Matisyahu's Blog

  • Back to work on Thursday.

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    Today was a relaxing day to be off from work – enjoying the new archgola out the back on the patio with the sunlight flooding. Before I went to bed last night I got a tandoori chicken out of the freezer to defrost for dinner and I had that with a salad for dinner – mum came over for dinner because she was working close where I live so it made sense to grab dinner (we were going to head out to a restaurant but I had already gotten the chicken out so I didn’t want to refreeze it because I wasn’t going to cook it up on Thursday). 

    I opened up Chrome and checked for updates and Google released an update which bumped the version from 156.0.8078.80 to 157.0.8103.39 and with that update there were 213 security bugs fixed up (link). Out of the 213 security bugs corrected there were 7 critical updates and a whole lot of bugs that were rated high. Ubiquiti has made available a release candidate for UniFi OS 5.1.35 which addresses a security bug in the Linux kernel relating to the TCP/IP stack. In the early access channel there is the UniFi OS 6.0.17 which fixes the same bug found in UniFi OS 5.1.35 as well as a an improvement and a generic bug fix – given the short list of bugs corrected, maybe we’re getting close to seeing UniFi OS 6.x making its way to the release candidate channel soon. UniFi Access Point & Wireless Bridge 8.8.14 was released to the release candidate channel – looks pretty close to maybe a release soon.

    Apple has released the beta of the 27.3 update and what came to my attention was the Safari 27.3 beta release notes (link) which includes a huge number of not only bug fixes but features that have been added. The biggest addition has been the following:

    • Added support for the offscreen API. (184269255)

    It was only just a few weeks ago that the preliminary support had been added in the Technology Preview so I had assumed it would be many months away from appearing the mainstream release of Safari. I’ve been trying to download and install the Safari 27.3 beta however at the moment they’ve only got the Safari 27.2 beta so many they’ll make it available when the public beta of 27.3 is released. I don’t see it fixing the issues that I have with Safari but I’m trying to be optimistic that maybe I’ll be proven wrong one of these days and all my cyniciism will be put to rest. It’ll be interesting to see whether Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 256 includes those changes – hopefully that’ll be released in the next few days.

    I’ve been following the midterms in the United States and I have to admit I was sceptical about there being a ‘blue wave’ or a ‘blue tsunami’ given that in the past the polls have been wrong. The big surprise wasn’t just the Democratic Party winning control of congress but also winning control of the senate with a ‘Fetterman proof’ majority in the senate just in case Senator Fetterman decided to leave the Democratic Party. I also think the big success is also the number of senate seats won in states that hadn’t voted Democratic for decades, not only Democratic governors but also other important offices such as attorney general. What I do hope is that the new Democratic attorney general in Texas not only investigates Paxton but he also goes after Elon Musk and many others – trace down every lead and leave no stone unturned.

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  • Day off from work.

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    A long day at work is finally over and I’ve been now back at home for a couple of hours and getting ready to get to sleep. I enjoyed catching up with work mates but I really do prefer having the comfort of home in a quiet environment where I can focus on work without the many distractions. Lunch was very tasty – chicken burger from Burger Fuel has a grilled chicken breast although I think it could do with some spiciness in the form of sriracha sauce or possible some jalapenos. I avoided the chips because by the time they got to the office they were no longer fresh – one of the reasons why a lot of the truckies would only pick up burgers on their way through to Auckland when I worked at a fastfood chain.

    Once I got home I got a tandoori chicken out of the freezer so that it can defrost overnight and on Wednesday I’m going to head down to the supermarket to pickup some coleslaw for dinner to go with the chicken. While I was at work mum came around to check on the Archgola – it has be all put up and it is looking great although there is some stuff I want to do regarding the patio. At the moment the patio is in pretty rough shape so what I’m looking at doing is installing some slat decking tiles to make it look a little nicer. There is still more work I want to do with the backyard and with the good weather I can take advantage of that to make it look a lot nicer – maybe a few planter boxes would be a good start.

  • Back to work on Tuesday.

