Matisyahu's Blog

  • A rainy start to the day.

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    I woke up this morning before my alarm went off and it was kind of spitting down but I thought I may as well get the walk in before it really starts to rain. Funny enough, after coming back the heavens opened and it started pouring down and it has been that way for the last few hours – the temperature has also dropped so I’ve had to put my heater on to get the house back up to a comfortable temperature.

    Ubiquiti is has some big updates in the pipeline over the next few weeks – there is the UniFi OS 5.1.33 currently in the release candidate phase of testing . The really exciting updates are in the early release area with UniFi 6.0.7 which updates the Debian distribution that runs on Ubiquiti hardware to Debian Trixie which upgrades the Linux kernel from the 5.x series to the 6.12 LTS series. UniFi Network Application 10.6.106 has also been released to an early release along with the niFi Access Point & Wireless Bridge 8.8.7 that was released 6 days ago.

    The big announcement for version 27 of Apple’s platforms was announced – it’ll be released on 14 September US time which translates to 15 September NZ Time. All I have to say, I am so bloody happy that it has been released on that day because it is my day off where I can spend all day, doing a clean install on all my devices – maybe I’ll get lucky and see Ubiquiti push out an update as well. From all the reports the release is going to be rock solid from day one rather than one of those situations of “umm, I think I might way for the first x.1 release before I consider upgrading”.

    I logged into my work computer this morning and Salesforce is still freezing with Chrome 153. I did a completed clearing of all cookies and cache, shut down the laptop completely then cleared out all the vents for any dust then turned it back on again. Things were going well until the Salesforce page would freeze again but the funny thing is that the browser itself hadn’t frozen because I could click on other tabs and everything was runnign perfectly fine. I also have to note is that the issue doesn’t appear on any other website so I’m unsure as to the cause of it. I’ve setup Firefox and I’m using that now but I do hope that it is just a matter of waiting for the second update Google pushes out in the same week some time that will address the problem.

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  • Looking forward to Thursday.

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    Today was a good day but there was quite a lot of work that I uncovered that I’m going to work through for the rest of the week. It is one of those things where you shouldn’t go looking for more work because you might end up getting just that but once found you quickly realise that a lot of it should have been sorted out age ago. I logged into my work computer and upgraded Chrome to 153 however I’ve had some strange behaviour with Salesforce so what I’m going to do on Thursday is reboot my laptop, do some cleaning of the vent at the bottom to remove any dust build up – I’m always surprised how dust can build up.

    I mentioned before about the update pushed out by Microsoft so when I go around to mum’s house next week I’ll check to ensure that it has updated itself. Mum has a Beelink mini-PC which has been really go so far – the AMD Zen 5 strix halo SoC performs well although I have to admit mum isn’t exactly putting it under a lot of pressure. I’ll also need to check to ensure that Chrome updated itself as well.

  • Back to work.

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    Woke up this morning thinking that the Apple event took place but then I realised that it is Wednesday US time which is Thursday NZ time. I checked for updates for my mobile phone and iOS 26.6.2 which fixes an update issue when updating via a mobile data connection – is that an indication of an update being made available on Thursday? I guess we’ll wait and see.

    Google has released an update for Chrome which boosts the version from 152.0.7977.83 to 153.0.8010.37. There area. huge of security fixes with this release. 230 in total with a decent number of them either classified as high or critical and it also marks the move to a fortnightly release cycle so get ready to see more frequent updates being pushed out. It isn’t surprising that such a move is taking place given how LLMs are being used to hunt down security vulnerabilities and bugs which necessitate getting updates out as soon as possible.

    Microsoft has also released a massive update for Windows 11 – I’ve got it on my work computer however normally there can be a delay before it is made available which can range from a few hours to a few days. The update has a list of some quite nasty security bugs so I wouldn’t be surprised if they make it available as soon as possible but then again I’ve got a pretty good security setup with my router and firewall settings which help keep things secure particularly when working from home.

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  • Back to work tomorrow.

