Matisyahu's Blog

  • Some thoughts on the AI bubble.

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    I’ve got a few things going through my mind at the moment in regards to the AI bubble such as the systemic financial risk of having so much debt being tied up in something that has a dubious business plan attached to it. I was watching the following video over on YouTube:

    I’m going to split this blog post into two areas, the first being the financial side of it in terms of the business and the second being the technology itself. When it comes to the financial side of it I see it as questionable whether there can be a sustainable business developed around providing LLMs in the cloud given that the whole gamble is based on the same logic that SaaS and cloud infrastructure was based. The logic being, build up the infrastructure, reach economies of scale and at that point the cost of delivery plateaus then at which point you start seeing profits. That makes sense in the case of cloud computing and SaaS because there is the cost of the initial build out but once you reach the economies of scale with each additional customer the cost of servicing them is next to nothing resulting in high profit margins and low overhead costs. This is the reason why for the last almost decade and a half the SaaS industry has been pretty much a licence to print money and the wizkids over in VCs thought they could replicate the same model for the AI industry.

    Let us assume that Alex Karp is correct about Sovereign AI, do hyperscalers become little more than cloud providers who simply provide the ‘bare metal’ infrastructure and then the customers load their own operating system, models, middleware etc. and pay for the capacity they need instead of paying for API tokens from Anthropic or OpenAI to access their frontier models? Then there is the question regarding running the models locally given that there has been improvements in NPUs, the mainstreaming of unified memory architecture, the models are having their memory footprint reduced without meaningfully impacting output or performance. There is is the rise of new models being developed such as Inkling from Thinking Machines and bespoke models that do one and one thing very well such as the recent announcement regarding a Cisco security model. If a significant amount of the workload can be done on device then what will happen to all that capacity that was built out only for it not be used – keeping in mind that every year that passes where the hardware isn’t be utilised is another year closer to when the hardware will need to be written off and then replaced because it’ll be out of date and less efficient.

    Now there is the matter of technology itself and I’m personally sceptical of its utility outside a small number of areas where it makes sense. Is it to say that the technology is entirely worthless? no, but I do question the exaggerated claims that the ‘high priests’ of AI who have put them out there with the unquestioned relaying by the media. I also question whether it is going to be a multi trillion dollar industry given the rise in the quality of local models, the performance/price and performance of NPUs that are now becoming standard, nVidia with their RTX Spark platform. With all that being said, a lot of the hype is a solution in search of a problem – if a technology was actually useful they wouldn’t need to spend billions hiring social media influencers and celebrities in trying to convince people of the usefulness nor would there be a backlash by normies who feel as though it is something that is intrusive and not something they opted in for.

    In the past the technologies that have arrived were readily apparent in what benefits it brought to the lives of ordinary people. I remember when mum bought a fax machine and rather than having to send a letter to nana she could send a fax and nana would get the document. Then email arrived and that was even better – you could attach a document or any file you want then send it through. Broadband then made it possible to have cloud based storage, work on documents collaboratively in the cloud, streaming videos on demand, stream live events such as when Apple or Microsoft had a keynote but you couldn’t physically attend because it was on the other side of the world. With each of the technologies it didn’t require billions of marketing because the benefits were obvious – it didn’t require people to convince them of a problem that didn’t exist and then sell a solution that kind of addresses the problem in an unreliable nondeterministic way.

    Have there been some interesting advances? sure, LLMs have improved converting text between languages, help with code coplemention, auto correct, grammar checking along with improved reliability of voice assistants. Most recently Google through the use of AI can translate sign language into text so then a non fluent sign language person can understand it – all of that done locally. So I keep coming back to the question – is it really a trillion dollar industry once you realise that a lot of the stuff that is being marketed is actually being delivered as local models on device? If Anthropic and OpenAI got rid of their free tier and subscriptions in favour of token billing (pay as you go) could they be profitable? I guess but at that point you really have to wonder how big the market is – people are happy to overlook wasted tokens when they’re not paying for them but the moment that the incorrect response is provided thus requiring more tokens to be wasted I think you’re going to find that even businesses who were all in on ‘tokenmaxxing’ are going to question what they’re getting out of all this.

