Matisyahu's Blog

  • A pretty productive day.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am however I had enough motivation this morning that I got out of the house at 10:00 am for my walk. As a result of me getting better organised I was able to go for a 14.57 km walk before work and when I came back I enjoyed a relaxing shower which made the work out all the more worthwhile. Tomorrow however I’ve set the alarm to 8:30 am because I’m hoping that even if I muck around for an hour I can still get out of the house by 9:30 am and then that would give me enough time to maybe getting 16-17 km before work. I think one day I’m going to get motivated and link up my bluetooth headphones to my Apple Watch so then I can listen to music without having to take my iPhone with me.

    Tonight I’ll be getting to sleep earlier which will be a bit of a challenge given that I’m normally used to staying up late but I think aftter a few weeks of the new routine I’ll find that it’ll become like muscle memory. One thing I have noticed on my walk every morning are the decent number of other people doing the same thing I am doing – retirees out on their bicycles getting some fresh air, parents taking their kids for a walk down to the park etc. Summer is coming but it is still up in the air regarding what the weather will be like due to the Super El Niño – heatwaves, droughts and maybe forest fires but I’m feeling pretty confident that regardless of who wins the election in November that the civil defence will be well run and can respond when help is required.

    There are rumours that Apple will be hosting an event on 13 October (US Time) which will include a refresh of their HomePod range along with the possibility of a refreshed Apple TV 4K. I think the big thing I am looking forward to is the Apple TV 4K with an upgraded SoC so that it can support AV1 playback and hopefully the inflation caused by AI bubble hasn’t made the HomePod (the non-mini one) too expensive because I’m tempted to replace my current speakers on my computer with maybe a pair of HomePods that can work in stereo mode – put them on either side of my television and use it for both my Apple TV 4K as well as my desktop or laptop when I want to.

    Daily writing prompt
    The genie grants you a wish. What is it?
    View all responses

    Immortality and perfect health for every person in the world – when as a species we’re not struggling to survive we can spend those resources on making the world a better place, to explore space, colonise celestial bodies, find out what else is out there in the universe etc. It would be interesting to see how life would change particularly when it comes to economics, scarcity – would there need to be a rethink of how societ is organised? with so many options that are now available it would interesting to see how society changes in both the short term as well as long term.

    ,

  • A good first day back at work.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up at 9:30 am but I decided today that I wanted to get a decent walk in so I left home at 10:30 am and went for an 11.42 km walk. I’m going to get to sleep tonight before midnight and lights off before 11:00 pm and I’m hoping that getting into a good routine at the end of the night will make it easier to get up in the morning to go for my daily walk. Just as I gradually made the change of getting up earlier so then I can time my exercise in the morning, I’m going to focus on getting the lights off by 11:00 pm so that eventually it’ll become a routine for me. There is the temptation of having worked all day to want some time to relax watching movies etc. but I think that the best thing during the week is if I want to do any sort of relaxation I’ll need to fit it in before work or leave movie watching to my days off from work.

    I’ve upgraded my installation of Chrome from version 154.0.8037.58  to version 154.0.8037.93 . I haven’t noticed any regressions yet but it is still early days but even with the hiccup of 153 and Salesforce but so far the two extensions I have installed are working well. I did give Safari a second chance but Google Chat scrolling issue remains and WordPress doesn’t work as good on Safari as it does on Chrome. I want to give Safari a second chance but I keep having issues – one can blame the web developers for not debugging for Safari but ultimately for the end user they don’t care who is at fault they just want to be able to navigate the web with minimum fuss and bother – if Chrome enables them to do it then so be it.

    I was watching a video videos regarding the whole SaaSpocalypse – this narrative pushed by technologically illiterate idiots on Wall Street that have convinced themselves that AI will make SaaS obsolete because every company will just vibe code a custom solution. It is abundantly clear when I hear these Wall Street types speak that they’re regurgitating the farts they’ve huffed earlier on in the day from their fellow Wall Street types rather than having a firm grasp of what they’re talking about. There is a reason why businesses avoid creating bespoke software unless either they really, really, really need to do it because their business requirements are very niche (aka there is no mainstream software vendor that is suitable) or the bespoke software is so trivial that there is a limited amount of risk associated with it.