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    I’m heading into the office on Tuesday to start work at 12:30 pm so I’ll grab the train at 11:41 am and will be in there by around 12:05 pm which will give me enough time to grab a coffee, set up my laptop and be ready to start work. I’ve got the day off on Wednesday and I’ll have a relaxing day without any chores to be done around the house which will leave me ready to get back to work on Thursday. Tonight I had dinner with mum – we picked up some gardening equipment from Mitre 10 then stopped by the supermarket to pick up some salmon for dinner plus my weekly shopping. While I was there I checked to see whether all her computers were up to date – for some unknown reason Chrome OS will download the update but won’t update itself while the laptop is sleeping. The Windows computer was all up to date but something I did notice that Windows Explorer was a lot more responsive – probably due to the performance boost I’ve heard people talking about online.

    On Wednesday there is the scheduled release of Chrome 157 which will make for interesting testing and there is also a rumour that the 27.3 beta testing will start making their way out to developers. Rumour has it that 27.3 will be released in the first half of December but I wouldn’t put too much stock in rumours until the beta notes are made available and we get to see the scope of what will be coming in the update – will it be a modest release in the case of 27.2 or will we see some major feature additions particularly seeing improvements moving from the Safari Technology Preview to the main release. It’ll be interesting to see how close they will get to having their mainstream Safari release pass as many of the Web Platform Tests as possible.

    There appears to be a good amount of work being done regarding setting up the foundations for the offscreen API support. In Safari Technology Preview 253 the skeleton had been added but they’re gradually adding functionality to it. I don’t think it’ll be something we’ll see overnight given that the implementation appears to be touching many parts of the Webkit stack but it is good to see that work is being done. As much as I whinge, whine and complain about Safari, I am also aware that the alternative is Android on the phone with Chrome which doesn’t allow web extensions at all. I also like to follow what Firefox is doing but I’m disappointed by their lack of OTP support as part of their password manager – if they enabled that then it would bring their password manager into feature parity with the password manager included with macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc.

    Haley Stevens has come out to endorse the Republican candidate in the Michigan senate federal election (link). As someone who follows American politics (not because I want to but because I have to – the US does something stupid and then the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout), I never want to hear a single centrist Democrat ever again say ‘vote blue no matter who’ if you’re not willing to walk the talk. There has been a constant refrain coming from centrists that ‘in the primaries you back who you want to but when the general election you fall in line and vote blue no matter who’ which is a fair enough statement to make until you realise that Democratic centrists don’t do that. Does anyone remember ‘Clinton voters for McCain’ and ‘Party Unity My Ass’ (PUMA) because they were sore about Obama winning the 2008 primary? Either you believe the Republicans are an existential threat to democracy or what you’re really telling the world is that you agree with Republican policy but you’d prefer it if it were done with more decorum and with you preferable in charge. Centrists once again showing that it is performance not substance that shapes their politics – wanting to be in charge because of the pleasure that power gives them rather than using that power to do something useful.

    Getting back to the elections in New Zealand, no matter what the outcomes of the election the next few years are going to be rough going. The reason for it being rough going is because we’ve finally had the housing correction that had been put off for almost two decades and now it is time to build a real economy rather than ‘housing market with bits tacked on’ as Bernard Hickey a noted in his many writings, media apperances and podcast. After many years of neglecting the job of building a productive economy we’re now having to face reality with the big question being how we build that economy – on the right there is the ideology of minimal intervention with a focus around settings vs on the left where the government takes a more of a ‘hands on’ role. I’ve voted back when early voting started – remember to get out there and make your voice heard because regardless of who you vote for it is important that you participate in the democratic process.

    If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?

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    I’m a bit of a history buff so it would be difficult to narrow it down to on specific country or a specific region. Part of me would love to travel through the countries that made up the former Roman Empire then there is the Ottoman Empire and how centuries of living under their rule shaped the various peoples lives. I’ve also would love to take the train journey that goes from Moscow to Beijing – being able to watch the scenery change while enjoying the epic journey which would last 6 days going over multiple time zones and continents. A lot of these journeys would be impossible to do at the moment due to the unstable nature of the world but maybe one day things will settle down and I’ll be able to fulfill some of my dream travel.

