Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
Investors pulled $523M from BlackRock's IBIT bitcoin ETF on Tuesday, its largest single-day outflow since launch; BTC fell ~30% from its October all-time high  —  Investors pulled more than half a billion dollars from BlackRock Inc.'s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest single-day outflow since …

Miguel Arroz, on Mastodon:

Unpopular opinion, apparently: companies like Cloudflare and Amazon provide very high quality services people and enterprises actually need, with a level of uptime and security vastly superior to what most of their customers would achieve on their own or using traditional providers. Their downtimes being so visible is a consequence of their success.

A few readers have (very politely!) asked me whether yesterday’s outage (which made DF unreachable for, I think, about 90 minutes) made me rethink relying on a centralized provider like Cloudflare. My answer is no.

Until I started using Cloudflare in 2018, Daring Fireball relied on no upstream service. I paid for a server from a web hosting provider (those providers changed a few times over the years), and when you, a reader, requested a page on this site, your browser communicated directly with my server via HTTP requests and my server responded directly back. The basic architecture of the World Wide Web is beautifully simple, and I embraced that simplicity with the way I hosted and served Daring Fireball.

But the move away from HTTP to HTTPS added a lot of complexity. That complexity is probably worth it, overall, but it came at the price of simplicity. I originally made the switch to using Cloudflare as a caching front-end for Daring Fireball as a solution to an SSL-related slowdown that affected only some visitors in 2018. But I’d started using Cloudflare to handle my DNS the year before.

Daring Fireball has always been a fast website and has always had very good uptime. That’s not because the back end is cleverly architected, but rather because it’s so simply architected. But DF’s overall uptime and the frequency of any sort of performance problems went from good to great when I started relying on Cloudflare as a proxy. Also, in recent years, bot traffic has exploded. (Thanks, AI.) I’m pretty sure my server could handle those bursts of traffic on its own, but I sleep better not having to worry about it, because Cloudflare handles mind-boggling amounts of traffic.

Yueqi Yang / The Information:
Sources: Coinbase is preparing to launch a prediction market powered by Kalshi to allow its clients to bet on events such as elections and sports  —  Coinbase is preparing to launch a prediction market to allow its crypto clients to bet on events such as elections and sports, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Reuters:
Sources: US officials are privately saying they might not levy semiconductor tariffs soon, as the Trump administration takes a more cautious approach with China  —  - Officials see potential delay in semiconductor tariffs  — White House official denies policy change

Daniel Jalkut: For these scenarios, Xcode provides a handy checkbox that can be used to automatically attach when one of an app’s XPC services is launched. Look deep in the “Options” tab of the scheme editor’s “Run Action” page[…] While this feature is great for XPC services in particular, there are many caveats. For example, […]