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  • Thank goodness the week has ended.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:30 am but it was raining but I decided to get out of bed and stick to the routine that I’m trying to embed into my every day life. After getting out I had a couple of pieces of toast with marmite, a cup of coffee and I watched some news to catch up on what had happened then after all that I started. The day started off well but good lord did it start to drag on once it got past the half way point – it was almost as though I was being punished for something I did in a past life. Once the day was over I finished up some work so then it was all cleared out for the team on Monday and logged myself off – freedom at last! at the moment I’ve got some potato wedges cooking in the oven and I’ll have that with the sout cream and sweet chilli I’ve got left over from last week.

    There has been a lot of coverage regarding the death of the former University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday – no details have bene released regarding how he died so I am not goign to speculate. What I find rather concerning is up until this tragic end at such a young age it is amazing how the exact same media in the United Kingdom who did wall to wall coverage are now playing the insincere claim that they’re shocked at what happened. The press in the United Kingdom have a lot to answer for – yes there were accusations of plagiarism and questions regarding the narrative of his background but to see how the media saw blood in the water – an opportunity to feast on someones downfall while staying quiet for years regarding Jeffrey Epstein really does make the profession of journalism a sad joke. Something also tells me that if Jason Arday had been an upper class white guy that this whole fiasco would have been brushed under the rug – a dignified exit ‘for personal reasons’.

    I’ve been having a look at the specials that the different internet service providers and mobile providers are offering – am I better off grouping them altogether with one provide or am I better off having one provider for my mobile phone and a different provider for my internet. 2 Degrees is a strong contender because they’ve got a good price, getting help on Geekzone makes getting a problem solved rather easy but then again on the other side One NZ (formally known as Vodafone and before that formally known as Bell South) which has the benefit of a larger mobile network of coverage (although these days it is kind of negated by the fact that 2 Degrees has conprehensive coverage once you include the ‘Rural Connectivity Group’ towers which add extra coverage on top of 2 Degres own infrastructure).

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  • One more day to go.

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    I woke up this morning at my usual time and went for my walk 8.96km but rather than going down to the other end of the street where there are some nasty aggressive dogs that woof I decided to stay to the 5.8km and then repeat walking down the same street until I got to the railway crossing for pedestrians then came back again. The total distance for the walk is 8.96km which is fairly good – I try to aim for somewhere between 8-10km. As for the meals today – keeping a food diary has actually helped me quite a lot because it is allowed me to keep track so then I avoid nibbling between meals then losing track. I’ve just realised that I’ve got some miso soup in my draw so I think what I’ll do is have that tomorrow for breakfast along with 2 pieces of Vogel’s toast (this morning I had some baked beans and Vogel’s toast for breakfast).

    I installed Firefox on my laptop to see if the same issue that I was having with WordPress and Safari also impacted Firefox. The issue I’m talking about is when I click on post (from the ‘My Home’ on WordPress it is meant to take you to the page and insert the ‘Daily writing prompt’ on the blog post page but unfortunately for both Firefox and Safari it doesn’t appear so I’m dumbfounded as to why – is WordPress using a Chrome only feature? I originally thought it may have had something to do with third party cookies to tracking prevention regarding Safari so I disabled that and the issue still continued.

    I checked the Metservice tonight and it appears that there may be rain tomorrow but I’m going to still get up at 9:30 am because even if I don’t go for a walk because of the weather it is still good to keep in that routine. I’ve been doing this for a week and my dad used to say that if you keep something up for a month that eventually it becomes a habit and I hope that the changes I’ve made I keep up for a month then eventually it becomes something I don’t need to conciously think about because it becomes part of my every day life.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a moment when you realized you were officially an adult?
    View all responses

    The moment that I got a full time job I felt like I was officially an adult because up to that point I had part time jobs, casual jobs, I was attending polytechnic but it never felt as though I had transitioned to feeling like an adult. At the age I am at the moment I still don’t really feel like I’m adult because I guess I expect there to be some sort of feeling of being an adult but maybe this is what life is all about – everyone is just faking being an adult in a hope that maybe everyone else knows what is going on.

