Matisyahu's Blog

  • Almost the end of the week.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, I opened up the curtains and let the sun flood in while relaxing in bed watching YouTube videos and writing my blog. I decided not to go for a walk today but instead I’ve been doing some free weights randomly throughout the morning along with some squats, stretching and focusing on flexibility and mobility. It is something that I want to maintain as I get older – being able to get older while maintaining a quality of life by being able to have the mobility to engage in physical activity.

    There is an interesting video by David Frum in regards to the situation in the United States bond market (the 10 year bond yield in New Zealand is lower than in the United States):

    It is interesting the point he raised regarding what JP Morgan said regarding lending money and his replying being the first thing he considers is the character of the person doing the borrowing. The whole system is built on a system of character – are you someone who can be trusted, are you good to your word, do you have a track record of borrowing and paying it back. When you sign agreements then rip them up, you threaten to annex Greenland and Canada, threaten to invade Mexico to deal with drug cartels caused by the United States demand for drugs is causing? it should be no surprise that the market is stepping back and saying “this clown car needs to pay a premium if it wishes to keep borrowing”. That doesn’t even touch on the “if you raise interest rates I’ll capsize the economy” threat that Donald Trump gave to Kevin Warsh:

    Again, as a lender would you trust a country run by a president who is threatening to capsize the economy because he doesn’t have a basic understanding of economics? part of me wishes that Kevin Warsh had announced a 50 basis point rate increase rather than 25 basis point increase and when Donald Trump complained that Kevin Warsh turned around and said, “if you don’t like that then tough, we’ll pile another 50 basis points increase…the more you whinge, whine and complain the higher the interest rates will go..the ball is in your court Donald Trump”. I know it is petty but part of me wants the whole AI bubble to pop along with the whole sharemarket bubble – everything is going up in price and we can thank the coke snorting ketamine microdosing Patagonia jacket wearing wankers from Silicon Valley and Wall Street for this mess we’re in (who also bank rolled Donald Trump getting into office). Yes, I needed to get that off my chest because for last 10 years we’ve been living in a hell where things have gotten worse for everyone except the top 1%.

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  • Weather has cleared up.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, pottered around the house and then went for a walk – the weather has kept up although I was expecting possible showers for the next couple of days. I arrived home, had a shower then checked the weather and it appears that the weather has cleared up so hopefully it’ll mean fine whether for the rest of the weekend. I’ve started getting back into using my barbells in between taking calls and dealing with customers – a great way to squeeze in some extra resistance training rather than having to put time aside for it.

    I tripped over some clips of ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ clips on YouTube even though I had unsubscribed and stopped watching the videos a while ago – everytime I see one of his out of touch monologues I am reminded that I made a good decision to unsubscribe. When your whole political philosophy can be summarised down to weed, woke and Israel then it isn’t surprising that your takes are absolutely horrendous. When you’re being called out and your boomer level answer is “well, I’m not too sure about that” – I mean, come on mate, you do a show once a week, you’re telling me you couldn’t read a few books, check out some news and opinion pieces, a blog or two to see what the left actually believe rather than second hand half baked regurgitations from enlightened centrists over at the Washington Post and The New York Times? At this rate Bill Maher is making my little rinky-dinky blog look like professional commentary worthy of an award.

    Anyway, after having a week of so-called ‘AI experts’ talking about how their LLM is “so powerful it could end humanity” – yeah, I think the biggest problem aren’t LLMs but humans doing stupid things like taking a chatbot at its word. For example over on RNZ we had a special operations command analyst trying to half ass a report by using a chat bot (link). Yeah, the world isn’t going to end with the ‘AI taking over the world’ but some lowly analyst relying on a chatbot because the person involved wants to half ass it and then everyone up his chain of command blindly goes with whatever the word prediction machine spits out. Remember the old saying “never attribute to malice that can be explained by incompetence” – this is what happens when you anthropomorphise a word predicting machine and claim that it has “human agency” when in reality it’s a glorified bullshit generator.

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  • A good day today.

