Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • A productive day.

    It is good to have a day off from work but I also want to at least be productive in terms of getting stuff done. I woke up, had a shower then headed down the road where I was able to pick up some new batteries for my Airtag – I was getting a constant reminder so I thought it would be best to finally upgrade them. On a good side when I was at the supermarket there was a promotion where I got 10 x the points if I bought the Duracell ones which resulted in an extra 150 points vs the standard 15 points. I was going to get a new light bulb for the lounge room but I wasn’t sure which one was compatible so I’ll pick it up on Tuesday by bringing down the old lightbulb so that I get the correct one (it’s an LED bulb, I prefer them over the halogen ones which produce a lot of heat and heat up the room during the summer).

    While I was there I checked out ‘Bed, Bath and Beyond’ (it is still operating in New Zealand since the New Zealand business is separate from the US business) where I picked up loofah along with an exfoliating glove because the current shower puff is falling to pieces (it was a cheap supermarket one so I’m surprised it has lasted as long as it did).

    After arriving home I ordered some satay chicken and noodles for dinner from Noodle Canteen which was a nice dinner. After finishing that off I went for a 16km walk tonight – I really wanted to push myself and I came home exhausted but feeling really good knowing that I set a goal for myself and stuck to it. I decided to go back down the main road and it is funny how much has it changed (having not been down the road for quite a while) such as a few houses having been torn down, the empty land being levelled and it appears that 2 or maybe 3 dense houses being built on the same land (which is quite common where I live because many of the properties were the old state houses with the large sections).

    Regarding Tuesday, I’m looking at checking out a ‘powerline networking’ device so that I can move my security camera base station closer to where the cameras are located so then I can get a better signal. I’m also looking at getting a smart watch so that I can start keeping track of how things are progressing. I am hesitant because I’ve bought a smart watch in the past only to later sell it because I didn’t utilise it that much but then again that was back when I wasn’t exercising consistently so I really didn’t get my utility out of it.

    The big question is which brand do I go with – Samsung, Apple, maybe even Garmin because I’ve heard a lot of positive things being said about their watches. I’ve still got the bonus I got from work so I’m weighing up also upgrading my television that I’ve had for over 10 years – Noel Leeming has a few specials on so I’m tempted to have a nosy around.

    Oh, and before I head off to sleep, uBlock Origin Lite 2026.405.2010 was released today, it has arrived in the Microsoft Edge store however it is still waiting approval for the Chrome and Apple stores. Maybe I’ll be lucky and when I get up in the morning it’ll be available.

  • Start of the weekend.

    Finished work at 10pm once again, went for a walk then came home and had a sandwich for a quick meal. I’m making sure I enjoy the weather while I can because as we get closer to June the temperature will drop and the day will be less hospitable but I’ll keep getting out each morning to go for that walk because I know at the end of it I feel a whole better for it knowing I have stuck my my routine.

    At the moment I an working on a blog post regarding the decline of the right wing or at least the latest manifestation of the right. I’m working through it but I’m trying to avoid engaging in hopium – giving people the impression that the cancer of far right politics is in remission because just like a cancer in remission there is always a possibility of it coming back. There is also a possibility that many who have become despondent may drop out of politics but some may get coopted into even further right wing politics which is why it is important for the left to offer a bold positive vision rather than the more of the same managed decline and telling people that this is as good as it is going to get so don’t expect things to improve.

    The reason why I don’t have much faith in the left (or at least the left wing and the nominal left) is the tendency by far too many to have their work view being manufactured by the media. One only needs to look at the mainstream media in the US are failing to report on issues that media outlets outside of the United States report on. Let’s get one thing straight, the media is ultimately the mouth piece of the capitalist class which is why the will spend a whole week talking about the ‘deep and hidden meaning’ behind Trump posting Covfefe rather than covering how the Department of Education is being dismantled by Linda McMahon and the impact of its dismantling.

    On Monday I’ll go for a walk, come back home, have a shower, cash in the $50 voucher I got from work then head down to the supermarket to pick up a few items using that $50 voucher. I was going to hold onto it for a few more weeks but knowing my luck I’ll end up forgetting all about it so I may as well make use of it. What I might end up doing is walk down to the supermarket, grab what I want and then catch the bus back which will have the benefit of getting some extra exercise it while saving a couple of dollars.

  • Almost the end of the week.

    I woke up today a little bit earlier than 10:45am, I was laying in bed and decided I might as well get out of bed and go for my morning walk, arrived back home and relaxed a little before starting work. I decided tonight that I would relax after work because I went for a walk in the morning. I’m pretty happy that for the whole week I’ve stuck to my schedule of getting up every day and going for a walk – they say if you do something for a month that it starts to become easier so hopefully by the time May comes around it’ll become easier. The big struggle is having the discipline of going to sleep at a regular time to ensure I always get a decent 8-9 hours sleep so when I wake up the morning I am all refreshed.

