Matisyahu's Blog

  • Almost the end of the week.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

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

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

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

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

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

    , ,

  • Almost the end of the week.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

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

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

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

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

    , ,

  • A rainy start to the day.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up this morning before my alarm went off and it was kind of spitting down but I thought I may as well get the walk in before it really starts to rain. Funny enough, after coming back the heavens opened and it started pouring down and it has been that way for the last few hours – the temperature has also dropped so I’ve had to put my heater on to get the house back up to a comfortable temperature.

    Ubiquiti is has some big updates in the pipeline over the next few weeks – there is the UniFi OS 5.1.33 currently in the release candidate phase of testing . The really exciting updates are in the early release area with UniFi 6.0.7 which updates the Debian distribution that runs on Ubiquiti hardware to Debian Trixie which upgrades the Linux kernel from the 5.x series to the 6.12 LTS series. UniFi Network Application 10.6.106 has also been released to an early release along with the niFi Access Point & Wireless Bridge 8.8.7 that was released 6 days ago.

    The big announcement for version 27 of Apple’s platforms was announced – it’ll be released on 14 September US time which translates to 15 September NZ Time. All I have to say, I am so bloody happy that it has been released on that day because it is my day off where I can spend all day, doing a clean install on all my devices – maybe I’ll get lucky and see Ubiquiti push out an update as well. From all the reports the release is going to be rock solid from day one rather than one of those situations of “umm, I think I might way for the first x.1 release before I consider upgrading”.

    I logged into my work computer this morning and Salesforce is still freezing with Chrome 153. I did a completed clearing of all cookies and cache, shut down the laptop completely then cleared out all the vents for any dust then turned it back on again. Things were going well until the Salesforce page would freeze again but the funny thing is that the browser itself hadn’t frozen because I could click on other tabs and everything was runnign perfectly fine. I also have to note is that the issue doesn’t appear on any other website so I’m unsure as to the cause of it. I’ve setup Firefox and I’m using that now but I do hope that it is just a matter of waiting for the second update Google pushes out in the same week some time that will address the problem.

    ,

  • Looking forward to Thursday.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    Today was a good day but there was quite a lot of work that I uncovered that I’m going to work through for the rest of the week. It is one of those things where you shouldn’t go looking for more work because you might end up getting just that but once found you quickly realise that a lot of it should have been sorted out age ago. I logged into my work computer and upgraded Chrome to 153 however I’ve had some strange behaviour with Salesforce so what I’m going to do on Thursday is reboot my laptop, do some cleaning of the vent at the bottom to remove any dust build up – I’m always surprised how dust can build up.

    I mentioned before about the update pushed out by Microsoft so when I go around to mum’s house next week I’ll check to ensure that it has updated itself. Mum has a Beelink mini-PC which has been really go so far – the AMD Zen 5 strix halo SoC performs well although I have to admit mum isn’t exactly putting it under a lot of pressure. I’ll also need to check to ensure that Chrome updated itself as well.

  • Back to work.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    Woke up this morning thinking that the Apple event took place but then I realised that it is Wednesday US time which is Thursday NZ time. I checked for updates for my mobile phone and iOS 26.6.2 which fixes an update issue when updating via a mobile data connection – is that an indication of an update being made available on Thursday? I guess we’ll wait and see.

    Google has released an update for Chrome which boosts the version from 152.0.7977.83 to 153.0.8010.37. There area. huge of security fixes with this release. 230 in total with a decent number of them either classified as high or critical and it also marks the move to a fortnightly release cycle so get ready to see more frequent updates being pushed out. It isn’t surprising that such a move is taking place given how LLMs are being used to hunt down security vulnerabilities and bugs which necessitate getting updates out as soon as possible.

    Microsoft has also released a massive update for Windows 11 – I’ve got it on my work computer however normally there can be a delay before it is made available which can range from a few hours to a few days. The update has a list of some quite nasty security bugs so I wouldn’t be surprised if they make it available as soon as possible but then again I’ve got a pretty good security setup with my router and firewall settings which help keep things secure particularly when working from home.