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    Well, Thursday will be when Apple has their big announcement so hopefully we’ll find out when version 27 of their platform is released and we’ll probably get version 26.7 update released maybe Thursday as well. There are plenty of rumours regarding the announcement – the usual iPhone announcement will be made but rumours are circulating regarding an AppleTV, a HomePod update plus a few other updates being released. Google is also scheduled to release Chrome 153 tomorrow but that is assuming there hasn’t been delayed due to the Labour day holiday that was occuring in the United States.

    When I came back from the shop the house had been fully aired out however the temperature had dropped quite a bit so I closed all the windows and then closed the curtains on. At the moment the temperature is 7°C outside so I’ve got the heater on at the moment – hopefully this is just a cold spell before we get into spring then eventually summer. There are forecasts regarding super El Niño may make the weather even more unpredictable so it’ll be interesting to see whether summer is hotter and if so that will require me to purchase a fan – I’ll probably look at getting a Dyson Purifier Cool which is a bit on the pricey side but once you buy it then it’ll last for a long time vs. getting a cheap fan like I did last year and now it has fallen to pieces so I had to throw it out.

  • Reorganising and getting ready for tomorrow.

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    I got up at 9:00 am and had a chat with a few friends online and then after that I had a shower, got changed and after I got ready I found the delivery I thought was stuck in Auckland had arrived on my door step. The two tshirts and the hoodie were put into the wash – I’m always in a habit of washing clothes before I wear them so then any dye that may run is washed out in the first wash. After getting that sorted out I opened up all my windows and got ready to go down the road.

    I went down the road and purchase some clothes hangers – some wooden ones for delecate clothing items and some standard metal ones that are covered in a plastic/PVC coating so that the clothing doesn’t get damaged. I picked up a few items for dinner tonight and caught the bus back home and once home I moved all the sweat shirts and hoodies in my tallboy to clothes hangers then the long sleeve shirts I in my band wardrobe I put into the second one. After moving that around I had more space in my tall boy to put tshirts and a few extra items of clothes so that now it isn’t so crowded – some order to the chaos.

    Once again Trump makes a post over on Truth Social and for most normal people they would see it as a self own:

    The reason why the MAGA types don’t see it as a ‘self own’ is because they’ve fused their own identity with Trump – the net result? anything that is good for Trump is good for them even though any normal person can easily seen that it isn’t the case. This is cult of personality type behaviour of behaviour you see when it comes to any decision Trump makes. When there is a good outcome then it is a ‘masterful gambit’ and ‘5d chess’ where as if everything turns out bad then his devotees will claim he got ‘bad advice’ – ‘the great leader’ can never be wrong in the eyes of his cult members.

    It is the same sort of behaviour that authoritarians use when they claim that they’re the living embodiment of the will of the people and if you oppose him then you are against the will of the people which makes you the enemy of the people. What you’re seeing with the United States is 50+ years of running the education system into the ground, treating educating not as an institution to prepare future citizens but rather it has been turned into, to quote George Carlin, “smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to realise how much they’re being fucked over”.

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  • A cold and rainy day.

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    I woke up this morning before my alarm went off – it was raining and the temperature had dropped from the usual 15°C to currently 8°C so I turned the heater on to warm up the house. I’m in no hurry to do anything today on my day off so I’m going to relax at home, watch some YouTube videos and maybe later on when the weather gets better I’ll head out for a walk. For breakfast today I had a protein bar, bananas and some vogel toast – I’ve been getting back into eating more fresh fruit and vegetables now that we’re getting into spring and summer soon which should make seasonal fruit more affordable.

    For lunch I had pumpkin soup but I mixed the fresh pumpkin soup from my fridge with a packet of ‘Only Organic Boost Soup Pumpkin, Red Lentils & Coconut’ – heating it up in the microwave then finished it off with the leftover sour cream from last week along with a drizzle of sweet chilli. I was going to have some vogel toast with it but the red lentils in the soup already do a good job bulking it up along with the addition of pumpkin chunks in the soup. It makes me wonder whether I should start having more lentils in my diet to boost fibre beyond the typical sources of fibre.

    We’re around 2 months away from having the general election in New Zealand and I’ll probably vote the same way I usually do – Labour for my local MP and Green Party for my party vote. The rationale for splitting the vote is based on the opinion that Labour, when left to their own devices, they will become wishy-washy and neoliberal where as if they’re forced to go into a coalition with the Greens then the Green party will provide a Labour led government with a backbone. Is every Green party policy going to make it on the agenda? probably not but it will at least push the government to the left vs. Labour being merely a watered down version of the National party.

