I had a bit of a late night tonight but I’m going to head off to sleep. I gave the new seat a good test run and I have to say it is a huge improvement over my old chair. The old chair has been moved into my bedroom and the chair I had in my bedroom is now sitting in the lounge room (in the photo I had uploaded earlier, the chair is th one sitting under the outside chair cushions). The temperature is cold at the moment so I’ve turned my heater on to keep warm – hopefully this winter won’t be too cold.
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"
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The chair for my desk has arrived after ordering it in the early hours of Monday this week and it actually turned out to be smaller than expected which is a good thing. The website said it was 82cm wide, 82cm deep and the seat height is around 42cm high which left me concerned that maybe it would be too big for the place where I was going to put it (thus requiring me to move the furniture around to make it fit). I think the measurements they give on their website was the box itself because the seat height is around the same as my previous seat and the width and depth isn’t anywhere near around 82cm but I’m happy with the dimensions and it is very comfortable.
I’ve finally got my lounge room looking like I want it to – natural colours, use of wool, cotton, wooden furniture which gives the space a cosy feel which will be great during the winter.
As for dinner tonight, I’ll be popping down to the supermarket and I was hoping to have some Silverfern Farm lamb rumps along with a salad or maybe some roast vegetables. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get there – I guess the other option is to have some venison with plum sauce.
On the matter of politics, I was watching the following video:
And it reminds me of the same sort of logic that took place regarding how neoliberalism would result in world peace – the idea that if we created a world where we’re so intertwined, so interdependent that no one would be stupid enough to blow up the whole system that it would secure long term peace. The whole argument being derived from the idea of rational self interest or more correctly the assumption that prosperity being the motivating factor for leaders of individual countries. There is a small problem with that thesis, as we’ve seen that firstly not every nation is motivated by the same incentives and when you have a situation like the United States where a moron like Trump is voted in then the system that was dependent on rational self interest now has an irrational person in a position of leadership who upends the system.
What amazes me though is this idea that the United Staes can be trusted given how Trump has made it clear that even countries that the United States has agreements with are simply being ignored. The United States has a free trade agreement with Australia but that didn’t stop Trump from imposing tariffs onto the Australian exports to the United States. If the president can just unilaterally decide to walk away from a treaty then what does it say about any of the other treaties that the United States have signed up to? why would anyone take seriously the idea of having an agreement with the United States when the current president or a future president can just walk away the moment it becomes politically inconvenient without the legislative body going through the process of debating and the repealing the legislation that enabled the treaty to be enforced.
From the New Zealand perspective we (both National and Labour led governments) have attempted to get a free trade agreement with the United States without much success. When one considers how the United States have treated the Australia, given that there is a sign treaty, maybe this is the moment for both major parties in New Zealand to wake and stop wasting time believing that a free trade agreement is just around the corner. Let’s assume that through some divine intervention that there was a free trade agreement with the United states – how do we know it won’t be undone by the next president? let’s assume that the next president signs up for the CPTPP – again, what stops the president just deciding unilaterally to walk away from the agreement?
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I had a great day to day, got a text message from the courier company with the tracking number and it appears that it had arrived in wellington so I had the expectation of delivery on Wednesday but it didn’t work out . I’ll be getting up early on Thursday because I want to catch them before they arrive. If all that goes well then I’m going to put on my sneakers and exercise gear to then go for a long walk – getting back into exercise after being a bit lazy for a week and a bit.
There is some good news on the Webkit/Safari front with the focus of the next Safari release focusing on fixing up bugs, compatibility, compliance and under the hood optimisations (link) and along with that was the Safari Technology 245 release being made available (link). I’m looking forward to the release version 27 of Apple’s platforms because I have a feeling that one is going to have experience the changes first hand, that many of the improvements will require one to test it using websites one goes to rather than relying on what others have reported. I’ve been following the web platform test and the one thing to recognise that there is a big difference between implementing something and passing a test vs implementing it and it working in the real world. It is easy to charge ahead to implant something but if the implementation is broken hen it may as well not even exist. Something like over 500 bug fixes have ben made to Safari and some parts have been completely rewritten.
