Matisyahu's Blog

  • One more day to go.

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    Today wasn’t too busy but I was able to get almost all the emails out of the way along with a few other things sitting in the queue – the crew on tomorrow should find that there will be minimal number of emails that need to be done from peple sending them overnight. I’ve been sticking to my diet and it feels really good – I had a mushroom soup for dinner along with two pieces of vogels toast. The benefit of the Vogels toast and the mushroom soup is that they both have a good amount of fibre which meant that the energy was released slowly meaning I kept fuller for longer.

    I mentioned that Microsoft has announced the preview release of Windows 11 26H2 and although there has been quite a few changes it dosn’t include the bigger changes such as the new properties dialogue. Based on what I have read online, Windows 11 26H2 is a conservative release where as 27H2 will be a bigger, more disruptive release which is where those big inteface changes will make their way into the mainstream. It makes me wonder whether it is possible for Microsoft to convert their UIs that are based on Common Control and Dialogues over to WinUI 3 using AI give that it should be relatively easy for digest a particular UI design then recreate it using WinUI 3 but then again I maybe completely wrong – I guess we’ll see what happens.

    Once again in the hellscape of the National-NZ First-ACT coalition government we have the government taking away financial assistance for 18 and 19 years old whose parental house hold income is more than $67,225 (link). Have they extended the student allowance or invest money into more apprenticeship positions? no they haven’t. Once again we had the election decided in 2023 by people voting based on racism, conspiracy theories and a complete lack of understanding how the world operates. Everytime I see a video on YouTube of someone living off the grid in a log cabin, removed from the avalanche of idiocy on display these days I sometimes I wish I could escape such lving off the grid.

    Well, after a bit of unhappy news – lets leave on a high note. In Auckland the St James Theatre is being restored to its former glory.

    Hopefully once it all done that we’ll see shows return and given how close it is from the soon to be opened Te Waihorotiu Station train station it should encourage more people to come back into the centre of town. Ideally what I’d love to see local city councils do is to offer free public transport on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to to the early hours of the morning to encourage people to get out of the house and wonder around the CBD. Making the public transport free would also allow people to enjoy a night out on the town and now have to worry about costly transport home (at the moment the trains stop running just after midnight).

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  • A wonderfully sunny day.

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    I woke up at 9:00 am and decided that on my walk rather than listening to music I decided to just be alone in my own thoughts while I enjoyed the wonderful weather. At the moment the sun is shinning outside, I’ve got the windows open in my house to get some fresh air and I’m kind of kicking myself that I didn’t take advantage of the good weather to get the washing done so then I can hang it outside because it is the perfect day for drying.

    After coming back I had some minestrone, two pieces of Vogel toast, a protein bar and a low carb bar for desert. It was a satisfying lunch and the great thing with the minestrone is that it includes a good amount of fibre and it is filling even though it isn’t like a big helping. For dinner I’ll wait till I get there but I have a feeling that it’ll be something basic because I’ve already had a ‘fancy meal’ for my lunch so I’ll just for for an easy one for dinner.

    Ubiquiti has released UniFi Access Point & Wireless Bridge 8.8.5 today which is a pretty big version leap from the current stable version of 8.6.11. There are many bug fixes and features announced so we may not see it for a while as it’ll need to go through the gauntlet of testing by the early adopters but the benefit of that will be a more robust piece of software once released. I do see some improvements for 6GHz support which will interesting to test as I have my access point up to favour 6GHz over 5GHz because 5GHz over the past few years has become more common and thus the neighbourhood is getting a bit crowded.

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  • Nothing spectacular.

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    Today was a pretty normal day, nothing stood out at me but I was able to catch up on some work. Things are going pretty good at work with emails and other office work being kept on top of which will avoid them building up to the point that they become overwhelming. I think that as long as we don’t finish the day with a whole lot of stuff in the queue then it’ll give us time to catch up when customer enquiries are quiet.