    On a side note, I’m under no illusion that many of the problems New Zealand is facing are going to be resolved with a new government because the source of many problems originate outside of the government’s control. I would be advise political parties to be cautious and not to overplay your hand and make promises you cannot keep but instead keep your vision realistic. We’re at a time of great disruption thanks to the mad king in the White House meaning that there are many things outside the control of the New Zealand government and many of the solutions that are available have a long time line – building more renewable capacity, greater investment into electrification of the rail network etc. not only come with a price tag but also time to build then bring online.

    Such investments are great for the long term but in the immediate term when it comes to the cost of living the relief there needs to be delivery as soon as possible with the least amount of delays possible. The bigger question are the possible solutions can be provided with immediate effect while ensuring that the assistance doesn’t add to inflation and have the biggest impact. There are also issues regarding productivity and the fact that for over 4 decades we have had China acting as a giant inflation sink – it kept the overall inflation rate down (keeping in mind that the inflation rate is an average so some were going but they were offset by other prices going down) but now China is no longer the low cost outsourcing capital of the world.

    This is why there is a big push with AI, automation and robotics – this belief by some politicians and investors that such investments will in the long term improve productivity and exert downward pressure on inflation. I believe that there will be some improvements in productivity but I don’t think it’ll be even close to the promises being made by these cloud based LLM companies or many of the other AI and robotics companies. The reason why I say that is because we’ve seen promises of massive productivity improvements in double digit numbers but the reality the improvement was in the single digits.

    The problem is that with each technological leap forward the improvements become more incremental with each improvement in much the same way the deregulation and reforms at the beginning had improvements but once the biggest obstacles were removed the each reform since has had incremental improvements. For example, when weaving fabric went from a manual loom to an automated steam powered one was a massive leap forward but every improvement since then has been incremental – from steam to electricity, improvement it the quality of output, less waste, greater speed etc. all have had improvements but not as much as that initial leap forward when moving from manual to machine.

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  • A rainy and overcast day.

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    I woke up this morning still feeling under the weather but I still decided to get out of bed and go for a walk so I can get some fresh air – 11.37km walk although the weather was overcast with some drizzle however at the time of writing this blog it is currently raining. According to the Metservice it looks likes that for the next couple of days the weather is going to be a bit lousy but I’m going to play it by ear to see what happens.

    I checked the Microsoft Edge installed on my work computer and just like Chrome there was a small update. At the moment Microsoft is working to bring Edge releases in line with the Chrome releases. It would be interesting to know how much customisation Microsoft does but from what I have seen they still use the Clang compiler that comes as part of the LLVM project however it is compiled against their own C++ library rather than using the LLVM so maybe that requires work on their side to make sure it compiles cleanly against their own C++ library. On macOS it probably uses the built libc++ which is included as part of the LLVM project – the performance has always been top notch ever since Apple made that change many years from the GNU libstdc++ to the LLVM libc++.

    On the news front, once again we have the powers that be in the United States engaging in the time honoured tradition of xenophobia – first it was the USSR and the ‘evil empire’ and now it is Sinophobia regarding AI (or more specifically LLMs). Funny how just as there is momentum building from grass roots organisation that the United States government trots out the hysteria of accusing anyone not wanting a data centre in their area as either backwards, poor or siding with the chinese with claims that people are being influenced by 200,000 Chinese social media accounts.

    Why address the genuine concerns that people have when you can simply dismiss any opposition to data centres as either siding with the enemy or claiming that they’ve been brainwashed by some cabal of sinister actors through social media. A recent story from Axios came out regarding a social influencing campaign (link) with X/Twitter claiming that there are 200,000 accounts spreading anti-data centre content – amazing how a social media outlet that is owned by an organisation whose ‘total addressable market’ in their filings is primarily the result putting all their hopes in LLMs in the cloud being the future is defensive about something that is in their vested interest.

