Perhaps I’ve erred in framing it in heteronormative terms, but it seems that the type of problem being described does depend in part on sexual orientation, and the main point I’m making isn’t gendered at all. You’ve framed romantic partnership as the cornerstone of healthy social interaction, something that needs to be in place first in order for men to thrive socially. I see it as more of a capstone, the last thing to put in place after already building up something strong and robust.

People who are emotionally and socially healthy can find romantic partners that complement them well, without putting too much on that relationship or even straining it from over-burdening that link.

The thing is that you can be the best friend in the world, a partner will always come first for the other person.

And so framing it as being a competition or ranking ignores how these things are complementary. Having strong outside friendships improves the romantic relationships and strengthens the long term commitment there. Expecting the romantic partner to be the everything is what makes people lonely, because we’re not built for drifting independent pairings untethered to the rest of society. We partner up and the web of relationships outside that relationship provides bracing support for the romantic link itself.

Toxic masculinity is the expectation that men can’t be certain things, including emotionally supportive, and that stifling effect on male relationships with others isolates those men. The loneliness that follows is part of it, almost an inevitable consequence of it.

That’s what I’m talking about, though. You see male friendships as a method of coping with a more fundamental problem relating to women, and I totally disagree, and argue that healthy male friendships are social connections worth developing and maintaining in their own right, whether you are or aren’t in a committed relationship with a woman. Even your framing of why male friendships fall apart involves women. It’s the centrality of women in your worldview that is preventing you from seeing how male friendships are a critical thing to have in addressing male loneliness.

Put another way, married men need healthy male friendships, too. Putting all of that emotional labor into a single link with a woman is fragile and unreliable, and I’d argue inherently unhealthy. People need multiple social links and the resilience and support that comes from whole groups connected in a web, not just a bunch of isolated pairings.

And to be clear, I’m not saying that friendships are a replacement for romantic and sexual relationships. I’m saying that social fluency, empathy, and thoughtfulness necessary for being able to maintain deep friendships are important skillsets for maintaining romantic relationships as well. The lack of romantic partners, then, isn’t the “base issue,” but is a symptom of the internal state of the person and how that person interacts with the world.

So I maintain that your worldview switches cause and effect, at least compared to mine. And maybe I’m wrong, and I’m not trying to convince you that I’m right. I’m bringing all this up to share that the surprising part of this line of comments is that I was genuinely not expecting someone to treat romantic difficulties as a primary or fundamental cause of male loneliness. To show you that at least there are other people who view these issues very differently from you, and that there’s a broad diversity of thought on the topic.

Again not talking about the main issue that every men that feel alone will tell you as the root of their problem:

-Lack of a relationship.

-Lack of friendships due other friends being invested in their relationships.

Actually, your comment touches on something that is really interesting to me, and a major part of where you and I differ on what male loneliness means. You’ve elevated the romantic committed relationship with a woman as the primary means by which men are expected to derive social standing and stability, but I view it primarily as an issue of friendships, mainly friendships with other men. The loneliness problem, in my view, comes from men being unable to form strong relationships with other men, and a wife or girlfriend or whatever is secondary to that.

Maybe it’s because I’ve always had stability in my friendships but didn’t have committed romantic relationships until my 30’s, but it seems like the problem of loneliness comes from not feeling like you have people in your corner (friends, family, even work colleagues), but I think focusing on sexual and romantic relationships is itself isolating and lonely, even for men who do get married. Now that I’m married I still spend plenty of time with my friends, married or single, based on the topic/activity/interest that ties us together.

Because plenty of men who do not comply to gender norms or toxic masculinity (or masculinity at all) still feel alone. And their experience get invalidated by this explanation.

It sounds like you completely miss the application of the explanation itself. The phrase toxic masculinity describes the social norms and expectations that men act a certain way. Society imposes gender norms on people such that those who don’t comply are at the highest risk of being shunned or ostracized, and having trouble making social connections. And the social pressure may make men act in ways they wouldn’t otherwise, so that they grow up poorly equipped to be introspective and understand their own wants/desires/emotions/drives/motivations.

Toxic masculinity tells men what they’re not allowed to be, and tells men what they must be. Both sides of that same coin are toxic to men, and by extension those that the men interact with.

How does the updater get updated, though?

St Nicklaus

The golfer?!?

when you ask a computer to sort things for you, it will automatically order things correctly when the date follows this format

I’d go even further than that, and point out that the reason why computers sort things in this order is because that’s the most logical way to convey specific dates.

Most significant digits on the left, descending left to right, in order, is how we do all other numerical representations. It’s only dates that we have different norms.

Hawai
i

The hyphen can provide indicators on how to parse the letters on either side. “Pen-Island” would be pronounced differently from “Penisland.”

stop looking at those as “features of the keyboard and mouse that I purchased”

Seriously.