    Although I do whinge and whine occasionally I did log into the State Insurance website and I noticed that they’ve finally fixed up how details updated online wouldn’t properly be updated after you log out. My mum had the same issue with her email after moving from an xtra.co.nz email address to an outlook.co.nz email address – hopefully if the issue has been resolved with my State Insurance login that hopefully it’ll be fixed up for hers as well.

    Apple has announced an even with the title ‘Surprise and shine’ which will occur on 10 September at 5:00 am New Zealand time. I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast and there has been much speculation regarding what the title of the event means. I might as throw my two cents worth into the discussion – the surprise refers to a new device or devices being launched and shine referring to the sunshine of a new day which refers to updated hardware. Many rumours are abound but i wouldn’t be surprised if we see a refresh of Apple TV 4K, updated HomePod, updated iPhones like ever year and maybe a foldable phone.

    We’ll probably hear that iOS will probably arrive a week after the event and maybe macOS released a week after but then again I could be wrong and they might end up just releaing both of them at the same time – what Apple has done int he past isn’t always an indication of what they’ll do in the future particularly when you take into account the new executive team now in charge. It’ll be interesting to see whether 26.7 is released or whether that’ll launch after version 27 for those devices that don’t meet the system requirements for version 27.

    I’m reading through the latest WECG and there was an intersting discussion regarding ‘Provide a way to distinguish prefetch requests from regular navigations in extension APIs’ which will hopefully allow improved filtering because the whole pre-fetch thing has been a problem for content blockers even in the days of MV2 even if you have pre-fetching disabled in Chrome. The WECG meetings also give a good insight regarding the enthusiasm that browser vendors have for putting some serious time and resources to making extensions on their browsers vs. those who are just going through their motions, dragging their feet every step of the way so then they can tick a box to say they’ve done the bare minimum.

    Microsoft has announced that they’ve released a preview of Windows 11 26H2 – it’ll ne an enablement package which means the code is already baked in so it is just a matter of turning it on. This years update is going to be a minor update but I have a feeling that next year will be a more disruptive update because the launch of Zen 6 and Nove Lake will include some big under the hood architectural changes that require changes at the kernel level – the biggest ones being FRED, APX and ChkTag. Linux has had the functionality support added with benchmarks showing performance benefits – I assume the benchmarks are being done on preproduction chips.

    Just finishing up this blog post, it is always amazing the number of people who are so arrogant in their ignorance that they don’t understand how tax brackets work. It is one thing to be ignorant because no one can ever be an expert on everything but the toxic mixture is always amazing when I see it when it comes to Americans claiming that countries have an average tax rates of 45% or higher. What makes the situation worse is that with social media is that such nonsense is amplified because it feeds into a narrative that makes themselves feel good about the fact that the US spends more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare and yet has some of the worse outcomes.

    It reminds me of watching an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher and the amount of copium that his American guests engage when they try to make themselves feel better about he current situation. For example, they did a comparison between Germany and a state in the US (the name of the state escapes me) on the basis of GDP per capita which is meaningless because if you compared the median wage of Germany compared to that state, the average person living in Germany has a better quality of life. The median wage also doesn’t take into account that in Germany you have affordable healthcare, education, a well funded public transport system etc. vs being made bankrupt for simply having an ambulance ride to the A&E.

    Social media may amplify misinformation and disinformation but when people are more interested in seeking out what feeds the narrative that justifies their world view then it shouldn’t be surprising that misinformation and disinformation promulgates throughout the internet. When people are faced with the facts that they find uncomfortable they can either face those facts head on or they can retreat into denial and convince themselves. The vast overwhelming majority of Americans have been raised on a steady diet of American exceptionalism and when they’re confronted with facts that challenge the years of conditioning to believe they live in the greatest country on earth then it shouldn’t be surprised when we see the sort of behaviour we see online.

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  • Relaxing and enjoying dinner.