    ,

  • Back to work tomorrow.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    Well, Thursday will be when Apple has their big announcement so hopefully we’ll find out when version 27 of their platform is released and we’ll probably get version 26.7 update released maybe Thursday as well. There are plenty of rumours regarding the announcement – the usual iPhone announcement will be made but rumours are circulating regarding an AppleTV, a HomePod update plus a few other updates being released. Google is also scheduled to release Chrome 153 tomorrow but that is assuming there hasn’t been delayed due to the Labour day holiday that was occuring in the United States.

    When I came back from the shop the house had been fully aired out however the temperature had dropped quite a bit so I closed all the windows and then closed the curtains on. At the moment the temperature is 7°C outside so I’ve got the heater on at the moment – hopefully this is just a cold spell before we get into spring then eventually summer. There are forecasts regarding super El Niño may make the weather even more unpredictable so it’ll be interesting to see whether summer is hotter and if so that will require me to purchase a fan – I’ll probably look at getting a Dyson Purifier Cool which is a bit on the pricey side but once you buy it then it’ll last for a long time vs. getting a cheap fan like I did last year and now it has fallen to pieces so I had to throw it out.

  • Reorganising and getting ready for tomorrow.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I got up at 9:00 am and had a chat with a few friends online and then after that I had a shower, got changed and after I got ready I found the delivery I thought was stuck in Auckland had arrived on my door step. The two tshirts and the hoodie were put into the wash – I’m always in a habit of washing clothes before I wear them so then any dye that may run is washed out in the first wash. After getting that sorted out I opened up all my windows and got ready to go down the road.

    I went down the road and purchase some clothes hangers – some wooden ones for delecate clothing items and some standard metal ones that are covered in a plastic/PVC coating so that the clothing doesn’t get damaged. I picked up a few items for dinner tonight and caught the bus back home and once home I moved all the sweat shirts and hoodies in my tallboy to clothes hangers then the long sleeve shirts I in my band wardrobe I put into the second one. After moving that around I had more space in my tall boy to put tshirts and a few extra items of clothes so that now it isn’t so crowded – some order to the chaos.

    Once again Trump makes a post over on Truth Social and for most normal people they would see it as a self own:

    The reason why the MAGA types don’t see it as a ‘self own’ is because they’ve fused their own identity with Trump – the net result? anything that is good for Trump is good for them even though any normal person can easily seen that it isn’t the case. This is cult of personality type behaviour of behaviour you see when it comes to any decision Trump makes. When there is a good outcome then it is a ‘masterful gambit’ and ‘5d chess’ where as if everything turns out bad then his devotees will claim he got ‘bad advice’ – ‘the great leader’ can never be wrong in the eyes of his cult members.

    It is the same sort of behaviour that authoritarians use when they claim that they’re the living embodiment of the will of the people and if you oppose him then you are against the will of the people which makes you the enemy of the people. What you’re seeing with the United States is 50+ years of running the education system into the ground, treating educating not as an institution to prepare future citizens but rather it has been turned into, to quote George Carlin, “smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to realise how much they’re being fucked over”.

    , ,

  • A cold and rainy day.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up this morning before my alarm went off – it was raining and the temperature had dropped from the usual 15°C to currently 8°C so I turned the heater on to warm up the house. I’m in no hurry to do anything today on my day off so I’m going to relax at home, watch some YouTube videos and maybe later on when the weather gets better I’ll head out for a walk. For breakfast today I had a protein bar, bananas and some vogel toast – I’ve been getting back into eating more fresh fruit and vegetables now that we’re getting into spring and summer soon which should make seasonal fruit more affordable.