  • A very productive day.

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    Woke up this morning at 9:00 am, had a lazy start to the day, did some stretches and then went for an 8km walk – it is interesting how different an exercise routine is when one is going for an 8km walk on an empty stomach vs. when I used to go for a walk at the end of the day after eaten all day. I’ve been reading some articles regarding why that is the case with some saying it is because there is a delay in getting the energy from fat stores vs. if you’ve eaten then the energy is already ready to be used. The other habit I’m getting myself into is not eating or having coffee after 8pm and that is mainly because I find if I eat or have coffee after 8pm I find it difficult to get to sleep.

    I mentioned last night that I had cleaned the settings off and then set everything up with the hope that it would address some issues but unfortunately the ‘daily writing prompt’ issue sill remains. I’ve tried with both Safari Technology Preview 249 and the recently released 250 but the same issue remains. For better or worse if you want to get a decent experience online then you’re pretty much stuck with using Chrome or a Chromium based browser. I was hoping that Chrome 152 would be released next week but it was stabilised this week but it won’t be made generally available until 26 August. As much as the Apple ecosystem works well together the problem is that you cannot run Chrome on iOS in terms of Chrome using its own web engine so essentially what you end up having is front end to the Webkit web engine which kind of negates the whole reason for not using Safari in the first place.

    At the moment I am watching Silo Season 3, Episode 7 – it is a great season and it is good to hear that the gap between season 3 and 4 won’t be as big as the gap between season 2 and 3. I like watching dystopian television series because it allows the exploration of contemporary issues but in a different context – the power structures in place, the control that exists which doesn’t always appear in an obvious form but rather gently nudges people in one direction or another direction. It is also interesting to see how power is projected, how it is used, the motivations of those involved and the incentives that guide a person’s behaviour.

    Daily writing prompt
    If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?
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    It is easier to maintain good health by getting into good habits when you’re young than trying to undo a life time of bad habits when you’re older. It isn’t about depriving oneself of having a treat once in a while but it is all about moderation. Another important skill is finding health ways to deal with stress and anxiety because resorting to unhealthy forms of self medication end up making the stress and anxiety even worse.

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  • Feeling good.

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    Woke up this morning and went for an 8km walk – the weather was a little overcast but it was comfortable weather to go walking in. When I came back home I watched a few YouTube videos to catch up on the news and then grabbed lunch – Tuna & Quinoa Asian Style and two packets of roasted seaweed. What I am doing now is keeping a food diary to keep track of the calories at each meal and recording it into the Apple Journal with each day having its own entry in the journal so then I can keep track of how things are progressing. The benefit of having that journal is s that I conscious of what I eat during the day and recording when I eat – am I eating because I’m bored or am I eating because I’m actually hungry?

    Just before I started writing my blog I was watching a video from a YouTuber that I watch because although I don’t always agree with everything he does have some interesting takes. Tonight however I have to admit I disagreed with his assessment of the left wing within the United States – and the end of the day you can have a fit of righteous indignation and feel very smug about being perfect and pure but if at the end of the day you have nothing to show for it other than being smug then I have to ask what is it all for?

    If you want to engage in transformation politics then you need to build up a coalition of the working class that is bought together through the shared economic interests of the working class. Part of the coalition building means you have to meet people where they are, it also means that some things that are important may need to be on the back burner until such point that you have mass support needed to not only address the material conditions of the here and now but also the ‘big picture’ issues. The failure to address those material conditions creates fertile grounds for reactionary forces to claim that the left is obsessed with xyz at the expense of ‘real issues’.

    This is the reason why I’m dismissive of people over on the New Zealand subreddit who whine on a near constant basis of how the Green Party should stick to environmentalism and leave the social and economic issues to one side. The problem with such thinking is that firstly the environment, social issues and economic issues are intrinsically tied together (you can’t address the environmental issues without examining the economic model etc). The second issue is that if you don’t deal with the material conditions that the working class face then you run the risk of once again reactionary forces will claim that the Green Party is more interested in environmentalism as a new age religion rather than dealing with the ‘real issues’.

