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I can understand a "deeper bond with the product."

This is just blandly glazing a CEO.

"Cook has transformed Apple in his own image. The company is much more predictable now than it ever was, or could have been, under Jobs."

Not precisely what I would call "praise."


A fact I've noticed is that suicide rates are higher in areas with lower population density. For example, Alaska's suicide rate is 4x what New York's rate is.

Perhaps just human connection, even momentarily, is enough to break the pattern of behavior that has lead to the ideation.

Also worth noting that suicide rates among the elderly are higher than they are for anyone other than teens. If you have someone you love that doesn't get out much, make sure you give them a call now and again.


The more likely explanation is guns. Gun ownership tends to be higher in rural areas because of a mixture of culture, politics, utility and laws. Only 14% of adults in New York State have guns compared to 59% in Alaska. Having a quick, easy and painless way to end your life right on your nightstand makes it a lot more likely that a bolt of suicidal urges turn into action.

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/gun-ownership.html


Then overlay a map of gun ownership rates over the suicide rates and see if you see the same correlation.

This isn't an intuitive point. There's actual data showing the correlation I've described.

Something you'll also want to explain is why the suicide rate for teens is 3x higher than for adults and why elderly is 2x higher than adults. Or why more than 1/3 of suicides don't involve a gun at all. Or why Japan's suicide rate is so much higher despite having no gun ownership rights.


An alternative explanation is that cold places with long winters are depressing, and because they are depressing fewer people want to live there.

Alaskan winters are hard regardless of how many friends you have.


If you take a chart of population density, and overlay the chart of suicide rate, you'll see an exceedingly strong correlation. It does not follow weather patterns. Utah has 3x the problem relative to California, for example.

Yeah if you go to CDC WISQARS you can do fatal injury reports filtered by intent (suicide) and aggregated by urban/non urban geography. These differences are not small, they vary by factors or orders of magnitude in every state. It's not the weather.

XOR and SUB have had identical cycle counts and latencies since the 8088. That's because you can "look ahead" when doing carries in binary. It's just a matter of how much floorspace on the chip you want to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry-lookahead_adder

The only minor difference between the two on x86, really, is SUB sets OF and CF according to the result while XOR always clears them.


A carry lookahead adder makes your circuit depth logarithmic in the width of the inputs vs linear for a ripple carry adder, but that is still asymptotically worse than XORs constant depth.

(But this does not discount the fact that basically all CPUs treat them both as one cycle)


OF/CF/AF are always cleared anyway by SUB r,r. So there's absolutely no difference.

The point is OF/CF are sometimes dependent on the inputs for SUB. They never are for XOR.

Ah, you mean in terms of complexity of the calculation. Thanks for clarifying.

In practice AF and CF can be computed from the carry out vector which is already available, and OF is a single XOR (of the two most significant bits of the carry out vector). The same circuitry works for XOR and SUB if the carry out vector of XOR is simply all zeroes.


It also clears any dependence on the state of those flags. Which is probably not useful in practice.

This is one of those "That's weird. Why are you telling me?" stories.

Install Chrome update. Network usage goes off the charts. Close Chrome it goes away. Check task manager. No processes claim the downloads. Use firefox to search around for why.

Apparently "on-device AI models" are a thing. And are downloaded separately after the install of Chrome.

Deeply frustrating on a mobile connection.


Invested half a yard too much in a recent popular technology? No problem, just pivot, then spam Hacker News.

The updates often require more power. Which drains the battery more than it was designed for. Which helps shorten the life of the device.

BTW: DOS was supported until 2001, and Win95 could boot DOS standalone.


    vpcmpestri xmm2, xmm3, BYTEWISE_CMP 
    test cx, 0x10    ; if(rcx != 16)
I see this test/cmp all the time after the instruction and I don't understand it. pcmpestri will set ZF if edx < 16, and it will set SF if eax < 16. It is already giving you the necessary status. Also testing sub words of the larger register is very slow and is a pipeline hazard.

You've got this monster of an instruction and then people place all this paranoid slowness around it. Am I reading the x86 manual wrong?


I think people started doing that after one of the Intel SSE examples did it and everyone just copied it.

But on any modern CPU there should be essentially no penalty for doing that now. Testing the full register is basically free as long as you aren't doing a partial write followed by a full read (write AH then read AX), and I don't think there's any case where this could stall on anything newer than a Core 2 era processor. But just replacing that with a "jnc" or whatever you're exactly trying to test for would be less instructions at least. I'd love to see benchmarks though if someone has dug deeper into this than I have.


