If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.
Yes, but Apple wouldn't do this, because Apple is also at risk of losing customers when people get blocked by network security at work. We could also fantasize about Apple fighting all the tracking everywhere, including their own services...
Quite frankly, it's a bit silly to paint Apple as some privacy fortress, who wouldn't have to comply with law enforcement/intelligence to unmask/tap traffic. I mean, for a lot of people VPN choice is done considering legal jurisdictions somewhere far away. Apple could/would never possibly offer this level of protection.
But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?
That is unfortunately a fairly weak form of anonymity. With a fully public network you can trace even the most meticulously tumbled and laundered tokens. And while they may not exclusively trace back to you, they'll trace into a mixer and out of a mixer with a large majority of the inputs and outputs being tainted.
Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers.
Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.
It takes one OPSEC slip up for someone to link a wallet address to you. So yes, your transactions being public doesn't matter as long as you are cognizant of that 24/7 365 days a year.
You can resolve this issue by repeatedly tumbling your money, using the same tumbling scheme as everyone else. This will reduce the value of your wallet slightly, to pay the mining fees, but it's… hm. That sounds equivalent to inflation or tax, except that the lost money doesn't go towards anything useful: it just goes towards buying ASICs and burning electricity.
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
What, do you expect the energy companies to use their own money to invest in infrastructure for net zero and the AI boom? Oops too late it's been paid as dividends. No, just create a levy and make the public be unwilling investors except without getting the shares nor dividends
Don't forget it's also a tax for bailing out the failed energy companies
> It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
As if we aren't busy enough. I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them.
Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?
IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal
I think it's best to view this from an economics point of view - in a nutshell price signals are usually the most powerful way to create behavioural change; in this case, we want people to shift demand away from peak times. Nobody is being forced to, they just have to pay more for the convenience of not bothering.
> IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal
It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.
This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.
> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them
In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.
> Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?
The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market
When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)
> we want people to shift demand away from peak times
Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.
And who is the "we"? Definitely not me
I think a much larger conversation needs to happen about people's schedules, commitments and whether it's fair to say those who have less time and less flexibility due to work, children etc are somehow actively choosing to not be a good eco citizen. It's incredibly unfair.
I'd rather go back to root causes and re-evaluate private companies failing to provide the necessary infrastructure
In Australia, residential premises are prohibited from running aluminium smelters.
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.
If you're going to depreciate the battery then your return will be substantially greater than 7.3%. You can't use BOTH the capex AND the depreciation as your denominator, choose one.
The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
Basically every home in Australia, and certainly every home and business solar setup, has a smart meter that is grid connected and can be remotely shut down when needed. Or they even just limit the amount that can feedback to the grid if required I.e you’re making 8kw of solar, but it will only let you feed in 2 if the system determines that.
Commercial solar fields are entirely automated, nobody is going to the site to throw a disconnect switch lol. For sites without hardwire internet, there’s 4G or satellite connectivity. A 4G cell comm module is a few hundred dollars. Adding in remote operations control is probably a tiny fraction of a percent of a solar field project.
Also, turning off solar (known as curtailing) is just dumb. It's throwing away "free" electricity. The UK and Ireland is doing the same by turning off their wind turbines every now and then, and it's frustrating.
By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.
You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.
This is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
I'm on a time-of-use tariff, with a special "EV" slot between 02h and 05h. My car is programmed to only charge during this time unless I tell it otherwise.
The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.
This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)
I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.
I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.
At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.
Power at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.
Think of being able to set a price on Amazon Spot instances where it's low enough to charge your home battery for "free". When the price is right, you recharge your batteries as much as possible. When the price falls outside the range, you leverage your battery to offset the higher electricity prices. This would be part of the "smart" in "smart grids".
If power wasn’t cheaper, there’d be no incentive to run our heaters at the same time. I’d expect the market to work this out, and price power down during unexpected over-supply, rewarding nimble workloads. Then there arrives a reward for being nimble, which is something we should incentivize I think.
They could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
If you built homes with a lot of thermal mass, you could cool the internal thermal mass when energy is $0 and have that mass absorb heat the rest of the day. This is sort of the principle a lot of traditional architecture uses where evaporation, wind over a courtyard, or nighttime lows cool thick walls.
Yep, our house was built like this but in a cooler climate (large windows facing south with the all of the stone flooring and surfaces getting direct sunlight in the winter). But since most houses in the Aussie suburbs aren’t really optimized for this, you’d have to retrofit many million houses to take full advantage. Opens up some interesting opportunities for sure.
This is how the cold storage caves work in the Midwest. They run their ammonia loops harder in the off hours and let the cave mass handle it(provided a large enough area is kept frozen, otherwise thermal expansion cycling can cause a carve out in the ceiling).
That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers use them specifically to block users' access to websites.
There's a big difference between a company making that decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the network level.
The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve the right to force those to be blocked.
In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S., pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be gambling sites.
Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade protection or a legit state interest in protecting its citizens?
Cloudflare has a significant enough marketshare it doesn’t seem to make a meaningful difference whether it’s blocked at this or that level, for the vast majority of end users.
As someone who has had to implement these blocks, it’s not generally done because anyone wants to, it’s because someone passed a law that requires us to do it. I don’t get to override the ITAR or Entities list just because I don’t feel it’s fair someone is on it.
Didn't CF CEO post in March 2019 that they were going to start working with govts on suggestions for how to implement laws that would get them to block things people didn't like?
Could be. Regulatory capture is evident in a lot of places. TurboTax isn’t accidentally a very easy to use Tax filing software. It gets things right I’ve had expensive CPAs get wrong. TurboTax has more lobbying dollars than the CPA with an office down the street.
If the existing situation with website registrations, required ID uploads for social media, signing in with Google/Apple/Microsoft, etc. is to go by, the majority of people don't mind giving out nearly anything about them when asked for it by someone who seems trustworthy at a brief glance.
If they're not supposed to be used, why can they be used? Hyrum's law strikes again!
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. (https://www.hyrumslaw.com/)
Given enough motivation, access control is irrelevant too. See early Windows "private" API that was used for decades and Microsoft supported despite being "private", because they knew it was being used and they (used to) care about their users.
Interestingly the internet is full of "slack clone" dev tutorials. I used to work for a company that provides chat backend/frontend components as a service. It was one of their go-to examples, and the same is true for their competitors.
While it's impressive that you can now just have an llm build this, I wouldn't be surprised if the result of these 30 hours is essentially just a re-hash of one of those example Slack clones. Especially since all of these models have internet access nowadays; I honestly think 30 hours isn't even that fast for something like this, where you can realistically follow a tutorial and have it done.