    Regardless of whether you write it yourself, whether you pull in an assortment of third party community developed frameworks or vibe code the whole thing, you are ultimately responsible for it all – from planning to designing, to writing, to maintaining it, refactoring it, add new features as the demands of the business changes and retire features that are no longer needed etc. etc. That doesn’t even touch on the regulatory compliance such as ensuring that there is the ability to fully audit who did what to which transactions, customer records, when money is entering your bank to be able to trace the origin and when it leaves to know where it left to etc. This very important when it comes to areas such as finance, banking, betting agencies, insurance and many other industries where there is anti-money laundering compliance where government do random audits to ensure you’re doing your due diligence.

    This is the reason why businesses outsource that responsibility to the likes of Salesforce and other SaaS vendors (along with traditional software to run on premises) because when you pay Salesforce a set amount per user per year you are getting the expertise that they have behind the scenes. Salesforce not only develop the software but they also audit it and have a whole legal team to ensure that whatever regulations exist that their platform is compliant with them. When you pay the subscription to their service along with millions of other users around the world then the cost of maintaining it and improving it is shared across everyone using the platform where as if you bring it all inhouse then the only people who is carrying the burden is your organisation. You have to not only maintain a data centre, upgrade the hardware, maintain the hardware then there are the software licences, developer tools, auditing of the system for regulatory compliance resulting in a business asking themselves whether they’ve become a software company with an unrelated business tacked onto the side of it.

    , ,

  • Getting ready for work tomorrow.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I’ve just finished watching the latest episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’ on YouTube and there were some interesting guests on the show with each making some great contributions but Professor Wayne Hope giving some context regarding the rise of the far right in New Zealand politics:

    And I think one of the most points made was made by Professor Wayne Hope was around 39 minutes into the video – to really understand the book ‘Dirty Work’ by Nicky Hager you really have to read the two previous books he wrote which are ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Dirty Politics’. It gives a good insight into the origins of the far right politics in New Zealand – rather than it being a recent phenomenon the reality is that such politics have deep roots in New Zealand. For example, Oscar Kightly reminds the audience of the sorts of anti-immigration ads that National ran on television during the 1970s. The sort of far right politics we see in New Zealand are very much reminiscent of Lee Atwater – rather than out right racism what we see in New Zealand is seemingly innocuous phrases being used ti hide what the actual intention is for example the ‘Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill’.

    Getting back to voting – for goodness sake, check that you’re registered and actually turn up on election day to vote. Nothing frustrates me when I hear the same people who opine that they’re ‘not political’ right up to the moment when they’re negatively impacted by something – university fees go up, subsidies for bus and trains are reduced so they have to pay more to use public transport etc. Then there is the usual complaining about how they’re not going to vote because their very specific niche issue isn’t being addressed so they ignore all the other issues that need addressing. It is one of the reason I push for civics to be taught in school because as the old saying goes: “you might not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you” with the other old saying being “Democracy is a participation sport and if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”.

    ,

  • A productive Tuesday.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up today at 9:00 am this morning and got ready for the day – met up with mum for brunch down at a local cafe and I had my typical eggs bene with a bowl of mochaccino. After having brunch we headed down to the mall to pick up a new pair of shoes along with a sports coat for myself when I go to Australia for a holiday. After getting that all sorted out we headed back to my flat and did some gardening since mum has the whipper-snipper and I wanted to get the gardens all weeded along with getting some river rocks to make the stone garden a little interesting.

    There is a drain at the end of the driveway that is blocked up but I’m unsure where it is blocked because I can see two pipes that look like they go to the storm water drain but they maybe blocked up. I got out a shovel to remove as much of the build up silt, rubbish and leaves however it was horrendously stinky because of how long it had accumulated and rotted. The drain is filled with water so I think what I’ll need to do is net week grab an old jug and remove all the excess water from the drain remove the build up of sludge then try to work out where the blockage is. The reason why I want to get it sorted is because every time there is rain the driveway gets flooded.

    I also checked for updates today for my software and Apple has released 27.0.1 for all their platforms except for tvOS which is on 27. There was a version bump of the modem firmware on my iPhone 17 Pro Max which went from 2.10.01 to 2.10.04 – I haven’t noticed any difference when it comes to my phone in terms of signal quality (which has already been top notch from day one). It is interesting to see that Safari has also been bumped to 27.0.1 so it appears that although the change list was pretty short, it is important to note that not every single fix is listed but instead only the most high profile issues that have been fixed. My experience so far has been pretty good – I’m using Safari at the moment but I like to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of Chrome and Firefox.

