Energy per transaction is not a very useful metric since each validated block helps secure previous blocks as well.
Put another way - each validated block helps secure every single transaction that came before it.
I'm not going to argue that the energy consumption is worth it (I don't think it's sustainable myself). I'm only pointing out that energy per transaction is a bad metric if you want to have an honest debate. It's much more complicated than that.
Because blocksize is fixed and blocks are consistently full, it's possible to estimate the next block's energy usage per transaction. All blocks are currently full as miners have an incentive to collect all transactions available, ordered by their attached transaction fee.
If you mean that the same amount of power would be used whether the blocks are full or empty, you are technically correct but in practice it's not relevant until blocks are consistently not full.
Does BTC makes sense if there would be no transactions?
If transactions are critical for everyone, wouldn't that mean that keeping bitcoin mining alive is a fundamental part of transactions?
We could argue that fiat keeps databases running (if we ignore physical money) and bitcoin is keeping blocks mining active.
I don't think it is wrong to say megatwatts per transactions. We could ignore this completly and say 'the baseload of just keeping btc running is x megawatts per hour' and that would just ring the same bells.
I'm pondering if we could also say something like "btc itself as a cryptosystem motivates actors to consume megawatts per hour due to the interest in btc and the current fiat<>btc exchange value"?
First, energy use is not tied to transactions. An empty block uses the same amount as a full block.
And second, the transaction count we’re discussing is the count of settled base layer transactions. This doesn’t include the majority of transactions of value: those that occur off chain or through second layer transactions. An infinite amount of off chain and L2 transactions only need a single on chain transaction to settle.
Not in terms of population density, which is what matters when it comes to intercity rail. I know this isn't convincing to senators from big western states — but we've gotta draw a line in the sand in allocating decision making power to big empty spaces in this country, it's becoming an existential concern at this point.
Existential for whom? You talk about "this country" so clearly it's not everyone in the world. And you talk about the big western states, so it's not me as I live in California.
So really, it's just your concern that is important to you. There's no "we" in it. Only what benefits you.
If you think intercity rail is a great idea, you don't need the US Senate. Just your own local and state officials to boldly pay for it with your own local and state taxes.
The federal government is the issuer of our currency and is well-positioned to fund intercity rail in a way that states and cities just aren't. It's bad that, as you suggested, the senators from large and sparsely populated western states could shoot the idea down because it doesn't happen to work for their states, even though it could be a great solution for 200+ million people on the coasts (California included) in the South, and in the Great Lakes region. If the United States can't mobilize to build infrastructure because a minority of the country doesn't want to, that's an existential threat to the country.
The existential threat to the US is that war upon the locals is establishing methodology. Your championing it here is symptomatic of its continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control.
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term. There’s no “Plymouth Rock therefore California.” No “Jamestown therefore Santa Fe.” No “Mount Vernon therefore Maui.”
I dunno if this is really some high modernist plot to assimilate all of these quirky little polities into a single transportation regime. If New Mexico or Montana don't want trains I really couldn't care less. But the actual power dynamic is the inverse of what you're positing: the western states elect senators with frontier mindsets who value austerity and self-reliance (nevermind who is paying for the interstates that crisscross their states) and they exert an outsize influence on policy for the rest of the country. "Santa Fe therefore Jamestown" is actually a fantastic summary of how federal transportation policy has been standardized over the last seventy years, using the sparsest and least geometrically constrained places as a yardstick for what should be built (freeways) and for whom (people making 20+ mile city-suburb or suburb-suburb commutes).
> The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term.
Here we agree, which is why the US should build several dense intercity rail networks within its borders which will eventually serve as skeletons for its balkanized successor states :)
I suppose you consider federalism itself to be "war upon the locals". That ship sailed (or perhaps burned and sank) when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution.
continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control
If I could only just control my compulsive, pathological desire for decent-quality intercity rail travel in densely populated regions...
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
By that logic, taxpayers in New York have been paying fealty to Texans in the Fort Worth area (via the Lockheed F-35 construction facility) for years.
> I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency
What multiplier do you have to add to the environmental damage to get to the point where Bitcoin meaningfully supersedes central banking instead of providing a funky niche alternative to it, and how do you feel about it then?