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    Woke up at 9:00 am and it felt easier than previous days – my body getting used to the new routine? appears to be so. I went for a walk and the weather was overcast but no rain, arrived back home then got ready for work then watched some news before logging into my work laptop. I’m keep tracking of my meals and I think the biggest mistake was not keeping a journal on those days off – something I’m going to do this week so I avoid making great progress and then undo all that progress on my day off.

    I was watching a video by Taylor Lorenz regarding the push for social media bans around the world – the satanic panic has been resuscitated with a new moral panic. Rather than empower parents to monitor what their kids are doing online and giving young people the tools to navigate the internet safely. As a society we’re smart enough to realise that if we want people drinking responsibly we expect that parents set a good example of how to drink alcohol responsibly. We’re also smart enough as a society that when people want to get a drivers licence there is a process – you start off with a learners licence then graduate to a restricted licence and then eventually, once you demonstrated you’re ready, you gradually to a full licence.

    This is what happens when you have politicians being voted in who believe it is their job to implement some social engineer grand plan where is their job to fix all society’s ills. I’m sorry but society’s ills are not going to be fixed by passing legislation that make people feel good believing that is the end of the discussion. I am also cautious when Is start hearing politicians who use moral panics and culture wars as a distracting from fixing actual social issues – where they’ll talk about everything but the most obvious explanation. A good example of that is the drop in the fertility rate – politicians and talking heads who worship at the altar of neoliberalism and twist themselves into all manner of contortions to avoid the obvious that the cost of living is too high and people aren’t earning enough. Reminds of the quote from Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

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  • The forecast was a bit off.

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    Last night I went to bed expecting it to start raining but I heard nothing so I drifted off to sleep expecting it to maybe the case when I woke up in the morning but when I woke up it was overcast but and some drizzle but no rain. I’m wondering with climate change and el nino has made it more difficult to model weather as it becomes more unpredictable because according to the Metservice there will be rain overnight and in the morning but as of 10:33 pm the weather is still fine, the temperature hasn’t dropped and there isn’t any increase in the wind speed – all rather quiet.

    I checked out Webkit.org and the Safari Technology Preview 251 was released today (link) and it works ok but the issue that I have with the NZ Post YouShop still hasn’t been fixed up. I also checked it out with the uBlock Origin Extension and I noticed a few bugs with Safari when trying to access the settings page – I cleared the extension cache, exited it and then went back in and found it started working. The impression I keep getting from Apple regarding Safari is that it is something they’re reluctantly developing rather than enthusiastically putting their time and resources into.

    UniFi Network Application 10.6.101 was released today so it’ll be interesting to see when it’ll be released – maybe next week sometime? I guess it’ll be a waiting game especially if there is feedback from the community forum regarding things that need working on before it can be released. Personally I would sooner take their time and make sure that the software is as robust as possible before releasing it. My sister has my old UniFi Dream Machine and the AP AC HD at their place and things are going well – a rather drama free experience when compared to the limited coverage her old router had that the internet provider included as part of signing up with them.

    There was an interesting press release regarding One NZ and 2 Degrees posiing that they share infrastructure (link). Reading through the idea if makes me wonder whether the three networks should be all merged into something like a ‘Chorus for wireless’ that would own the spectrum and the network infrastructure and operate purely as a wholesaler so then the three companies will have equal coverage and also would allow other players to enter into the market. For a country like New Zealand which has a small population of around 5 million people – consolidating it might also mean a reduction in the amount of infrastructure required or the ability to redeploy infrastructure where more of it is needed such as in rural areas where the coverage is limited.