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    Woke up this morning at 9:00 am, I went for a walk but decided not to have brunch after arriving at home because I didn’t really feel like anything. I finished work at 10:00 pm tonight and decided to have an easy meal of a ciabatta roll along with some canned tomatoes heated up in the microwave with some chili flakes stirred into the mixture. It is an easy ‘tomato soup’ although I wish I had some diced up brown onions because that would have added an extra kick to it. Most of the time when I have a meal I like to keep it pretty simple – don’t over complicate what is ultimately just a meal for one along with the fact that I’d sooner do that on my day off when there isn’t the urgency of getting it cooked in a set amount of time.

    Google released an update to Chrome today which upgrades it from version 153.0.8010.48 to version 153.0.8010.53 which includes a back ported fix for the Salesforce issue (along with a few other website that were impacted based on specific system configurations setting off the bug). So far things have been pretty robust with the reliability and because the fix has been merged into Chrome 154 and future releases it should hopefully mean we won’t see the issue reappear in the future. In the release there were 16 security bugs that were fixed up (link) with many of them picked up by Google themselves. Although LLMs can give hints that maybe some code could pose a security risk but humans are still required to investigate further due to the potential of false positives.

    I made a post today on BlueSky saying “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” which was kind of missing context regarding what I meant when I posted it. There tends to be a narrative that lowercase liberals like to tell themselves that society has gotten better because they don’t see evidence of reactionary beliefs. Just because you don’t see evidence of reactionary beliefs doesn’t mean they’ve gone away and the election of Trump demonstrated that a significant portion of the American population had been hiding their beliefs. What the election of Trump said to those who had been keeping their beliefs on the down low that they could now come out of the closet and make their beliefs known. I think for many liberals it was a shock because they sincerely had convinced themselves there had been progress when in reality the forces of reactionary politics had hidden themselves by flying below the radar.

    I think the narrative that liberals told themselves was that progress was inevitable like it was some sort of law of nature, that as society progressed forward that it was like a ratchet – the gains were locked in. The problem is that society doesn’t function that way, that as easy as progress is made the progress can be undone just as easily – just look at the concessions from the capitalist class that unions won prior to the rise of neoliberalism then in less that a generation those hard fought concessions from the capitalist class were taken away. That the welfare state that the working class fought as a compromise to actual socialism was slowly dismantled – death by a thousand cuts and it was all done in the name of efficiency and fiscal prudence.

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  • Rise and shine.

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    I had a wonderful good night sleep last night and I woke up at 9:00 am – the first time in a week where the alarm woke me up rather than me being awake before the alarm went off. There was a fair bit of rain last night but at the moment the weather is fine with the Metservice forecasting that it’ll be fine all today however tomorrow there will be a bit of rain on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday I’m tempted to go for a bit of a day trip right into town, walk along the waterfront and enjoy the fine weather – you can’t beat Wellington on a good day.

    I’ve been following events regarding the recent Chrome upgrade and the impact it has had when using Salesforce and other websites. There is a bug case that shows some progress being made (link) and although there are people reporting that there particular system configuration appears to be addressed there are still people reporting either issues or the occurrence of the page freezing has been greatly reduced. The problem is with software is that it isn’t always a quick fix – you may come up with a fix, deloy it and then find either a corner case will appear or a regression because of a scenario not picked up during testing.

    When I was experiencing the problem on my work computer what I did was disabled the Javascript optimisations which reduced the number of times the page froze but it wasn’t a complete solution. I was unsure whether that actually contributed to fixing the problem or whether it was just luck but it appears that maybe there was something going on with Javascript engine and by disabling optimisations it reduced the frequency of the freezes (based on reading through the bug report). It is always good reading going through bug reports and see the process in action of tracking down the source of a problem).

    Regarding the recent interview where Scott Bessent said he was ‘the house’, I’m going to have to stop you there. Yes, it would be correct that you were the house if you controlled both fiscal and monetary policy – if you controlled both then you could deal with the budget deficit and public debt unilaterally while using the brute force of monetary policy (aka quantitative easing aka ‘money printer go brrr’) to push the yield down at the end of the bond curve but Scott Bessent doesn’t have that control. The reality is that Scott Bessent isn’t ‘the house’ but rather he is subletting a room, has his own bathroom but shares kitchen facilities – he may have the biggest room in the house but that doesn’t make him ‘the house’.