    What do the pro-AI pro-data centre CHUDs do as a result? they use it as an example of how any opposition to AI and data centres isn’t something organic but instead manufactured by ‘the United States greatest adversary’. I really have to wonder whether these people actually do any rumination over the facts before opening their mouth. Have such individuals ever thought that, if the claim by X/Twitter was true, that maybe the 200,000 accounts on X/Twitter is nothing more than a psyop by United Stats adversaries to convince Americans to double down and triple down on LLMs in the cloud at the expense of other potential AI models? aka “if they don’t us to do this then we should double down and prove them wrong”.

    If I wanted to send the United States to the poor house then would I create a psyop that creates opposition online so then the Sinophobic CHUDs in the United State end up doubling down by wasting billions on a dead end technology thus giving China, who is spending a fraction of what the United States is spending on AI, the room to explore better alternatives to LLMs. In other words China would do to the United States what the United States did to the USSR and basically force them into spending their way into bankruptcy by believing in a threat that didn’t exist (aka ‘The Star Wars Project’) thus resulting in China being the last country standing and not having wasted billions on dead end projects.

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  • Off to bed.

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    Another ‘cloud gaming’ vendor has put restrictions on the number of hours you can use their service per month and that follows nVidia doing the same thing on their service back last year in December. You’d think that these AI obsessed twits would have learned from their ‘cloud gaming’ fiasco but alas they’ve convinced themselves that something that is even more hardware and energy intensive such as running LLMs in the cloud is going to be the big winner. Microsoft is the one that has introduced restrictions (link) – the subscription service for games (aka attempting to be the Netflix of games) didn’t work for obvious reasons and the ‘cloud gaming’ is turned out to be unprofitable or not profitable enough to make it worth the amount invested into the infrastructure.

    As I’ve mentioned in the past, the economics of LLMs in the cloud is based on this idea that you first build out the infrastructure then once economies of scale are reached the costs plateau, the revenue grows and voila you have a profit. You can companies taking the SaaS model and believing they can apply it to everything and anything but that simply isn’t the case – cloud gaming has shown it cannot be done unless with limits and now LLMs subscriptions have usage limits. The whole business model is a house built on sand and in the case of cloud gaming it is a solution search of a problem – the phones are already fast enough to run modern games so how about just making your games run better on the hardware instead of delivering games in the most inefficient way aka the cloud.

    I think the interesting thing to see will be when the nVidia RTX Spark devices start shipping, both laptops and desktops, and whether we’ll see people move over to local models. Claud code can be use used with a local model and if you match it up with Gemma 4 model and given that the nVidia RTX Spark device can come with up to 128GB then it’ll have more than enough processing grunt and memory to run the model. Same can be said with running Gemma 4 on a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra and 128GB – plenty of power without having to worry about on going to costs of having to pay per million tokens. Personally I think the greatest threat to LLMs in the cloud isn’t people protesting data centres but rather people realising that they can grab an open weight model, run it on a decent machine and now having to worry about on going costs other than powering the machine they’re running it on.

  • Feeling under the weather.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a walk then came home, had brunch however I had this painful feeling in my stomach so I rushed to the bathroom – it felt as though someone had kicked me on the stomach it hurt that much. I ended up having to lay on my side – that that point I rang up my boss and advised him I wouldn’t be in work today because I wasn’t too sure how long it would last and whether it would reoccur later on in the day. I’m unsure what could have caused it but if it reoccurs then I’ll get in contact with my doctor but I’m sure it is something minor.

    Before getting up this morning at 6:34am there was an earthquake (link) – it was a sharp jolt and I braced myself for another shake but it didn’t come. I’m lucky in that I’m a single story small single unit so there was no damage – one of the benefits of having houses built of wood is that it allows movement when there is an earthquake. It is something that you get used to when living in Wellington.

    I mentioned last night that I was watching the last episode of Silo season 3 and at the end of the episode when Congressman Daniel found out the name of the women he keeps seeing when he wakes up from his deep sleep – the name of the woman is Helen Drew. He finds who she is that out after completing the operation regarding Silo 17 – he realises that may she may have been in Silo 17 or maybe Silo 18 or any of the other Silos. The moment that he realises that his actions are no longer divorced from his own personal life is the moment I think he realises the horrific thing he did to Silo 17. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Silo season 4 when it is released and his character arch – does he fixate on just Helen Drew or does he have an epiphany which changes how he makes decisions in his role.