    I think the reason why this issue raised online was because of a recent interview of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she raised the issue of Woke 1.0 vs Woke 2.0 – the excesses of Woke 1.0 leading to the reactionary backlash then the return of woke in the form of Woke 2.0. It is all very well to parade up mainstream talking about ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish ice’ but what does that actually mean in terms of actionable policy? when regular people aka ‘normies’ hear ‘defund the police’ what is actually going through their minds – something tells me that the moment ‘defund the police’ is chanted that the regular person hearing such a chant the first thing that comes to mind is chaos, anarchy, crime, violence etc. I hope that what was said in the interview is a sign that the left in the United States are thinking strategically so that it is possible to win then engage in transforming the system for the better rather than engaging in empty virtue signally and moral posturing.

    I’m back using Safari after giving my installation a good cleaning – I logged into recover, mounted the data drive then opened the terminal to then navigate to the Library directory to clear out all the contents. Once all that was done I rebooted, logged back in and signed into my iCloud account then installed uBlock Origin Lite which had been updated to 2026.812.1211. Everything is going smoothly at the moment and there are reports of Apple working on a 26.6.2 update for macOS and a 26.6.1 update for iOS and from what the rumour mill is reporting it will be focusing on security fixes – I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is using the same developer tools other big names are using to pick up security holes that have laid undetected for years.

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  • First day back at work.

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    You’ve probably noticed that I’ve changed around the blog template a bit – I finally found a template I like and with some tweaking to the default design it has turned out pretty good. I tend to prefer minimalist designs because I find that designs that are too busy and chaotic are distracting along with being difficult to navigate when using a smaller screen device. When I was choosing a new template it reminded me very much of the old days of the internet back when you could get a free website through Geocities, using Netscape Communicator to create HTML with dragging and dropping photos etc. it was a lot of fun those early days even with all the limitations of dial up modems. I think what made the internet fun was the fact that it was the wild west, that anything could be possible because nothing had been written in stone – weird business plans, traditional businesses putting up a website but still very new to the idea which left many wondering what needed to be on that website.

    I got up at 9:00 am this morning, took my time getting ready, did some stretches and then went out for my walk for the day. There was a lot of activity occurring in my neighbourhood with more houses being built which is a good sign because I was worried that with the house prices stagnating that it may dissuade developers from building more homes but it appears that things are progressing well. I finally found out what my water bill is from Tiaki Wai – it is only marginally higher than the previous years when it used to be altogether in the council rates. No one likes paying taxes but the benefit of having the three waters taken care of a single entity for the Wellington region without the political meddling should hopefully result in peple feeling that when they pay their water bill that they know it is going to Tiaki Wai rather than into a giant slush fund to be fund everything other than water.

    Google released an update to Chrome today (link) which bumped the version from to 151.0.7922.109 to 151.0.7922.138 – I’m unsure whether there will be another update tomorrow like last week so I guess we’ll wait and see. On the same day uBlock Origin Lite was updated to 2026.811.1529 which is kind of unusual that the Chrome store got it before the Apple app store – not that I’m complaining but it did come as a bit of a surprise. I gave it a bit of a test and I’ve noticed that it is stopping ads that were coming through on the previous version. The problem is with content blockers in general is that these websites are always finding ways of getting around them so it is perpetually a game of cat and mouse – sometimes it is filters that need updating while other times it is the actual extension needing to add userscripts to deal with the content that has worked out a way to get around the content blocker.

    The parcel I ordered from the United States and got delivered via YouShop arrived in Auckland this morning so I am hoping that it’ll be delivered either on Thursday or maybe Friday. When it is delivered I’ll be washing it and then hanging it up on the clothes rack that I’ve since fixed up by taking the wheels off it – one of the wheels were already broken so removing the other wheels stopped it from being wobbly. I’m still deciding whether I should get a new clothes horse because the last one was made with a combination of plastic and metal with the plastic connections ended up breaking (when I threw that out I also threw out my old fan because it had stopped working).