    For lunch I had pumpkin soup but I mixed the fresh pumpkin soup from my fridge with a packet of ‘Only Organic Boost Soup Pumpkin, Red Lentils & Coconut’ – heating it up in the microwave then finished it off with the leftover sour cream from last week along with a drizzle of sweet chilli. I was going to have some vogel toast with it but the red lentils in the soup already do a good job bulking it up along with the addition of pumpkin chunks in the soup. It makes me wonder whether I should start having more lentils in my diet to boost fibre beyond the typical sources of fibre.

    We’re around 2 months away from having the general election in New Zealand and I’ll probably vote the same way I usually do – Labour for my local MP and Green Party for my party vote. The rationale for splitting the vote is based on the opinion that Labour, when left to their own devices, they will become wishy-washy and neoliberal where as if they’re forced to go into a coalition with the Greens then the Green party will provide a Labour led government with a backbone. Is every Green party policy going to make it on the agenda? probably not but it will at least push the government to the left vs. Labour being merely a watered down version of the National party.

    On a side note, I’m under no illusion that many of the problems New Zealand is facing are going to be resolved with a new government because the source of many problems originate outside of the government’s control. I would be advise political parties to be cautious and not to overplay your hand and make promises you cannot keep but instead keep your vision realistic. We’re at a time of great disruption thanks to the mad king in the White House meaning that there are many things outside the control of the New Zealand government and many of the solutions that are available have a long time line – building more renewable capacity, greater investment into electrification of the rail network etc. not only come with a price tag but also time to build then bring online.

    Such investments are great for the long term but in the immediate term when it comes to the cost of living the relief there needs to be delivery as soon as possible with the least amount of delays possible. The bigger question are the possible solutions can be provided with immediate effect while ensuring that the assistance doesn’t add to inflation and have the biggest impact. There are also issues regarding productivity and the fact that for over 4 decades we have had China acting as a giant inflation sink – it kept the overall inflation rate down (keeping in mind that the inflation rate is an average so some were going but they were offset by other prices going down) but now China is no longer the low cost outsourcing capital of the world.

    This is why there is a big push with AI, automation and robotics – this belief by some politicians and investors that such investments will in the long term improve productivity and exert downward pressure on inflation. I believe that there will be some improvements in productivity but I don’t think it’ll be even close to the promises being made by these cloud based LLM companies or many of the other AI and robotics companies. The reason why I say that is because we’ve seen promises of massive productivity improvements in double digit numbers but the reality the improvement was in the single digits.

    The problem is that with each technological leap forward the improvements become more incremental with each improvement in much the same way the deregulation and reforms at the beginning had improvements but once the biggest obstacles were removed the each reform since has had incremental improvements. For example, when weaving fabric went from a manual loom to an automated steam powered one was a massive leap forward but every improvement since then has been incremental – from steam to electricity, improvement it the quality of output, less waste, greater speed etc. all have had improvements but not as much as that initial leap forward when moving from manual to machine.

    , ,

  • A rainy and overcast day.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    I woke up this morning still feeling under the weather but I still decided to get out of bed and go for a walk so I can get some fresh air – 11.37km walk although the weather was overcast with some drizzle however at the time of writing this blog it is currently raining. According to the Metservice it looks likes that for the next couple of days the weather is going to be a bit lousy but I’m going to play it by ear to see what happens.

    I checked the Microsoft Edge installed on my work computer and just like Chrome there was a small update. At the moment Microsoft is working to bring Edge releases in line with the Chrome releases. It would be interesting to know how much customisation Microsoft does but from what I have seen they still use the Clang compiler that comes as part of the LLVM project however it is compiled against their own C++ library rather than using the LLVM so maybe that requires work on their side to make sure it compiles cleanly against their own C++ library. On macOS it probably uses the built libc++ which is included as part of the LLVM project – the performance has always been top notch ever since Apple made that change many years from the GNU libstdc++ to the LLVM libc++.

