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'"

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  • A quiet Saturday working from home.

    A rather uneventful day today – got up out of bed, went for a small walk around the block to get some fresh air before starting work. I decided to create some chia seed pudding but using the ‘Up and Go’ protein drink (125ml of protein drink plus 50g of chia seeds) to see how well it worked out. I started work and at around afternoon tea I checked to see how it had turned out and to my surprise it actually turned out really good. It had the consistency of ‘dairy food’ but with more protein and fibre but low in calories so after having it for my afternoon tea and my late nigh snake I made some more for tomorrow. I’ll probably have to get another container so then I can do some meal prep as one of the glass jars I had broke so now I just have three (I really need 4 because each ‘Up and Go’ is 250ml so I split it in half so I’d rather not have a half finished container sitting in the fridge waiting to be used after making a third chia seed pudding).

    Work was pretty quiet today which enabled me to get some office work done and after work I made use of the new dutch oven to cook up some bolognese – a combination of canned cherry tomatoes, bolognese sauce and some chill flakes to add some extra heat then combine that with onions and mushrooms. I cooked it on ‘low and slow’ to reduce down so then the mixture was thick with wonderful concentrated flavours of tomato, chilli etc. I couldn’t be bothered cooking up the pasta I got because I really need some pots and pans so then I can boil it and all I have is the dutch oven which would require me to put the meat aside, wash it then heat up the water then cook the pasta. I’ll have a look on Monday at getting myself a pot so then when I cook bolognese in future I’ll have the pasta cooked at the same time I take the bolognese off the element.

    Farmers emailed me that they have a birthday present as part of being in their Farmers Clubs so on Monday I’ll head down there to see what that is all about then head down to NZ Post depot to pick up the parcel they couldn’t deliver on Thursday. On Tuesday NZ at 5:00am which works out to be 10am pacific time in the United States. I’ll probably go to bed early on Monday night and then wake up early so then I can watch it live but for me the more exciting party will be the ‘Platforms State of the Union’ which is still a ‘big picture’ look but gives more technical details. There are rumours making the rounds regarding version 27 of Apple’s platforms being a ‘Snow Leopard’ release with the focus on getting the new Gemini powered Apple Intelligence working along with refinement rather than revolution – plenty of rumours regarding sorting out Liquid Glass into what it should have been (the funny think about Liquid Glass is that it reminds me of Aqua with it’s ‘lickable interface’).

    I’m still having a look at Target Furniture because I really do need a better seat at my desk because right now it is rather average and not really comfortable when using the computer for long periods of time. I might send up giving mum the seat instead. This is the seat that I am looking at (link):

    Although there is a swivel version for around the same price, something like that will go with the rest of the lounge room and will be a lot more comfortable than the chair I have today. If I am going to order it then it’ll need to be on Sunday so then it arrives on the week I’m on annual leave.

  • A good first day back at work.

    I had a good first day back at work although the weather is lousy I was able to get up early to head down to the post office to ship off the pone, watch and case which allowed me to get back some of the money I had spent. The security cameras that I ordered had to be signed on delivery meaning that when they came on Thursday I was in bed asleep when it arrived so I’ll pop down on Monday to pick it up since I’m in no great hurry. I’ll install the cameras in the same place where I have them now and the improved battery life should make that keeping them charged should be relatively easy and the new base station, from what I understand, supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz but I’m unsure whether you can select which frequency the cameras will use to connect to the base station.

    I checked for an update on my Samsung TV and there was an update ready to be installed – I didn’t notice any difference although it is slightly more responsive. The Apple TV 4K on my new television is going well and although I talked about giving Samsung’s Tizen a try the big problem is that I have an Apple ecosystem where the Apple TV 4K acts as a HomeKit hub for my house which is what I use to ‘glue’ everything together such as my security cameras (I have two, one in the backyard pointing towards the shed and one where the side gate is which shows anyone trying to get into the backyard or walking up the driveway. I’m unsure what I’m going to do with my old setup given that it is over 10 years old and Is no longer receiving software support.

    I’ve been watching videos regarding the GTX Spark announcement and the more I hear the more I once again seeing Windows as a giant boat anchor around the neck of hardware vendors who create a wonderful platform only for it to be undermined by the operating system aka Windows. I say this because when you cannot add long path name support to Explorer after adding support to Windows in Windows 10, version 1607 then I don’t have much confidence you’ll get many of the other issues fixed. When you cannot even be bothered getting your own applications and system components to support long path name support then I don’t hold out much hope that you’ll actually fix the variety of other issues that people have raised.

