Matisyahu's Blog

  • A chilly day at home.

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    Toady has been a productive day although the temperature was cold and there are forecasts of the temperature will be pretty cold for the next week or two. I’ve got my heater on at the moment and set it to 20°C so that it keeps my place at a constant temperature during the day. I was expecting a whole lot of work after coming back from my weekend but apart from email everything else was ok which made the day go pretty quickly. The current tough economic climate is impacting all businesses including the one I’m working at but luckily in the Asia-Pacific region we went through the efficiency drive so we’re not going to need to do anything extra. I really do hope that the local New Zealand economy picks up soon because there are plenty of New Zealanders doing it tough at the moment.

    I’ve finally installed Chrome 154 and things are going well so far (my work laptop is on Chrome 152 but I think that is because after the fiasco with Chrome 153 it is understandable that they want to extensively test it before allowing the update to go ahead). The one thing I have noticed with Chrome when compared to Safari is how aggressively Safari puts to sleep inactive tabs asleep which can cause problems if you click on a tab only to find that you have to refresh it to get the website visible (when I click on tab after being inactive the page will be white) where as at least in the case of Chrome there is the ability to disable that. The reality is that I’ve got 24GB of memory so it isn’t as though I’m running it on a system with limited specifications which is why I really don’t need those extra memory optimisations that Safari is employing.

    There is some good news recently – 2 Degrees turned a profit after spending the last few years consolidating all their acquired brands into a single brand. I’d say that as they move customers over to the new brand you’ll eventually see the old brands disappear off the internet in much the same way that One NZ is doing the same thing by moving their customers gradually over to their new modernised billing system that brings all their services to a single billing platform. The other good news the National Ticketing Solution has rolled out in Canterbury – it has been a long time coming but it is a ‘world first’ to have a national ticketing solution which will mean if you live in Auckland but travel somewhere else in New Zealand you can use the same NFC card. The timetable for it coming to Wellington is 2027 but one thing to keep in mind it is a gradual roll out and that schedule is very much dependent on whether there are any unforeseen hiccups that appear.

    There is also more good news in terms of bringing rail back to Christchurch (link) which will really help with the huge amount of growth that the region has been experiencing – could Christchurch eventually become an Auckland sized city? it would make a lot of sense for that to happen particularly when you consider that most of New Zealand’s energy generation is in the South Island so it makes sense that is where most of the development should be taking place particularly when it comes to manufacturing. It appears that things are gradually happening, slowly but surely, so maybe in a few years time we move beyond building a business case and start seeing new rail lines, electrification and rolling stock being ordered.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your best healthy eating habits?
    View all responses

    Take your time and eat slowly – enjoy the meal and the added bonus is that it gives your stomach time to feel full rather than eating in a hurry and still feeling hungry afterwards. Ensure that you’re getting enough protein and fibre – fibre slows down the release of energy from your food so then you don’t have a massive sugar spike followed by a crash and protein allows you to keep feeling fuller for longer.

  • Another rainy day.

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    I woke up this morning and saw it was another rainy day – I love the sound of rain on the roof as I am laying in bed typing on my laptop. I was hoping that the weather and temperature would improve but I’ve had to put my heater back on because the temperature has dropped back down to the single digits. I’m fortunate enough that I can work from home which makes the experience a whole lot more tolerable and I’ve checked my work laptop for a Chrome update however it appears that the tech team have kept it on Chrome 152 for now until they’re confident that Chrome 154 hasn’t broken Salesforce again. When your whole organisation is run on a single piece of technology then you cannot afford to have the sort of problems we experienced with Chrome 153.

    Chrome 154 has been released and there are a whopping 108 security fixes (link) and 11 of the security fixes are for critical bugs. I’m going to install it on my personal laptop and desktop after work then give it a try but in the meantime I’m going to have a read through of the platform changes that were introduced with version 154 (link). The interesting change will be in Chrome 156 with the ‘IndexedDB: SQLite backend’ change which should hopefully make a whole lot of the web apps and websites work more reliably with move SQLite backend for IndexedDB. When I originally saw the note about the change I didn’t realise how many websites actually use it but a quick bit of research uncovered just how many websites actually rely on it. YouTube also makes use of it so I wonder whether the bugginess I experience when using it something to do with it – maybe I’ll get lucky with Chrome 156 and the issues will disappear.

