Matisyahu's Blog

I woke up this morning at 8:30 am to the pitter patter of rain on the roof and according to the Metservice it appears that it’ll be on and off all day so as a result I’m going to have a lazy day at home before work. It feels kind of weird working in the office and then the next day working from home – that experience in the office I guess breaks the monotony which makes the day go a little better.

Ubiquiti has made available in the early release channel UniFi OS 6.0.12 for Dream Routers and along with that there was UniFi Network Application 11.0.83 made available on the same channel for testing. I’m happy that Ubiquiti are taking their time and making sure their software is well tested because in a world of ‘run fast and break things’ it is nice to know that there are still companies around who understand that breaking something can cause more than a mild inconvenience. If a featured doesn’t work on social media it isn’t the end of the world but if you ship a dodgy update for a router then that undermines the ability for someone to work from home then millions are impacted in a real way.

With all this AI investment hype, the hundreds of billions of dollars slushing around, am I the only one sitting here thinking “that is an awful lot of money….where did it come from and if we taxed the wealthy would this whole bubble have even taken place”. Imagine what could be achieved if as a society we actually taxed the top end of town and went after the top end of town when it came to the creative financial engineering they employ to avoid paying taxes. For example, the rich and powerful that borrow against their assets rather than selling them off – to me, that may not be a violation of the literal reading of the tax code but it is abundantly clear that it is a violation of the spirit of the law.

I also look at how businesses borrow to fund share buybacks but when they’re hit financial issues they’re the first to run to the government for a bailout – maybe share buybacks should be banned along with banning businesses borrowing money to fund dividends because they don”t want to repatriate funds from overseas and pay taxes on it. When American politicians complain about China and ‘unfair competition’ what they’re really complaining about (without admitting to it) is the short-termism that far too many western businesses have – focusing on the next quarter without any consideration about what happens in 5 years time. The culture of short-termism unfortunately is probably not going to be addressed until a crisis occurs and from that crisis the western view of running businesses is challenged not just on Wall Street but in the business faculties at universities.

Huawei has made a recent announcement regarding bringing HarmonyOS to the global market – one thing to keep in mind that in China the operating system HarmonyOS has 24% of the market. It’ll be interesting to see whether third party hardware vendors start adopting it for maybe entry level and medium range phones and then in the long term on their flagship models. The gradual roll out globally will also involve setting up relationships not only with OEMs but third party developers to bring their software to the platform and then there is building relationships with banking for payment solutions to complete with Samsung Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay or does Huawei decide to team up with an existing player like Google Pay or Samsung Pay to avoid the lengthy process of building a platform and then negotiating with banks? this is something I’ll be keeping my eye on.

I went for my daily walk today and I decided to listen to a podcast on my walk to stop myself from getting bored – I wore my wired earbuds rather than over the head earphones to avoid getting too hot. I decided to just do two laps and I am happy that I made that decision because I was exhausted after those two laps – a combination of heat and feeling a little dehydrated by the end of the walk but it was satisfying. I had a shower, got changed and then got myself prepared for the day.

I was listening to a recent ‘Windows Weekly’ podcast and then checked out the Microsoft presentation that was broadcast recently online with the launch of nVidia RTX Spark laptop and desktop. A few weeks ago there were articles talking about how Microsoft was downplaying the copilot branding as an indication of maybe Microsoft was scaling back its AI ambitions but I think it is a misreading of what Microsoft has decide to do. I think the problem with Microsoft’s fixation about AI is the fact that they did a lousy job showing to end users how AI integration into search can actually help make using their computer a lot easier.

In the case of using AI to improve the search functionality is the ability to type in something like “I want to change to dark mode” and the functionality appears in the actual search result where you can change in then and there. Compare that to the rather embarrassing use of AI a few months earlier, what they demonstrated was something that the average user finds useful. When Microsoft talked about integrating AI in tasteful ways this is what I am thinking – how can be we use AI so that AI isn’t the focal point but rather end users just recognise the fact that the search functionality got a whole lot better and not care about it was improved. A bit like the AI assisted photo editing, people don’t care about AI but they do care that there is a useful feature in their photo editing app that allows them to tweak a photo they’ve just taken.