    The UniFi Dream Router 7 is going well – I’ve kept all the settings the default settings out of the box with the only change being that I’ve changed the router IP address to 10.0.1.1 (the same as the Apple Airport router back in the days), enabling UPnP and setting the WPA to version 3 but other than that I’ve stuck with the defaults. I’ve found that the less I tweak with something then the less likely things are going to go wrong. I guess that is a pretty good lesson for life, don’t make things more complicated than they need to be and something is the default then maybe find out why it is the default before changing them (aka ‘The Parable of the Fence’).

  • Atrocious weather and back to work on Friday.

    I’ve stayed at home all today because the weather has been pretty abysmal but in the mean time I’ve sorted things out – I’ve sold my Samsung phone and watch along with the SmartTag2 and I’ll be sending it off either on Friday or Monday next week depending on when the money arrives in my bank account. I’ve copied the emails from Google Workspace and got that up and running, my Apple TV 4K is setup and working and I’ve now got an Apple Watch Ultra 3 where I find the navigation a whole lot easier than the Samsung watch along with a better battery life due to watchOS being better optimised when compared to wearOS (which is based on Android). I’ll be writing a longer blog about my experience with the Samsung and Google ecosystem but I’ll leave that to another day.

    I’ve been watching the Build 2026 keynote and it is interesting to see the Nvidia RTX Spark announcement but what has made it interesting is the unreported data centre cancellations and the selling off of land that was purchased to future data centre expansion. The combination of a capable platform that can run LLMs locally, talk about OpenClaw and combine that with the data centre reversal makes me wonder whether the AI bubble, rather than bursting, will be like a a hot air balloon in a cartoon that gets a hole in it and the flies around letting the air out. The dream that AI could be like SaaS aka a ‘licence to print money’ has turned out not to be reality given that the past booms were always about “if we build it up, we’ll lose money in the sort term but once we reach economies of scale we’ll start making a profit”. The problem is that the cost of AI, both inference as well as training, is too expensive and the inaccuracy too high that even if they were to move to token based billing the problem is that the amount of wasted tokens because the model gets it wrong undermines the argument that AI is cheaper than hiring actual humans to do the job.

    The interesting part are the new models that were announced that are specialised and scaled down so that they can be run locally. The impression I get, there will be a place for cloud based AI but for many end users for what they want to do then the local model will be good enough – the ability for locally run models to pull down information from the internet and run the inference on device rather than in the cloud. I think that as the hardware becomes cheaper to run models on device and the scaled down versions are good enough to to do what most people want, the desire for end users to use something like ChatGPT (let along pay for it) will disappear – I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, assuming Anthropic and OpenAI survive, they will become enterprise and developer focused businesses that’ll be locked behind a pay wall with no free chatbots like we see today or even chatbots at all.

    At the end of the day, at some point the backers of your organisation will start demanding a return on investment or at least some sort of pathway to profitability and that is damn well next to impossible if you’re giving away ChatGPT for free to 700+ million users where you’re losing money on every single inference (this is the reason why boasting amount 700+ users but only 3% paying for the service (and even then with the subscription based users there is still money being lost on every transaction) is a just a ridiculous thing to boast about. It is like saying you have the best restaurant in town because of the number of customers but ignoring the fact that people are coming to your restaurant because you’re giving food away for free.

    On a side note, I’m enjoying the UniFi Dream Router 7 – got it all setup, rock solid and going reliably however I decided to move back to my ISPs DNS server and I have found it working slightly faster than using a third party one. I originally had changed it over to Cloudflare however the ISPs DNS has been rock solid so I think I’ll be sticking with that. What I found interesting is there was a message about there being IPv6 being available on my WAN connection however when I enabled it (DHCPv6 with the Prefix Delegation size set to auto) it didn’t get an IPv6 address. I checked out on Geekzone to find out what had happened and it appears that maybe Spark is testing IPv6 support to a limited number of customers or possibly just employees so I guess we’ll find out whether anything comes of it. Oh, and on a side note, I decided to stick with Skinny since the amount I pay each month for my mobile is the cheapest on offer and the internet connection is a lot cheaper as well (I’m on a 900Mbps down and 500Mbps up).

  • First day of my holiday.