There is the developer beta however the one thing to keep in mind is that at this stage there is still plenty of changes that take place not to mention debugging code is included which can reduce performance. One thing to remember that in the beta process that the major heavy lifting has been done and during the beta cycle it is about fixing up reported bugs, putting on the finishing touches, addressing developer feedback regarding new features etc. If version 26 is anything to go by then I wouldn’t be surprised if we end ups seeing it being released around mid to late September but that is very much dictated by the progress being made – generally iOS gets released before to line up with the launch of a new iPhone and possibly an early release of tvOS to coincide with the rumoured Apple TV refresh.
Something I forgot to mention from the past blog I made regarding WWDC is how there is a big focus on optimisations. I guess that even if you’re not a Mac Neo user that you’ll get the benefit of Apple optimising their operating system for their new entry level operating system which will flow up to the higher specced devices. The following video gives a good overview on what one can look forward to:
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This morning I woke up at 4:45am NZ time so I was all logged in to watch the live stream at 5:00am NZ time. If you’ve been following the news regarding WWDC then you’ve got. good understanding that the WWDC this year isn’t about new features but rather it being a ‘Snow Leopard’ style release where the focus is around finally getting Apple Intelligence working along with refining the rough edges of Apple’s platforms along with bug fixes, optimisations focused around making the system work better by making ‘under the hood’ changes. This blog post is what I noticed after having watched both the keynote and the platform state of the union (the blog isn’t structured in any particular order but rather just grouping common topics together).
When it comes to Apple Intelligence I think it is important to note that there were many rumours regarding the next generation of Apple’s models would be based on Gemini (I speculated that myself but then again it was more guess work rather than statement of fact since I was only dealing with unverified rumours) but in an after keynote interview (link) with Craig Federighi, Amar Subramanya and Mike Rockwell, and Sebastien Marineau-Mes there was greater insight in the role that Google played in terms of Apple Intelligence.
What was interesting was the focus by various speakers regarding Apple Intelligence where there appears to be a concert effort to have as much of the processing being done on device and the private cloud computing being used as a ‘last resort’ rather than first port of call. I think this is very much driven the reality that running an AI datacenter is incredibly costly and given how AI provides are already looking at moving customers to ‘pay as you go’ models or subscriptions with severe limitations, I think Apple want to set realistic expectations. With the focus on local models I also wonder whether the use of cloud based AI is going to be something of a crutch until hardware eventually gets to the point that having to use cloud based AI will become either a thing of the past or only used for niche issues that users are willing to pay additional for.
What I found interesting is the emphasis being made by Craig Federighi regarding the importance of AI being tastefully integrated where it based sense – a swipe at Microsoft’s and Google’s attempt to ram it into everything regardless of whether the user wants it nor not? the demos that were given were actually things that I could see myself doing – practical use of AI rather than it being a tick box project of “I don’t know whether people will use it but we’ve got to ram it in there to keep the shareholders happy”. Apple appears to be very much aware of the backlash that Microsoft is receiving with commentators referring Microsoft as Microslop by many online – make sure if you’re going to integrate AI that it is actually useful and it is unobtrusive for who don’t have interest in using it.
There is talk about usage limits but no details have been given how however it appears, at least as it is being reported on Macrumors, that it maybe linked to the tier plan you’re on when it comes to iCloud+. With that being said, it’ll be interesting to see whether in conjunction with the rate limits whether there will be the ability to pay for extra usage and if they go down that route then what meterage will be employed – a set number of requests per month for an allotted amount? If they are going in that direction then it’ll have to be some sort of way in which the average person an understand it. with that being said, given that we don’t know the specifics I guess it’ll come down to how things turn out during the public beta once launched so then Apple can get some sort of vibe check regarding what sort of load they’re getting from early adopters and how that’ll be extrapolated out to the general population once the stable version is released.
The demos of the on device models are a big improvement – there was a video a while ago which compared a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra to an Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max regarding editing a photo. The editing of the photo were basic things like removing an element out of a photo and the examples that were given the results of the iPhone 17 Pro Max were pretty horrible. I’ve seen even more recent examples and the models haven’t gotten much improvement over time. The presentations were impressive however it’ll be interesting to see what the results are in the real world when the public beta is released and people start sharing photos they’ve edited.
At the moment the process of automating is done via Shortcuts however that requires the end user to have a reasonable level of technical skills however there will be the ability to create multistep automation simply by asking your phone to do just that. It’ll be interesting to see how reliably it does it but for me I would sooner manually make any sort of short cuts and read the documentation if I have trouble understanding how to do it.