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  • End of the week, start of the weekend.

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    Well, the week is finally over and the weekend has started – I was feeling a bit peckish so went down to the local store down the road to pick up a couple sandwiches and a packet of crisps. The weather is nice outside so I sat out on the back patio and had my meal – enjoying the fresh air and chilling out after having a rather hectic day. This week I’ve got a broken weekend where I’ve got Monday off then in the office on Tuesday and then Wednesday off from work- it isn’t ideal but everyone in the office is having to do it. Given how jobs are difficult to come by, the economy is looking precarious and there is an election, I feel happy that at least I’ve got a job even if I do regularly complain about it.

    The new setup I’ve got in my office is going really well and on Monday I’ll be taking the monitor along with the old equipment into the office. I’ve got a $15 voucher in my ‘Everyday Rewards’ where I’ll need to pick up some ‘Up and Go’ for my breakfast and maybe some few other items. What I’ll do before I leave tomorrow is to put together a list just to avoid standing in the isle and asking myself “hmmm, do I need to purchase that? I don’t remember seeing it in the cupboard…” only to find that if I buy it I have a double up and if I don’t by it I get home and realise I didn’t have it after all.

    I’ve been having a read through Reddit and it is always funny hearing people talking about rumours as if they were statements of facts – posters declaring that x product is the worse product that would ever exist and that they’re sticking to what they have now all while ignoring that said product hasn’t even been launched yet. I’m still doing some contemplation about what I’m going to do with things going forward because I have a soft spot for Android because the biggest strength over iOS is the fact that it isn’t a monolithic operating system meaning that the individual components can be upgraded outside of the big releases. When it comes to iOS we see an update every 6 weeks or so but that tends to primarily bug and security fixes where as with Android you have your monthly updates plus individual components such as Chrome as not just updated but upgraded with new features for both end users and developers. 

    What has the end result been of iOS not being able to upgrade and update on a modular way like Android is? have a look at the Web Platform Test website comparing the latest stable versions – Chrome is sitting at 93% compliance where as Safari is hovering down at around 80% compliance with extension support of Safari on macOS absolutely abysmal because Apple insists on implementing Declarative Net Request (DNR) on top of the Content Blocking API rather than implementing it natively in Webkit (which results in one having to wait for the DNR filter to convert to the native format) not to mention the bugs that exist, I follow on GitHub, I request a status regarding how far away the fix is and Apple developers ignore my posts. At this point I wonder whether Apple developers even care about making a decent product given how little there is a sense of urgency of addressing the product’s shortcomings.

    I saw this video on YouTube from the BBC regarding Meta and Apple teaming up which raises many of the issues that I raised not too long ago:

    We’ve started to see the market finally wake up and ask the obvious question – not whether the technology of LLMs (or AI in general) is useful but whether there is even a business case to answer for to justify the hundreds of billions being spent on this build out. At some point after billions of dollars are burnt we start to see people ask the question, “ok, now you’ve burnt billions when are we going to see a return on that capital expenditure”. This is was what eventually took down the whole dot-com bubble because big promises were made, a lot of leeway were given to these dot-com businesses but at some point I think it is fair that those providing the money as capital to start asking when does that investment turn into a viable business model which will in turn become a sustainable long term profit growth. 

    There is also the element of higher interest rates – with interest rates going up the gap between the amount one can get from a term deposit vs buying bonds or shares has to be sufficient enough to justify the risk one is taking. If people start seeing the interest rate go up, the gap between the interest rate on a safe investment vs a speculative investment close then I wouldn’t be surprised that fewer people are willing to throw money into the pile. For example, OpenAI (link) is struggling to hit its funding round goal as people are finally asking what the long term plan is other than burning money and now there is reports of Anthropic bonds being rated as junk following its IPO (link) by credit rating agencies. At some point the interest rates on bonds are going to get so high that even those with an appetite for risk will just throw in the towel and walk away because it is becoming ridiculous.

