Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • Day off from work recovering.

    I had a splitting headache so I decided to take the day off from work to recover and I’m taking it easy today and I’ve given my boss a heads up that I’ll take Thursday off. I updated Chrome to version 148.0.7778.97 and it looks like there are some big security fixes that have been made their way into the release given that at the time of this blog post they haven’t put up the details regarding what has been fixed (link). It makes sense to wait because in the end you don’t want a situation that exploits are created for the security vulnerabilities before a sizeable number of end users have updated their installation of Chrome.

    I’ve been writing down some random notes in Google Keep so when I get a suddenly inspiration to talk about a topic but it is rather incoherent until I have the time to write a coherent post on my blog. I’ve been thinking about AI and the rise of consumer products like iPhones, iPads etc resulting in a generation that is less tech savvy than many of the Gen X and Boomers who came before. It is amazing the number of people who are younger than I am who don’t know how to send an email, who understand the internet other than through apps on their phone with no idea on how to use a web browser and that doesn’t even touch on how to navigate a file system, how to manage files or in the case of emails – how to manage your emails through the use of folders. Maybe I’m getting old and grumpy but are kids actually being taught those skills at school because I remember spending years at high school learning how to touch type and as much as I found the experience boring at the time I look back happy knowing that I can now properly touch type.

    Then to compound the rise in tech illiteracy has been the growth of AI and the impact it has on critical thinking, how it flattens history, philosophy, politics etc by removing the nuance not to mention the fact that getting the answer is as important as the journey on search of answer – the twists and turns culminating in the understanding that history isn’t a matter of black or white but a whole lot of grey area. We’ve now got a generation who cannot effectively use Google to find an answer then complain that ‘Google is getting worse’ whey fail to understand the use of keywords and how to narrow down the scope of a search when looking for something. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who get locked out of their Google or Microsoft account which makes me wonder whether things are getting so bad that I’m starting to look like I have my life together.

    Oh, and I did something silly today, I cleared the cookies and cache for both my computers and phone but on my phone I ticked all the boxes including the password box and accidentally cleared them off resulting in all my passwords disappearing. I was lucky in that I had backed up my passwords but I need to remember that for next time – on Chrome for macOS the option of clearing the passwords isn’t present so I guess I wasn’t thinking when I ticked all the boxes because I assumed it was like what happens on macOS.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.503.1521 has finally appeared on the Chrome website although there is still 2026.504.2301 waiting for approval but the update is primarily to fix up a regression on Safari with some filter updates for everyone else. The release candidate for version 26.5 has been made available but I’d say that unless there is a serious security fix they need to push out then I’d say it won’t be released until early next week which will given testers enough time to report and fix up any regressions that appear. Oh, and you’ve probably noticed, I’ve changed the background from white to grey, I find the whiteness too harsh on my eyes although I am looking at maybe moving to a theme of a black background with white text but I’m still doing some experimentation with themes.

  • Feeling lousy but trying to push through.

    I woke up with a horrible splitting headache this morning, I drank a good amount of water and went for a walk hoping that maybe some fresh air and some water will sort it out but all it did was make it a little less crappy. I’m back at home after getting some fresh air during the day, organise a passport photo, had dinner with mum (from the local Noodle Canteen). I was able to get my passport updated online by uploading the photo – the photo of the passport is pretty horrible but I think that has to do with the way I was sitting on the seat. I’ve organised it all online so hopefully in a few weeks I’ll get it delivered and I’ll be all ready for a trip to Australia.

    I was able to recover my Emirates air points account that I setup a couple of years ago when I went to Europe and found that I could use the points to pay for part of the cost of travelling to Australia. I’ve also standardised the email address I’m using for both Air New Zealand as well as Emirates which will make managing the online accounts a whole lot easier. I have multiple aliases for my email so that I can keep track of the various organisations I have provided my email to so then I can keep track of where emails are coming from and whether a particular business has been compromised at some point.

