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 rainy day to today.

    I woke up this morning, pottered around the house and I was going to head down to the store to pick up a few items but it started raining – I’m one of those people who would sooner avoid the weather and stay inside rather than ploughing along to do something that isn’t all that urgent. I’m sorting out my office and what I’m going to do is move the clothes horse out of the lounge room into the office and then move the shelf that is in the office into the lounge room – the big question is whether I put in on the right hand side of the television or whether I put it over where I’ve got the seat at the moment (below the Joan Miro print on the wall) then put that seat over on the right hand side of the television along with the wooden draws (or maybe just put the draws in the office since I have plenty of space to put it there).

    Edit: While thinking about it I ended up going with the plan of putting the bookshelf below the art print (I tried it on the right hand side of the television but it didn’t look balanced – probably due to the television cabinet being wide than the bookshelf which made it look ‘off’. I then moved the chair to the right hand side of the television along with the porcelain elephant from the left side of the television to the right hand side so it is now visible when you enter the room. Regarding the office, I’ve put the draws in there and there is also enough space to put the vacuum cleaner in there too so now it is no longer tucked away as you enter the hallway (not too sure whether it qualifies as a hall way since it is more like a landing pad than anything else). This is what it now looks like in the lounge room:

    Regarding the office, at the moment I have the two monitors I have been given to me by my work but I want to replace it with a single wide screen monitor that can also act as a USB-C hub which will make the desk a lot tidier. The one I’m looking at is the Samsung ViewFinity S65UC 34″ Ultrawide QHD 1000R Curved Business Monitor – it is around the same width as what I have at work and it also means I can then use the monitor as a hub (it includes USB ports, ethernet port etc) so then it is a matter of just attaching it up to the laptop and everything works smoothly (I’ll send the work one back).

    A bit of a surprise today was the release of uBlock Origin Lite 2026.614.1502 which was updated automatically through the Mac App Store (I’m now back to using Safari) and the experience keeps getting better and better. The changes in Safari 27 should also result in better for extensions that make use of JavaScript – AdGuard makes use of JavaScript quite extensively so I’m interested in seeing how well it performs when compared to AdGuard running on Safari 26.5. It’ll be interesting to see what the web benchmarks are like when comparing Safari 26.5 to Safari 27 along with the Web Platform Tests and the implementation along with the level of compliance the implementation is.

  • End of the week, start of a new week.

    Today was a good day, just spent the day hanging out around the house, tidying things up along such as cleaning my dehumidifier, folding the sheets I washed last night before I went off to bed and then after dinner I went for a 16km walk. After completing my work out I came home and had a shower – felt a bit sore – sore legs and sore feet but it felt good having had a good work out. Although it is meant to be the start of winter the temperature is around 13°C which makes me wonder whether we’ll have a mild winter or have I jinxed it by saying we’ll have a mild winter only for it to be the coldest winter on record.

    I haven’t decided what I’ll do on Monday but I think it’ll be a low key affair, maybe a walk down to the mall which will get my exercise in for the day, have a look around at the stores and then walk back afterwards. I am looking at a couple of new duvet covers as well as some sheets because I got a cheap one awhile ago but it has a low thread count, it is mainly polyester and I’m now pills all over it. If I am going to make what I have a whole lot better I may as well replace the whole lot – three sets of sheets and three duvet covers which will replace what I have at the moment because right now it is a bit of.a hodgepodge of Manchester that I’ve accumulated over the years.

  • A good day today.

    I have a nice sleep in today and woke up just before midday, I had a quiet day at home and then headed down to the supermarket to pick up an HDMI cable for my Blu-Ray player that I picked up. After arriving home I had some soup and fresh bread for dinner, watched a few YouTube videos and then went for a 16km walk after being lazy for around a week. It felt good getting out to have some exercise and I worked up a good sweat even with the cooler weather.

    I generally like watching ‘Washington Week’ over on YouTube because it tends to have pretty good guests on and the moderator does a good job keep the conversation flowing however the most receive episode really got under my skin with one of the contributors playing the game of false equivalence:

    The comparison between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders along with the usual nonsense of the ‘horse shoe theory’. It is the usual game that the liberal establishment or more correctly the ‘enlightened centrists’ like to play because they’ve convinced themselves that if you’re in the middle it some how makes you the ‘reasonable’, ‘sensible’ and ‘the adult in the room’. There is no comparison between Trump and Sanders – Trump is a reactionary and Sanders is in the same tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Trump’s politics are xenophobic and reactionary, Sanders is left wing internationalism and understands the importance of the institutions that were set up post-WWII to attempt to deal with conflicts without them descending into another war.

