WTSocial: Alternative to Facebook is Announced by Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia



Jimmy Wales' (founder of Wikipedia) has a new project, WTSocial  

I'm going to presumptively speak for "the World" here:  The World is ready for an alternative social gathering spot that respects users' privacy, discourages acrimony and tamps down hard on misinformation. I'm an early financial supporter because I really want this project to take off. This will be a fundamentally different business model than Facebook in that it will be funded through user donations. Here's are a few excerpts from a Financial Times article about WTSocial:

“It won’t be massively profitable but it will be sustainable,” [Wales] said . . . Wales said he believes the time is now right for a new venue that is free from what he calls “clickbait nonsense”. “People are feeling fed up with all the junk that’s around,” Mr Wales said.

Regarding his goals for numbers of users, Wale stated: “Obviously the ambition is not 50,000 or 500,000 but 50m and 500m.”

Photo Credit:  Photograph: ed g2s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15707

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Waitress Reports: Families no longer having conversations over dinner

My daughters and I ate at a local diner tonight. Our waitress has been doing this work for 45 years, since she was 15. She said one of the striking changes in her business is how people no longer engage in conversations while eating. She estimated that 8 out of 10 groups of people barely talk. Instead, they are mostly looking at their phones while they eat at the restaurant. She is dismayed about this and said that she sees this in her own family; it is difficult to have conversation with her own children because they are glued to their phones. Apparently, Phubbing is the new normal.

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Moore’s Law: Alive and Well.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. It's still going strong 52 years later, ever since 1965, when Gordon Moore made his prediction. That this law has has held for more than 50 years is amazing, almost miraculous-seeming. It reminds me of the wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains), a mathematical problem expressed this way:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

In the chessboard example the final number is a whopping 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (the 64th Mersenne number). Wikipedia reports this commentary:

In April 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that "In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times. As we progress from 14 nanometer technology to 10 nanometer and plan for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well".[25] In January 2017, he declared that "I've heard the death of Moore's law more times than anything else in my career ... And I'm here today to really show you and tell you that Moore's Law is alive and well and flourishing.

 

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