    I checked for an update for Chrome and it appears there was a minor release made after the usual relaese on Wednesday – from 146.0.7680.178 to 146.0.7680.179 – I haven’t noticed any regressions from 146.0.7680.165 to 146.0.7680.178 and to 146.0.7680.179 so the bug fix must have been pretty minor because it also isn’t mentioned in the Chrome release blog page. Google have started with the early roll out of Chrome 147 but I don’t think we’ll see a mainstream availability until next week on Wednesday NZ Time (assuming they don’t release it earlier because of a serious security fix). I tried giving AdGuard another try with a testing profile on Chrome but I’m still experiencing issues with page freezing where as with uBlock Origin Lite the same issue doesn’t occur – I’d hazard to guess it has something to do with the User Script where as uBlock Origin Lite is a pure Declarative Net Request (DNR) based extension.

  • A quiet day today.

    Woke up this morning at 10:45am this morning and went for a walk, came back home, relaxed and watched some YouTube videos then started work. Going for a walk in the morning put me in a good mood for the rest of the day and there were hardly any cars on the road so it made the morning walk very peaceful. I finished work tonight at 10pm and then went for another walk thus making it a total of 16km walked today – arrived back home, had a shower then jumped into bed. I’ve got Saturday and Sunday to go but it should be fairly quiet given that it is the easter weekend so I assume most normal people would be spending time with their family.

    The more I’m using Chrome the more I am enjoying it to maybe on my day off I’ll have a look at Google Workspace. I’m also got Google applications installed on my iPhone and the experience is pretty good so far – if I do make the switch I want to make sure that there is a good experience on all my devices. Although all the applications work well it does kind of suck that the Chrome for iOS available in New Zealand is restricted to using Webkit rather than being able to use the native Chrome webengine that is available in some markets.

  • A good day today.

    I had a good day today, I got out of bed at around 9:45am, left home for my walk at around 11:15am, arrived back at around 11:30am, watched a few YouTube videos as I was cooling down then had a shower, got dressed then headed to work on the train. It does feel kind of funny getting up a lot earlier than I would normally – the feeling of having accomplished something by making the best of the day rather than getting up and heading into work while still not feeling fully awake. At work we had an Easter get together with work mates and the company provided some nibbles.

    While I was at the office I ordered a few things for delivery – the convenience of being able to get what I need delivered so that by the time I get home it has already been delivered. This is the reason why I always push back against those who compare the AI bubble to the dot com crash – the business models of ‘make a loss off every sale but make it up on volume’ was a ridiculous idea but what it did was allowing the laying of the foundation for more established retail players to enter the market because the demand was there but the challenge was creating a sustainable business model around it.

    I’ve got work on Friday but I’ll be working from home – a nice walk before work and then settle in for a day off either one of two things – craziness as people spend their time off using our services or it will be dead quiet. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. After work I’ll go for another walk so in a day I’ll end up walking 16km so as long as I walk each day I’ll be walking close to 100km in a week.

  • A good day at work.

    I woke up this morning at around 9:30am although I laid in bed hoping that the 30 minutes before the alarm went off would last as long as possible but I had to face reality and get out of bed then get ready to start the day with a walk. Although I came back with enough time to spare I’ve decided to set my alarm to 9:45am so then it gives me 15 minutes to get up and out of bed so then I go for my walk at 10 so by the time I come back I have over an hour up my sleeve where I can cool down, watch some YouTube videos and then have a shower then head off to work.

    When 26.5 beta was released I couldn’t find Safari 26.5 beta but it has now been released with the notes available here (link). It isn’t a substantial list of improvements but I have noticed that some of the changes that were documented in recent Technology Previews have made their way into the mainstream release of Safari such as the bug fix for web extensions noted in the change log. I was expecting Chrome 147 to be released but as of the time of writing this blog post it wasn’t been released although there was an update which updated Chrome from 146.0.7680.165 to 146.0.7680.178 – so far I haven’t had any issues on either my Windos laptop or any of my Macs.

    I’ve been following politics and I can see why many people disconnect from politics when politicians are more interested in trying to score cheap political points that pandering to their base, who treat politics like supporting their local sports team, rather than having a productive discourse. The problem is made worse when you have the media reward politicians with attention every time they say or do something stupid – the latest example being a politician claiming that the Broadcasting Standard Authority (BSA) as being “bordering on fascist” in regards to whether their authority extends to online services.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a productive discussion to be had around the legislation regarding the scope of the Broadcasting Standard Authority (BSA) and whether it is fit for purpose given how broadcasting has changed. The problem is that to start throwing around accusations of “bordering on fascist” tells me that you’re not actually interested in having a productive discussion other than saying the most outrageous thing you can dream up and then hope that the media give you a whole lot of free advertisement.

