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

  • No, the software industry isn’t going away.

    I’ve been watching some videos over on the YouTube channel “The Tech Report” where Ed Zitron has been a breath of fresh air regarding the AI hype. I was watching the following video which appeared in my ‘suggested videos’ section on YouTube (I guess the algorithm is suggesting this video as a counter balance to the other videos I have been watching):

    The above video is the perfect example of someone getting high on their own supply of believing the hype – the reason why the there are software companies in the first place and that is because you’re not just paying for a system that can be customised into a bespoke solution but you’re also paying for someone to take responsibility for maintaining it over the long term. In other words businesses want to know who the buck stops with and that who is the software company. It reminds me very much of an executive from Westpac many years ago when talking about the role of technology within the banking sector – that is something that enables the organisation to serve their customers, the bank isn’t there as a technology company in and of itself but there to use technology to achieve an end goal.

    The other problem is the fact that AI code is slop code – poorly written code not to mention the complete absence of system analysis and design documentation to make sense of how the whole system works together. The lack of documentation also means that you spend just as much time if not more trying to understand the code before fixing any bugs, auditing the code base to ensure there aren’t security holes and ensuring that it is compliant with the given regulations for the industry that your business operates in. That doesn’t even touch on the cost of the technical debt that builds up resulting an even more complex and convoluted code base that those within the organisation have very little to no understanding on how to maintain and develop it further.

    If there was ever evidence that the market isn’t rational then it is the recent weeks of Trump saying something and then the gulliable people on Wall Street believing what Trump had to say. This is what happens when you have traders and analysts who get sucked into the hype of something and lack the knowledge to find out whether what is being said is a load of nonsense or whether there is actually some truth to it. It is something I see in large business, executives lacking the intellectual curiosity to go out of their way to educate themselves on something – you don’t need to be an expert at a a micro level but you should have a good understanding at the macro level so then at least you can detect hype and over promising not to mention asking the right questions.

  • I’ll put this under the title of ‘a penny for your thoughts’:

    I was watching the following video and thought about it in context to the post I made before entitled ‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe they’ve changed’ (link) that I made a few days ago where I pointed out that I don’t believe that the videos of people regretting their vote will actually translate into a long term change of those people’s politics.

    The original post I made wasn’t just in reference to Trump supporters but also independents (those who don’t identify with either party) who voted for Trump but are having regrets. I talked about the idea that far too many Trump supporters appear to vote based on vibes but I also wonder to what extent are we not picking up everyone – how many Trump supporters are stuck in the sunken cost fallacy vs staying for the sense of community, belonging, identity being defined through ‘the struggle’, the comradery that they get being part of a movement; the tendency for movements to continue past their used by date.

    Regarding the whole AI hype frain, put me in the category of being an ‘AI Hater’ given the amount of time and resources wasted on what has become yet another attempt by Silicon Valley to look for the next growth market – metaverse failed, 3d televisions and phones failed, the ‘touch first’ vision that Microsoft put out with Windows 8 failed, the belief that the AR/VR headset would become the next smartphone etc. Here we are and now Silicon Valley is convincing the coke snorting micro dosing types on Wall Street that the next ‘big thing’ is just around the corner and all they need is a few hundred billion more and then something magical will happen.

    One of the major promises of the ‘AI revolution’ is that it will allow us to overcome the limitations of our current forces (which is causing persistently high inflation) to herald an age of abundance where money would cease to having meaning aka a post scarcity society. Sounds great in theory but we’ve seen promises like this is the past regarding other technological leaps – sure, there were improvements in productivity but the degree in which the technology improved productivity never really lived up to the hype. The current crop of LLMs are already hitting their limit with each increase in the size the improvement in accuracy decreases meaning at some point we’re going to hit some sort of plateau and thus will need to develop something better than LLMs.