    The week is going well with the schedule of getting up at 9:00 am and the low carb ‘treats’ I’ve bought myself really hit the sweet tooth and with the bonus of having 6-10 grams of fibre while being low in sugar. The walk this morning was refreshing with not too many people out but saying hello to the occasional person who passed by. One of the big benefits is the bike and walking track that was installed a couple of years ago which makes walking a whole lot easier given it is on the side of the road without any houses so you’re not dodging cars coming in and out of drive ways.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
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    It is the non-fiction book ‘Chomsky on Anarchism’ which is a collection of essays that I bought many years ago when I was at university. It is one of those books that are kind of heavy in the content – read a few pages, then thinking about it for a while then maybe read a little bit more. It is the thing I enjoy about finally being out of university because I can now read books at my own pace and enjoy them – writing down notes, updating my blog when I’m inspired by something I read rather than having to worry about some sort of schedule I have to stick to.

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  • A productive day today.

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    Had a great day at work today – was able to clear out all the emails in the Salesforce queue exception one which was kind of hairy so I thought it would be best to chat with my boss regarding how to handle it in a sensitive way. I have to admit, I tend to over analyse what I write – always thinking about how it could be interpreted or misinterpreted because the sentences I use maybe to abrupt thus giving an incorrect impression.

    Apple has released a refresh for their Mac mini and Mac Studio to the M5 bring it inline with their other M5 products plus the availability of a M6. I think the exciting part is the ability for consumer computers to run AI workloads locally, for developers to choose an open weight model that works best for them and them strap a harness to it then start using it without worrying about how many tokens they are burning through. As I’ve said in the past – the future is local for most people with some limited use cases for AI in the cloud.

    There was a great video on Youtube by ‘The Tech Report’ addressing just that, most people don’t need frontier models, specialised models are better in many cases (as I’ve mentioned in the past) and consumer hardware is going to eventually undercut the advantages that cloud based AI has. The one thing to always remember is that the world runs of GET – good enough technology and unfortunately far too many tech dude bros in silicon valley obsess over the best rather than what the end users actually need which is something good enough to do the job. It reminds me of Itanium, promised to be this futuristic CPU only for it to crash and burn the moment that you could get a good enough solution based around x86-64 running Linux.

    I’ve been watching the bond situation in the United States regarding interest rates rising on long dated bonds and the attempt by the Trump administration to bend the curve. Everytime I see this sort of thing take place I am reminded of the saying that you maybe able to buy some time in the short term but in the long term the market ends up winning in the end. Time and time again we see governments insist that they have more control over the situation. It reminds me of what an advisor to Nixon (the same Nixon who proudly proclaimed “I am a keynesian”) that politicians want to appear to be doing something, anything, even if the right thing is to do nothing.

    New Zealand back in early 1980s had Prime Minister Muldoon that borrowed to prop up the New Zealand dollar but eventually in 1984 he had to devalue the dollar and when the new Labour government came in they floated the currency so its value was decided by the market. It was a painful process but a necessary one because just like the British Pound it become increasingly more expensive to defend the currency. I have the same feeling with what is happening in the United States – there will be a breaking point and all the maneuvering at the moment is putting off the inevitable or possibly the maneuvering making the situation worse versus if they just allowed to happen whatever was going to happen.

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  • A good start to the week.

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    Woke up at 9:00 am this morning and got out of the house at 10:00 am for a 9km walk – the weather is overcast with some drizzle which makes sense since the Metservice are forecasting rain from tonight and for the next few days. After arriving back at home I had a shower and rather than being lazy and staying in my pyjamas I’ve gotten changed into what I would normally wear if I went into the office. Long story short I want to see whether in improves my metal health by having that clear line drawn in the sand between working vs when I’m not working.

    I’ve checked Chrome for updates and Google has released an update which updates ir from version 151.0.7922.174 to 152.0.7977.65 (link) there are a huge number of security bug fixes included – 327 security bug fixes in total. I also noticed that on YouTube the bug relating to the ‘don’t recommend this channel’ where the dialogue in the left corner of the page that confirmed the action wouldn’t appear. I haven’t checked to see whether any other bugs have been fixed up in other areas but so far on macOS it is going well.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.825.1619 has been released and I haven’t noticed any regressions. I’m looking forward to Chrome eventually getting the ability to filter response and request headers which should hopefully close the functionality gap between the old MV2 framework vs the new MV3. Although uBlock Origin Lite is available on Safari as well, I find that it works best on Chrome because in Safari the declarative net request (DNR) isn’t implemented natively but rather it sits on top of the native content blocking API which has its own set of issues (as I’ve outlined in the past).