    On a good side, I was able to get a free coffee when I was down the road which is always nice so I got a muffin as well then had a look around. I saw a few items of clothing I quite liked the store I frequent – I’d like to get an extra pair of brown pants and I’m also looking at getting a tallboy for my office so that I can put my exta clothes in. At the moment I’m currently hanging up my hoodies however if I put it in a tallboy then that’ll free up more space on my wardrobe that at the moment is a bit crowded. I’m looking at also a album I’ve seen online – Isaac Hayes ‘Black Moses’ but I’ll need to see where I can get it on Discogs or whether I should just buy the album through the Stax records online store which has it available in FLAC format. The benefit of the FLAC version is that the quality is the same as getting the physical copy with the added benefit of not having to pay postage and packaging down to New Zealand.

  • It was a good day today.

    I woke up this morning and spent my day just relaxing around the home watching some YouTube videos on the television and then I decided to head down the road to do some grocery shopping. While I was down there I needed to pick up some ointment because I have dry cracking heels (I’ve applied it to them and I think that as long as I keep applying to them then they’ll eventually heal). While I was also down there I bought some dinner (lamb rumps and some Japanese coleslaw for dinner) along with some fresh fruit and vegetables – something I’m aiming to each more of along with avoiding bread because in a lot of cases it is empty calories that leave me feeling hungry within an hour of eating it. The coleslaw is always nice – the great thing with the Japanese coleslaw (I’m unsure how Japanese it actually is) is how the dressing isn’t overpowering and there isn’t a huge amount of dressing to the point that the whole coleslaw is drenched in it.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.503.1521 has been released (link) – it is currently available on the Microsoft Edge and Apple stores but not available on the Chrome store as it is waiting approval. More improvements are on their way and I’ve tested it out on Safari with plenty of success. I was having a look online at the availability of Apple TV 4K given that there are rumours of there being a refresh being launched soon. All the major retailers in New Zealand either have run out or have very limited stock which indicates to me that maybe the inability for them to get more supplies into New Zealand is an indication that Apple wish to flush out their stock before any sort of upgrades are announced as to avoid having to give the older version steep discounts. One of the big rumours with the next Apple TV is the SoC upgrade to A17 Pro which will mean AV1 hardware accelerated support out of the box. There are no announcements but apparently it is waiting for an improved Siri and Gemini integration to be made available so that the experience for end users can be a lot better.

    I’ve been watching more videos on YouTube regarding how the economics of AI simply don’t make sense and it is always interesting to hear the same refrain from supporters about expotential growth. There is a problem making such a claim, these AI companies are burning huge amounts of money and on every subscription tier they’re losing money. When you’re not charging the actual cost of delivering your service then it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a huge amount of demand but the big question is what happens when you start charging the actual cost of delivering the service, when that service isn’t getting a massage subsidy, is that demand going to be sustained or will those customers reevaluate whether paying for your service makes sense. I say that because there was a company recently who reported that they had gone through their year’s token budget within a space of 3 months. When you’re paying for tokens used rather than a flat rate then every time you get an answer back that is entirely useless and you have to do the operation again then that is more tokens burned and more money spent – at some point companies are now admitting that AI costs more than humans (link) but then again anyone who hadn’t been sucked down into the cult of AI could have told you that. That being said, I’m not anti-AI but I think that there has far too much hype and the technology simply isn’t there yet – the error rate is still high, the cost of computation is too high and many businesses are simply unable to use it in a way that is actually producing useful output.

    Things are pretty rough out there, the economy is struggling, retailers are barely holding on with many now finding they’re now getting few hours of work each week. There is an election in November and I don’t envy whoever ends up winning the election because there very little in the way that the government can do to meet the immediate challenges being faced. I say that because there are plenty of solutions for the long term such as a national rail strategy of electrifying the whole network and standardising the voltage to 25kV, standardising platform height and signaling system as well as investing into double and triple tracking where extra capacity is required. That doesn’t even touch on the bigger goal which should be to bring logistics companies closer to rail depots so that long distance trucking can be replaced with rail with trucks being used for the final mile delivery. They’re all great ideas but they take years to implement (and should be implemented) but there are also needs that need to be met today but the big question is what the solution is and whether it’ll be enough given the fiscal constraints the government is currently under.

    I’ve been watching the following video and although I’d like to be optimistic about the future I am regularly reminded when I hear people talk about how they regret their vote for Donald Trump but when asked “would you vote for Kamala Harris” very few of them said yes with most saying they would either not turn out, leave the selection blank or vote for Donald Trump again with the asinine justification of him being the lesser of two evils.