    You’ve heard about the big lay offs in the press but what isn’t covered in the press are the businesses that months later reverse their decision and try to rehire all those people they had laid off. What also isn’t being reported on is how well it performs when compared to humans – how accurate are they when compared to a human, when it comes to code aka vibe coding is the output unreadable verbose slop resulting in technical debt or will it actually improve product quality and productivity. All the test so far that have been done has resulted in underwhelming results and one could argue that the results would be even more underwhelming once these services are no longer subsidised and are charged at the cost of delivering it. Unlike the dotcom bubble where there was actually something useful being sold, I think at the end of the AI bubble there will be very little in the way of scraps that can be used to build the next push forward for the technology sector.

  • And I’m feeling good.

    I woke up this morning and the weather is looking great outside – I’m going to catch the bus down to the mall to have a look around, get some fresh air and see how the world is going. I have to admit, I was a bit lazy yesterday and apart from a walk during the day I just stayed at home and chilled out because I’m at a point in my life where my value peace of mind over satisfying some abrirartry need to feel ‘productive’ on my day off. While I’m down there I’ll probably get my self a coffee, check out the music store along with a few other things and because it is Tuesday it should be fairly quiet which is one of the reasons I like working Wednesday to Sunday with my weekend being Monday and Tuesday – I avoid the crazy crowds on Saturday and Sunday when everyone else has their weekend.

    An update for Chrome was released which bumped the version from 146.0.7680.154 to 146.0.7680.165 on macOS with the details of the update can be found here (link). The uBlock Origin Lite update hasn’t been released yet although there has been an update in the last couple of hours to fix a regression so it’ll be interesting to see whether uBlock Origin Lite 2026.322.1735 will appear or will they jump straight to 2026.323.2044 instead. Oh, and in disappointing news, 26.4 wasn’t released today so many it’ll be tomorrow however what I have noticed though is quite a few updates have come through for apps on my phone which makes me wonder whether there maybe some changes in 26.4 that require apps to get ready for the platform launch.

  • A relaxing day at home.

    I woke up early today to the chime of a message being sent to say that the food I ordered was on its way. When it arrived I put it all away and then got to cooking up the mince – it had been in the freezer for quite some time, I cooked it up and it was truly awful. I’m unsure what may have happened but I’m going to remember next time not to freeze the mince for longer than a few months before the mince I had was all grey and dry – even cooking it with a decent amount of canned tomatoes didn’t fix it up. Unfortunately it was a bit of a waste of food but I had a plan (b) that I could turn to so I guess it wasn’t that bad after all but I guess it is a case of ‘you live and you learn’.

    I checked for updates for my software and uBlock Origin Lite 2026.322.1735 was released today. I wasn’t expecting an update so soon after the beta release but there are two notable updates for Safari – I quickly updated, cleared the cache, and set it up cleanly and I haven’t noticed any regressions so far. The update has ben made available on the Apple App Store (both iOS and macOS) and the Microsoft Edge store but it hasn’t arrived yet in the Google Chrome store yet – that may take 24-48 hours. On Tuesday we may see the 26.4 update (which would be Monday in the United States) but it could be possible that they’ll release it on Wednesday (which would be Tuesday in the United States).

    On a good side I ordered two CDs on Discogs: Grady Tate Movin’ Day and Grady Tate After The Long Drive Home which are getting shipped from Japan. The Arthur Adams CDs arrived and I ripped them to FLAC, backed them up to the cloud and then I encoded the FLAC to AAC for playback on my iPhone along with playing on my other devices. I’m getting back into listening to music and I’m tempted to buy a DVD player so that I can build up my DVD collection once again. At the rate things are going I may need to buy myself another bookshelf or do some rearranging of furniture around the home – I need some more space.

    Winter is coming in the next few months so one of the things I want to do is to setup a curtain on the side door where I can feel the heat escaping. I’m tempted to get some sort of ready made curtain that I purchase ‘off the rack’ but I’ll need to get a tape measure so then when I do pop into a place that sells them that I get the correct sized ones. In the area I have a wicker wood chest for my shoes but what I really would like to get is a proper shoe rack/cabinet – the one at Kmart looks good enough and the colour fits in with the other furniture (I’m avoiding the whole white furniture look because it would look out of place in my house).

  • I’m sorry, I don’t believe they’ve changed.

