stormbrew (u/stormbrew)

stormbrew commented on An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data heatpumpmonitor.org/... · Posted by u/protontypes

verelo · a year ago

100% agree. Our electricity costs are fairly low, and its a very low carbon source (mostly hydro electric + nuclear), so for us it makes a huge amount of sense. If you're in Alberta, where most of the electricity comes from coal...theres no logic in switching to electricity.

I'd argue that's politically motivated and very deliberate however...

stormbrew · a year ago

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).

http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...

stormbrew commented on A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations wired.com/story/a-revelat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

TheRealPomax · 2 years ago

And yet, if we look at the numbers, wildfires are actually nowhere near as bad as they were in the 90's: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/data/charts/NFDB_stats_chart.p...

I'd like a ban on people going outside and causing wild fires like we had in 2020 though. That was a good year.

stormbrew · 2 years ago

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.

stormbrew commented on Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse privacy.thenexus.today/ju... · Posted by u/jdp23

chrisnight · 2 years ago

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.

stormbrew · 2 years ago

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.

stormbrew commented on Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse privacy.thenexus.today/ju... · Posted by u/jdp23

vidarh · 2 years ago

I think a potential difference here is that a substantial part of the existing Fediverse won't care if we break compatibility with Threads. Many will actively welcome it, so there's potentially less pressure to yield if the make changes people don't like.

stormbrew · 2 years ago

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.

stormbrew commented on Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse privacy.thenexus.today/ju... · Posted by u/jdp23

chrisnight · 2 years ago

The problem I see with Threads isn't what Meta will do with fediverse data, it's the power they have with owning 97% of the entire fediverse network [1].

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers complain that your using a Mastodon server instead of joining Threads that has this feature they want? You either go against your entire community or let Meta takeover your account.

As such, the resolution is to not let anyone have this much power. It being Meta makes it easier to hate on them, but no single server should own the vast majority of the network, let alone (100M / (100M + 2M + 1M)) = 97% of it [1].

[1] Threads has 100M users and is rising fast, Mastodon was recently stated to have 2M active users, the rest of the fediverse can be estimated to be, say, 1M. As such, Threads has about 97% of the userbase.

stormbrew · 2 years ago

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)

- https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

Threads numbers (only total users, pulled from badges on Instagram)

- https://www.quiverquant.com/threadstracker/

stormbrew commented on Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders · Posted by u/kdragon

fiatjaf · 3 years ago

I don't know about KaZaA but I remember it was very popular for a time, so it might have done some things right? What was its fate? Was it censored to death?

And I disagree very much that IRC is "semi-decentralized". IRC is completely centralized, it is just chat rooms on a server. You have to register on each server and each server has full control over its rooms and users.

stormbrew · 3 years ago

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).

stormbrew commented on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

panick21_ · 3 years ago

> 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.

stormbrew · 3 years ago

> 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.

stormbrew commented on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

kortilla · 3 years ago

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.

stormbrew · 3 years ago

> buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life

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.

stormbrew commented on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

ckw · 3 years ago

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'.

stormbrew · 3 years ago

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.

stormbrew commented on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

nyokodo · 3 years ago

> Stupid people with money can look like they are clever

I get it, some people hate Elon’s guts and equally hate Elon fans. I also think that it’s pretty well established that he has a range of character flaws that really hurt him and threaten his future success. However, anyone who insinuates that Elon is stupid needs to establish how a genuinely stupid person could found two successful dot coms and then hire all the brilliant engineers that have made his subsequent companies so successful against such odds and become the world’s richest person. Luck and debatable opinions about his alleged wealthy upbringing cannot explain this. Even assuming all the highly debatable opinions about his technical contributions any reasonable observer must admit he is at least a genius at hiring the right people to achieve his vision and then avoiding getting in their way enough to make enormous inroads and sell it all brilliantly. I am far from an Elon fan but I couldn’t hope to achieve 5% of what he has.

stormbrew · 3 years ago

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.