One feature I didn’t expect to hear a lot about but was actually talked a lot about is the device management features that parents can use for their children’s devices. It is interesting the various speakers and how they talked about responsible use of technology, a heathy use of technology at a young age so there is a good mixture of using technology in conjunction to playing outside with friends, exercising and other non-tech based activity. The impression I got was that the announcement was as much an announcement of features as it were a signal to regulators (who are currently being pressured by voters to keep ‘big tech’ in check) that they’re taking their concerns seriously and are proactively doing something to empower parents rather than waiting for regulatory agencies to step in and start passing mandates on what the tech industry needs to do.
When it came to the optimisation side of the equation they have examples of how they’re optimising how text is rendered, replacing old C based technology such as the font rendering engine with a modern Swift based font rendering engine.AppKit controls, SwiftUI controls and UIKit Controls with a unified backend, allowing users to tweak the tinting/glass effect when it it comes to the Liquid Glass design language. I think for the under the hood changes it’ll be a situation of waiting until the release of version 27 of their platforms to ‘feel’ the change. It’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see a noticeable improvement in the number of security bugs being found in areas where it is common for those bugs to be found once they’ve been replaced with one rewritten in Swift.
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I had a good day today, I set my alarm for 4:45am and I went to bed early on Monday night so that I could get up to watch WWDC 2026 Keynote Live – It didn’t disappoint given that for months before hand there was sufficient information leaking out that this would be a ‘Snow Leopard’ release along with finally delivering on the Apple Intelligence promises that were made over the last couple of years. As long as you went into the keynote with realistic expectations then you wouldn’t have left disappointed.
I went to sleep after watching the keynote and then I woke up to watch the platform state of the union – it builds upon what was mentioned in the keynote but once again it was very much focused on getting Apple Intelligence sorted out along with addressing bugs, optimising the system to use less memory and perform better on the same hardware etc. I’ve got exhaustive notes where I’ll go into more detail but I’ll post that blog later on – either later on tonight or tomorrow depending on how far I get through the notes I wrote down.
The winter is getting pretty cold in the Hutt Valley with the current temperature sitting at 10 °C however it feels like 3°C at the moment. I’ve finally turned the heater on and warming up the house because if the choice is between a higher power bill or getting sick then I’d sooner deal with that higher power bill.
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Finally finished the day and now looking forward to Monday where I’ll pop into the local NZ Post depot to pick up my delivery as well as stopping in at Farmers to find out what my birthday present is and while I’m there I”ll pick up some pots so I can boil pasta when I need to. While at work I had to order a few things from the supermarket and got them delivered because I was running low on a few essentials plus I wanted to have some fresh ciabatta with my soup for dinner tonight.
I finally took the plunge and ordered the chair from Target Furniture after doing some measuring where the chair will go I found that I have enough space at the desk for it to fit. For those wondering, I went with the standard one rather than the swivel chair (link):
It is a bit unconventional to have such a chair at my desk but I’d prefer having something with comfortable padding and support then combine that with the spare pillows I have which I can have on the chair, I’ll be able to use the desktop computer for long periods of time in comfort. Regarding the current chair I have there, I’ll probably either put it in my bedroom or maybe donate it to the local Salvation Army but I’ll see what happens when the time comes.
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A rather uneventful day today – got up out of bed, went for a small walk around the block to get some fresh air before starting work. I decided to create some chia seed pudding but using the ‘Up and Go’ protein drink (125ml of protein drink plus 50g of chia seeds) to see how well it worked out. I started work and at around afternoon tea I checked to see how it had turned out and to my surprise it actually turned out really good. It had the consistency of ‘dairy food’ but with more protein and fibre but low in calories so after having it for my afternoon tea and my late nigh snake I made some more for tomorrow. I’ll probably have to get another container so then I can do some meal prep as one of the glass jars I had broke so now I just have three (I really need 4 because each ‘Up and Go’ is 250ml so I split it in half so I’d rather not have a half finished container sitting in the fridge waiting to be used after making a third chia seed pudding).