    The alternative vision to this whole cloud based LLM build out is open weight models running on local hardware – either on the workstation or in the data centre of a company where it is tweaked and fine tuned to do specific tasks where LLM excel at. The reaction by Sam Altman to a future where he isn’t sitting at the entrance of the cloud clipping the ticket for every request into the cloud and ever response coming out the other end? he blames end users for wanting to have their own a computer for why RAM prices are going up and not because of the speculative bubble the he and his ilk have created off the back of fansifull narratives about a post scarcity future where we push beyond the limitations of our current productive forces (link). Just when you thought the broligarchy couldn’t get more out of touch we have Sam Altman showing that yes, they could get further out of touch.

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  • A quite night at home.

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    I clocked off from work tonight at 10:00 pm but before I did I ordered some Mexican from my local restaurant and I was able to make use of a $10 coupon I had. The great thing about the food at the place I order from is that it is low on carbs, lots of vegetables and the protein on offer is always top notch. I decided to stay home tonight and catch up on organising myself for next week – I’ve got the two monitor setup that I’m returning to the office along with the old wireless keyboard and mouse the provided me that I’ve since replaced with a wired setup. Mum has offered me a ride to bring it into town so then I can drop it off and then on the way back I’ll grab a few items of shopping then have dinner.

    There is a whole lot of discussion about the recent correction on the NASDAQ where investors are finally asking the obvious question, the same question people like me and many others have been asking, when is there going to be a return on investment. What I also think it is interesting is how the Democrats have pushed a bill to ban any bail out of the AI industry if it all goes belly up – who ended up opposing it? The Republican Party which demonstrates that they don’t believe the the AI build out is sustainable because if they did believe it was sustainable they would have backed the bill. The fact the Republican Party oppose the bill tells the American people that a bail out of the AI industry was always on the cards – as the old saying goes “bail outs for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor”.

    Unfortunately this is once again the inevitable consequence of capitalism and the concentration of capital in a hands of a few is that it bleeds over into political capture which is why bailouts are inevitable – those who capture the political process use it to protect their class interests. This is the reason why the whole argument of ‘real capitalism has never been tried’ just starts to sound a bit childish after a while – at some point you need to stop living in the land of theoreticals and start living in the real world where life is messy and complicated. I’m not saying that a socialist society where the workers would directly own and control the means of production would be perfect but at least it would be possible to have a political climate where the outcome isn’t determined with who has the most capital.

    On 7 November at 7:00 pm the results will start to gradually come in according to the Electoral Commission website (link). I have a feeling that the result on the day won’t be anywhere like the polls have been predicting. The problem is that conducting polling is a lot more difficult these days – almost no one has a landline, many of the polls are ‘opt in’ resulting in the polls being skewed towards those who are heavily engaged in politics that doesn’t represent the mainstream etc. It is the reason why I’m sceptical of the polls coming out of the United States because all too often there are quite voters who don’t appear in the polls then suddenly appear on election day – we saw that in Australia when Scott Morrison won a second term in 2019.

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  • The weather actually held.

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    I was expecting the weather to be horrible this evening but apart from a whole lot of wind earlier on in the evening the weather stayed fine. I went for a 12 km walk tonight and came back, relaxed and watched a few shows – enjoyed some chips because I was in the mood for something savoury, salty and a hint of vinegar. I’m in bed at the moment getting ready for work on Saturday. I’m trying to find a way to setup the ‘Write Editor’ on WordPress so it comes up by default when I make a post but I haven’t been able to locate a way of enabling it although I have provided feedback so maybe it’ll be something they’ll off in the future.