    There is a great interview on a channel I’ve just recently subscribed to on YouTube because I’ve been following the whole Canada-United States conflict. I’ve been following it because the conflict serves as a microcosm of what is happening more broadly between the United States and the rest of the world.

    Unfortunately there are too many within the business and political world who don’t seem to be able to understand the general rule of thumb that the moment you capitulate to the demands of the United States then you’ve signalled weakness. The moment you signal weakness then it is open season – you’ve already capitulated once so why wouldn’t you do it again then again then again to the point that the United States make it clear that as a country you don’t actually have a backbone. Sure, you can get angry and get pulled down into the mud and fight with the United States or you can accept that the relationship has ended and simply walk away thus leaving your clothes free of being covered in mud and the rest of the world look on the United States lashing out at other countries while furiously rolling around in the mud.

    Just to round it up, there is an interesting video regarding the increase in interest rates and how the interest rates serve as a benchmark for all other interests to be set (in much the same way that the minimum wage serves as a benchmark on which all wages are set relative to it).

    Which makes me think that the reason why Kevin Warsh isn’t giving the sort of long term guidance that previous Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States have given is because his goal is a controlled deflation of the AI bubble rather than a pop (coming out and just straight out saying “the AI bubble is too big and we need to do something about it” may cause a panic resulting in an crash). With that being said, there is a comment regarding what China did do their property bubble – the ideal situation would have been not to allow it to happen in the first place but the second best would be to pop it when you have the opportunity to do so. Yes, it has involved some pain in China but as a consequence we now see money being invested into productive sector rather than asset speculation. Such investment includes investments in robotics, chip fabrication, moving up the value chain to move beyond just providing a cheaper version of what already exists.

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  • A relaxing weekend.

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    Before mum came over for dinner tonight I pulled out all the appliances, swept behind them and then got out the mop to give the floor a good cleaning. I have to admit that because it is just me who lives at my home I can get a bit lazy when it comes to doing the mopping – never dirty but it could always be better. All the floors were given a good wet mopping and now it is looking like it was when the floors were first installed. I also wiped down the fridge, front of the cabinets and then the skirting boards.

    Mum came over and we had a chicken Kiev katsu bowl each and for desert we had a Sara Lee blueberry danish and some ice cream. The meal was wonderfully tasty and the Kewpie mayo really kicked up a notch along with the Sriracha Chilli Sauce. After dinner I cleaned up the kitchen, took out the rubbish with this week being recycling as well as general rubbish – it is strange to me how we don’t prioritise recycling more than rubbish by having recycling weekly but rubbish fortnightly like when I was living in Australia.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.920.1710 for Safari has been released and things are going pretty good – I did ‘clear storage’ for the extension so I was starting with a clean slate (I noticed that the conversion from the native DNR format to the native content blocking format was almost instant when compared to Safari 26). Everything is going well – I tend to hop back and forth between Safari and Chrome with each browser having their strengths and weaknesses. Although I’ve listed the issues with Safari (rendering issue with YouShop (although I’m looking at moving to myUS because it doesn’t have the limits in terms of dollar value that YouShop has), the notification in the tab for Google Chat not supported, the ‘daily writing prompt’ in WordPress not working when you click on ‘post’ which should automatically insert it into a new blog post however the issue with Microsoft Teams has been fixed up in Safari 27) I have found that the bugginess of YouTube seems to be worse with Chrome.