    The problem is that for almost 30 years we’ve had artificially low interest rates because of the flawed way we’ve been calculating inflation – consumer goods have gone down in price but necessities such as renting a house has gone up in price (the rent is based on the cost of paying back the mortgage plus maintenance, insurance etc – house prices are going up because of cheap money taking the path of least resistance which is in many cases to property) but the inflation is calculated as an average. When you calculate inflation based on an average then the problem is that consumer goods have gone down in price but necessities have gone up in price with the inflation rate remaining low.

    The problem is that people can cut back on consumable products but they cannot cut back on necessities so while the cost of a television has come down in price the cost of a rent has gone up. Long story short, for many decades the inflation has been largely hidden until now however China is no longer the cheap workhouse of the world, wages are rising, productivity in the construction sector in many countries has stagnated which has made building houses more expensive even if you exclude all the other factors such as regulatory approval, zoning restrictions etc. (link).

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  • Finally logged off for the evening.

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    I’ve logged off from my work computer for the evening and this time I actually finished up at 10:00 pm rather than doing some extra work. I’ve finally cleared out the last remaining bit of work thanks to that extra work done after I clock off on previous days so now it is just a matter of maintaining it rather than having to make up for lost ground. It is one of the habits I picked up when I was working in fast food: a) always end the night and week with nothing required to be done for the next day so each day is start with a clean slate b) make sure you do a little bit of cleaning every day so then it doesn’t build up to become a massive job.

    I was watching an interesting video a while ago and there was an interesting comparison between LLMs in the cloud being an unviable business model and then comparing it to rise in cloud gaming. I raise the comparison because when both LLMs and cloud gaming launched it was sold as ‘all you can eat for a flat price’ but now we’re starting to see usage limits, in the case of LLMs if you use a third party developer tool you have to pay the API price. What this demonstrates is that the business model isn’t viable because cloud gaming and LLMs aren’t like SaasS where each additional user has a negligible additional cost and even for a heavy user of a SaaS they will still only be using cents worth of resources when compared to the dollars charged each month.

    How did they get the business model so wrong? because it was based on a set of assumptions that never made sense. The assumption was that it would be a matter of scaling up data centres and then eventually you reach a critical mass where your costs plateau as your user base increases. Basically it is the SaaS playbook but applied to cloud gaming but there is a small problem – the economics of SaaS cannot be applied to cloud gaming and LLMs because both of those services are so much more resource intensive. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that LLMs by their nature are probabilistic so not only are you going to have something expensive to run you then have customers slamming the system when the answer that is given is completely useless.

    That doesn’t even touch on the issue of cloud gaming being a solution in search of a problem given how powerful smartphones are these days – even the Samsung A series has more than enough grunt for the casual gamer. Then there are game consoles, buy once and then buy your games – no usage limits on how much you can play the game for. Same can be said for LLMs – do you run them in the cloud and not know how much something will cost until it spits out a ‘kind of working’ solution or do you just buy a decent workstation from Apple or a Strix Halo AMD platform with 128GB of RAM then just the model locally – choose one of the free open weight models or an LLM from one of the big names like Google and others, tweak it and use it with a developer tool of choice.

    Why do businesses do stupid stuff like the above? because they pander to idiot shareholders who don’t seem to understand that technology a) progress doesn’t occur in a linear upward fashion but rather there are sudden burst then a period of consolidation and refinement then out of no where another sudden burst of innovation b) the businesses that are household names such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon etc. are how mature businesses – the rapid hypergrowth days are behind them, they’ve now become a blue chip stock like IBM. Unfortunately these businesses appear to be going through the equivalent of a ‘mid life crisis’ and the equivalent of a middle aged man buying a sports car is a mature company throwing their money at something that they think will make them ‘cool, hip and into it’ to the idiots on Wall Street.