Work was pretty quiet today which enabled me to get some office work done and after work I made use of the new dutch oven to cook up some bolognese – a combination of canned cherry tomatoes, bolognese sauce and some chill flakes to add some extra heat then combine that with onions and mushrooms. I cooked it on ‘low and slow’ to reduce down so then the mixture was thick with wonderful concentrated flavours of tomato, chilli etc. I couldn’t be bothered cooking up the pasta I got because I really need some pots and pans so then I can boil it and all I have is the dutch oven which would require me to put the meat aside, wash it then heat up the water then cook the pasta. I’ll have a look on Monday at getting myself a pot so then when I cook bolognese in future I’ll have the pasta cooked at the same time I take the bolognese off the element.
Farmers emailed me that they have a birthday present as part of being in their Farmers Clubs so on Monday I’ll head down there to see what that is all about then head down to NZ Post depot to pick up the parcel they couldn’t deliver on Thursday. On Tuesday NZ at 5:00am which works out to be 10am pacific time in the United States. I’ll probably go to bed early on Monday night and then wake up early so then I can watch it live but for me the more exciting party will be the ‘Platforms State of the Union’ which is still a ‘big picture’ look but gives more technical details. There are rumours making the rounds regarding version 27 of Apple’s platforms being a ‘Snow Leopard’ release with the focus on getting the new Gemini powered Apple Intelligence working along with refinement rather than revolution – plenty of rumours regarding sorting out Liquid Glass into what it should have been (the funny think about Liquid Glass is that it reminds me of Aqua with it’s ‘lickable interface’).
I’m still having a look at Target Furniture because I really do need a better seat at my desk because right now it is rather average and not really comfortable when using the computer for long periods of time. I might send up giving mum the seat instead. This is the seat that I am looking at (link):
Although there is a swivel version for around the same price, something like that will go with the rest of the lounge room and will be a lot more comfortable than the chair I have today. If I am going to order it then it’ll need to be on Sunday so then it arrives on the week I’m on annual leave.
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I had a good first day back at work although the weather is lousy I was able to get up early to head down to the post office to ship off the pone, watch and case which allowed me to get back some of the money I had spent. The security cameras that I ordered had to be signed on delivery meaning that when they came on Thursday I was in bed asleep when it arrived so I’ll pop down on Monday to pick it up since I’m in no great hurry. I’ll install the cameras in the same place where I have them now and the improved battery life should make that keeping them charged should be relatively easy and the new base station, from what I understand, supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz but I’m unsure whether you can select which frequency the cameras will use to connect to the base station.
I checked for an update on my Samsung TV and there was an update ready to be installed – I didn’t notice any difference although it is slightly more responsive. The Apple TV 4K on my new television is going well and although I talked about giving Samsung’s Tizen a try the big problem is that I have an Apple ecosystem where the Apple TV 4K acts as a HomeKit hub for my house which is what I use to ‘glue’ everything together such as my security cameras (I have two, one in the backyard pointing towards the shed and one where the side gate is which shows anyone trying to get into the backyard or walking up the driveway. I’m unsure what I’m going to do with my old setup given that it is over 10 years old and Is no longer receiving software support.
I’ve been watching videos regarding the GTX Spark announcement and the more I hear the more I once again seeing Windows as a giant boat anchor around the neck of hardware vendors who create a wonderful platform only for it to be undermined by the operating system aka Windows. I say this because when you cannot add long path name support to Explorer after adding support to Windows in Windows 10, version 1607 then I don’t have much confidence you’ll get many of the other issues fixed. When you cannot even be bothered getting your own applications and system components to support long path name support then I don’t hold out much hope that you’ll actually fix the variety of other issues that people have raised.
The UniFi Dream Router 7 is going well – I’ve kept all the settings the default settings out of the box with the only change being that I’ve changed the router IP address to 10.0.1.1 (the same as the Apple Airport router back in the days), enabling UPnP and setting the WPA to version 3 but other than that I’ve stuck with the defaults. I’ve found that the less I tweak with something then the less likely things are going to go wrong. I guess that is a pretty good lesson for life, don’t make things more complicated than they need to be and something is the default then maybe find out why it is the default before changing them (aka ‘The Parable of the Fence’).
