Matisyahu's Blog

  • The week is over.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a leisurely walk before work, came home and then had a shower followed with breakfast. The weather is nice outside and I checked out the news regarding the opening of the CRL project up in Auckland and hopefully it’ll mark the beginning of greater investment into rail. Around a year ago there was talk about a rail project that has been on the plans since the 1950s (link) – how about the Labour Party come out and say “instead of wasting billions on roads of national significance that have an appallingly bad ROI we spend the money on building the aforementioned rail project in Auckland”.

    There have been a few hiccups with the launch of the CRL (link) but it isn’t surprising given that the project was huge, at least in terms of projects undertaken in New Zealand, but I’m sure that as time goes on that issues will be resolved and we’ll learn from the experience which will influencer future mega projects. The other thing to keep in mind is that as part of the CRL project has been the bigger project of reinvesting back into the railway infrastructure after decades of underinvestment which goes further back than the privatisation of rail to way back to the 1970s when Muldoon cancelled the massive rail investments that Labour had planned in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s (Muldoon’s answer to the oil shocks of the 1970s was the ‘think big’ projects that did massive damage to New Zealand’s finances which New Zealand to undertake radical reforms of the 1980s).

    I was watching a video regarding a recent opinion piece over on the Washington Post (link) regarding the evangelical Christian movement. I’ve watched a video commentary but I’m going to read the article first hand so that I can read the full opinion piece – I’m not a fan of basing an opinion on a second hand inpretation even though I agree with what the YouTuhe commentator was saying. I think it’ll be quite a drawn out blog post because I’ll want to vent a bit about quite a few theological issues I have with the evangelical and non-denominational movement (funny how the non-denomination movement has become a denomination in the process of claiming not to be a denomination).

    I saw this video recently regarding the dodgy stuff during the dot-com bubble where analysts were they were going on television cheerleading on and promoting shares of particular companies while behind the scenes they were emailing each other about how crappy they were.

    It will be interesting to see what happens when this whole AI bubble bursts and how many analysts who were cheerleading on businesses were saying the exact opposite behind closed doors. It reminds me of an analyst over at Raymond James (link) making insane claims regarding SpaceX and its future share price – I really wish that there were people keeping a record of what these analysts put there and for there to be a name and same session when they ridiculous forecasts crash and burn. I know I’ll be keeping an eye on 2031 to see how this all works out.

    This isn’t the first time analysts have ben spectacularly wrong – anyone remember when Intel launched the Itanium? There was IDC that claimed back in 1997–1998 there would be a $38 billion global market size by 2001 and then by mid-2001 they shifted the goal posts to $15 billion by 2005 but the problem is that by 2006 the actual numbers were $3.4 billion. Not to pick on IDC because many other but they all do a lousy job at forecasting – not just off by a small amount but really badly incorrect. If you’re wondering, by 2006 the global server shipments of x86-64 sat at $52.7 billion. I’m always amazed by the fact that anyone pays these analysts given how often they get it so spectacularly wrong. I was calling Itanium a failure back in the 2000s but too bad I didn’t have the ability to charge a premium for my rectum plucks. Given how badly analysts get it wrong – maybe buying a dart board and throwing darts blindfolded at it would produce more reliable forecasts.

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  • At the half way point.

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    It appears that I’ve finally got the issue solved with Salesforce and Chrome 153 – the solution is to disable JavaScript optimisation. To do that you need to click on the three dots in the top right corner of the window, click on Settings then ‘Privacy and Security’, click on ‘Security’ then click on ‘JavaScript optimisation and security’ then select ‘Don’t allow sites to use JavaScript optimisation’ from the list. After I did that, I cleared the cookies and cache from Chrome and everything to appears to be working now and by that I mean there are fewer freezes but I don’t think it is completely fixed. There appears to be something going wrong in the optimisation process or a bug somewhere with Salesforce so hopefully Google and Salesforce can have a bit of a chat about getting this situation sorted.

    For dinner tonight I’m going to have some Mexican food delivered – the great thing I love about the place I purchase it from is the fact that they have fresh ingredients, their prices are reasonable and everything tastes wonderful. It is one of those things of finding something that is reliably great so you just keep coming back on a regular basis. On Monday I’m going to go for a walk down to the supermarket to pick up a few items and on Tuesday is the big day when version 27 of Apple’s platforms are going to be released – I might end up just downloading it while I’m going for a walk so when I come back it is just a matter of writing it to a USB stick and do a clean install.