    It is interesting to see that Apple has skipped 27.1 which makes me wonder whether we’re in store for a launch of a product refresh soon so 27.1 will be about supporting new hardware or maybe it is a small update that doesn’t require outside testing because the scope of the changes isn’t going to potentially introduce regressions. Version 27.2 will be an interesting one particularly if we start to see it result in the improvements introduced in the Technology Preview make their way into the mainstream release so then maybe we’ll see the mainstream release of Safari reach the web platform test hit 100% in terms of compliance. When it comes to tvOS, I used to rely on the Democracy Now! app (it was an unofficial app that downloaded an RSS feed so you could select episodes to watch – it has been removed from the store) but now that the Podcast app supports video streaming. It is neat how the Podcast app has created a single place where you can search for content while at the same time the content producers broadcast it from their own platform rather than being dependent on third party platform in the case of YouTube.

    Nicky Hager has released a new book entitled ‘Dirty Work’ that investigates the ‘New Zealand Taxpayers Union’ – it has been a while since I bought a book so maybe while I’m at Unity Books I’ll also buy a copy of ‘Dirty Politics’. It is interesting how an organisation can call themselves a union given that almost every other organisation tend to have restrictions regarding what they can call themselves – for example you cannot call yourself a ‘bank’ or an ‘insurance’ company without going through a whole lot of legal hoops because of what the use such words implies when you refer yourself as an ‘insurance’ or a ‘bank’. Maybe there needs to be a clear definition of a union, who can and cannot call themselves a union, institute (or what ever seemingly innocuous term being used by a lobbying organisation) in terms of the criteria they must meet. For example, the ACT in ACT Party stands for ‘Association of Consumers and Taxpayers’ – there is no ambiguity that they’re masquerading as something they’re not.

    There has been a recent announcement that the National Party have made regarding supermarkets but what people appear to ignore was what was actually said – they would get the ComCom to do a study first before making a final decision. What does that mean? well, the National Party are channelling their inner Donald Trump by announcing they can concepts of a plan – get voted in, the ComCom comes back saying “breaking it up won’t save money…” and then nothing happens. The problem is that in New Zealand we have a small population and the economics of supermarkets are based on having economies of scale because the more economies of scale you have the more you can spread your fixed costs over a larger population and thus your margins do not need to be as high while still making a decent profit. Unfortunately speaking the truth when the masses want a bogeyman that they can hang all their grievances on isn’t going to deliver a solution other than providing something that people direct their frustration at.

    The lawsuit lead by California that attempted to stop the merging of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has been settled – there has been an agreement struck but it will be interesting to see what else has been promised but not written down. As I’ve said in the past, Trump is convinced that his own ‘transactional relationship’ shtick is a one way street but what he is quickly going to realise is that once Silicon Valley get what they want along with many of his backers, Trump will find out that those who backed him only tolerated his existence. I say this in the context of rumours that Gavin Newsom is going to run for president in 2028. Gavin is someone Silicon Valley can see as a person they can ‘do business with’ while not being embarrassed about being associated with him. Don’t be surprised if Mark Zuckerberg once again claims there has ben a ‘vibe shift’ in 2028 – like a chameleon he will change into what ever happens to be the dominant vibe of the moment. Notice how no one is talking about ‘masculine energy’ in the office? the vibe has shifted and so has Mark along with many other Silicon Valley tech broligarchs.

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you make time for self-care?
    View all responses

    The first thing about ‘making time’ is to take stock of everything you do and ask the question the Marie Kondo asks which is “does this spark joy”. Are you sleep walking through life and by what I mean by that is going through the motions of doing things because “well, that is what everyone else does”. How many of those things you do are actually necessary? Life is about learning how to triage what is and isn’t important – not everything you think is important is actually important. It reminds me of when I worked at a supermarket on the checkouts at Christmas time with people fretting about putting on Christmas lunch or dinner for the family – if you’re the one preparing the food for the event then the guests should be happy with whatever you put on and if that means you roll out the BBQ and prepare a pavlova for desert then they should thankful for all that you have done.

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  • Another rainy day.