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a moment when a stranger completely restored your faith in people?
    View all responses

    When I worked at an internet service provider I remember having people from all different walks of life – young and long, novice and experienced, then everyone in between. What restored my faith in humanity was that the person I was helping wasn’t just going through the motions but they also wrote down notes for future reference in case the same issue occurred again. When you’re on a long telephone call it feels good that the person on the end of the call demonstrates that they appreciate your help but taking on board the education you’re providing because then it what it means is that it empowers the end user with more knowledge so in the future they can help themselves.

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  • Back to work on Wednesday.

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    Relaxing in bed and getting ready to go to sleep – I’m going to have an early night in bed tonight with the goal of getting in bed and lights off before 11:00am so then I can relax, listen a podcast and drift off to sleep. On Wednesday I’ll be getting up at 9:00 am and then go for an 8km walk although I am open to a longer walk it I’m feeling up to it but I relaly want to get back into a good routine because I have made so much progress I don’t want it to all come undone. On a good side though the meals I bought from the supermarket will provide some variety and I’m going to start keeping a food diary so then I can keep track of my calorie intake – I think if I keep a diary then it’ll remind me to stick to a routine rather than losing track during the day as I’m rushing between working, breaks then back to work again.

    I was watching ‘The Bradbury Group’ tonight and there was a discussion about Chris Luxon and whether he would remain on as prime minister or whether someone will challenge him for the role at the emergency meeting on Wednesday. As much as there is gossip and rumours I wouldn’t put much stock in it because at the end of the day if you look at the polls the right wing is still likely to win the election (being a one term government is incredibly rare). Chris Luxon may not be popular but firstly who is the alternative? secondly, what will an alternative bring given that the issue is regarding policy not personality? thirdly, they’re already going to win the election so why change the leader other than for the feel good factor of having a popular leader?

    Microsoft has announced that they’ll be removing MV2 support out of Edge with support within the consumer version being removed by the end of 2026 and enterprise by early 2027 (link). It isn’t surprising given that Microsoft has kind of signalled that it was something that would take place but they never gave a firm timeline regarding it’s removal. Long term if you’re really into MV2 support then you’re betting off going with Firefox because as others have said, the MV2 support in Edge was always on borrowed time. Microsoft has talked about improving the efficiency of their operating system and Edge was mentioned as part of that which will make for interesting reading when those improvements are merged and whether the will appear on Chrome as well (whether it appears in Chrome is very much dependent on whether Google compiles a particular feature into their build or whether it remains a Edge only feature).

    Apple has released beta 5 of their next platform (version 27) to developers and most of the reports I have read it has been fairly stable. Personally I would be perfectly fine if Apple just kept working on it and didn’t release it until October or November if required because I’m in no hurry. What I think will be also interesting is how quickly after the release of the stable version that we’ll see improvements from the Safari Technology Preview make their way over to the stable version of Safari included with version 27. I can see there has been plenty of progress when it comes to the Web Platforms Test but what has always been lacking is how quickly they get it from technology preview to stable version.

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  • Posting during the day.

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    I woke up this morning at around 9:10 am just before my alarm went off at 9:30 am – I got out of bed and prepared for the day. The groceries got delivered at around 10:30 am with everything arriving perfectly so I put everything away and then after that was done I started preparing for the meal tonight but cooking the chilli during the day. The reason i started cooking early is because I like to cook the chilli ‘low and slow’ so that the meat takes on all the flavours and the amount of liquid is gradually reduced so then it becomes a good thick consistency perfect for nachos at home. The recipe includes 500g of mince along with the two vegetarian meal packages I mentioned early which makes the whole batch I cooked contain 24g of fibre.

    Watching another interesting put out by Mehdi Hasan from Zeteo regarding Ben Shapiro’s ‘Daily Wire’ movie ‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’.

    I have to ask Ben Shapiro, if someone made a movie regarding Kahanist terrorists, made frequent reference to Orthodox Jewish traditions throughout the movie – would you just brush off concerns that the movie may be perceived as antisemitic? something tells me that if such a movie actually existed that Ben Shapiro would be one of the first to condemn such a movie by claiming that it is antisemitic and yet when it comes to ‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’ he claims it isn’t Islamophobic. I don’t ask for much, I just ask people to be consistent.