    I think the damage that has been done by the Donald Trump administration give that when you view it within historical context where in the space of 28 years the world had to deal with 8 years of George W Bush, then some of the damage was undone by Barack Obama only for all that work to be undone with the first Donald Trump presidency. Then after Donald Trump had lost in his attempt to go for a second term where Joe Biden won the rest of the world thought it was just a blip on the radar and things would get back to normal only to find that Donald Trump once again tried to go for another term and won. After dealing with both George W Bush and Donald Trump then it shouldn’t be surprised that the rest of the world has had enough.

    Governments are currently working with friendly countries such as the recent agreement signed between New Zealand and Singapore regarding energy supplies and food security. I think we’re going to find many more agreements like this being signed and many of them being setup to work around the United States. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, already has a long term plan in terms of how to deal with United States, closer relations with the European Union regarding defense production, intelligence sharing, and supporting Ukraine. When it comes to trade, Canada is in a good position along side Mexico when it comes to the CPTPP and it’ll be interesting to see whether China and Indian end up joining the CPTPP. Slowly the globe is working around the United States then sooner or later the United States will wake up and realise that the world has moved on without them.

  • Finally the end of the week.

    Woke up this morning and went for a 8km walk a little later than my normal time but the main thing is that I got out of the house for that walk I need in the morning. I know it isn’t setting the bar very high but what I’m aspiring to is to get up at 9:30am every morning and going for at least an 8km walk every day and on days off because of wet weather I’ll keep getting up at 9:30am to ensure that I keep in a good routine because once you fall out of a routine it can be sometimes difficult to get back into it again.

    There is an interesting article regarding Microsoft recommending 32GB of memory (link) which make sme wonder, as part of Windows K2 and moving more of the system over to the Windows App SDK/WinUI 3 that they’ve realised that maybe for a lot of what customer’s wish to do they can actually get it done using a scaled down local model. The reason why I say that is because if you push up the recommended memory up to 32GB then it would provide the amount of memory required to run these models locally which is particularly important for businesses who may wish to use LLM but for security and privacy reasons want to run them locally – the benefits of AI without the security and privacy headaches.

  • Coming to the end of the week.

    Woke up this morning and went for a 10km walk and it felt really good – the weather was mild, the sun was out but it wasn’t intense so I enjoyed the warmth and there were plenty of other people out also enjoying the experience. On Sunday I’m looking forward to a good walk but tonight I’m going to get to sleep early so I can get some extra sleep so I’m more refreshed in the morning. It is funny how the slightly longer walk in the morning makes me feel good for the rest of the day and sticking to a consistent 9:30am allows me body clock to get used to a regular time to get up each morning rather than bouncing around between 9:30am on one day, 10:30am on other days and then on my day off it is entirely random.

    I was watching ‘Washington Week’ and I found the first part of the show quite interesting regarding the whole ‘White House Correspondents’ Dinner’ that takes place where politicians and journalists are schmoozing. Journalists are meant to be the ‘4th estate’ that is setup to hold those in power accountable and yet when they hang out together in such a setting it raises ethical and moral questions.

    Should journalists be that cosy with politicians particularly when the mainstream media and journalists have a low approval rating by the general public? does it make it more difficult for journalists who have a close relationship with those they’re reporting on resulting in them holding back on asking the difficult questions because the journalists know many of the politicians on a personal level? when the public seen journalists cosying up to politicians then it gives the public the perception, to quote George Carlin, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club…” meaning even when journalists are doing legitimately good work there is always that perception that journalists are doing the bidding of the powerful.

  • Things are getting better.

    I don’t know what happened today but the day actually pretty good. Most of the time when I am work I am going through the motions and just wanting the whole day to end so I can do something other than working but today something felt different. I got up at 9;30am this morning, left home at 10:00am and went for a 10.8km walk (the walk I had calculated to be 10km but I think it wasn’t particularly exact since it left on the section from my home to the main road) and when I came back I was in a really good mood afterwards. I think what has made the situation better is the fact that I’m just sticking to a 9:30am start which avoids bouncing around with different start times depending on whether I’m working at home, going into the office or whether it is on a day off from work.