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    Woke up this morning at 8:23 am and it was raining outside, my driveway is flooded and everytime I see it I am reminded that I need to get the drain in the driveway fixed up so then the water drains away properly. After waking up I had a protein bar and protein drink for breakfast then ordered some food for delivery from the supermarket for dinner tonight – mum is coming over and we’re having a katsu bowels but I’ll be cooking up the chicken kiev I’ve got in my freezer. As for the groceries, they were delivered an hour later and I’ve ordered a few extra items such as kewpie mayo, two different kinds of coleslaw and a desert afterwards – berry danish and a tub of ice cream.

    It is interesting seeing the ‘evolution’ of vibe coding regarding how the technology world has gone from sending a request to an LLM in natural language then hoping for the best then realising that structured language gives better results. Congratulations, you’ve created a structured language in the form pseudo code that LLM and harness can then turn that pseudo code into a lower level language such as C++ or C which can then be compiled. I don’t want to sound cynical but haven’t we just reinvented COBOL but in the form of a pseudo code general purpose structured language with the harness and LLM essentially being a translator? so effectively they’ve created a less efficient version of what we had before. Once again we have silicon valley create a less efficient version of what we already had.

    One again I am confronted with “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” with the recent announcement by the Minister of Education.

    Yes, I would go further and move computers into the computer lab and get the kids back to reading and writing. There is a time and place to use a computer which is in the computer lab where you learn how to touch type and computer fundamentals rather than ‘click and drool’ in a hope that a random set of actions will result in what you want. It really does pain me when someone makes the right call particularly when they’ve had so many bad takes in the past but the truth is the truth.

    I also think if there is something we need to learn from the era of ‘a laptop for every kid in school’ it should be that the people who championed the idea, Silicon Valley billionaires and billionaires who think they know it all because they’re wealthy, should be ignored in future. An experiment was run where the politicians decided that listening to every half baked idea being uttered by billionaires was a good idea when we should have been listening to the actual education experts who were sounding the alarm bells 20 years ago about the long term consequences of going in the direction that politicians eventually decided on.

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  • A productive Monday.

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    Today has been pretty productive today – the new zip up hoodies are now dried as I hung them up in the office (after having them on the line for part of the day), turned the dehumidifier on and close the door while I was down at the supermarket to pick up a butterflied roast chicken and salad for dinner. When I came home I heated up the oven then put the chicken for 1 hour and 10 minutes the checked on the clothes and they were all dried – the green one goes quite nicely with the brown pants I have and the other autumn colours that match up with it. The blue goes well with the jeans and the black one goes well with the…the black trousers I have. It is pretty good value at The Warehouse – the fabric isn’t too thick and there is a good amount of warmth without causing overheating.

    I’m always amazed at the number of people on Reddit who seem to lack basic reading comprehension skills. When someone says something is overhyped that does not denote that said thing is useless or not useful but rather the claim about its usefulness have been greatly exaggerated. I would have expected that the quality of discourse on Reddit would be better than the average Facebook or Instagram post but I guess I have set my expectations far too high given the number of people who either cannot read a full sentence or flat out fail to read the full thread to see where the conversation is at. That is the great thing with online conversations – there is a record of what was previously posted so rather than repeating something someone else has already said that maybe you should address the reply that has already been made addressing those issues.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.920.1710 has finally been released in the Chrome store – it didn’t update my browser extension automatically so I did a backup of the settings, deleted the extension then reinstalled it, configured then transferred the settings over regarding the websites I allow ads for. So far I haven’t noticed any sort of regressions yet. I also noticed that the first range of Googlebooks (which will replace the current Chromebooks) are appearing online from various OEMs and they’re running on a Qualcomm SoC. There isn’t any discussion about a ‘Googlebox’ mini-pcs (replacement to the Chromebox) but I’m sure it’ll come in waves. I think the interesting part is whether we’ll see Samsung bring One UI to their own range of Googlebooks so there is a unified design language from their televisions through to their laptops and desktops – a unique Samsung design language while being able to leverage the Android ecosystem.

