Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.

But also, you’re right. Here’s an article from 1994 describing Visicalc as a “Killer App” from the late 1970’s, that prompted people to buy personal computers.

“Killer rap” was pretty popular in the 90’s too.

It’s because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.

Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.

Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.

That’s why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.

Why do people Google questions anyway?

Because it gives better responses.

Google and all the other major search engines have built in functionality to perform natural language processing on the user’s query and the text in its index to perform a search more precisely aligned with the user’s desired results, or to recommend related searches.

If the functionality is there, why wouldn’t we use it?

Search engine algorithms are way better than in the 90s and early 2000s when it was naive keyword search completely unweighted by word order in the search string.

So the tricks we learned of doing the bare minimum for the most precise search behavior no longer apply the same way. Now a search for two words will add weight to results that have the two words as a phrase, and some weight for the two words close together in the same sentence, but still look for each individual word as a result, too.

More importantly, when a single word has multiple meanings, the search engines all use the rest of the search as an indicator of which meaning the searcher means. “Heat” is a really broad word with lots of meanings, and the rest of the search can help inform the algorithm of what the user intends.

The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years

Four years? You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.

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?!?

Standard operating procedure for getting help on Linux tech support is to say that Linux sucks and that it would be way easier to complete a certain task on Windows.

You can have the code to my kernel, sure. You don’t get a login on my machine, though, and you’re definitely not on the sudoers list.

Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000’s, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.