    I’m still working through the massive release noes of Safari Technology Preview 253 (link). It looks like 27.1 will probably be a minor release with the focus about supporting new hardware, 27.2 release notes have been pretty modest which leads me to wonder whether 27.3 will be a bigger update. There are quite a few fixes for web extensions I the technology preview although there is only one fix included with Safari 27.2 beta so maybe this is a situation of getting a much needed update out there asap which has minimal stability impact and leave those bigger changes for another release.

    Skinny Mobile is now linked up with Everyday Rewards and by linking them up I ended up getting 250 points and the plan I am on means that every three months I’ll automatically get 500 points. I was being tempted by options available with other carriers but this link up with Woolworths has made staying with Skinny worthwhile. On the topic of internet connections, I’ve moved my DNS setting back to using the one my ISP provides and so far things have been pretty reliable. I had originally moved to Cloudflare because there was a period of time that the ISP DNS went belly up but so far things have been going well. DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is still working with Safari – I have a feeling it is picking up the settings on my router that I setup – the provider I have setup is Cloudflare.

    ,

  • How Apple AirTag recovered my lost keys.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up today and went for a walk but silly me I put my keys in the pouch at the front of my hoodie along with my mobile phone but at some point when walking I took out my mobile phone the keys also fell out. I only just found out around 3/4 of the way home because I wanted to check my phone and found that my keys were missing. Well, thank goodness I had an AirTag linked to my keys because I traced it using the AirTag software on my phone and I eventually found that it was dropped off at a local store by a member of the public. I popped into the store, asked whether some keys had been handed it and I thanked the shop keeper for keeping it safe – thank goodness I found the keys because there was more than just the house keys and would have been a nighmare trying to replace them.

    My mum has had a heck of a time trying to organise someone to build a veranda with the organisation she was going through which operates a franchise based system – you contact the head office and then the head office contacts the local builder who then gets in contact with the customer. Well, after getting the wheels in motion she received no reply three weeks later so mum then contacted the head office again and advised them not to bother because three weeks had passed with no answer. I keep hearing stories about small businesses struggling with the current economic climate in New Zealand and here is my mum with money at the ready to pay for it to be installed yet a New Zealand small business can’t do the absolute minimum.

    I ordered my groceries on Sunday night before heading off to bed for the evening – I was going to flag it and leave it for tomorrow but luckily I didn’t because Woolworths had an outage which stopped people from logging in which would have thrown a spanner in the works. I got it delivered and for dinner I had tandoori chicken and coleslaw – I think in future I’m going to stick to either the Japanese coleslaw or the Mexican salad because the creamy winter salad was pretty, as the kids say these days, ‘mid’ when it came to the taste or there lack of. On the other hand, the chicken was very tasty – it is a guaranteed winner every time from Ingham with their tandoori chicken and can be picked up at a reasonable price at the local Pak ‘n Save (I tend to prefer shopping at Woolworths because it has a better selection in some areas).

    On the topic of AI, the greatest threat to humanity isn’t the AI ‘gaining sentience’ or ‘agency’ but an individual or an organisation doing something stupid which ends up setting off a chain of events. We saw with recent AI assisted hacking that occured where individuals didn’t properly sandbox, air gap and monitor the experiment they ran but rather than admitting they screwed up they instead decided to use anthropomorphic language to firstly absolve themselves of responsibility and secondly to attribute sentience and agency in a vain attempt of claiming that AGI is ‘just around the corner’ so they get the dopey AI pilled types on Wall Street to clap like train seals – the sort of people who do zero investigation into how LLMs actually work. Want to know the greatest threat? the AI assisted hack is done on a country like China then the United States doesn’t handle the fall out diplomatically then China responds resulting in something bad happening all because someone couldn’t be bothered doing their job when running an experiment. As the old saying goes, never attribute to malice that can be explained as incompetence, or in the case of AI the greater threat is stupidity of those involved rather than a LLM somehow becoming sentient and have agency.