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  • The day started off fine.

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    I woke up this morning and went for my daily walk, came home, had a shower then logged into my computer. In the first half of my shift I was able to work through the last remaining bit of paper work which should mean a lot smoother sailing. I was able to pick up a few things and reported them to the appropriate department who will investigate them further. Given that I work in an industry that has a lot of government oversight it is important to report things that don’t look quite right even if you’re unsure because there are legal consequences if things aren’t exactly the way the government needs to be.

    Within the last couple of hours it has started raining outside which makes me happy that I took advantage of the opportunity to get a walk in at the beginning of the day. I’m finding that getting up at 9:00 am is becoming easier over time and now it is second nature to the point now that wake up before my alarm goes off. The other benefit of having a good routine is that it is allowing me to stick to my meal plan that I have organised as well as keeping track of calories.

  • An exciting day at work today.

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    Well, after logging in and finding that the update to Chrome had been rolled back to the previous version I then went hunting to find out the reason behind the chaos caused by one little update. On the Salesforce website (link) there is a link to the Chromium bug (link) but there are mixed signals as to whether the issue has been fixed – some are reporting the issue resolved while others have said they have been able to reproduce the bug on version 153.0.8010.48. The one thing to keep in mind that Salesforce is a complex platform and many organisations have third party services integrated into it, many customisations to suit their workflow so the cause of the problem could involve quite a lot of work to narrow down the cause and then eventually find a solution.

    I’ve got version 153.0.8010.48 installed on my Mac becase I do like the notification in the tab when someone sends a message in Google Chat rather than having to keep switching back and forths to avoid missing a message. Although I can get uBlock Origin Llite on Safari it never performs as well as it does on Chrome – I also noticed a bug on Goovle Chat that when you send a message that it doesn’t scroll down to the new message you sent but rather it stays on the last message that the person sent to you. I’m unsure whether it is a Google or a Apple problem but as I’ve said in the past – end users don’t care who is at fault they just want the software to work. It is the reason why the first Microsoft Edge (using their own web and javascript engines) never gained traction – because the moment that a website didn’t work the end user threw their hands in the air, installed Chrome and went on their merry way. There was a conference where a Microsoft developed outlined the statistics based on the telementry data they collected so I’m not surprised when Microsoft were faced with an uphill battle or adopting Chromium they took the pragmatic choice.

    I’ve been following the whole Ed Sheeran and Macklemore situation – many people have put their opinions out there so I thought I may as well put out my own. There were other acts that were Ed Sheeran tour who decided not to continue on the tour – smaller acts who had a whole lot more to lose from not performing than if Ed Sheeran put his foot down and not compromise. Whether you agree or disagree with Macklemore I think one thing is clear – the moment you capiticulate to bullies and bend the knee to their demands is the moment that you paint a massive target on yourself for further bad actors making demands from you. Don’t be surprised if we see more venues flexing their muscle and using economic coercion to silence speech they disagree with. This is the reason why I oppose cancel culture and why it is important to start having a serious conersation about freedom of speech in the light of how public spaces have become privatised, places where people congregate are now controlled by private interests.

    The technology industry are laying off more people (this topic came to my attention when reading an article about the recent Oracle layoffs and Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson’s company wide town hall meeting) and it always amazes me the number of people involved in the tech industry who act shocked that in the capitalist system the purpose of a business is to maximise the return on investment for shareholders by minimising costs and charging the maximum amount the market is willing to bear. It reminds me of the discussions on Slashdot by tech employees with a libertarian streak that had convinced themselves that they were the indispensable strata in society that allowed them to command higher wages which is why they didn’t need to have unions like blue collar workers. Well, here we are almost 30 years later and I think tech workers are slowly waking up that maybe those blue collar workers were onto something when it came to unions and collective bargaining. Then again unfortunately for many people they would sooner hold onto myths that comfort them into believe the world operates a certain way because facing the reality of how the world actually works is rather unsettling for many.