    With the release of 27.2 the Music app as part of macOS has been updated however I haven’t had time to check to see whether the bug that has existed since back in version 26 has been fixed. The issue is when you list the songs, enable column browser, listen to some music and focus on another app. The problem is that if you switch back to the app that the column browser disappears and all you get is a list of songs meaning you have to go back to view and enabling column browsing again. It is an issue that has just suddenly appeared back with the introduction of liquid glass so I’m unsure what they’ve done but they’ve made the app a whole lot worse. I’ve been looking for people on reddit with a similar issue but nothing pops up – maybe I should look for an alternative media player.

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  • A tasty dinner.

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    I’m at the halfway point of my shift and things are going well and I’m looking forward to going for a walk tonight. At the moment the weather is lovely, I’ve got all the windows in my home open to get some fresh air through the home before the sun goes down and it starts to get a bit cold. I’m looking forward to the summer warmth over Christmas and I’m hoping to get a day off on Christmas day to spend with the family.

    Google has released an update for Chrome which bumps the version from 156.0.8078.74 to 156.0.8078.80 – there are a whole lot of security fixes (link). 21 security fixes in total which makes the combined number of security fixes sitting at 73 for the week. Chrome 157 will be getting released next week on Tuesday US Time (Wednesday NZ Time) with quite a few under the hood changes so I’m looking forward to see how that translates to how well it performs for every day use.

    What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?

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    There are two purposes that cryptocurrency has been marketed as – the first being a store of value and the second being an intermediary currency (think of it as a ‘bancorp’ as envisaged by John Maynard Keynes). I was and skill sceptical of it being a store of value in the same way of gold, silver and other precious metals or commodities but I could imagine it being an intermediary currency used for currency transfers which would challenge the current banking and SWIFT based model. A lot of the early promises around cryptocurrency was the idea of making it cheaper for migrant workers to send money home but these days it is a speculative asset akin to ‘digital gold’ without the usefulness of being gold. 

    I think the interesting question is where central bank digital currencies will fit in the future because it’ll also challenge the role of banks now that people could have an account directly with the central bank rather than the traditional banking system we have today. As for where I stand regarding crypto – it is too early to tell but I like to keep an eye on it to see whether something interesting happens with it in a meaningful way for the average person.

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  • Rest and recouperate.

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    I had a wonderful walk tonight – the temperature isn’t too cold and not too many people were out on the road so the air was refreshing after being stuck all day with work. For dinner tonight I was a bit lazy and had some crumpets with butter and honey and a protein shake. When you’ve only got 30 minutes to eat dinner then every minute spent preparing is one less minute one can spent relaxing before having to get back to work. There was an interesting video I watched on my break regarding the lack of economic benefit AI is having on businesses outside of the tech sector – I’m writing in a blog post but it may not be up until Monday next week.

    I’ve been having lots of fun with the upgraded Tizen 10 – the YouTube app is definitely a lot more responsive and at this stage I’d be pretty hard pressed to justify upgrading to the bew Apple TV 4K given that my television already does everything that the new Apple TV 4K does such as AV1 playback support amongst many other features. Oh, and as for Bixby, it does a pretty good job such as when I’m in the YouTube app and want to search for a channel because my subscription list is so long it takes a while to scroll through them all.

    I find the online discussion regarding the new MacBook Pro with touchscreen rather funny given the number of people who are adamantly against it – reacting as if someone had just punched their mother. I’ve had a Microsoft Surface Laptop which came with a touchscreen and I never used it but the fact that it existed didn’t take away from an otherwise great piece of hardware. There appears to be a subculture online who get worked up because they weren’t personally asked what they would like in a product – the idea that maybe not every product is made specifically for them appears to be a concept that they’re not familar with.

    Unfortunately with whole AI bubble the cost of everything has gone up. I just had a look at the cost of the new MacBook Pro and it makes me happy I bought my two Macs when I had the opportunity because if I bought then at this time the price would be unaffordable. The other interesting thing are the number of outlets who have low stock of many devices with many of them probably wanting to get through the stock the have before ordering in new stock which will have a higher price tag. As for the price of memory, don’t expect any rest from higher prices any time soon because even if the memory manufacturers start building extra capacity that capacity won’t be online for many more years. The fact that there are hundreds of billions of dollars floating around so freely tells me that the top end of town aren’t being tax enough.