    I’m not too sure whether I’ve mentioned this but XenoPanther over on Twitter found in the future platform release build of 29661 kernel related files (ntdllpx.dll, ntkrlapx.exe and ntdllmp.dll). Given how closely APX, AVX, ChkTag and FRED are related to the next generation of microarchitecture from AMD and Intel then I wouldn’t be surprised if that build of the kernel also includes support for the other technologies as well. It’ll be interesting once the first systems start shipping with Windows 11 support for APX, AVX, ChkTag and FRED to see how they compare to ARM based computers in the area of performance per watt.

    Just to finish up the post, I mentioned on my previous post regarding the United States having an overvalued dollar and needing to get their deficit under control so there is a reduction in demand for US dollars. I forgot to mention that in and of itself will not address the 20% overvalued nature (although it may chip away a small amount at it) but rather the United States needs to have a serious discussion about whether it wants to be the global reserve currency given the burden it places on the United States. If the burden of destroying your manufacturing capacity is seen as not good arrangement then be honest and talk to your global partners of establishing what was plan (b) to the Bretton Woods agreement by setting up a bancor (link) which would allow the US dollar to depreciate so that the value reflects its balance of trade.

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  • The first day of the weekend.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, shower, fresh pair of clothes and then off for a walk down to the local bakery for some eggs bene then afterwards I walked down to the mall so that I can roll up my exercise into going down to the mall and back. While I was down the road I checked out some basic zip up hoodies at The Warehouse that I saw online but I wanted to check out what they were like in person. I ended up buying the blue, black and green hoodies at NZ$22 per item and once I got home I washed them in a heavy duty wash to get them clean and they’re now hanging on the line to dry. Although I have a couple of zip up hoodies I prefer having a few more because during spring and summer when I need some extra warmth the idea of a zip hoodie means I can unzip it when get a little too hot rather than with a traditional hoodie where you’re having to take off the whole swearshirt.

    There are conversations regarding New Zealand and Australia becoming associate members alongside Canada (link) – I think it is important to note that association doesn’t mean membership but rather something that is a closer relationship with some benefits for both sides. The European Union benefits from such a relationship because it allows them to expand its soft power projection by positioning itself as the reliable democratic and liberal partner when compared to the chaotic unreliability of the United States. I remember posting a while ago about a ‘regulatory union’ where smaller countries could become part of the regulatory umbrella involving the European Union because large multinational businesses serving new Zealand pretty much ignore the rules of smaller countries. Maybe that could be a feature of the associate membership – we’ll get the consumer protection that the European Union has passed, being able to run the real Chrome on iOS rather than the Chrome that is merely a shell sitting on top of Webkit.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.920.1710 has been released with a few interesting improvements along with the filters being updated however it hasn’t appeared on any of the extension stores. Apple have provided an article over on the Webkit website that outlines the improvements that have been made to Safari (link) and Safari Technology Preview 252 is hitting 99.1% on the web platform test however it maybe some time before we see those improvements in Safari along with web developers upgrading their code base to make their code compatible with the three major browsers. It’ll be interesting to see whether web developers making use of MCP when testing their code so they can pick up issues through an automated system rather than having to painstakingly checking every feature with the three major browsers.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?
    View all responses

    Getting into a good routine of exercise and a health diet along with finding healthier ways of dealing with ones mental health. The benefit of starting that when you’re young is that it is easier to start and stay in the routine and if you do it consistently then eventually it becomes so embedded into your life that you don’t even need to think about having to consciously do it.

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  • End of the week.

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    Well, it is the end of the week and I’ve logged off for the day. Unfortunately the vibe of the day was undermined by a few idiots ringing up who refuse to listen but rather than wasting what little fucks I have left give I decided to end the call. It is always amazing how people who have used our services for over a decade still cannot get their head around the absolute basics particularly when they have had it explained to them multiple times. It reminds me when I worked at a bank and the number of customers who were ignorant of something, you educate them and then a week later they’re back with the same problem even though you have educated them – at what point do people take responsibility for themselves instead of this learn helplessness of expecting everyone else to pick up the pieces of the dumb decisions they make.