    Tonight for dinner I had some tacos with plenty of salad. I’m not really a fan of cheese so i leave that off (which funny enough is an easy way to save money given how much chese costs these days) but instead I put some sour cream on along with some guacamole. It is possible to enjoy a meal while sticking to a diet – a lot of the time it is about sometimes replacing one thing with something else such as how my dad would have four hamburgers (the small ones from McDonalds) and a coffee rather than having the fries or in the case of me when I have tacos or nachos I like to ensure I use a lot of salad which is an easy way to fill up while keeping the calories low.

    The Samsung watch is going well. I am gradually teaching myself how to navigate the screen but that being said I don’t use many of the advance features but instead I’m happy with being able to keep track of my time, speed etc. which serves as a good motivator as I like to keep track of things. I am tempted to start using the calorie counter as well because if I am going to utilise the built in software then I should make sure I’m tacking full advantage of the features. It’ll be interesting to see what Samsung has in store when WearOS 6.1 is released which is based on Android 16.

    Interesting enough it appears that speculation regarding Android on laptops running One UI branding maybe coming to Samsung laptops (link). I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing not just laptops but convertibles as well as maybe even mini-PCs with ARM based SoCs. It’ll be interesting to see whether the willingness by Google to allow customisation of Android on the laptop along with watches and phones will be extended to Android TV because at the moment there is a limited amount of customisation taking place. With all that being said, Tizen delivers a pretty good experience based on my time using my Samsung television.

  • A productive day at work.

    I got up at 9:30am this morning and left home at around 9:45am which allowed me plenty of time after I came home to relax, cool down, watch some news on YouTube and then jump into the shower to get prepared for the day. Went into the office today for my second mandatory day in the office but the day went well, not too crazy busy and I was able to enjoy a mexican bean wrap for breakfast this morning along with a mochaccino – which reminds me I really do need to sign up for their coffee club so I can collect points. On Friday I’ll probably go for a slightly longer walk since I would prefer to get my walk in before work than leaving it to after work where I really don’t feel in the mood to do anything other than relax before work. On my days I work from home I might actually squeeze in a few extra kilometres – maybe bump it up to 13.8km with the other benefit of walking during the day the weather is warmer where as late at night the temperature gets down to around 5 degrees celsius which isn’t particularly enjoyable.

    On a good side, while I was at work I followed up on my leave request and unfortunately because I put my leae in too late I missed out on taking 30 and 31 May off but I did get 3 and 4 June off which means the remaining three days of the week I’ll be working from home and then I’ll go into my holiday at the beginning of June where I’ll get to follow along with WWDC. I’m excited to hear the under the hood changes given the rumours of version 27 being a ‘Snow Leopard’ like release where there is a focus on delivering on Apple Intelligence while focusing on dealing with the rough edges that many in the online forums have been complaining about since the release of version 26 and the new Liquid Glass design language.

  • A good day back at work.

    Today was a good day, I woke up at 9:30am and left home for my morning walk at 9:45am, back in around 1 hour and 20 minutes, cooled down, had a shower, got dressed adn then headed out to catch the train into work. I had a great night sleep and it is funny how the body knows when to wake up – for me, it is around 8 hours or so when my body decides that I’ve had enough sleep and I need to get out of bed to start the day. The weather is particularly nice and according to the Metservice the next seven days are going to be fine so I’m going to take advantage of that spell of good weather.

    Work was all good and I put through leave for two days before my birthday and two days after so I end up getting 6 days off (my birthday occurs on my ‘weekend’ which is Monday and Tuesday (1 June)), I also put it through for my time off in November when I go to Tasmania for a holiday along side the time off I have already organised for the week of 8 June. I’m unsure whether my November leave will be approved since it is quite a distance into the future but I guess I’m in a habit of getting the leave in early because my previous employers preferred to get as much of a heads up as possible rather than waiting till the last minute.

    I got home at around 11pm tonight and the first thing I did was check to see whether my passport was still valid – thank goodness I did because it expired back in January this year so I’m going to head down on my day off on Monday or Tuesday next week to get a photo at the chemist and then organise a passport online through the RealMe portal. I tend to be pretty good with these kinds of things but then again the last time I used my passport was when I went over to Europe in 2024 so it has been a couple of years. I might as well get it sorted out straight away rather than letting it linger in the back of my mind because knowing my luck I’ll suddenly remember close to the holiday and then have to pay a premium to get a passport rushed.