Maybe I’m an old timer but my idea of extra features on a mouse or keyboard are simply more inputs: more mouse buttons or wheels, more keys on a keyboard (like media keys). At most that just requires additional hardware, but nothing my OS can’t handle on its own.

And then to answer your question I don’t think it has much to do with the sport itself.

To think of another example, I’ve seen a lot more violent anger in living rooms triggered by a video game than a sporting event.

Ok so most monitors sold today support DDC/CI controls for at least brightness, and some support controlling color profiles over the DDC/CI interface.

If you get some kind of external ambient light sensor and plug it into a USB port, you might be able to configure a script that controls the brightness of the monitor based on ambient light, without buying a new monitor.

To be honest, no. I mainly know about JPEG XL only because I’m acutely aware of the limitations of standard JPEG for both photography and high resolution scanned documents, where noise and real world messiness cause all sorts of problems. Something like QOI seems ideal for synthetic images, which I don’t work with a lot, and wouldn’t know the limitations of PNG as well.

You say that it is sorted in the order of most significants, so for a date it is more significant if it happend 1024, 2024 or 9024?

Most significant to least significant digit has a strict mathematical definition, that you don’t seem to be following, and applies to all numbers, not just numerical representations of dates.

And most importantly, the YYYY-MM-DD format is extensible into hh:mm:as too, within the same schema, out to the level of precision appropriate for the context. I can identify a specific year when the month doesn’t matter, a specific month when the day doesn’t matter, a specific day when the hour doesn’t matter, and on down to minutes, seconds, and decimal portions of seconds to whatever precision I’d like.

This isn’t exactly what you asked, but our URI/URL schema is basically a bunch of missed opportunities, and I wish it was better designed.

Ok so it starts off with the scheme name, which makes sense. http: or ftp: or even tel:

But then it goes into the domain name system, which suffers from the problem that the root, then top level domain, then domain, then progressively smaller subdomains, go right to left. www.example.com requires the system look up the root domain, to see who manages the .com tld, then who owns example.com, then a lookup of the www subdomain. Then, if there needs to be a port number specified, that goes after the domain name, right next to the implied root domain. Then the rest of the URL, by default, goes left to right in decreasing order of significance. It’s just a weird mismatch, and would make a ton more sense if it were all left to right, including the domain name.

Then don’t get me started about how the www subdomain itself no longer makes sense. I get that the system was designed long before HTTP and the WWW took over the internet as basically the default, but if we had known that in advance it would’ve made sense to not try to push www in front of all website domains throughout the 90"s and early 2000’s.

Your day to day use isn’t everyone else’s. We use times for a lot more than “I wonder what day it is today.” When it comes to recording events, or planning future events, pretty much everyone needs to include the year. Getting things wrong by a single digit is presented exactly in order of significance in YYYY-MM-DD.

And no matter what, the first digit of a two-digit day or two-digit month is still more significant in a mathematical sense, even if you think that you’re more likely to need the day or the month. The 15th of May is only one digit off of the 5th of May, but that first digit in a DD/MM format is more significant in a mathematical sense and less likely to change on a day to day basis.

Functionally speaking, I don’t see this as a significant issue.

JPEG quality settings can run a pretty wide gamut, and obviously wouldn’t be immediately apparent without viewing the file and analyzing the metadata. But if we’re looking at metadata, JPEG XL reports that stuff, too.

Of course, the metadata might only report the most recent conversion, but that’s still a problem with all image formats, where conversion between GIF/PNG/JPG, or even edits to JPGs, would likely create lots of artifacts even if the last step happens to be lossless.

You’re right that we should ensure that the metadata does accurately describe whether an image has ever been encoded in a lossy manner, though. It’s especially important for things like medical scans where every pixel matters, and needs to be trusted as coming from the sensor rather than an artifact of the encoding process, to eliminate some types of error. That’s why I’m hopeful that a full JXL based workflow for those images will preserve the details when necessary, and give fewer opportunities for that type of silent/unknown loss of data to occur.

• Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people’s own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there’s benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
• JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
• The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn’t ready to replace camera RAW files, but there’s room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

It’s great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.

Adobe is backing the format, Apple support is coming along, and there are rumors that Apple is switching from HEIC to JPEG XL as a capture format as early as the iPhone 16 coming out in a few weeks. As soon as we have a full blown workflow that can take images from camera to post processing to publishing in JXL, we might see a pretty strong push for adoption at the user side (browsers, websites, chat programs, social media apps and sites, etc.).

In addition to the stone/clay based works that you might be thinking of, I find certain metalworking sculptures to be interesting, too. Alexander Calder made a bunch of red steel sculptures, almost architectural art, in addition to things like dynamic mobiles. Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” is an interesting one, too.

There are small metal sculptures, too. From little trinkets made from wire, to welded metal parts, to elaborate chandeliers, these all involve artistic creativity in manipulating materials in a three dimensional space, and it’s a skillset that I admire and respect (and do not have any, myself).