    Woke up this morning and decided that I’ll count the walk around town as part of my walk – I caught the train into Wellington and walked down to the technology shop to pickup a few pieces (I’ll write up a review in the next few days). While I was in there I had a look around at the new Wellington library that has reopened along with the construction around that area There is slow progress being made but it is gradually getting there – it appears to be quite a big job and I guess part of it involves seismic strengthening.

    When I was in Wellington I picked up a Unifi Dream Router 7 which will replace my gateway (the gateway, cloud key and switch will be sold or used to upgrade my mum’s setup to provide better wireless coverage. While I was there I ordered a replacement security cameras – the ones I have are around 10 years old and no longer receiving software updates along with the fact that the batteries are dying and the integration with HomeKit is rudimentary at best. I ordered it at the since it needs to come down from Auckland so I’m looking forward to getting it installed.

  • A great day today.

    I slept in today and I woke up, had a quick snack and then headed down the road for walk along with a look around – getting out of the house for some exercise and fresh air altbough there was some reain so I had to take the bus back home. My brother tried to get in contact with me and it didn’t work – I’m unsure whether he was tyring via WhatsApp or via a normal phone call . At the moment 2 Degrees is having a special of 1/2 off for 6 months so I’m tempted to moving to 2 Degrees because I’ve been with Skinny for many years but the coverage has been spotty in Wellington, in particular in the office building I work in. It’s often said that to get the best deal you’ve to to be willing to move or otherwise the supplier you’re with will see you as a customer they don’t need to put any effort into retaining.

    I checked my computer for updates and there was an update to 26.5.1 – Zollotech talked last week about there being a 26.5.1 release however on the release notes today there weren’t any details other than talking about generic fixes. On Wednesday I’m hoping there will be the release of Chrome 149 but that is assuming that some random holiday in the United States doesn’t delay it like last week. The details regarding what will be included with Chrome 149 can be found here (link). I’m giving my iPhone another try, I’m going to have a sleep on what I’m going to do in the future given how having a Android phone is rather disruptive in Apple ecosystem.

  • The start of my weekend and holiday.

    Feels so good finishing up for the week knowing I’ve got not only Monday and Tuesday off for the weekend but also Wednesday and Thursday off as well. Today felt as if it dragged on and on as I thought about finally finishing for the week, trying to remind myself that every phone call pushes me a little bit closer to the end of the work day. I’ve jumped into bed but I’m not going to set my alarm – I’ll get up at what ever time and then go for that walk I’ve been talking about and I might even grab some lunch while I’m down there. I’ve checked the Metservice forecast and it is sayign there will be rain but it is currently midnight at the moment and nothing happened – not even a small drizzle yet so maybe the forecast is wrong?

    I opened up Chrome and checked to see whether an update for uBlock Origin Lite had been released and I’m happy to say that uBlock Origin Lite 2026.529.1448 has been released. I’ve been using it on my break and I’ve noticed that the filtering speed has improved and does a great job blocking popups particularly on websites that do dodgy things such as when you click play it opens pu another window, then you click on play and the same thing happens. With uBlock Origin Lite it does a good job blocking that sort of deceptive web design so you shouldn’t face the issue as so long as you keep your extension up to date.

    The UniFi U7 Pro Max firmware update to version 8.6.11 was released – I’ve been running it for almost a week and the experience has been rock solid. The UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.7.3 has been made available on the early access channel and there is a mixture of feedback but it is one of those situations where you only find out issues once you get a variety of different hardware trying to connect to the access point – what may work for one operating system and one type of hardware may not work for a different set of hardware running the same operating system.

    On a bit of a tangent, I find it interesting when petrol prices go up that the same people who complain about it also complain about there being no alternatives are also the same people who keep voting for politicians who create car centric suburbs and underfund public transport. It is always telling when the people who complain the loudest cannot seem to see the link between who they vote for and the outcomes they experience. The same sort of people who claim they’re not political’ but they sure will tell you about their litany of woes that certainly do sound political since it would be politics that would actually address those issues. As I’ve said in the politis, everything is political – from whether your bus is subsidised, trains and rail infrastructure are invested, whether the local library is upgraded and more facilities are offered etc.

  • Almost there.

    Woke up this morning at 9:30am however I wasn’t in much of a hurry so I pottered around the house and then I went for my 8km walk. I arrived back home, had a shower then enjoyed a cup of coffee before work while catching up on some news. The weather was nice and I on my walk I can see that the rail upgrades are taking place and I think the eventual goal is to replace all the old wooden infrastructure with steel long with the gradual repalce of the wooden sleepers with concrete. It has been a bit of a piecemeal process because the funding is done from year to year so the focus is mainly around upgrading those that need upgrading first and then working from that down to the non-critical upgrades that need taking place.