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  • A windy morning.

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    I woke up this morning and there was a fair amount of wind blowing around outside and according to the Metservice forecast it appears that we maybe seeing some rain later on today but then again the Metservice earlier in the week had forecasted something else. I had a great night sleep after going for a walk after work – around 12km, it allows me to dump the contents of my brain after dealing with society’s more annoying people all day resulting in a quiet brain when I go to sleep. I grabbed myself a cup of tea for breakfast and checked through the cupboards to get a good overview of what I’ve got in stock. My goal before heading off overseas in the second week of November is to reduce the amount of food I’ve got in the cupboards and fridge. I’ve built up a bit of a surplus but I also need to do some ‘stock rotation’ to ensure that I use them up before they expire as to avoid food waste.

    I checked the Ubiquiti release community to see whether 5.1.34 had been released and then promptly updated it and in the early release channel UniFi OS 6.0.16 was released. A modest list of fixes were announced – I used to run the early releases many years ago when I wanted to be on the latest and greatest but now that I work from home I really don’t have the luxury of taking the risk of having an unreliable setup. On the matter of updates, with the iOS 27.2 update the modem firmware was updated from 2.10.04 to 2.20.04 I’ve noticed a slight improvement with power management and signal strength.

    Just before I head off to work, I have to admit that I have to eat some humble pie because I was pretty adamant that Apple would release a touch screen Mac but it turns out I was wrong (link). I had forecast years ago that Apple would never do it, that it isn’t part of the Apple way of doing things, if they were going to do touch based improvements then it’ll be using the touchpad rather than a touchscreen. I’ve used touchscreens myself such as on the Surface laptop but I never really made full use of it but it’ll be interesting to see how wide spread the adoption will be given that I would hardly call myself ‘the typical user’. It’ll be interesting to see whether the adoption of a touchscreen will result in those raised on touchscreens will use these new laptops with touch being the primary input or will it being a situation of using ‘the best tool for the job’.

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  • A productive work today.

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    My first day back and work with the new setup in the office – the laptop is raised up on a stand and it has remained quiet the whole day where as normally it sounds like a jet taking off. The new monitor is working wonderfully – it is great that I can attach all my peripherals (keyboard, mouse, webcam) can be hooked up to the monitor then a USB-C cable from my monitor to the laptop that provides power as well as a connection to the monitor. I’ve gotten used to having now one wide monitor so I’m making use of Windows built in ability to automatically manage windows by having two windows side by side. I wonder whether I’ll end up saving power with the new setup – I guess I’ll keep an eye on my power bill for the next few months.

    I was watching television and the suddenly a message appeared that informed me Samsung had released Tizen 10.0 (the previous version I had running was Tizen 9.0) I installed the update and upon reboot I noticed the improved user interface. I also noticed how it is a lot more responsive which is probably due to Wayland being updated and optimisations being done under the hood – the Samsung browser now has Samsung Pass integration included with it although I do wish that Samsung would do a better job providing Samsung Pass support on non-Samsung devices. The web browser, which is Chromium based, has been updated as well and I find it more responsive – I use it to watch content that is only available via the website such as Democracy Now! although I guess I could setup Pocket Casts and stream it via there because I find that interface a whole lot easier to navigate when using the remote.

    Google released an update for Chrome 156 (link) and like last week there is an avalanche of security related fixes – a grand total of 52 security fixes with four of them classified as critical. On the Ubiquiti release candidate channel there is the UniFi OS 5.1.34 to address the compromised eMudhra CA certificates. It’ll be interesting to see how far away UniFI OS 6.0.15 is from being released because it was released 5 days ago so maybe next week we’ll see it graduate to the release candidate channel. The release of UniFI OS 6.x series will allow the upgrade to the UniFi Network Application 11.x series which has quite a few user visible features along with under the hood changes.

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Hello,

I’m Matisyahu

An open diary of my life as I navigate the world – the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.

“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick’” – Mikhail Bakunin

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