    I finished watching the following video – I can’t help but get the feeling that a lot of FAFO content is hopium for non-MAGA to believe that there will be this giant ‘ah-ha moment’ where those who voted for MAGA will realise how wrong they were and will become Democrats.

    I’m sorry but I don’t believe that these people will ever change given that their political world view is based on vibes not a robust understanding of reality. The people complaining how about Trump were the same people who, during George W Bush, would wear 10 gallon hats, cowboy boots, claim that ‘these colours don’t run’, would obnoxious talk about buying their ‘freedom fries’ and shout “freedom ain’t free!” along with “support our troops” with the icing on the cake being “we don’t cut and run”. Funny how 8 years later the economy crashed, the United States were stuck in two quagmires and these same people claimed that they were always against it or tried to excuse their support by claiming that they were lied into the war (even though there were millions of people in the US and around the world with the same evidence saw that it was a lie).

    The problem is that there is a sizeable section of any population whose understanding of politics is akin to supporting their local football team because they like they name, the cool jersey design, the prevalence of its profile in the community they live etc. The net result is that you have people who vote based on the vibes of a campaign – not an understanding of the policy platform but rather than vibes of the campaign and whether they resonate with those vibes. The net result? people who voted for George W Bush who then became involved with the Tea Party then jumped on board the Trump train aka MAGA – all contradictory movements and you’d be hard pressed to get many of them to explain their position regarding politics based on who they voted for.

    Getting back to the original point, long story short, you cannot reason someone out of something that they never reasoned themselves into. As so long as there are people who attach themselves to a political movement based on emotions then the idea that such individuals will suddenly change their world view is simply foolish. MAGA voters were warmed exactly what would happen, they ignored the warning and are only now caring because negative things are occurring to them but truth be told if those bad things were happening to other people but not themselves then they wouldn’t care – it’s all about the vibes until they’re negatively impacted. Time will pass and there will be another Trump, they’ll fall back in line and vote for Republican – nothing learnt, no evolution of ones political world view, just going through the motions.

  • Start of the weekend.

    I worked an extra hour on Saturday which meant i could finish and hour early on Sunday night with tbe benefit being that I could catch a bus to the supermarket to pick up some chicken nibbles and salad for dinner. Once I arrived home I jumped online to order for the next couple of weeks now that I worked through the stock I had along with taking the mince out of the freezer to defrost for dinner on Monday. When cooking chilli I tend to cook a large batch of it then break it into meal sized portions that I can use for later – makes life easier to have those meals ready to defrost and reheat rather than cooking them in smaller batches. The order I placed with Woolworths will get delivered around midday which will be enough food for 3-4 weeks but occasionally I’ll need to top up with the occasional trip into town.

    On Monday I’ll go for a walk, head down to the mall, look around at the stores and get some fresh air – it is easy to become a bit of a recluse so I try to get out of the home on my days off. I went for a walk this morning on Sunday which was a nice refreshing day to start the day with the sun out along with the shade provided along the walking path and there were plenty of people out doing the same thing. It is something that I want to keel up long term because although I’m inclined to not wanting to do it I also know that after having a walk I feel a whole lot better and more energy for the rest of the day vs getting up out of bed and hanging around the house watching YouTube videos before I have to log into the laptop for a day of work.

    I’ll be having a look at Google Workspace and have some experimenting around with the service although the coming week we’ll see 26.4 to be released, maybe uBlock Origin Lite stable version will be made available. When it comes to Ubiquit, the stable version of UniFi Gateways 5.0.16 hasn’t been released and UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.5.18 has been made available on the early acccess channel – will be interesting to see when it’ll be released because there have been reports of improvements to the MLO implementation – I’m unsure whether MLO has come out of EA but then again most of the MLO implementations tend to be pretty flakey so I not surprised that Ubiquiti is pretty conservative in terms of no over promising.

  • The end of the week is near.