    There is talk about upgrading the current Waterloo interchange in Lower Hutt however unfortunately the NZTA have decided not to fund its replacement (link). You’d think that in an election year that this would have been an easy win for the National-Act-NZ First government to fundm but once again they’re showing that when it comes to National one can set ones watch their political philosophy of a) tax cuts b) deregulation c) privatisation d) build a road and I guess if it weren’t for NZ First (I’m certainly no fan of NZ First) in the government advocating for rail then I wouldn’t be surprised if National just ignored rail completely like they’ve done every time they’ve gotten into government.

  • Two more days to go.

    Woke up this moring at 9:30am but I decided to muck around watching a few videos and then left home at around 10:15am to go for my walk. Wonderful weather in the morning and it felt great when I came back all refreshed ready for a day at work. I jumped into the shower, got some fresh clothes on and had a cup of tea and watched a few news items on YouTube from France 24 and DW to see what has happened in the world.

    Work today was pretty ‘meh’ but I guess is because I would sooner be going for a walk along the new Petone to Ngauranga than having to answer phones. I am looking forward to Monday next week where I’ll be getting up at 9:30am, throwing on my headphones and going for a long walk along the waterfront.

    Out of a fit of optimism I opened up Chrome to check to see whether uBlock Origin Lite had updated and yes, it had update to uBlock Origin Lite 2026.516.1652. Unsure as to why there was that long delay but I’ve found it does a better job blocking content on some of the websites I visit.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?
    View all responses

    Interplanetary space flight that is accessible to the general public – being able to travel to the Moon, Mars etc. I’m sure some time in the future there will develop some technology that’ll make the rockets of today look primitive in comparison. I hope that by the time it does happen that humanity put aside its petty differences and focus on things that benefit humanity collectively rather than pointless rivalries.

  • Three days to go.

    Three days to go and I’m turning the ripe old age of 45 years old and the strange thing is that I don’t ‘feel’ older just as I don’t ‘feel’ like an adult. It is funny that as I get older I don’t feel like I’m getting older – not too sure whether that is a good or bad thing but I can’t complain because I’m having a whole lot of fun in the process. I got up this morning and went for an 8km walk then arrived back home and decided to work from home for today because why the heck not. I had my shower, got some fresh clothes on and I felt all refreshed ready for work.

    I checked Chrome on my work laptop as well as on my personal computers (Mac Studio and MacBook Pro) and I found that an update had been released – version 148.0.7778.216. Google made an announcement (link) however it will be a few days before the specifics of the update will be disclosed – as I’ve noted in the past, Google prefers to wait for a certain percentage of users have updated before releasing the security fixes but I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few nasty security bugs were fixed like last weeks update – I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is making good use of their own AI model and using their experience to improve the quality of their model at picking up security flaws and locating bugs. Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes I am still waiting for uBlock Origin Lite 2026.516.1652 to be released on the Chrome Webstore.

    I’ve been having a look through my electricity bill to find out what is causing it go up each month even though I’m more or less using the same amount of electricity. Within a year the daily charge has gone from 172.50 cents per day to 207.00 cents per day which is a jump of around 30 cents per day which roughly translates to an extra $10 per month in just the daily charge. The price of electricity has gone from 25.32 cents per kWh to now 26.19 cents per kWh. I’m pretty lucky in that I’m single and I don’t have major commitments but I’d fear that there are plenty of Kiwis who are really doing it tough particularly during winter and unfortunately I don’t see any plan by the opposition party to drive down the cost of electricity by bringing generation back into 100% public ownership with a long term policy of the power generators not providing the government with a dividend but for the profit to be fully invested back into more power generation to get the price per kWh down to somewhere reasonable (4 years ago the daily charge used to be 69.00 cents per day – from 69.00 cents per day to 207.00 cents per day in 4 years is rediculous).

    Oh, and to round it up, I have my daily catnip of videos about AI crashing and burning – not that I am anti-AI because I’m sure there are use cases where it makes sense but I do find it funny when far too many tech dude bros convince themselves that everything is now a nail because they have a hammer.