  • Back to work.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a brisk walk, came back home, had some breakfast and then a shower. The weather is great and the temperature is getting warmer but given the El Niño coming in the New Zealand summer it’ll be interesting to see how crazy the weather will become. Last night I had a chat with mum about the backyard and getting a archgola put over the patio area which will provide some shelter particularly when drying clothes outside on an overcast day.

    While chatting I talked about two other things I want to look at doing in the long term which is the replace the fence at the back with something tidier along with the fences on the side of the property. After replacing the fence I want to then replace the shed with one with a proper floor and is hooked up to the power so then I can move the chest freezer from the office outside along with enough space left over to have a clothes horse as well so that I can dry clothes in there with a dehumidifier.

    I logged into my computer today and the tech team who manage the devices have rolled back the Chrome installation to Chrome 152 (looks like it is the long term branch) which should hopefully fix the issue with Salesforce. The strange part is that it only occurs when I’m either on a call or after a callout if I am logged out of Amazon Connect the issue doesn’t occur which makes me wonder whether there are multiple sources of the problem rather than just one thing that needs to be fixed.

    Regarding the midterms in the United States, I am always reminded of the often repeated phrase ‘checks and balances’ by Americans as if the system had some sort of internal self correcting mechanism that doesn’t require human agency. I read an interesting article (link) and once again it is clear, at least to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, the promise of ‘checks and balances’ is dependent on having the right people in the right places and when push comes to shove they do their job even in the face of political pressure.

    Long story short, the system is only as good as those involved in the system which means it comes down to humans doing the right thing when it counts. The whole system is based on people following the rules and the problem is when you delude yourself with the repetition of ‘checks and balances’ you’ve convinced yourself that some how the system has agency of its own and will repeal bad actors like an immune system dealing with an invasive germs, viruses, bacteria, and other threats. When you realise that isn’t the case then you suddenly recognise the fact that the constitution isn’t something special but rather a social contract that only works as long as everyone abides by it.

    It reminds me of Max Stirner and the phrase “it’s all a spook” – these things we put up on pedestals only have meaning because we as a society give them meaning, we imbue them with meaning because the reality is that they don’t have meaning outside of what we humans give it. The moment you start attributing agency to an institution is the moment you absolve those involved within the institution of agency – “well, we don’t need to worry about the Republicans because there are checks and balances which will keep the Republic safe!”. This is where you get Americans convincing themselves they have the worlds most perfect most wonderful government ever with the repeating of ‘checks and balances’ with the expectation that “everything will work out in the end” like some sort of bedtime story book.

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  • Back to work on Wednesday.

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    I’ve just come back from having dinner down at the local restaurant to celebrate mum’s birthday – mum picked me up and we had a wonderful meal along with a desert (my sister, her partner and two kids also joined). While we’re down there I was able to do some grocery shopping after the meal because I needed to pick up some odd bits and pieces. Woolworths had a special on a 3 pack of caned baked beans for $5 so I grabbed a few of those along with some Pepsi Max and other food for the week.

    I watching tonight’s episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’ where Tau Henare addressed the issue of anti-Maori racism that rears its ugly head every election. The reason why anti-Maori racism keeps appearing every election year is because it can be summarised best by President Lyndon B. Johnson:

    “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

    It gives person or a group of people who have no power or influence someone to look down on so that it allows them to feel better about themselves. The capitalist class telling the middle class to scapegoat the working class then the working class being told to blame the beneficiary for their problems then they tell the beneficiary that the problems in their life are due to immigrants. It is a giant pyramid of the capitalist class directing the classes below them are the reason for their hardship is the close below them.

    As for the CRL (as mentioned in the episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’) regarding the cost overruns, this goes back to the larger problem which is the lack of a Ministry of Works in terms of long term planning, training up and retaining those with the expertise and experience to be able to lead nation building projects on a large scale. The other component are the continuous legal challenges by professional oxygen thieves hell bent on challenging the CRL every step of the way – a group of idiots claiming the they own the land 30 metres under their house and threaten to bring the whole CRL project to a grinding halt. Then there were legal challenges about building a station in Drury – again, more money wasted dealing with legal challenges and every day the project is stalled is money being wasted.