    For some unknown reason Ikea is sending another parcel to me so I guess I’ll find out what it is all about when it arrives. Regarding the order from the United States via YouShop, the scheduled delivery time being 12–14 August so I guess I’ll need to keep my eye out for that delivery during the week. When it arrives I’ll wash it so then I can start wearing it – if I have time I might take some photos of the clothes as well. I’ve got some meals for the next week along with burger buns and a few other items so next week I can have come chicken burgers for dinner – I tend to keep them fairly basic.

    I’m looking forward to 13 August when Google will do their big announcement – it is know there will be a Pixel 11 announcement along with a watch refresh however there are rumours of maybe a new bluetooth tracking device, maybe an updated Google Streamer etc. Next week is when Chrome 152 will be stabilised however it’ll probably be released two weeks after – if you want to keep track of what is happening in the world of Chrome you can check out the roadmap website (link). The one thing to keep in mind is that the roadmap does change – the ‘IndexedDB: SQLite backend’ had been scheduled for Chrome 152 but it got pushed back to Chrome 154 for technical reasons so it is very much dictated by how things are progressing in a given project and if it needs more time then it’ll get bumped to a future product release.

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  • Day one of getting back into a good routine.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:30 am and then got out of bed – although I didn’t have a long sleep last night I did want to stick to my goal of getting back into a good routine. I got my house organised, had a shower then walked down to the local bakery to have brunch and while eating brunch I watched a few YouTube videos on my phone. After finishing brunch I bought some items from the display cabinet for dinner tonight and walked back home – not much of a walk but a walk nonetheless.

    I was watching a video regarding the backlash against technology – in particular the technology hype around AI:

    For me technology just straight up sucks these days for two reasons – the basics aren’t being done well resulting in a crappy experience over all then to compound that further you’re now subjected to AI being rammed into every nook and cranny with no discernible benefit to the end user. When it comes to AI integration, in many cases it is difficult to avoid it unless you’re willing to go out of your way to hack the software to remove or disable such functionality.

    For me what symbolises the ‘technology sucks today’ narrative is how the quality of software keeps going from bad to worse – I’m not asking for new features but rather making sure the basics are done and done well. I’ve routinely complained on this blog about Safari and it’s half baked attempt as supporting web extensions, many have mentioned the half baked delivery of liquid glass with the launch of version 26 of their platform. In the case of Windows 11 I routinely hear complaints about Microsoft ramming AI into every nook and cranny while they cannot be bothered to fix up their UI so then dark mode works properly, finishing off migrating control panel compoents to settings ever since moving to the new UI which started back in Windows 10.

    Unfortunately what we see with the AI hype is the product of capitalism – rather than these technology companies accepting that they’re now a maturing part of the economy they’re desperately trying to convince themselves that they’re still hip, cool and in with it like an old guy convincing himself he still has it. The other part of the equation is the fact that venture capitalists have been producing negative returns for quite some time because the big hyper growth opportunities are few and far between. If these venture capitalists were honest they would hand back the money to their investors and close up shop but unfortunately venture capitalists are like a social movement that reaches its goal and is now trying to justify why it should continue existing.

    The era of technological leaps forward has come to an end at least for now so the focus should be, by the technology sector, to consolidate the benefits of what they already have and make them work better rather than looking for a new distraction. Can LLMs and AI in general be beneficial? sure but I don’t think it is a multi trillion dollar industry. I think there is opportunity for the models improve from both a hardware demand as well as accuracy but what I think we’ll see long term is a move to locally run models. Developers will start preferring to use specialised models or open weight models which allow them to tweak the model for a particular task. When you own the hardware and run the model locally then you’re in control – no guesswork over how many tokens you’ve used.