  • A relaxing weekend.

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    Well, that weekend always goes quicker than I would have liked but here we are on Tuesday night getting ready for Wednesday. I’ve finally moved from a 9:30 am alarm to a 9:00 am alarm and with that my goal is to have lights out before 11am so that I am relaxing, listening to maybe a podcast or two before heading off to sleep. Long story short I want to get myself into a good headspace so that it is easier for me to fall to sleep so then I can have a long and restful sleep good night. I had a 9km walk today and tomorrow I’ll be doing the same – I might squeeze maybe some extra few km because later on the week the weather is going to be a bit lousy so I’d like to squeeze in a bit of exercise.

    There was another release candidate for 26.7 which may result in being released maybe next week or possibly when or if they make some new product announcements in September. The impression I get regarding 26.7 is that this is their last update so they want to really nail things down – fix any outstanding issues. I’ve been checking Ubiquiti regarding UniFi Network Application 10.6.97 and I don’t see a newer release in the ‘Early Access’ channel so I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether there needs to be more testing taking place. Version 27 beta 7 from Apple has been released to developers (link) and is now available as a public beta as well (link) and quite a few things have been fixed. I would say that we’re getting pretty close to maybe seeing a release candidate soon given that they’re release a beta every week – version 26 had 9 betas but given that the scope of version 27 is narrowed to getting AI sorted and the basics nailed down it is possible that we may not end up seeing 9 betas but then again we’re two weeks away from beta 9 not to mention that this is the time when Apple announces the next iPhone along with product refreshes.

    Tonight I did some shopping at Woolworths to pick up a few groceries. I saw some protein bars that looked good so I bought that along with some Pepsi Max on special. I bought the two packets I bought a week or so ago that I used for the chilli because next week I’ll be cooking it up for tacos. I generally like to cool my chilli on ‘low and slow’ to really bring out the flavour so I’ll get it all cooked up on Monday and then put it in the fridge for Tuesday so then it is just a matter of heating it up. The one thing I didn’t get was a salad because I don’t trust it to last a week before I get to use it so I’ll wait until Monday and buy it fresh along with a couple tomatoes or maybe some cherry tomatoes.

    Daily writing prompt
    If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?
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    I would like to work in a think tank that specialises in researching difficult societal problems and coming up with policies to address them. The reason for this interest is two fold – the first is that I want to feel as though I am doing something that is meaningful and the second is the intellectual curiosity of tackling big societal problems by diving deeply into why things are the way they are then coming up with a solution.

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  • What a wonderful day.

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    I woke up this morning just before 9:00 am after having a good night sleep – it feels like my body is getting into the routine of getting up earlier and I didn’t feel groggy when getting at 30 minutes earlier than I normally would. I made a post earlier on today in a hope that I would move onto a second post I was going to make regarding the ‘myth of the nation’ that was born out of the documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’ – the ‘myth of the nation’ originating from Leo Strauss. Long story short, I was making no progress and the more time I spent the more disjointed and incoherent it became to the point that I had to ask myself whether I really wanted to write it in the first place – at that point I decided to throw in the towel. I haven’t completely discarded wanting to explore some of the ideas that I had planned but I think they would best bought up when addressing future topics.