    Regarding my previous post regarding Chrome, I’ve decided to stick with Safari because it really integrates better into the Apple ecosystem. Although there are those couple of bugs I’ve talked about I don’t think it warrants making life more difficult by straddling two ecosystems. I’ve just run the Jetstream benchmark and it is considerably higher than what Safari 26.6 was hitting along with Chrome as well so I’m going to stick with it – maybe in around a month and a half we’ll see 27.1 released and we’ll see the improvements present in Safari Technology Preview 252 make their way into Safari 27.1.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
    View all responses

    Depending on where they are in their life the advice would be different. If they’re at high school I would remind them that they may think that high school is the centre of their universe but 5-10 years after you leave high school to go to university or polytechnic no one is going to care what happened during those years. There is a reason why the saying “high school hero, real world zero” holds true because apart from those who seem to be perpetually stuck in their high school phase, everyone else moves on to bigger and better things after high school.

    There is no set path and don’t look for a preset way to give your life meaning – you have to go through that process yourself to find what brings you meaning. When you just ‘phone in’ or to use an existentialist term ‘living in bad faith’, the process of finding meaning in itself brings meaning to your life in much the same way that Albert Camus noted in his essay on ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy because his conscious acceptance of an endless, meaningless struggle turns his punishment into an act of ultimate rebellion.”

    Lastly, don’t compare yourself to others – comparing yourself to others and where other people are at in their life is the ruiner of joy that may have in your life. Rather than celebrating the small achievements you have made in your life you’re constantly comparing yourself to others so you never get to enjoy the feeling of having achieved something. It is something that activists are reminded – celebrate the small victories allows you to recharge your batteries which will enable you to continue fighting for the bigger long term goals.

    Just to round it up – stop caring whether something is cringe. If you want true freedom then embrace the cringe, become the cringe, because I can assure you that 99% of people are living their lives completely oblivious to what you’re doing in your own life. There is a tendency of assuming that people are making judgments about you but the reality is that most people are too occupied in their own lives dealing with their own drama with little concern with what other people are doing in their own lives.

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  • All devices updated.

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    I spent the morning upgrading all my devices to version 27 – DFU installation on my iPhone, a reset and update on my Apple TV 4K, watch updated and both Macs are updated as well. The one thing you’ll find is that version 27 is a lot more polished than version 26 when it was released – not major changes but instead a whole lot of smaller things such as the glass effect, getting that weird floating appearance when it came side bar where as now it was gone back the way it was in previous versions.

    When it comes to individual applications, everything feels more responsive, the icons are cleaner and less ‘bubbly’, copying files and completing tasks is faster than before, networking in terms of sending and receiving files over the network is faster etc. Long story short version 27 is what version 26 should have been and it always boggles my mind as to what the purpose of ‘Liquid Glass’ actually was because if one was inclined to conspiracy theories then one wonders whether it was a distraction because they failed to get Siri sorted after years of promised.

    I’ve checked out WordPress with Safari 27 on macOS 27 because previously I had tried Safari 27 on macOS 26.7 – it shouldn’t make a difference but I thought it would be best to at least test it on both just in case that wasn’t the situation. The ‘daily writing prompt’ on WordPress isn’t working on Safari 27 running on macOS 27. I’ve disabled ‘cross site ‘prevent cross-site tracking’ and I even tried disabling ‘hide ip address from trackers’ and that didn’t fix it either. Maybe this is something that I either need to get over or I go back to using Chrome because it doesn’t have these ‘issues’.

    Half way through this blog I moved over to Chrome on macOS 27 and there aren’t any issues so far – I’ll get around to installing it on my Mac as well. It is unfortunate that developers only seem to care about whether it works with Chrome and if you’re using something else then it is a situation of ‘it sucks to be you’. I’ll see how things progress going forward but in the mean time I’m still having a look at One NZ and 2 Degrees for a possibility of changing my internet and mobile phone provider.

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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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