    I woke up today expecting Chrome 148 had been released but it appears that it has been pushed off until next week so today I was greeted with an update to version 147.0.7727.138. It was a quick install along with uBlock Origin Lite 2026.426.1536 being updated as well – no regressions noted.. If you haven’t installed it yet I would strongly you suggest that you do so given that quite a number of critical and high rated vulnerabilities have been fixed (link). It is the one thing I always mak sure of, when dealing with customers, that if they’re having issues to make sure they’re running the latest version of Chrome and then pair that up with clearing cookies and cache I tend to find that 99% of the customer’s problems as solved (the other 1% tend to be people using content blockers which canse problem with the company website).

  • Back to work on Wednesday.

    I decided to sleep in today because wanted to catch up on sleep but that didn’t sotp me from getting a 8km power walk in – around 2pm I went for an 8km walk, really got my heart rate up there and completed the whole set it around 1 hour and 17 minutes. At the end of the power walk I had done over 10000 steps with the calories burnt at around 729 calories but generally the reading from such devices they’re not necessarily reliable which is why I don’t count the calories burnt into the calories consumed in the day – basically I stick to being around 200-300 calories under what I need for a day based on my basal metabolism so that any exercise I do is an ‘icing on the cake’ rather than my calorie control in a day being dependent on it.

    The UniFi Network Application 10.3.58 has been release however it is currently rolling out gradually however if you switch to release candidate, install it and then switch back to the official release channel then you should be all good to go. The one habit I also like to do is to restart the Cloud Key so that there is a fresh start with the UniFi Network Application freshly booted. After updating it I haven’t noticed any issues and the speed is as fast as usual although I go with Cloudflare because they have a local presence in New Zealand where as I haven’t found any documentation showing that Google has a local presence in New Zealand as so far as running DNS servers in New Zealand (the last time I checked I saw it being resolved by a server located in Australia).

    Just a follow up to the Safari Technology Preview 242 release that I mentioned earlier – I advised that the wpt.fyi webside hadn’t been updated to include Safari Technology Preview 242 however I noticed that they have no updated it. The score for Safari Technology Preview 242 has gone from 75.4% for Safari Technology Preview 241 to now 85.7% for Safari Technology Preview 242 so it’ll be interesting to see what is in store for future releases and whether we’ll see that gap close even further because at the moment Chrome is currently on 89.1% (it’ll be interesting to see what the numbers will be when Safari 26.5 is released with the platform release of 26.5 (the fourth beta was released within the last day so iit could be possible that we’ll see maybe a release candidate next week and then maybe the final release the week after).

    I’ve got my alarm set for 9:30am, I’m going to wake up, leave home for a walk however I am tempted to go for a 10km walk because that would only be around 2km longer than what I currently do. The great thing with getting out before midday is that it avoids the heat and the sun at the peak although i still wear a hat and put on some sunscreen. I did talk about the idea of maybe going for a walk after work but I’ve decided that if I am going to do any extra exercise then I’m probably better off doing it in the morning, having a shower and then heading into work then spending the time after coming home from work on relaxing and getting an early night in bed. My goal is to get at least 8-9 hours worth of sleep.

    Regarding upcoming time off from work, I’ve put some leave through for the week of the 8 June however since I can get time off for my birth and my birthday falls on Kings Birthday this year I am going to see whether I can either get 30 May off or maybe 3 June off because my work has the ability to take a day off because of ones birthday. In November I am looking at travelling to Tasmania for a holiday (mum is head over there for a meet up with dad’s old classmates when he was at Duntroon), I’ve had a look at airfares with the best value being one where I go from Wellington to Sydney then from Sydney direct to Tasmania (on an Airbus A220 – the first time I’ve been on such an aircraft) – I’m wanting to get those flights booked early so then I can get them at a reasonable price given that the date is getting close to when the school holidays will start.