    , ,

  • At the half way point.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up today at 9:00 am and it has been raining all day – part of me likes being inside on a rainy day, hearing the sound of rain on the roof, it feels so peaceful. It is probably one of the reasons why I like having it play on my phone when I have difficulty getting to sleep at night – play an audio clip of rain and I drift off to sleep. Thet Metservice says the weather will get better later on tonight but given how topsey-turvery things have been when it comes to forecasting, I’ll play it by ear and see how things turn out.

    For dinner tonight after work I’ve got some chilli I froze a couple of weeks ago and I want to eat that up before it can get a bit nasty – even when frozen I have found that the quality reduces the longer it is in the frezer. I’ve also got out some Buffalo Chicken pies to defroast on the counter – I’ll be logging off in around 5 hours which should be more than enough time to let them defrost and worse case scenario if the pies aren’t defrosted by the time I log off I can always put them in the microwave to complete the defrosting.

  • One more day to go.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    Today was a good day at work although I had some rude customers I have found that as I have gotten older that ending the call is a whole lot more satisfying than dealing with someone who cannot seem to control their ‘big feelings’. I remember when I first started dealing with customers I just took the abuse believing it was ‘part of the job’ but these days I value my mental health over being used as a soundboard for customers to yell at. Unfortunately they tend to be of a certain age where they believe that their position as a customer some how gives them the right to treat the customer service person poorly. It kind of goes back to an idea I had many years ago – everyone must work at least 5 years in customer service full time before moving to the job they’ve trained for. My rationale behind that line of thing was that first hand experience on the front line might hopefully make people behave in a polite manner when dealing with customer service staff.

    I was watching a video regarding regarding how certain ‘tech writers’ have been hanging around in the milieu of Silicon Valley to the point that they’ve started ‘huffing their own farts’ for the lack of a better phrasing. I’d like to believe that rather than it being a conscious decision on the part of these ‘tech writers’ but instead a consequence of inculturation and the normalisation of behaviours and opinions that would be viewed as abhorrent outside of Silicon Valley. There is a book entitled ‘The Nerd Reich’ by Gil Duran and I’m wondering whether the individuals mentioned in the book are slowly building relationships with these ‘tech writers’ to the point that we end up having them saying things like the following: “I think X is better now than ever” followed by “twitter was falling apart so I’m glad Elon Musk took over but I was like elon has never ran a social media product”. When you start sucking up to Silicon Valley oligarchs then it is difficult to take such people seriously – you’ve decided that the relationship with the powerful is more important than reporting the truth.

    Tonight I broke my fast with some tuna fillets along with a protein bar and protein shake – the benefit of having that refill of protein means I feel full without over eating. I’m still getting up at 9:00 am each day and going for a walk – the calories burnt when going for a walk is only around 600-700 but I do it primarily to get out of the house, get my body moving and waking my body up for the day. The walk today was enjoyable because it is the first time in a while where I could walk without having to wear my hoodie – enjoying the sun and the fresh air before having to say inside all day as I work from home. I’m looking forward to tomorrow so that I can finish the week off and start the weekend on Monday and Tuesday.

    , ,

  • It’s Saturday.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I’ve just come back from my walk this morning and the weather is looking great. I was checking out some videos and once again we have the ‘why I left the let’ grift is still going. It is amazing the number of people who pull this stunt of “I used to be on the left but now I am [insert new branding opportunity]” while never explaining what made the consider themselves left wing in the first place. I can’t help but get the feeling that many of these people who call themselves left-wing are like those sort of people who are raised in a religion, going through the motions because “that is what is expected” while never asking themselves “why do I believe what I believe?” or even the more important question “do I actually believe what I was raised to believe?”.

    It reminds me of the saying “the unexamined life is not worth living” – to hear someone saying they left the left but they never go into detail regarding what made them identity with the left in the first place. For example, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton were both Republicans – were they Republican because that is what they actually politically believed or was it a matter of being born into an environment where that was the default political worldview for that in that particular community. It reminds me of the old saying that a fish doesn’t recognise water because that is all that it has ever known. I would say for many people they’re born into a community and accept that things happen a certain way without questioning why they happen that way.

    Just to round up the post there was an interesting discussion regarding the Jacinda Ardern government and the failures of the Labour led government. As I’ve said in the past, when millions are spent on a project but there is nothing to show for it then it shouldn’t be surprised that people get jaded and vote for a National led government with a leader who was seen as a continuation of the John Key era. It is all very well to diagnose a problem such as “capitalism as failed” and “neoliberalism has failed” but when it isn’t followed up with substantive policy then it shouldn’t be surprising that many New Zealanders see you as “yet another politician who talks a big game but doesn’t deliver”.