    I’ve been listening to a few episodes of ‘The Ezra Klein’ show regarding how liberalism used to be a revolutionary force of upending the old order and pushing a better future but gradually it has become the very thing that it was rallying against. There was a more recent episode entitled ‘The reason why people hate government’ which kind of builds upon the larger thesis of why liberalism has failed. I would argue that liberalism in the United States has failed because it has failed to evolve and what it has evolved into is social democracy and democratic socialism which as been built outside of the liberal movement. Social democracy and democratic socialism are the natural evolution of liberalism resulting in those who call themselves liberals today have become what the conservatives were at the time liberalism came on the scene.

    The problem is that the liberals in the United States today are more or less repeating the same talking points that conservatives made 40-50 years ago – liberalism has evolved into social democracy and democratic socialism but liberals want to maintain the privileges they have accumulated. What has essential happened in the world of liberalism is a group of people have decided that they’re now in a position of privilege, they wish to protect that privilege and as a result you see the massive push back within the Democratic Party against anyone daring to promote policies that would be considered mainstream in any other country in the world – single payer health care, paid paternity and maternity leave, making collective contracts and unionism the default rather than the exception plus many more policies.

    As I’ve said in the past, what one would call the ‘corporate democrats’ are essentially the Rockefeller Republicans from 50 years ago – they’re in the Democratic Party because they’re too embarrassed to be associated with the Republican Party so they took over the Democratic Party instead. What is the net result? the corporate media play up the rebranding with the nonsense of calling these former Rockefeller Republicans the so-called ‘moderate wing’ of the Democratic Party because the ownership class want to convince the middle and lower class that the Rockefeller Republicans are now the new moderates which has resulted in the whole Overton window being pushed to the right thus labelling what used to be centre-left policy as being on the far left.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best and worst airport you’ve been to?
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    The worst airport has to be Dubai – it is like the labyrinth which is made worse when you’re travelling from Australia to France via Dubai then finding you’re having to trek from one gate to another gate with the mixture of uncomfortably hot trains to numerous escalators and lifts. The easiest would be Heathrow which was easy to navigate particularly when I wasn’t feeling the best and having to take the train out the airport then from there I was able to find the check-in desk the locate the lounge with the flight being close by.

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  • Spring is looking good.

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    Woke up this morning and there was a good amoujnt of rain so I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of going for a walk then suddenly getting caught in a downpour. I had my breakfast then caught up on some news then when the weather improved I opened up all the windows to get some fresh air in – something I’m getting myself into a habit each day so I can get some fresh air in while working from home then closing them all once the sun goes down. Another perk of things warming up is that I can now turn off my heater – the evenings aren’t cold and my place keeps the warmth overnight without the need for additional heating.

    The one thing I just tried then was weather the ‘Daily Writing Prompt’ issue had been fixed with Safari 27 Beta but unfortunately it hasn’t been fixed. I’m not holding out much hope that the issue will ever be fixed as I’m unsure whether it is an issue related to Safari or WordPress but it hasn’t been fixed. I guess it is very much like what Microsoft experienced with Edge (the non-Chromium one) where people would give it a try then find that the moment that their favourite website wouldn’t work proplerly that they would give up and go back to what they knew would work which was Chrome.

    At the moment I’m watching Silo season 3 episode 10 which is the latest episode in the season. The show starts where episode 9 finished off which gives a lot more context as to how these Silos came into being, the rules, the purpose of them etc. There has been only glimpses in previous episodes with many speculating online what these hints could mean but this final epsiode answers a lot of questions but still leaves many unanswered. I’m looking forward to season 4 when it is released which will be the final season.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
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    Characters who make painfully stupid decisions that are clearly going to result in a bad outcome or failing to listen to those who have more knowledge results in the whole group or family survival being threatened. This is really common in dystopian television shows where there is always someone who ignores someone offering advice who has far more knowledge then the someone in the group insists “but we must save them” only for the group to end up losing 2-3 people in the process trying to rescue that one person who refused to follow advice.

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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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