    New Zealand, like many other countries at this time, are going through a difficult period in regards to fuel supplies and let’s also be blunt about the fact that neither party have done a good job preparing the country for these sorts of events. The problem is that during the good times there is a lack of political motivation to make investments to insulate the country from economic shocks relating to geopolitical events and when those events do occur we then see politicians spending most of their time pointing at each other for not doing enough (in many cases the ones doing the finger pointing were the same ones that down played the need for contingency planning during the good times).

  • Back to work tomorrow.

    Today was a good day – I got up at 10am and to be completely honest I really didn’t feel like getting out of bed, I wanted to sleep in but I know that if I am going to get into a good routine then I need force myself to do it for the next month then it’ll eventually become a lot easier. Tomorrow will be the third day getting up at 10am and before work I’ll go for an 8km walk before work (I went for an 8km walk tonight) then have a shower then get dressed for work. The benefit being that I can get some exercise in the morning so then by the time I arrive back at home after work, which is usually at around 11pm, I’m not having to squeeze in not only some exercise but also unwinding after working then having a shower. The days I work at home though I’ll go for. second walk at night because by the time I do come back it’ll be before midnight with plenty of time to unwind then have a shower.

    I was going to move to working in the office 3 days a week this week but I’ve found that on Friday there is a bus replacement for the whole day and I would rather avoid the whole fiasco of hoping that the bus replacement turns up where I expect it to but it also arrives on time in town. If I am going come into the office then I may as well give myself a treat on the days i come into the office with a savoury scone and a coffee for brunch before work. It is nice to have something to ease into the day with rather than the rush, rush, rush that normally comes with work.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.329.1951 has been released for all the platforms although for Chrome it came later than then Edge and Apple Stores. I really have to wonder whether it is because Google have a large volume of extensions being submitted or whether Apple and Microsoft simply more people around the world who review the extensions which allow them to approve them quicker. Anyway, long story short, I updatd it on Chrome and Safari – although I’ve given Safari a try I keep coming back because the bugs with Safari relating to website issues become rather annoying after a while. For me, I’m unsure whether it is the browser or the website but as an end user the reason for it is secondary to wanting the problem fixed. I submitted a bug to Apple regarding the a bug on the YouShop website accounts page which renders perfectly fine on Firefox and Chrome but breaks on Safari yet a year later it still hasn’t been fixed – at this point I give up and give into just using Chrome.

    On Wednesday I expect Chrome 147 to be released, today Apple released 26.5 beta however I don’t see any Safari 26.5 beta release which makes me wonder whether 26.5 is going to be a ‘light on features’ release with the final stable release coming out around the middle of May some time before the WWDC conference with a 26.6 release maybe around middle of the 27 beta cycle then again it depends on what is announced at WWDC. In the next couple of weeks there is the patch tuesday for Microsoft’s own products so it’ll be interesting to see whether we start to see the promise of addressing Windows 11 shortcomings start appearing in this release. When only something like 5% of your paying customer base care enough to pay for Copilot then that should be a clear message to you that ramming it into every nook and cranny isn’t going to magically result in more people adopting it.

  • A good Monday, looking forward to Tuesday.

    I went down to the supermarket and i was going to do have a chicken salad but I decided to have a lazy dinner of a chicken sandwich enabled me to use up the lettuce I bought on Sunday along with the tomatoes on a multigrain bread. I was going to buy some blueberries but the ones they had there were, well, underwhelming ebcause they look like they had shrunk because they had been in the cooler for too long. Instead of getting the blueberries I decided to get some fresh dates instead – I’ve put them in the fridge and I’ll be able to have a couple each day as a sweet treat.

    When 26.4 was released by Apple I installed it on my Macs but before I did that I deleted off Chrome so then i coud go back to giving Safari another try. I’ve gone back to using Chrome and the one thing I noticed is the performance improvement of running Chrome on 26.4 when compared to 2.6.3.1 (a) – it feels like there has been an improvement in responsiveness regarding thread and process performance. On Tuesday I’m looking at maybe setting up Workspace for a trial run to see how it performs when compared to iCloud but I’ll see how I feel.

  • Panther Lake improvements and AI reality check.

    I’ve been following what the x86 working group have agreed upon and one of the big changes was the inclusion of FRED that has made an appearance in Panther Lake and will be appearing in the Zen 6 based CPUs rumoured to be coming out in late 2026 or early 2027. At the moment I haven’t seen any discussions over whether FRED made its way into Windows yet (we may not see it until 27H2 with the new system based around 29000) however Linux have had the necessary patches merged with the kernel.