> No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending
I can think of a few state actors that could take control of 51% of the network, and one with rather capricious views on private property rights that could do so just by seizing the mining hardware already operating on its soil.
I just saw another interesting whitepaper the other day from the World Sudoku Society suggesting that we tile the Mojave with solar panels to generate more Sudoku puzzles!
The ad infrastructure can still exist -- it would just have a restricted set of data (IP, device fingerprint, the surrounding content, and whatever info the first-party publisher voluntarily submits about you) to decide what ad to serve. Small, niche websites may do better than big news sites under this regime since you can infer more about their visitors by the fact that they chose to visit.
I could see bigger sites expending a lot of energy trying to bring the tracking and inference in-house, and even federating these efforts, creating a kind of soft-paywall that requires you to "pay" by validating an email address or some other stable identity marker in exchange for temporary access to content, so they can watch what you browse and build a shared model of you that they can feed back into the ad networks. I could see the NYT continuing to manipulate and fine-tune its headlines and graphics, trying to sort its visitors into cohorts based on what appeals to them to squeeze every last cent out of a pageview.
At the same time, so much content discovery and consumption happens in the belly of the beast (Facebook, Google, Youtube) that most ads will continue to be targeted based on the considerable information those websites have about you, regardless of what browsers do or what happens to third-party tracker networks.
I used paged.js in production and while it's definitely not fast enough to run during an HTTP request, it can render a 300 page document reasonably quickly, definitely within the 120 second TTL of our worker tasks. It can be quite finicky though and sometimes stalls on things like images that are taller than a single page.
> Even though it was far from ready, SvelteKit was the only framework that matched our esoteric requirements. (Anyone who has worked in a newsroom and done battle with their CMS will know what I'm talking about.)
I would be interested to hear more about the esoteric requirements; whether they're performance-related, have to do with what's representable in the CMS, or something else. At any rate, those NYT covid tracker pages are great and I have (sadly) spent a lot of time with them over the past year.
• we can't have any dynamic pages, everything has to be static HTML
• we don't control the actual page; our job is to create a fragment of HTML that the CMS stitches into the body, then associate that fragment with some publish metadata...
• ...but during development, we need a simulacra of the NYT article template
• we have to be able to create AMP versions of almost every page
• our old app was already fairly Svelte-centric, and we wanted to reuse as much as possible
• we wanted to use client-side navigation to avoid page reloads (while capturing custom navigation analytics) e.g. because it makes no sense to make people load MapboxGL repeatedly
It's possible that we could have coaxed one of the existing static site generators into fulfilling all these requirements, but it seemed like we'd be in uncharted territory without the benefit of having the SSG maintainer on staff!
Not concrete plans but I expect it will happen, yes (at the very least in the sense of having an `adapter-deno` to allow the built app to run in Deno; running SvelteKit _itself_ in Deno is a separate issue)
i was surprised to learn how many counties in the US are still considered high risk.
also its a pretty cool indication of trust in Rich that they let him build his own metaframework and dogfood it in production at NYT scale. not sure what else i can draw about that (its probably not a good idea to let most devs do that) but its cool
It is maybe not such a bad thing that now and again a woman secures the financial independence she needs to look beyond the life she was born into in her tiny rural community.
I (presumably along with GP) am using Firefox where the background shows up white and the contrast ratio weighs in at 1.43:1. But it looks fine on Chrome.
I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.
That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them.
I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.
Shit, every time I reboot my iPad it asks for permission to connect to my phone for wifi calling, and I keep on saying "no" and I wish I could just say "never ask this again". It's just as annoying when Apple does it.
You can disable this feature, it's specifically a thing that you enabled at some point. The reason you're getting prompted is because you indicated that you want it. IIRC it's something to do with the wifi calling settings on your phone, not your ipad.
It IS annoying that their nag box doesn't have a "go to settings" option, at least.
It actually is. A while ago, someone (i think fb) produced an article that showed that to avoid the issue, they find it is best to show user their own similar screen, and only if the user clicks "yes", show the OS screen (cause for that one you only get one chance). I suspect you're seeing the apps' first "app-made" screen and not the OS one. Look carefully. If so, click yes there, and NO on the OS screen.
Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with apps (which is great) I see this before practically every photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd very much like to not see this dialog more than once a month.
Go to Settings, scroll down to find the app, and select it. Then you get the "Allow <app> to access" and a list of entitlements, one of which is "Photos". Select "Photos" and you get three options "Selected Photos" (which is what you likely have), "All Photos", and "None". Push "None" and you should never see that dialog again.
Similar theory behind those “do you like this app” prompts that come from the app itself. If you tap “yes” they’ll give you the prompt to rate on the AppStore. If you tap “no” they won’t. This can seriously inflate an app’s rating and help prevent low ratings. Nice, underhanded and effective dark pattern!
Is it actually explicitly disallowed in Apple's guidelines? Their wording almost makes it indicate they want you to only ask for a rating when people are happy with the app:
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task.
I understood that to mean, if you've goals within you app (e.g. CityMapper — completing a journey; Dropbox — uploading a file; some game — beating a level), ask after the user has completed them, rather than what apps used to do (e.g. before you've been created an account, or getting in your way while you're changing some setting). But when they _do_ ask theyre meant to show the rating dialog either way, not first check what rating you would give.
Interesting! It’s obviously been a while since I was in the 3rd party app business because in my day, the use of these was widespread! Nice to see the vulnerability was closed.
Unfortunately it's still widespread, as the rating dialog shouldn't come up during the app review process. So it's unlikely to get caught without being reported.
If the notification consent prompt on iOS is any indication, it will only be shown the first time it is requested, which is the reason these notification requests usually already have a "testing screen" like the one described in the article.
While I agree with your point about this and that most people will do this it really brings up a lot of questions about what consent actually means. Especially with dark patterns and asymmetric information.
used to be like this but these days there's so many dark patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted button if the button stands out a little too much
Same here. If I understand correctly, the GDPR states that if the user is tricked into clicking that they give consent, that doesn't count as them truly giving consent. Despite this, many otherwise reputable websites try to deceive you into 'agreeing'. Disappointingly, TomsHardware is one such.
These dark patterns will only go away once there are properly enforced laws against them.
> if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it
While cookie-laws have good intentions, this side effect should have been properly researched first. An internet full of shady and useless pop-ups which drive this behavior makes me sad. I'm still hoping they will someday disappear.
The intent has been that there would be two equally available buttons.
Regulators just hadn't understood yet that you have to make that explicit, then hire some people to find the loopholes and make it more explicit. Down to prescribing font sizes and colors, or even a standardized dialog.
Of course, mandating compliance with DNT (or a new header) would be better.
And then you need actual enforcement, because when the compliant players see themselves get screwed out of ad revenue by everyone else ignoring the law and nothing happening to them... they can't stay compliant, and they won't.
The skeptic in me bets that side effect was quite thoroughly researched, by the media companies, who found by normalizing intrusive banners they could get users to agree to whatever they heck they’d want.
True but looking at my own iTunes App Analytics dashboard for example, about 50% of users don’t opt-in to share analytics with us.
At Facebook-scale 50% means at least a billion users will still opt-in, but probably significantly less than what they were tracking before at the 100% level.
I propably already learned the "don't klick the obvious button asap" lesson pretty early, when websites had like 5 "Download now" buttons (ads) and you had to search for the small text with a link to actually get the download.
That's so true. Even though I consider myself privacy conscious, and hate all forms of surveillance capitalism, if there's something I need to read ASAP and I'm in a hurry, and the only thing between me and the content is a GDPR form, you can bet your top dollar I'll click "Accept all" without thinking, just to get the popup out of my face.
(Which is also why I'm strongly in favor of more aggressive fining for GDPR violations. "Accept all" shouldn't be the easiest choice on a website.)
The article has precisely that prompt in one of the images.
The thing is, just like certain apps require certain permissions (camera app wants to access the camera, device files, etc..) I believe a lot of people will just accept these conditions without realizing they are completely optional.
But there's also strong education regarding system prompts. Users know when an app is asking for extra permissions (which this is basically the same of). Those people who care about what permissions apps have will know what to click.
Those who don't care, that's the most you can do.
Besides even Facebook estimate that only 10-30% will click allow. I'm not sure if you can ask for more at this point.