  • Almost the end of the week.

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    I woke up this morning but I decided not to go for a walk – I wanted a lazy Saturday morning to spend time watching YouTube, cleaning the window ledges but I’ve gotten one window into it and realised what I’ll leave it till Monday because I really need to get a bucket of water so I can clean the inside and outside. I logged into my work computer to check for any Chrome, Edge or Firefox updates then checked for Windows updates – the administrator gods have blessed me with the September 2026 update and now that is all installed. I’m going to use Chrome today because the choice is between Firefox forgetting that I gave it permission to use the microphone then occasionally the website crashing or Chrome/Edge where it remembers that I gave it permission to use the microphone but the website crashes to.

    If you’ve ever wondered why there is so much AI slop and content farms online, if you needed reassurance that real journalism still exists – Semafor has released a video regarding ‘Ghost’ creators. One thing to keep in mind that the whole ‘content farm’ thing has been going on well before AI arrived on the scene and blessed us with ‘generic white guy with British accent reads script and appear on two dozen YouTube channels.

    Goes into detail regarding the slop channels and content farms – remember the old saying, “hate the game, not the player”. I’m not denying that those involved have an ethical and moral responsibility for what they put out but at the same time it is important to understand that people act based on the incentives that are in place. It is like getting angry at a landlord – a landlord has made an investment decision based on the tax incentives in place and of course that landlord is going to wish to protect their class interest by backing politicians who ensure their interests are protected.

    I am reminded of a video on YouTube from years ago that has been quoted many times over the internet: “Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.” (link).

    Regarding politics in New Zealand and the latest fiasco regarding the Ministry of Social Development (formally known as ‘Work and Income New Zealand’). To be honest I am not surprised about this given that these issues were bought to the attention of the mainstream by Sue Bradford over 30 years ago as she advocated on behalf of beneficiaries. When the news stories came out regarding the Ministry of Social Development (link) (link) (link) (link) I can’t say I was surprised given sort of thing is a regular occurance – it reminds me of the Yes Minister episode regarding ‘the policy of administration and the administration of policy’ where politicians play the game of blaming the ministry for the consequences of the policies the government of the day passes in parliament.

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  • Almost the end of the week.

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    Woke up this morning, pottered around the house and then went for my walk in the morning. The weather was great and the temperature is mild but too bad summer will come along and the temperature will go up – I guess during summer I’m going to have to get better organised and try to leave earlier for my walk to avoid the heat at around midday. I’m looking at looking a few more kgs which will make the heat in Australia a whole lot easier to handle but I’ll still be wearing trousers but I’ve got some liht weight ones that are comfortable to wear during the summer.

    Work was good today, I updated Edge and unfortunately it has the same issue as Chrome with Salesforce and Firefox has its own set of issues (rather than hanging it comes up with an error message) such as if you tell Firefox it is ok to use the built in microphone but for some reason it keeps forgetting when a call comes through (we use a Salesforce and Amazon Connect integration). Hopefully tomorrow there will be an update for Chrome that may fix it but I have a feeling it is something on the side of Salesforce that was triggered by version 153 because the issue never occured when I was running 152.

    I’m excited about the launch of version 27 – yes, I’ll be upgrading on day one to the new version and like always I’ll be doing a clean install so then if there are any issues it isn’t because of some pice of third party software that is causing problems. It reminds me many years ago of an third party extension that would break the upgrade resulting in Apple having to tweak their installer to pick up the third party piece of software and remove it as to avoid causing problems.

    I caught up on the recent announcement regarding the iPhone Duo – to be honest I’m not exactly wow’ed by the idea of a foldable phone except for when Microsoft had the Surface Duo which had two distinct displays rather than a folding one. The reason why I’m not that into them is because I probably won’t find much of a use for the bigger screen so it would end up being closed most of the time thus undermining the point of a foldable phone. With all that being said, I do like the Samsung clamshell flip phone style one which is quite popular based on people using them when I’m down at the mall.

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  • 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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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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