    I find it confusing when i hear businesses talking about efficiency and yet they cannot even implement basic technology that has existed for years. I worked at a bank that had a call centre located in Wellington but served the Australian market so it was quite common to get calls around tax time to request bank statements covering the whole financial year. Something like that should be as simple as logging into internet banking, specifying the start and finish dates and then requesting the statement with the server itself generating one and either providing it as a download or emailed to the customer. Did the bank I work at do that? no they didn’t, what I needed to do was put through a request to a human who then had to manually create a statement and then send it through to the customer – we had the technology to automate that process over 20+ years ago.

    Another example is Spark – I bought a phone on an interest free plan (this can be applied to any mobile phone carrier by the way so it isn’t just Spark who does this) and I wanted to pay off the remaining balance. Now, you’d think that it should be just a matter of logging into the Spark customer portal, navigating to the interest free payment area and then choose to make final payment but nope that would make far too much sense. What does one have to do? get in contact with Spark, talk to an operator, ask the operator to create a request for final payment who will then get it put on the next bill. What did Spark do instead of making it so one can make the final payment online oneself? implement an AI chat bot instead and cannot even do basic functions such as what I wanted to do – why fix an actual problem when ‘more AI’ appears to be the latest buzzword MBA wizkids in the corporate world like flies being attracted to a freshly paid pile of cow dung but I’m sure the consultants will make plenty of money in the process of selling an entirely useless system that’ll get canned after a year of annoying customers.

  • Busy but productive day.

    Woke up this morning, had a brisk walk before work and afterwards I had a cooling down before showering up and getting ready for the day. Today was fairly busy with events taking place that impact the industry i work in so there were plenty of things that needed to be done particularly when dealing with returning customers. Tonight I worked an extra hour just to clear some stuff out of the queue – this is one of the benefits of working from home is being able to do some extra work and not having to time it up with when the next bus or train will be leaving town.

    On one of my breaks I finally got the last two shelves of my pantry sorted out – all of the cups (glasses, coffee mugs etc) are on one shelf and the plates, bowls etc, are on the other shelf and now it is looking a whole lot less chaotic than before. The kitchen is now looking really well organised and I’m looking forward to some cooking on Tuesday next week – I’ll buy some mince, onions, mushrooms, pasta sauce etc. although I am tempted to make some chilli but whatever the case maybe it’ll be a more enjoyable experience now that I have the right tools for the job.

    I checked for Chrome updates today however it appears that it has been pushed off for release on Thursday (Wednesday US Time) and hopefully with that will come the update for ublock Origin Lite. I really do wish that US based businesses would have more than one office where these extensions, apps etc. can be approved because while the US has a holiday the rest of the world continues on with the expectation that things keeps progressing. Apple released a beta of their 26.6 update which makes me wonder whether we’ll see a 26.7 or whether 26.6 will be the last major update before version 27 is released (there will be future updated for 26.x I’m sure but they won’t include new features but instead solely focusing on bug and security fixes).

    I was watching a video on AI – it is a good feeling knowing you’re not the only person who refuses to be sucked into the BS vortex that the tech dude bros are insisting on imposing it upon others.

    As I’ve said in the past, the technology industry has a habit of reinventing the wheel and the replacement they create ends up being worse than what they replaced. One of the examples given in the video is creating a todo list based on reading through Slack – sounds like a great idea in theory until you realise that there is a benefit of actually reading through it yourself. Yes, reading through Slack may take you longer but the benefit is that it jogs your memory as you read through the messages, it maybe pick up something that the LLM doesn’t pick up on, you may see a reference to another source that you follow up on to provide context and thus make sense of what was posted. There is a benefit to reading an email, you can pick up on the tone of the email, how the other party is reacting to a particular idea where as with an LLM summarising you miss the nuance in the email itself.

    Language is more than just words, there is a whole lot of baggage that comes with how people write, the words being used, the order in which something is discussed etc. all of this gives you an insight and the suitable questions you may need to ask in follow up to seek further clarification. This is also the problem when you start using AI in academia where the the journey is replaced with an instant answer that lacks nuance. When you’re finding information it is the journey of getting there, of going down paths that turn out to be dead ends but you gain the experience and pick up some extra knowledge you wouldn’t have otherwise gained. I think in the long term the other downside is the loss of curiosity leading to a damping of creativity – an unwillingness to experiment with an uncertain outcome in favour of wanting to have instant gratification (assuming that what the LLM provides isn’t a load of nonsense). Just to finish this post off, I am reminded of what George Carlin said – when viewed in context to how the humanities have been devalued within education, the push for AI to replace teaching children how to be curious and seek out knowledge, it isn’t surprising how the far right thrives in a such a society.