    After work I had a coffee, some toast and a protein bar because I was a big peckish – I’ve gotten back into intermittent fasting and the big thing is making sure that after you come off intermittent fasting that you have a light meal. It has been my second week at it and I’m feeling good and starting to see some benefits already but keep in mind that you also have to remember to maintain calorie counting during the week – it isn’t some sort of magical thing that produces instant results but rather something you integrate into your life so then it becomes second nature in much the same way that when I moved to getting up at 9:00 am was difficult at first but then has become a regular part of my life. Gradually making lifestyle changes and consistently doing them so then eventually it becomes something that is second nature rather than having to consciously thinking “oh, today I have to do…”.

    Microsoft released a massive update as part of their September 2026 patch tuesday update and then shortly after that they had to release an out of band update to fix some things that were broken in the proces. The problem is that when you have a platform that works on many different system configurations, third party drivers, software and kernel extensions. Given all the possible combinations and even with all the testing in the world it is possible that a bug slips through and that doesn’t even touch on third party kernel drivers like anti-cheat software that routinely cause BSODs or end point security software because these same companies fought tooth and nail for a better way of doing things are only just coming to the table after the whole CrowdStrike fiasco back in 2024. Some of it is of Microsoft’s own doing by promising backwards compatibility forever with no clear guidelines on deprecating and removing old crufty things

    It is always funny when I hear Americans complaining about ‘unfair trade practices’ and ‘bad trade deals’ yet when you look at what they complain about they’re unhappy that other countries actually have food safety standards – oh the horror! that the reason why people outside of the United States don’t buy American made vehicles is because their vehicles are too expensive thanks to their overvalued dollar (which makes their exports uncompetitive) and imposing costs on their businesses (such as forcing them to pay for the healthcare of their employees where in every other OECD country they have some form of single payer healthcare) which makes the United States the 2nd or 3rd most expensive country to do business in. When faced with the choice of a brand new car made in the US costing NZ$100,000 where the median wage is NZ$65,000 or a car from Japan, Korea or China for around NZ$40,000 brand new, why would I buy the more expensive American made car?

    To hear the United States complain about other countries with the usual nonsense about currency manipulation, tariffs and non-tariff barriers it reminds me of an analogy that I posted a while ago. Imagine there was a person who decided to adopt a “I eat fast food at every meal” policy then in a years time they have type 2 diabetes, gained a whole lot of weight, their blood pressure is through the roof and cholesterol is at an unhealthy level. Is it the various fast food chains who are at fault for that person voluntarily choosing an unhealthy lifestyle or it the responsibility of the person who made the decision to adopt such a lifestyle actually at fault? I think we know the answer. The US chooses to have a ‘strong dollar policy’, they choose to run massive budget deficits which has a result of being the global safe haven people buy the debt and to do so they have to buy US dollars which push the value of the dollar up (some economists say that the US dollar is 15-20% over valued but I’d argue it is closer to 20-25% over valued) and that doesn’t even touch on the regulatory clusterfuck of every state being their on fiefdom so god help you if you want to operate a business in more than one state (that doesn’t even touch on the healthcare issue I raised in the previous paragraph).

    Call me old fashioned but I am reminded of something my boss used to say which was “focus on controlling the controllables” – in other words, focus on the things you can control. The United States are never going to compete with making $10 t-shirts but what it can do is compete where it does make sense and to compete that involves having to take stock of the obstacles that make the US uncompetitive when compared to other first world industrialised nations then deal with them. Replace employer based healthcare with a single payer system (publicly funded, privately delivered), negotiating lower drug prices, dealing with the indemnity insurance of healthcare professionals etc. When it comes to regulation to bring as much regulation up to the federal level so then when a business operates in multiple states there is one set of regulations they have to abide by. Invest in structured apprenticeship schemes that involve practical on the job training as well as in class learning at the local polytechnic. Then there is the matter of the overvalued currency and budget deficit that would be a long term project but it is doable if there is the political will behind addressing such a challenge.

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  • 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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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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