The other interesting part of the presentation was the push into locally run models and models run on premises – there has been big push recently recently by nVidia and Palantir regarding ‘Sovereign AI’. As Alex Karp said, why would a business want to want to hand over their proprietary data that gives them a competitive edge – keep the model in house and protect your competitive edge. When it comes to local models running on local hardware then the benefit is that you don’t have to care about how many tokens you burn and if you do need to fall back to the cloud then that will be available. I think for many businesses who went into this whole ‘tokenmaxxing’ are going to start reevaluating their plans going forward – are they better off just buying each developer a decent workstation running an model locally with cloud based AI as a last resort?

If there is a move to more local models then the whole business case that justifies the hundreds of billions being spent on data centres is now undermined. If most if not all AI work eventually becomes something that can be run locally then where do these AI cloud providers sit in the equation? do they have a small cloud based business and charge a subscription for customers to download a local model they can run with the subscription paying for training runs, harness etc? If that is the future then it sounds like a move back from being a cloud provide to a software provider.

Apple released Safari Technology Preview 254 today (link) and it includes a tonne of bug fixes and new features – I scroll straight to the section that deals with Web Extensions and it appears that it is getting some much needed attention. It’ll be interesting to see whether 27.3 includes many of these updates because I’m guessing 27.1 will be for new hardware support and 27.2 appears to be (based on the beta release notes) a pretty modest release rather than including some big updates.

I finished wok at 10:00 pm tonight and I decided that I had been putting something off for far too long – I gave myself a much needed haircut after letting it grow out over the winter to provide some extra warmth during the cold days. It took a while to get through it, thank goodness it is plugged into the wall rather than relying on a battery like my previous clippers, and now it looks a lot better along with the fact thatn when I go for my exercise each day it’ll be easier to wash and dry after having a shower. Tomorrow I’ll head out for a walk and I should find it a lot more enjoyable now that I’m no longer carrying a massive mop on top of my head.

uBlock Origin Lite 2026.1006.1931 has been released and it is now available in the Chrome extension store. It is a fairly light improvement with mainly the filters being updated and so far I haven’t noticed any regressions. I still keep an eye on AdGuard on a seperate profile to keep track of how the two main content blocking extension are performing on the websites I frequent visit that require content blocking. Apple has released beta 3 of 27.2 platform so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it’ll arrive but reports on reddit point to many of the rough edges have been addressed so hopefully it should address some of the concerns people have when it comes to installing a new release on an in production platform that you rely on for your work.

I’ve decided to have an early night in bed tonight so I’ve kept my post pretty short, there are a few things I want to talk about but I’ll leave that to when I have a day off from work so then I can spend that time writing without the stress of getting it done fore a set time.

Went over to mum’s house for dinner tonight and updated all her devices at home – the PC upstairs updated to Windows 11 26H2 and it is robust without any issues but then again I don’t fiddle with settings other then setting it up and installing updates when they appear. It is a Beelink mini-PC and so far it has been pretty robust with great performance – it has a strixhalo AMD SoC with 32GB of memory so out of the box everything just works. The funny part is that at one stage I was going to purchase a Belink SER10 MAX AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 but in the end I purchased a Mac Studio because as much as I have my complaints with Apple the complains pale in comparison to what I would have to deal with if I was Windows 11.

There are rumours that there will be a product refresh next week – Apple TV, HomePod and HomePod mini with leakers pointing to hardware upgrades that’ll enable the new Siri AI to run on these devices. With the shortage of components I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing there being a premium being charged for them when compared to the previous version. I’m personally looking forward to 27.3 or maybe a later release for some of the improvements show cased in the Safari Technology Preview releases make their way into the mainstream release. I think the biggest leap forward for people who make use of extensions on Safari will be once the offscreen API is fully implemented – what is implemented in Safari Technology 253 are the first steps to hopefully seeing maybe it appearing in a future update of Apple’s platform.

Chrome 155 appears to be shipping tomorrow (based on the Chrome platform status website) which has some modest improvements. With Chrome 156 scheduled for release in two weeks time which comes with a big change related to the IndexedDB implementation. Many websites make use of IndexedDB and based on the notes related to the change (link) it will be interesting to see whether there is a marked improvement in the reliability of Chrome when dealing webapps that make extensive use of such an API. Salesforce for example makes extensive use of it for client side functionality so when it rolls out to both Edge and Chrome I’ll get to test it in a real work environment and see how it performs.