According to the Washington Examiner: By Tuesday morning, 1.5 billion people had viewed the app in the iPhone App Store, with nearly 400,000 people receiving notices they were placed on a waitlist upon trying to sign up. Could this be true? When it comes to numbers, be skeptical It pays to understand the world that numbers…
After receiving a solicitation from the Republican Party to join Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” social network, I decided to try it out. Although the solicitation says it is “Live,” the sign-in page asks you to join a waiting list. Since you have to agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, I wanted to…
Less than six months ago, it seemed that Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, had learned a very public lesson. Between its involvement in spreading disinformation in the January 6 insurrection, a humiliating leak of documents showing how little it cared about the corrosive impact of its policies, and public calls to break the company up,…
I hope you’re having fun solving Wordle puzzles; I know I am. As I attempt the puzzles, I’m often thinking about how vowels and consonants appear in different patterns in five-letter words. I wanted to start exploring those patterns, so I wrote a Python program to probe the results of different patterns. If you want…
Yesterday’s mathematical analysis of the popular word puzzle Wordle was flawed. It assumed that the words used in the puzzle were similar to other word lists, but they’re not — and that changes everything. What word list does Wordle use — and why does that matter? Wordle actually uses two word lists (or properly speaking,…
Wordle, the simple word-guessing game, has become insanely popular. Your job is to guess a common five-letter English word and see which of the letters in your guess are in the unknown word, either in the correct or incorrect location. You can only play once a day, you have six tries, and everyone is guessing…
Did you know that Facebook’s parent company Meta is now releasing a crypto token called Meta Token? Actually, it isn’t. But the same scammers who placed Facebook ads for the Amazon Token are now advertising a Meta Token, supposedly backed by Mark Zuckerberg — advertised, of course, on Facebook. Same scam, different day If you’ve…
In an interview with Ina Fried of Axios, Andrew Bosworth, who will soon be the CEO of Meta, defended the spread of misinformation on the company’s platforms. The Washington Post described the argument as “Social media doesn’t hurt people. People hurt people.” Is Bosworth right? After all, people post what they want on Facebook. Do…
Yesterday, I told the story of how LeafFilter failed to show up for three appointments — and never called me — when scheduled to perform service at my house in Maine. I described the events from November 1 to December 9, when I’d finally had it with the company and was prepared to tell the…