    On the news front, once again we have the powers that be in the United States engaging in the time honoured tradition of xenophobia – first it was the USSR and the ‘evil empire’ and now it is Sinophobia regarding AI (or more specifically LLMs). Funny how just as there is momentum building from grass roots organisation that the United States government trots out the hysteria of accusing anyone not wanting a data centre in their area as either backwards, poor or siding with the chinese with claims that people are being influenced by 200,000 Chinese social media accounts.

    Why address the genuine concerns that people have when you can simply dismiss any opposition to data centres as either siding with the enemy or claiming that they’ve been brainwashed by some cabal of sinister actors through social media. A recent story from Axios came out regarding a social influencing campaign (link) with X/Twitter claiming that there are 200,000 accounts spreading anti-data centre content – amazing how a social media outlet that is owned by an organisation whose ‘total addressable market’ in their filings is primarily the result putting all their hopes in LLMs in the cloud being the future is defensive about something that is in their vested interest.

    What do the pro-AI pro-data centre CHUDs do as a result? they use it as an example of how any opposition to AI and data centres isn’t something organic but instead manufactured by ‘the United States greatest adversary’. I really have to wonder whether these people actually do any rumination over the facts before opening their mouth. Have such individuals ever thought that, if the claim by X/Twitter was true, that maybe the 200,000 accounts on X/Twitter is nothing more than a psyop by United Stats adversaries to convince Americans to double down and triple down on LLMs in the cloud at the expense of other potential AI models? aka “if they don’t us to do this then we should double down and prove them wrong”.

    If I wanted to send the United States to the poor house then would I create a psyop that creates opposition online so then the Sinophobic CHUDs in the United State end up doubling down by wasting billions on a dead end technology thus giving China, who is spending a fraction of what the United States is spending on AI, the room to explore better alternatives to LLMs. In other words China would do to the United States what the United States did to the USSR and basically force them into spending their way into bankruptcy by believing in a threat that didn’t exist (aka ‘The Star Wars Project’) thus resulting in China being the last country standing and not having wasted billions on dead end projects.

    , ,

  • Off to bed.

    Published by

    Matisyahu

    on

    Another ‘cloud gaming’ vendor has put restrictions on the number of hours you can use their service per month and that follows nVidia doing the same thing on their service back last year in December. You’d think that these AI obsessed twits would have learned from their ‘cloud gaming’ fiasco but alas they’ve convinced themselves that something that is even more hardware and energy intensive such as running LLMs in the cloud is going to be the big winner. Microsoft is the one that has introduced restrictions (link) – the subscription service for games (aka attempting to be the Netflix of games) didn’t work for obvious reasons and the ‘cloud gaming’ is turned out to be unprofitable or not profitable enough to make it worth the amount invested into the infrastructure.

    As I’ve mentioned in the past, the economics of LLMs in the cloud is based on this idea that you first build out the infrastructure then once economies of scale are reached the costs plateau, the revenue grows and voila you have a profit. You can companies taking the SaaS model and believing they can apply it to everything and anything but that simply isn’t the case – cloud gaming has shown it cannot be done unless with limits and now LLMs subscriptions have usage limits. The whole business model is a house built on sand and in the case of cloud gaming it is a solution search of a problem – the phones are already fast enough to run modern games so how about just making your games run better on the hardware instead of delivering games in the most inefficient way aka the cloud.

    I think the interesting thing to see will be when the nVidia RTX Spark devices start shipping, both laptops and desktops, and whether we’ll see people move over to local models. Claud code can be use used with a local model and if you match it up with Gemma 4 model and given that the nVidia RTX Spark device can come with up to 128GB then it’ll have more than enough processing grunt and memory to run the model. Same can be said with running Gemma 4 on a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra and 128GB – plenty of power without having to worry about on going to costs of having to pay per million tokens. Personally I think the greatest threat to LLMs in the cloud isn’t people protesting data centres but rather people realising that they can grab an open weight model, run it on a decent machine and now having to worry about on going costs other than powering the machine they’re running it on.

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

Let’s connect

Recent posts