Almost all coal plants in Alberta have been shut down and it's a small minority of net generation now. Natural gas has taken up most of the slack, but there's actually quite a lot of solar and wind generation in Alberta considering the politics (though that's likely to slow down now).
Ah i didn't realize the coal plants were retired! That's good to see. I was looking at the carbon impact per kwh in Alberta earlier in the year for a project I was working on, and was surprised how high it was. I guess other areas of the country just have a lot of other sources diluting the impact.
17.577 million hectares have burned so far this year. If 2023 were on that graph it would be a skyscraper towering over every big fire year in the 80s and 90s.
This year is unprecedented. And it isn't even over yet and the fires are still burning.
The Mastodon corner of the fediverse is also ridiculously more well run and diverse than xmpp outside the big players ever was.
Like, when threads joins it's far far more likely to be a net contributor of spam and abuse towards the rest of the network because the people who run Mastodon instances generally actually care.
Even Mastodon.social (the biggest instance currently) routinely gets silenced or blocked temporarily by other instances when it lets spam get out of control, and that is generally considered a good thing by users.
Honestly that's gonna be the main reason threads gets defederated after the first round of ideological blocks: self-defence against abuse.
Threads has 100m total users (that number is based on userid badges on Instagram afaik).
The fediverse has somewhere around 10-13m total users, about 8-10m of those are on the main Mastodon network, and around 2-4m MAU. It's hard to pin these down precisely because different counters disagree (it's hard), but if you're going to take the most optimistic number from Meta (the only one you'll ever see), you should take the most optimistic from the other "side" as well.
Threads doesn't have an MAU yet because it hasn't existed for a month, but it will not be anywhere near 100%. Most people I've seen on it seem to have bounced day one and user growth has stalled a lot (roughly halving every day).
Sources for fediverse/mastodon numbers:
- fedidb.org
- the-federation.info (includes some things that aren't activitypub based)
This is indeed true and we will have to see how the numbers settle as we go along.
However I would be surprised if Meta doesn’t continue to possess well above a supermajority of the userbase until another large corporation embraces ActivityPub.
>However I would be surprised if Meta doesn’t continue to possess well above a supermajority of the userbase until another large corporation embraces ActivityPub.
That's likely true. But that doesn't force me to interact with that user base (I don't interact with them now and nothing of value is lost, so why should I start?) in the Fediverse.
If I had an Instagram/Threads account, I would be forced to do so. I don't, so I'm not.
So many folks here and elsewhere complain about the garbage in their "feeds" from the centralized "social media" sites, but (apparently) don't realize they don't have to see that garbage, or advertising or posts that are about/from topics/persons they don't care about.
And so the question I'll ask you is: Why should I care how many Threads users exist? I have no interest in interacting with them and am not forced to do so.
I think that's true, though I also think the fediverse (but not necessarily Mastodon specifically) will outlive threads.
But I think the really big question will be: in 3-6 months is meta putting out DAU and/or MAU numbers for threads separate from Instagram's?
Until then you can only guess how "big" it really is. I don't personally find the numbers so far all that impressive: it's a sub-10% conversion rate from insta daily active users and I think behind the celebratory face they're putting forward that might not be what they were hoping for.
But mostly I see this trend everywhere where people give a lot of latitude to things like threads and Twitter and then give the most pessimistic read of the state of Mastodon.
If Mastodon were a startup and "centralized" its growth, bumpy as it is, would be the darling of the tech press. This is really obvious because every article about the fall of Twitter lists at least one and often several networks that have worse numbers and worse growth than Mastodon as if they're the next big thing.
Though maybe that'll change now that threads has bought its first 100m users.
I'm sure all the script kiddies who loved to take over channels in netsplits are gonna be disappointed that they never actually did that now.
More seriously, this is the second time I've seen someone on here characterize IRC in this (very wrong) way in the last day. Where is this coming from?
IRC networks are made up of servers that relay (hence Internet Relay Chat) with each other. You connect to one server and you can communicate both with people local to that server and people on other servers that are part of the same network (including ones that server is not directly connected to). Channels prefixed with # are shared across all servers in the network, while channels starting with & are local to that server (though rarely used).
I think you may be confused because you decided to rely on this loose concept of "semi-decentralization". IRC providers may use multiple servers, but that doesn't mean decentralization. They are closed networks, not very different from any sufficiently big internet business that runs multiple servers behind a load-balancer.
Part of it is that for users IRC definitely presents as centralised. You don't usually connect to a specific server, but rather a network that did some load balancing in the background. Like you typically connect to irc.efnet.org and not one of the sixty servers specifically.
If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.
If someone wins the lottery 4 different times buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life, you better fucking believe something special is going on there.
>How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.
> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.
Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.
More or less yes. Read up on how close spacex and Tesla came to imploding at the same time.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
You’re confused about the timelines there.
> These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
Again, you think it was just PayPal doubled down to Tesla, which then somehow turned into a war chest for SpaceX or whatever. Tesla and SpaceX happened in parallel, spacex didn’t get help from Tesla, and both ran out of money from PayPal.
> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.
So because he once made 23 million. Making 23 billion $ is not impressive?
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
Tesla had his money but not his leadership and was run straight into the ground. Musk took over and now its making almost the same amount of money as Toyota.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
What? This isn't accurate.
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
There is a long history of rocket startup before and after him. And non are SpaceX. Most failed. Beal Aerospace being a good example. There was a company called Rocketplane Kistler that could have been SpaceX but failed.
So yes, we do have quite a bit of evidence that starting a successful space company is incredibly hard even with quite a bit of money behind it.
> Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.
> And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.
I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.
If someone wins the lottery repeatedly (Zip2, X.com/Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company) I'd entertain the possibility that they weren't just 'picking numbers'.
Without commenting on the others, the Wikipedia article for Neuralink seems to say it’s taken a ton of funding but failed to make any big improvements in the science or technology, and without even reaching initial human trials. The Boring Company built “a single-lane underground roadway less than a mile long, driven by conventional Tesla automobiles, constructed at a total cost of $48 million” (see the Wikipedia article for it).
I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.
Neuralink is trying something that amazingly difficult and many medical companies, specially those working in something as complex as operating on the human brain are not expected to launch a product within a year or two.
> The Boring Company
The Boring company if sold today would likely make more money then most lottery winners get.
Thanks for your contributions btw. I don't like Musk, but suggesting he is talentless or just lucky is asinine Reddit-level commenting and it's good to see it called out.
Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.
only Paypal & SpaceX though, the rest may fail, Neuralink & The Boring Company are merely hype at this point. Tesla will face a lot of competition in years to come and now it has no novelty factor.
Every hitherto successful enterprise might fail due to future conditions but Tesla getting us from essentially zero to a competitive mass produced electric car market is already a historic achievement.
Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?
Curious about this claim, Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90). For the next two years, EV sales doubled while tesla sales grew by 50%. The next year tesla and overall ev growth by went up by about 50%
Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production? It was for tesla (very much so), but not the overall EV market. Then selling 30k put of 180k the ne xt year, seems like the scaling up is not complet6due to tesla. Though tesla recently is pushing about 2/3 of EV sales and recently was at 75% (source => googled: percent EVs sold in 2022 by brand)
The idea single handedly brought about the EV industry seems not to be supported by this data. Namely the growth in EV sales outpaced the growth of Tesla sales and in this early days Tesla was not an overwhelming percentage of the market (though recently it is).
My inference here is Musk had good timing for market fit, he made a lot more people aware of EVs (cultural change), and he scaled up production to a high mark recently achieved. All of which is commendable. Though the comment of "zero to nothing" applies (from what I see) only to Tesla itself and not the broader EV market (which is still quite an achievement, and the actual broader impacts are as well)
> Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?
The Chevy volt never got up to mass production territory as they never broke 25000 per year [1] whereas >100,000 model 3 and model y are each being produced per quarter. [2] That's a respectable mass production volume if not record breaking amongst all cars. The Prius is a hybrid car so it's not in the same category.
> Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90)
The Model S and X are not mass-production models.
> Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production?
They increased the number of EVs produced to truly mass-production volume. The difficulty going from a few thousand per quarter sold at a high price to >100,000s sold at an affordable price is a huge leap.
The tesla sales numbers also include their hybrid offerings?
I suppose it is a matter of opinion whether 25k constitutes "mass production" or not.
Seemingly Tesla did not break that threshold for 5 years. The OP I took to imply that tesla drove production of _all_ EVs from roughly zero to large scale. The data I'm seeing still does not support that claim. Within Tesla, yes, but globally, no.
Eg: While significant, tesla was not more than 20% of global EVs sold (in recent years) [1].
Tesla's are still expensive too? 2023 models look to start at $70k to $110k
It's not clear to me where our apples are turning into oranges since the different delivery numbers do not line up (perhaps hybrid vs not, perhaps pre-order and sold vs built - not sure)
Regardless, the [2] citation says of the response above states: "Clearly, the production and sales ramp in the second half of 2018 is the first big, noticeable bump in Tesla’s output."
The time frame is very significant as it alludes to whether Tesla was the reason for EV growth from zero, or if they are a significant (but not sole) part of a larger trend.
Quick google has 3M EVs sold in 2019, compared to tesla selling 10% of that. The rest of the car industry was not dormant.
I do agree though that going from 1k's to 100k's is a big leap. The fact it is in the same general ballpark as F150s is remarkable. The rub though is that happened over 10 years, mostly over the last 5 and during a period where absent tesla there was still very strong YoY sales growth of EVs
In sum, is Tesla the birth of EVs? No, but it is nonetheless a significant and remarkable part.
In Canada Disney+ is where most of the stuff on Hulu or FX eventually ends up, among some other things, and at this point I think it's actually probably the streaming service with the deepest library because of that, which is kind of funny. It's probably the one I'd be least likely to drop, while Netflix has been on the verge a few times now.
This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button.
Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.
You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all.
I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.
If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).
I was replying in context to the comment above about typing in the handle, and I would put copy/paste in the same category.
With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...