    Ubiquiti has released UniFi OS 5.1.31 and I’ve installed it on my Dream Router 7 – it took around 8-10 minutes to install but upon reboot I haven’t noticed any regressions. With the updated firmware I have noticed some improvements in terms of the speed to resolve hostnames and downloading websites but I’m unsure whether that is related to the update or whether that is the byproduct of a reboot. The memory usage has decreased slightly and it is is using 1.41 GB out of 2.94 GB. I am still tempted to make a move to either One NZ, 2 Degrees of Quic because the three of them have an interconnect which is also shared with Cloudflare which I use as my DNS provider which should resolve in even lower latency.

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  • Addicted to doomerism and future faking.

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    There are two YouTubers that watch on a regular basis, ParkrosePermaculture and KnittingCultLady, because they provide a grounded commentary in a world where influencers and commentators are peddling the latest clickbait. I find that these two commentators provide a sober analysis on what is actually going on the real world. There is a tendency by some commentators to peddle clickbait videos either because they’re either charismatic presenter but light on details but decide to ‘fake it till you make it’ (so then they can make some money) or decide that hating the Trump administration is more important than facts so the net result is the decision not look into something further and go with assumptions built on assumptions.

    At one end of the spectrum there are those who keep peddling copium/hopium because it tells the audience what they want to hear – audience capture if you will. The net result of this peddling of copium/hopium has been this peddling of nonsense by both commentators/influencers as well as established media outlets. Does anyone remember the constant drum beat of “the walls are closing in on Trump” and “Trump is going to end up in prison” in the mainstream media? I remember seeing that on MSNBC (now known as MS NOW) and the copium/hopium put out into the world with people being convinced that they didn’t need to do anything because something magical would happen and then everything would turn out for the best.

    At the other of the spectrum there are those who pedal doomerism that thrive on doomerism because for some it is a business model where it is easier to spread doom than it is give a sober assessment on what is happening in the world. Then there are those who pedal doomerism because, to quote Mark Fisher “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” It is the defeatist mindset that doesn’t require effort on the part of the listener or a creator to accept that pushing back against the right is a Sisyphean task – it is a never ending up hill struggle and it is up to those of us on the left to find meaning in that never ending struggle rather than just giving up because we believe the world ought to work a certain way then get angry when it doesn’t.

    Getting back to being grounded in reality, KnittingCultLady did a great video pushing back at the idea of ‘Pete Hegesth fired all the top military lawyers’:

    Once you listen to the video then you quickly realise that what was being spread around the internet does not match up with reality but unfortunately the correction made by KnittingCultLady has limited reach because it isn’t powered by sensationalism but by facts. Again, it is easier for doomerism to spread faster than a sober assessment and to be honest the power structure actually like the doomerism narrative because it attributes more power to them than they actually have in reality.

    Another good video to watch is by ParkrosePermaculture where she talks about the idea of ‘future faking’:

    Much like how the doomerism narrative benefits the power structure the idea of ‘future faking’ is about spreading the narrative that future is predetermined and there is nothing you can do about it so you may as well give up. The problem is that if you start believing that the future is predetermined then what happens? people give up, the momentum for change dissipates as people feel as though any effort to make meaningful change is doomed to failure. This is the same sort of narrative being put out by the AI industry (not too sure whether you can call it an industry given it is losing money hand over fist) that the future is AI, that future is set in stone, either get on the bandwagon or get left behind – once you realise how LLMs actually work you quickly realise this is the biggest ‘fake it til you make it’ gamble in modern history that puts the dot-com bubble to shame.

    Just to round off the post, there is a good video by Ryan McBeth regarding the WSJ article which had drummed up the hysteria by claimed the the US Army would phase out the drone unit – small problem there, that wasn’t the case.

    One thing to keep in mind is that he is a consultant for the government so he has to be fairly careful about wading into politically sensitive topics hence the reason why he avoids talking about such topics. Long story short, the video goes through the claim that was being made and by the end of the video you’ll quickly realise that at best the WSJ did a bad job understanding where drones fit in the larger Army structure or that the narrative was more important than consulting an expert to ensure that they understand what was happening.

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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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