    Apple has done a good amount of work with their own SoC but AMD is rumoured to have Zen 6 SoC with a built in NPU along with the purchase of Taalas which could mean a PCIe accelerator card where the silicon is designed from the ground up to run specific model. How fast? Taalas can run the Llama 3.1 model at 17k tokens per second when compared to an nVidia B200 doing 354 tokens per second. Intel is also doing their own work in the field of NPUs and GPUs along with work being done by Microsoft and others in terms of getting AI models running on CPUs without any loss of precision.

    Getting back to hating the tech dudebros and the whole AI hype cycle. I think the biggest worry people have is how connected the AI industry is politically and when it all turns to crap then people are concerned that it’ll get bailed out. This is the reason why I look at the recent proposal of a $1.5 trillion budget – not just once off funding for build up armaments and equipment but a shift to a defence budget of $1.5 trillion. For that amount I could imagine if Oracle finds themselves in a spot of bother I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with the Pentagon claiming that these AI data centre projects are of national strategic importance and nationalise them which will bail out Oracle. Don’t be surprised if we end up seeing Palantir Sovereign AI running on said data centres.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best local dish you’ve ever eaten while traveling?
    View all responses

    When I went to Ireland on my trip overseas the best meal I had was at a local restaurant where I had seafood chowder with fresh crusty bread and butter. It was a rather overcast and miserable day but the meal offered something comforting which made up for the lousy weather.

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  • And the vibes moved on.

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    FInished the week and now I’m in bed for an early night sleep with the focus on waking up at 9:30 am – so I’ve gone from 11:30 am to 10:30 am and 9:30 am on Monday. Although I’ve set the alarm for 9:30 am I am tempted to just go for a straight 9:00am which gives me 1/2 hour to wake up and get out of bed then get changed to go for a brisk walk in the morning. The weather is looking a whole lot nicer so maybe we’re lucky enough to have gotten through the wet part of winter so then all we have to deal with is just the cold which I can easily deal with – a few extra layers of clothing and everything is all good.

    Regarding the walk tomorrow, I’m tempted to go for the walk down along the waterfront like a couple of weeks ago – get some fresh air and I think if I go down there earlier I’ll find that there won’t be as many people out. One thing I did enjoy on my last walk was being able to listen to podcasts because in the past I never really thought about the idea of listening to a podcast when doing a work out but I found it pretty relaxing – mixing up the monotony of listening to music with some podcasts for variety. I’m not going to push myself because I am getting back into regular excise – no use pushing oneself to the extreme and the find it is next to impossible to function for the rest of the day or getting up the next day to do some exercise.

    Does anyone remember after Trump had won a second term and there was this narrative in the media that there had been a ‘vibe shift’ or sometimes referred to a ‘cultural shift’ with centrists politicians insisting that the middle had moved to the right and now they have to move to where the new middle now resides. Then came the avalanche of businesses moving away from DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) by claiming once again there had been a cultural shift in the country away from such policies. Then there was the rise of ‘trad wife’ influencer that were once on the fringes were now having their moment in the spotlight – carefully curated content that was completely devoid of any practicality.

    As we get to the middle of Trump’s second term, his poll numbers are going from bad to worse, influencers who were cheerleading Trump have either turned on him or completely changing the subject in a hope their audience won’t remember their role in getting Trump elected. Then there are the trade wife influencers who are now doing the rounds – “oh who, me, na, I was never a trad wife…I don’t know who gave me that label but that isn’t something I call myself”. The whole ‘cultural vibe shift’ is now having another vibe shift as the Trump vibes have become toxic thus no longer a viable business model so they’re now all rebranding as something else.

    Social conservatives have become more visible especially of the Christian nationalist variety but sooner or later they’re going realise that there hasn’t been a ‘revival of traditional values’. What was sold in the form of ‘trad wide’ was off the back of an nostalgic aesthetic that attempted to cater for the anxieties of its audience by providing that felt reassuring, a return to stability, providing fulfillment etc. The problem with making a decision based on vibes and aesthetic is that eventually the whole thing comes crashing down when reality rears its ugly head and then those involved quickly realise how utterly unfulfilling it is trying to live up to an unrealistic archetype that isn’t grounded in reality.

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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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