Unless instances are sparse, higher code density is of course always better, because of the instruction cache (and the microcode cache, if this doesn't get "pinhole optimized" away or something like that, I know nothing about the microcode cache).

But yeah, it may not make a real impact yet anyway.


Alex Jones lives rent free in peoples heads. They mistake a phyrric victory for a real victory.

they took everything he owned and are now unraveling all the bullshit tricks he used to hide his assets. Certainly it's more real than phyrric.

He can own new things. So, other than inconveniencing him slightly, I'm not sure what we've accomplished.

... after he services his debt, then he can have toys.

That's not at all how corporate or personal bankruptcies work. You exactly prove my point.

.. but in this case: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/13/nx-s1-5501648/alex-jones-info...

"If Infowars' brand and property are sold, Jones could still start a new company or work for someone else. But because the bankruptcy judge ruled Jones' behavior "willful and malicious," the bankruptcy will not erase Jones' debt, meaning families can keep claiming any money he makes in the future until he pays the $1.3 billion he owes them."


Take some time to see how bankruptcy works. You cannot take all of someones property, nor can you take all of their paycheck. There are specific limits. You can also still come to an alternate settlement with your creditors.

This idea that he "can't have toys" or the court is "going to take is cat" because he has debts is insanity.

Let's say it's your family member. And they go bankrupt due to medical bills. Is this how you want the system to treat them? Justice isn't an opportunity to demean people you don't like.

People will tolerate all kinds of bad precedent and injustice simply because of their emotions. Which might be fine, but to see it drizzle onto the front page of Hacker News, I have to agree with the OP, is annoying.


I know how bankruptcy works, i've seen it up close. The problem, for him, here is that bankruptcy does not absolve him from his debts on this particular judgement because of his own behavior and choices. That's on him, if it is 'demeaning' so be it.

He could have cooperated with the original trial instead of stonewalling discovery until he was dealt a default judgement, he could have cooperated with the other trial but he didn't, he could have not tried to hide his assets in the bankruptcy process but he didn't... he could have done SO MANY THINGS. But he chose not to. fuck him.


It's a camel designed by committee.

On paper it looks cool.

In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.


I think it's more contractors were responsible for providing only their deliverables. The program design as a whole is done by the DoD when they bid out their requirements.

Yeah, military pricing isn't because of it's good quality, it's because it's compliant, and they are usually at odds with each other.

> designed by committee

I've seen an argument--which I don't have enough expertise to advocate for--that the F35's broad but shallow appeal ("jack of all trades, master of none") has an indirect strength: A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.

Speaking of military hardware in general, I can easily imagine there are cases where "best for logistics" completely trounces "best for the job".


> A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.

Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35, let alone maintain them, and the geographic distribution of the effort only makes that worse.

And then they made it worse again by making many parts of the F-35 F-35 specific. You can't just drop in the same radio LRU from most other airframes and use it with the F-35, it has its own and its own maintenance cycles. The thing was designed to be expensive, it was not designed for manufacturing efficiency.


part of its mission is being expensive, but surely you can see how that changes with the stroke of a pen?

> Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35

This is completely wrong, though. It's cheaper to build an F-35 than it is to build a Eurofighter, Rafale or Gripen, which are significantly older and less capable platforms. And not even "a little" cheaper - quite a bit cheaper. Economies of scale are real


After reading your comment I did read up on the Gripen. Seems very interesting. Procurement is about the same as the F-35 but the running costs are about 1/4 so over its expected lifetime it'll be considerably cheaper. On the procurement front though Saab seems to offer factory set up as part of the deal, so you make back some of the cost into your economy. Being able to build and maintain them yourself seems like a big plus.

Capability wise the gap isn't as large as I thought either. The latest Gripen-E has similar radar, possibly better software, and they can be kitted out to fire the same air to air weapons. What they don't have is a stealthy airframe and they aren't designed for some of the same mission profiles. If you're a country that doesn't make your own aircraft then having access to both, or just the Gripen for interceptors would make some sense.


Camels are very well designed.

Pick on a less useful animal.


Well yes, we have a load of taxpayer funded people to decide what to build.

The taxpayer funding is often the smaller part the complete lifetime pay package.

> A 2014 study of U.S. Department of Defense appointees showed that 28% exited to industry. As of 2023, 80 per cent of U.S. four-star retirees are employed in defense industry.[0]

There are actually entirely reasonable, rational explanations for this, but it's not a great look.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)


Undoubtedly so! But blame the people who get free money out of your income to be impartial and make decisions, not the people who have to earn their pay to carry out the decisions. If they wanted to prohibit that sort of thing they could.

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