    I’m usually pretty happy to hear alternative points of view but when you play the game of false equivalency then any respect I may have had for you and your opinion instantly disappears out the window. The reality is that the left wing politics Bernie Sanders engages in is centre left – it doesn’t upend the capitalist system but attempts to smooth the rough edges, put some sensible regulation in place and ensure that those with market dominance don’t abuse that dominance in the market. In other words, he isn’t some sort of reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin but as noted previously he is in the same tradition as Franklin D. Roosevelt. If you’re scared of tepid social democracy or equate tepid social democracy to the train wreck that is taking place under Donald Trump then I really cannot take your opinions seriously.

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you think humans will ever colonize Mars? What would life there actually look like?
    View all responses

    I think that humans will eventually colonise Mars but I don’t think it’ll be in my life time barring some sort of massive leap forward in technology. To really make it work you’d need to build a space craft in space (which would never land but remain in space permanently) with enough capacity to store all the necessary food and water, a power source to provide additional power to the solar panels along with ensuring sufficient shielding from not only cosmic radiation but also micrometeorites.

    Once you get that sorted then you’ve got the matter of setting up a base on Mars which would involve creating an artificial magnetosphere (link) however the habitats would have to be inflatable along with small scale nuclear reactors for power along with solar as well. Then there is setting up hydroponic for food production while ensuring that you have enough long life food just in case there is a crop failure.

    Then there is the impact of micro gravity and low gravity – the length of time travelling to Mars, how do you deal with the long term impact of micro gravity, what is the impact on health? then there is going from a micro gravity to a low gravity environment such as Mars which has only 38% of Earth’s gravity – is that enough to avoid health related issues? will there be additional exercises and/or nutrition that will be required?

    Many things need to be addressed and I have a feeling that we’ll need to use the moon as a training ground because unlike the Moon, if something goes wrong on Mars you’re on your own. The benefit of starting off on the Moon is the closeness to earth incase something goes wrong along which allows trying things out, finding out what works the best before takin it from the Moon to Mars.

    Fediverse reactions

  • The week wrapped up well.

    I woke up today and headed down to the store to pick up the last few things I have been putting off but had on my list of things to do. All the old pots and pans I had I took down to the local Salvation Army because I’d sooner someone in need have them rather than them just sitting in a bag in my cupboard or being thrown out at the tip. After dropping it off at the Salvation Army I then headed down to Farmers that had a 55% off sale and I bought another pot because at the moment I just have the Dutch oven but I’ve bought another dutch oven but slightly smaller since it was cheaper than getting a pot so I’ll be using that in future to boil things that I cannot put in the microwave such as pasta. While I was down there I popped into Bed, Bath and Beyond to pick up a throw rug and an extra pillow for my seat which has made it very comfortable with the throw rug providing protection on the seat. I also bought a Blu-ray player so then I could play back the DVD collection I have although I’ll need to go for a walk tomorrow to purchase an HDMI cable since there wasn’t one included in the box.

    I mentioned how there is a big push by Apple towards making the default being on device LLMs and the exception being workloads that cannot be done locally to be done in the cloud. I was having at look at the Windows App SDK on GitHub and I’ve had a look at the latest experimental release for the 2.2.2 branch (link). What stood out to me was the feature “Language Model APIs on GPU [Experimental]” in the list of features added to the build. As Ed Zitron has pointed out, the much of the data centres that have been announced have either been cancelled, not started or severely scaled back as a result I can’t help but get the feeling that with Microsoft adding such functionality to the Windows App SDK that Microsoft are hedging their bets – that maybe the future is edge (running on the end users own computer) rather than it being cloud based except for those work loads that need to be run in the cloud. It makes me wonder whether we’ll see OpenAI offer scaled down versions of their LLMs and charge a subscription that will provided regular updates to their models that developers can download and use locally then jack up the price of cloud based models to cover the fulling cost of running it in the cloud.

    On a side note, there were some Wharfdale speakers I was going to purchase from JB Hi-Fi that looked like a great deal until I found out that it required the purchase of an amplifier thus making it a complete overkill for what I needed it for (the original plan was to get it, hook it up to a WiiM Mini Wireless WiFi + Bluetooth Audio Streamer then having wireless streaming from my computer, Apple TV 4K etc). What I’ve decided to do is instead what for the HomePod refresh to be announced (rumour has it that’ll be released this year along with an Apple TV 4K refresh). I’d be looking at getting two HomePod speakers so then I can have stereo sound at home then use Airplay 2 to stream my music so then I’ll have good sound regardless of the device I am using.

  • Heading off to sleep.

    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.

  • The lounge is complete.

    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?

  • An enjoyable day at home.

    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:

  • WWDC 2026: A day in review.

    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.

  • Happy WWDC day.

    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.

  • Start of the holiday, looking forward to WWDC 2026.

    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.