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I’ve stayed at home all today because the weather has been pretty abysmal but in the mean time I’ve sorted things out – I’ve sold my Samsung phone and watch along with the SmartTag2 and I’ll be sending it off either on Friday or Monday next week depending on when the money arrives in my bank account. I’ve copied the emails from Google Workspace and got that up and running, my Apple TV 4K is setup and working and I’ve now got an Apple Watch Ultra 3 where I find the navigation a whole lot easier than the Samsung watch along with a better battery life due to watchOS being better optimised when compared to wearOS (which is based on Android). I’ll be writing a longer blog about my experience with the Samsung and Google ecosystem but I’ll leave that to another day.
I’ve been watching the Build 2026 keynote and it is interesting to see the Nvidia RTX Spark announcement but what has made it interesting is the unreported data centre cancellations and the selling off of land that was purchased to future data centre expansion. The combination of a capable platform that can run LLMs locally, talk about OpenClaw and combine that with the data centre reversal makes me wonder whether the AI bubble, rather than bursting, will be like a a hot air balloon in a cartoon that gets a hole in it and the flies around letting the air out. The dream that AI could be like SaaS aka a ‘licence to print money’ has turned out not to be reality given that the past booms were always about “if we build it up, we’ll lose money in the sort term but once we reach economies of scale we’ll start making a profit”. The problem is that the cost of AI, both inference as well as training, is too expensive and the inaccuracy too high that even if they were to move to token based billing the problem is that the amount of wasted tokens because the model gets it wrong undermines the argument that AI is cheaper than hiring actual humans to do the job.
The interesting part are the new models that were announced that are specialised and scaled down so that they can be run locally. The impression I get, there will be a place for cloud based AI but for many end users for what they want to do then the local model will be good enough – the ability for locally run models to pull down information from the internet and run the inference on device rather than in the cloud. I think that as the hardware becomes cheaper to run models on device and the scaled down versions are good enough to to do what most people want, the desire for end users to use something like ChatGPT (let along pay for it) will disappear – I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, assuming Anthropic and OpenAI survive, they will become enterprise and developer focused businesses that’ll be locked behind a pay wall with no free chatbots like we see today or even chatbots at all.
At the end of the day, at some point the backers of your organisation will start demanding a return on investment or at least some sort of pathway to profitability and that is damn well next to impossible if you’re giving away ChatGPT for free to 700+ million users where you’re losing money on every single inference (this is the reason why boasting amount 700+ users but only 3% paying for the service (and even then with the subscription based users there is still money being lost on every transaction) is a just a ridiculous thing to boast about. It is like saying you have the best restaurant in town because of the number of customers but ignoring the fact that people are coming to your restaurant because you’re giving food away for free.
On a side note, I’m enjoying the UniFi Dream Router 7 – got it all setup, rock solid and going reliably however I decided to move back to my ISPs DNS server and I have found it working slightly faster than using a third party one. I originally had changed it over to Cloudflare however the ISPs DNS has been rock solid so I think I’ll be sticking with that. What I found interesting is there was a message about there being IPv6 being available on my WAN connection however when I enabled it (DHCPv6 with the Prefix Delegation size set to auto) it didn’t get an IPv6 address. I checked out on Geekzone to find out what had happened and it appears that maybe Spark is testing IPv6 support to a limited number of customers or possibly just employees so I guess we’ll find out whether anything comes of it. Oh, and on a side note, I decided to stick with Skinny since the amount I pay each month for my mobile is the cheapest on offer and the internet connection is a lot cheaper as well (I’m on a 900Mbps down and 500Mbps up).
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Woke up this morning and decided that I’ll count the walk around town as part of my walk – I caught the train into Wellington and walked down to the technology shop to pickup a few pieces (I’ll write up a review in the next few days). While I was in there I had a look around at the new Wellington library that has reopened along with the construction around that area There is slow progress being made but it is gradually getting there – it appears to be quite a big job and I guess part of it involves seismic strengthening.
When I was in Wellington I picked up a Unifi Dream Router 7 which will replace my gateway (the gateway, cloud key and switch will be sold or used to upgrade my mum’s setup to provide better wireless coverage. While I was there I ordered a replacement security cameras – the ones I have are around 10 years old and no longer receiving software updates along with the fact that the batteries are dying and the integration with HomeKit is rudimentary at best. I ordered it at the since it needs to come down from Auckland so I’m looking forward to getting it installed.
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