    Woke up this morning, went for a small walk before work and then caught up on the news before starting the shift. Tonight i worked an extra hour but on Sunday I’ll finish an hour early which will make the day go a whole lot quicker – I might even have enough time to jump on the bus down to the supermarket to pick up a few bits and pieces before the delivery arrives on Monday for the weekly shop I’ll place online once I come back from the store.- at this point all I feel like is some soup and fresh fresh for dinner on a Sunday night.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.320.1943-beta has been released – no major changes other than filter improvements although there appears to be some improvements in the area of popup blocking but I haven’t had a major in depth search around in the github source code to see what other changes are in store for the final release. I’m finding that uBlock Origin Lite works a whole lot better with Chrome than Safari and I think that has to do with how Apple implements the declarative net request API on top of their existing native content blocking API rather than implementing the declarative net request API natively as in the case of Chrome.

  • Two days to go.

    Work today was good, I decided to have a day of from exercise to allow my knee to recover from my fall and at this point I’m all good to getting up tomorrow at 11am for an 8km walk before work (maybe a little longer if I am making good progress). The day wasn’t too bad although there were a couple of special customers who can’t seem to grapple with the idea that laws are passed by the government and we (the industry being regulated) don’t get to pick which laws we wish to follow and which laws we find inconvenient. I really have to wonder whether there are a large number of simple minded people out there who don’t understand how the world actually operates – they’ve convinced themselves that the world is setup to annoying them rather than the fact that the we live in a society of rules.

    I’m gradually working through Fallout Season 2 episode 3 but I’d like to get it finished off by next week so then I’m all ready for some new releases that will be made available. On Saturday or Sunday night I’ll do some grocery shopping online to pick up some essentials although I have a voucher from work that I need to use up – I may hold onto it until the middle of April when mum has come back from her holiday around New Zealand to help pick up the extra bit of food from the supermarket so I can stock up the freezer before winter.

    Saturday will be when Microsoft will release an Edge update. I’ve also been following Ubiquiti and it appears that we maybe a while away before seeing an update for the non-Cloud gateways to receive an update. I’m always cautious about reading people’s horror stories given how many times I have seen people claim to have issues only to then see them later back peddle and admit that they had screwed something up by changing something in an undocumented way which caused a cascading set of issues.

  • You win some, you lose some.

    Well, I got up in the morning at 10am then headed out for an 8km walk, came back home, had a shower, got changed then headed out to work – things were going great until I tripped over an uneven surface when walking to the train station and landed on my hands resulting in some nasty cuts on my hands. I got back up, lucky that I had some tissues in my pocket, I got to work and was able to clean myself up and start work. I have a sore knee and it makes walking a little difficult so I’ll just take the next couple of days to recover by doing some free weights but as long as I stick with my meal plan I should be all good.

    I thought to myself that “oh great, another one of these days when everything bad all comes at once” but I actually things started to improve when my doctor came back to me with the blood and test results. The HbA1c came back as stable at 37 and the urine testing came back that my kidneys were doing what they were meant to do – all the results are back within the healthy range which is a good sign that few years I was over weight hasn’t had an a permanent impact on my health so now it is just a matter of keeping on track with a healthy lifestyle and keeping tracking of those numbers so that there are issues that pop up that they can be addressed with lifestyle changes and/or medication if need be.

    I’lll be working from home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday but I’m hoping that by Saturday I’ll be able to get in some light exercise but I’ll take it easy. I’m looking forward to next week when Apple is scheduled to release 26.4 of their platforms to the public and I’ll be able to see how much Safari has been improved when compared to 26.3. On a side note, I mentioned that I checked out on macOS 26.4 that there were some frameworks that were modified and it appears that the update released recently was fixing a security issue in Webkit which lines up with the frameworks that were modified.

  • Off to work.

    Woke up before my alarm went off this morning, went for a 5.8km walk, showered and I’m relaxing before leaving home to go to work. I haven’t got the test results back but I’m hoping that if it is below 40 then I’ll be happy although I have a bit of work to do because my goal is to get my HbA1c down to the low 30s which will stabilise things over the long term. I think having a good routine in the morning will also help with a morning walk to get things moving.

    Google has released a Chrome update and I got it installed, it was a pretty big jump from 146.0.7680.80 to 146.0.7680.154 – I’ll check out later on today what the changes were. Apple also released a 26.4 release candidate for their platforms with speculation that a final release will appear around this time next week.