes sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion, up from $1.76 billion in 2019, according to data analyzed by Sierra Sotheby's. That $3 billion stat is on a par with 2020 home-sales revenues in Aspen, Colorado (albeit there, the latest average home-sale price came in at $11 million). The trend is in line with real estate records being shattered from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Stowe, Vermont. And according to a just-released market update, it hasn't stopped: in the first quarter of 2021, median prices for single-family homes increased by an astronomical 70 percent year over year in Truckee, 72 percent in South Lake, and 81 percent in Incline Village...

"A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area," says Deniz Kahramaner, founder of Atlasa, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in data analytics. Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)...

There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there.
The article does note higher property taxes going toward public services (along with "more money eventually pumping into bars and restaurants.") And it also acknowledges affordable housing has for decades been an issue in tourist towns.

"It's just suddenly on steroids..."

FTP (file transfer protocol) celebrated its 50th anniversary this week. Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares an article commemorating a half-century of FTP: Over the years, the FTP protocol got refined with 16 different revisions(*1) adding support with TCP/IP, a secure extension also known as FTPS which is leveraging the same tech as HTTPS and more recent addition like IPv6 support.

Fifty years after its inception, FTP is still going very strong with millions of FTP server still being exposed on the internet which is fairly amazing considering the bad press it gets...

"Sydney university student Pablo Bonilla, 21, had his first academic paper published overnight and it might just change the shape of computing forever," writes Australia's national public broadcaster ABC: As a second-year physics student at the University of Sydney, Mr Bonilla was given some coding exercises as extra homework and what he returned with has helped to solve one of the most common problems in quantum computing. His code spiked the interest of researchers at Yale and Duke in the United States and the multi-billion-dollar tech giant Amazon plans to use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services....

Assistant professor Shruti Puri of Yale's quantum research program said the new code solved a problem that had persisted for 20 years. "What amazes me about this new code is its sheer elegance," she said. "Its remarkable error-correcting properties are coming from a simple modification to a code that has been studied extensively for almost two decades...."

Co-author of the paper, the University of Sydney's Ben Brown, said the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla's code was in its simplicity... "We just made the smallest of changes to a chip that everybody is building, and all of a sudden it started doing a lot better. It's quite amazing to me that nobody spotted it in the 20-or-so years that people have been working on that model."