    ,

  • Heading into the the final two days.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am and went for my walk – once again the weather is fine although the temperature overnight has been getting down to the low single digits. I’ve got my heater going at the moment which has kept inside a comfortable temperature but I long for a time where I don’t need to turn on the heater and just enjoy the wonderful warmth of summer.

    When it comes to news, once again we have the government having to slow down their plan of amalgamating city councils together (link). The government had laid down a three month deadline for coming up with a plan – maybe the government have realised that merging together city councils (something I support btw – personally we should merged all the councils together in each region so then we have provincial councils with a premier and assembly (kind of like a state) rather than city councils) is actually a little more complex than barking orders from Wellington then things magically happening.

    When you merge together city councils you have to deal with the various contracts that have been signed between the private sector and the council, how do you merge the various computer systems together such a library all the way through to back office functions. Then there are the things like the cloud based systems – one council may have a server room themselves, another may use Microsoft 365 etc. how do you bring all that information together into a single system while maintaining the legal requirements regarding transparency when OIA requests are made.

    That doesn’t even touch on the various bylaws – there are going to be overlaps between the various laws so how do you decide which to keep, which to modify? Then there are funding issues – how to do you ensure that rural areas receive adequate funding for infrastructure such as roads and the three waters (drinking water, storm water and sewage)? then there are council offices, what functions do you consolidate while ensuring that there is still an office for residents to get assistance with council related matters?

    ,

  • An enjoyable walk today.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up at 9:00 am, caught up some news and then headed out for a walk – the weather is wonderful, the sun was out but it wasn’t too hot but rather a nice cool breeze. One of those days when everything is just right and hopefully tomorrow (Friday) the good weather will continue. I enjoy going for a walk each morning as it wakes me up and puts me in a good mood for the day. Getting some fresh air in the morning always make the day go a whole lot better which is the reason why on my day off I choose to walk down to the local bakery to get some fresh air before enjoyng brunch and then walking from the bakery to the supermarket to pick up some groceries.

    Apple has released Safari Technology Preview 253 (link) and I did a quick scroll through believing it’ll be the same rather boring incrementalism which doesn’t deliver much in any sort of meaningful way but I was proven wrong. Under Web Extensions they have added ‘Added support for the offscreen API. (318833@main) (184269255)’ – it may not sound like much but many extensions make use of it on Chrome – For example uBlock Origin Lite makes use of the API for Compiling and Parsing Filter Lists and Executing Advanced Content Scriptlets. It isn’t an actual implementation of the functionality but rather it lays down the foundations so that it can be built do hopefully we may see it that functionality implemented soon. There are quite a few content blockers that make use of it so hopefully with its inclusion the result will be greater feature parity with Chrome which will make extension developers lives a whole lot easier.

    Ubiquit has released UniFi OS 6.0.10 the early access channel – since they’ve moved to a new Debian base I would expect that it’ll be in testing for quite some time. Part upgrade of the distribution probably includes updating the kernel the LTS branch of the 6.x series so it’ll be interesting to see how that translates to better performance, lower CPU and memory utilisation etc. There is also a WiFi access point firmware update for the U7 series currently in the early access as well so that will also be interesting to see when it’ll be released.

    Something I noticed on YouTube are two things – the first being fake interviews to give the appearance that the person being interviewed has something so important to say that they were able to get someone to interview them. The second thing I noticed are the number of ‘influencers’ (or should I more accurately call them ‘salesperson’) pushing AI by creating contrived ‘real life’ examples of how AI can integrate into your life by using their own life as an example. The AI industry must be pretty blood desperate to start funding randos on the internet to talk about how they decided to pay $20 per month for some AI service that is in desperate need to be a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist. If you need to go to such lengths to get people interested in your product or service then maybe that product or service shouldn’t exist in the first place.

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you write what people actually want to read?
    View all responses

    I don’t consider what my audience would like to read but instead just write what I am interested in and if they’re interested in it then great, if they’re not then that is great too. For me my blog isn’t about ‘engagement’ or making money, it is an open diary that allows me to put my opinions out into the ether of the internet and see what happens.

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

Let’s connect

Recent posts