    Over on Phoronix they have released a FRED benchmark with the latest Linux kernel (link) and the results so far look very positive. It would be interesting to see how over time the performance improves once APX is merged along with memory memory tagging. Although there was an attempt at a more radical change with the x86S the decision was to create the x86 Advisory Group where they probably took many of the ideas explored with x86S and see how they could deliver those changes without being disruptive. As others have pointed out, the cost of legacy support is very small and most modern operating systems don’t even touch the old legacy stuff.

    I love seeing Ed Zitron pop the hype cycle when it comes to AI – every time I see what is happening in the AI space I can’t help but get the feeling of the accounting scandals of the 2000s. Promises of datacenters and funding but not actual contracts being signed, GPUs being shipped to datacenters but not being plugged in because there isn’t the infrastructure needed. Then add to that is emerging technology in the form of TPUs that Google have demonstrated to be more efficient at inference work as well as building the LLMs thus questions about the long term viability of brute forcing GPUs when there can be bespoke hardware that can do it more efficiently in much the same wat that bitcoin mining now uses Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) instead of GPUs because they’re more efficient.

    The thing that is also ignored is the fact that AI is a means to an end not an end in itself – you integrate it into your products to make those product do things better. No one buys AI for AI sake but they do so because it enables them to do something that either they couldn’t do it before or if they could do it before it was a laborious process., I also question long term whether many of these stand along AI companies will last long term and I would hazard to guess that many who are ingesting into them are making the big gamble that a bigger player will buy them out in much the same way that Loopt was bought out by Green Dot. One thing to keep in mind – AI is more than just LLMs and there is plenty of legit and interesting work that is being done and we’re still very much at the beginning but unfortunately far too many on Wall Street appear to lack a well tuned BS detector to pick up when promises are being made with very little grounding in reality.

  • End of the week.

    The end of the week couldn’t come soon enough but I’m now relaxing on my bed with my laptop updating my blog. The weather was looking a bit overcast so I still go out of bed today but instead I spent the morning tidying up around the house, hoovering the floors, dusting, hanging up clothes that are dried, folding the washing that would be put away in drawers. The benefit of getting up at at recent time is being able to get those things out of the way rather than getting up late and by the time I get around to do it I’m basically in the mood of not wanting to do anything. I’ll be getting up at 10am on Monday and my goal is to set that is the time every for the week and then eventually it’ll stop becoming a new routine and then becomes the default routine going forward.

    What I think is amazing is how once again New Zealanders voted in a National led government and are now acting surprised at how useless they are when it comes to tackling the current energy crisis that is being faced. For those who don’t keep up with New Zealand politics, there was a study conducted by the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission where this study said that around 60% of spending on infrastructure should be allocated to making the existing infrastructure work better and the remaining 40% spent on new infrastructure. Long story short, if you’ve got an existing road for example the Hutt Expressway (officially known as Sate Highway 2) then it would be better to upgrade that road by replacing the lights with over passes etc. so that traffic can make use of the road more efficiently.

    Another example of investment would be to invest into rail – upgrade the Wellington network to 25kV (to bring it inline with the Auckland network), standardise signalling system, platform height etc. then eventually electrify from Wellington all the way to Auckland along with double tracking where it makes sense (not to mention completely electrifying the whole network outside of the main trunk line from Wellington to Auckland). In other words, take your existing infrastructure and it make it work more efficiently, don’t go out and build new infrastructure while neglecting the existing infrastructure. What have the National led government done? resuscitated the ‘roads of national significance’ aka a giant tongue kiss to the trucking lobby and the worse part about these new roads is that they have the most abysmal ROI you could possibly imagine.

    Then add to that the latest idiotic underinvestment into public transport resulting in a situation now where we’re poorly situated to deal with the current energy crisis that is unfolding. Heck, that doesn’t even touch on the lack of investment into renewables, the dopey LNG terminal costing $1 billion and the cutting of electric vehicles tax credits that would encourage people to get off fossil fuel powered cars. You’d think that this would be a wake up call to make ourselves more energy independent so we’re no longer impacted to the degree we are when there are energy supply shocks – it appears that the National Party never learn from their past mistakes and New Zealanders also fail to learn from their bad voting decisions resulting in the movie plot of ‘ground hog day’.

    Monday I’m going to head down to my favourite cafe and grab something for lunch – a nice walk down the road and back which is around 3.2km but I like to try to get some walking in even if it small amounts at a time. I may walk down to the mall after brunch and have a look around at the stores – pick up a few things for dinner if I can’t find anything I like in the fridge. I’ve got some fish that I picked up on special at the supermarket but what I really need is some fresh lemon, maybe even some lemon better, tin foil and maybe a white sauce for the fish. I want to work through what I’ve got in my freezer before doing any big grocery shopping so then I can get some sort of stock take and then work out what I have, the types of meals I want to cook for the next couple of weeks and then work out what I need to purchase.