    Just before I end this post, I was watching a video regarding the ‘enshittification of AI’ and I have to ask the most obvious question, how can you enshittify something that was already shit. As Ed Zitron as noted, the moment when the all you can eat subscriptions disappear and the only way to use their service is via the API then I think people are quickly going to find that AI companies were making many promises and most of them were never delivered. When you have failure rates of 30-40% and you wasts hundeds of thousands of tokens in an attempt to vibe code your way out of a problem then you’ll quickly realise that maybe those humans you got rid of weren’t so expensive after all. We’re slowly seeing companies having that day of reckoning – the same companies who were proudly proclaiming how many people they were going to lay off are rather quiet when they later have to back peddle. What is also amazing is how the corporate culture see employeelayoffs as a signal of ‘good management’ where as in the past the idea of laying off employees as a failure by management because it was seen as a last result rather than it being seen as something to be proud of. Then again when you have management who are far removed from their employees I guess it is easier to employees as simply numbers rather than humans who have lives, families etc.

  • Conspiracy theories are not a short cut to redeeming yourself.

    With parts of the MAGA movement souring on Trump, or at least the online commentariat, there has emerged a conspiracy theory regarding the two assassination attempts on Trump. For the record, I don’t what to see Trump assassinated and that has nothing to do with something noble or altruistic but rather the fact that I don’t want someone like him becoming a martyr. if Trump goes I would sooner it be the form of him choking on a ham sandwich while on the toilet or something equally as embarrassing. Getting back to the conspiracy theory, the claim is that the two attempts are staged which is part of the larger narrative that you’ll see emerge which will be an attempt to divorce Trump from the MAGA movement. The larger narrative will be that Trump either sold out to the ‘deep state’ or that Trump was always part of the ‘deep state’ and the reason why he didn’t do what he is doing now (aka the regime change wars) in the first term was the idea that it was part of the ‘grand plan’ to hold off from regime change wars to the second term to ensure he got two terms.

    As a consequence of this narrative (which is emerging out of the online commentariat who are in turn being backed by billionaires with their own political ambitions) the goal is to divorce Trump from the MAGA ideology (assuming there is a coherent MAGA ideology given the various groups whose interests contradict each other eg paleoconservatives who don’t want to be involved in foreign wars teaming up with Christian Zionists and their end times prophecies that necessitate such interventions in global affairs) so whoever ends up emerging for the 2028 primaries will claim that they’re the ‘real MAGA candidate’ who will actually do MAGA instead of selling out or being compromised.

    I also think we’ll start to see it move beyond the MAGA influencers to regular people who will use it as an excuse to play the victim and then distance themselves from their vote – “oh, we were lied to, Trump is a shitty president and we didn’t vote for this, he betrayed MAGA…I’m all in on MAGA and Trump isn’t MAGA”. These are the same people who voted for George W Bush twice, the sort of people who would talk about ‘freedom fries’, ‘these colours don’t run’ and any criticism of US adventurism overseas was met with ‘why do you hate America’ yet today such people will deny they voted for George W Bush. Mark my words, when Trump’s presidency ends at the end of 2028 and a few years have passed then don’t be surprised when those very same people will claim they either didn’t vote for Trump or they were a victim of Trump.

    When these narratives that are created don’t get created organically, they get created for a specific purpose. As the former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair noted, the whole MAGA movement is carefully managed behind the scenes – the influencers are all coordinated behind the scenes and the narratives that are being put out there are being coordinated to ensure that whatever narrative is being put out there is consistent with whatever the end goals of the billionaire backers. The billionaire backers see Trump as a liability so they’re organising who will be the successor to Trump – who that successor will be, it depends on who will eventually emerge, it may even be an outsider who is outside the political establishment given that JD Vance is too closely associated with the current administration where the obvious will be asked of it him: “why didn’t you do something about it?” the only answer will be shoulders shrugging followed by “fucked if I know”.

    Daily writing prompt
    When do you feel most productive?
    View all responses

    I feel the most productive at night – for some reason when I get up I have little energy but like a Greek dance I slowly speed up towards the end of the day. Unsure as the reason for this, maybe my body takes time to ‘wake up’ or something. In the case of today, I woke up today, walked down to the supermarket (which is around 5km), did my shopping, jumped on a bus home and by the time I got home I felt as though I had a lot more energy even though I hadn’t eaten anything other than having a glass of water before leaving to go for the walk.