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

  • Raining with a cold snap.

    With how horrible the weather is I decided to stay and work at home instead and I’ll do the same on Thursday as well because the temperature is dropping with more rain on the way. The forecast on the Metservice website says the weather could improve on Friday onwards but the problem is that the weather is so unpredictable so I guess it is a matter of playing it by ear. I’m staying in tonight, had some comfort food to keep me warm as well as having the heater on – I generally prefer holding off on putting the heater on until June or July at the earliest but I’m not going to freeze myself for the sake of saving a few bucks. On a good side, at least my home as double glazed windows and plenty of insulation which keeps the warmth in without having a big electricity bill.

    Once again we have some tech dude bros convincing themselves that they’re modern day philosophers by putting out a book with this post over on Twitter (I refuse to call it ‘X’) getting a lot of attention in the mainstream media (link). Having read through the post it is amazing how it is a toxic mixture of playing the victim, creating strawman and rhetoric which amounts to what can be described as (quoting the song ‘Psycho Killer’ by the Talking Heads) “You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything”. It reminds me of Juche, repetitious and getting high on one’s own farts. It also reminds me of the never ending whinging by far too many entitled New Zealanders who claim that there is a ‘tall poppy syndrome’ when in reality the problem is that far too many who get to the top end up acting like arrogant pricks and then get surprised that the unwashed masses aren’t worshipping the ground they walk on.

    For example, the 10th point is the prime example of projection. I simply don’t see the sort of cult of personality or hero worship that exists on the right appearing on the left when it comes to people treating Trump rallies like some sort of religious pilgrimage, the purchasing of ‘relics’ in the form of merchandise, the imitation of what the ‘great leader’ does by wearing a bandage on ones ear etc The cult like behaviour within the Republican Party isn’t new, we still have people worshipping Reagan even though outside of cult of believers he was a horrible president or those who selectively quote Barry Goldwater while ignoring that he enabled those who eventually become the basis on which the modern Republican Party cult of personality is built.

    Then there is the 9th point where the establishment tears down anyone who is left of centre – the Washington Post for example published 16 negative articles in a space of 24 hours attacking Bernie Sanders but something tells me that author of the book aren’t too concerned about things like that. Something tells me that the author of the book aren’t interested in giving those further left of centre a fair go given that the establishment are more than happy to sane wash Trump when it suits their agenda or rehabilitate the image of a politician or public official after a sufficient amount of time has past. The establishment never attacks those who do what the establishment want, the only reason why the establishment doesn’t like Trump isn’t a matter of policy substance but one of presentation – if the exact same things were being done by someone who could form a coherent sentence then mark my words the mainstream media would fall in line, bending over backwards to defend the administration – anyone remember MSNBC over 10 years ago when Trump ordered a strike and commentators quoted lyrics Leonard Cohen song and claiming that at that moment Trump had become presidential? I’m always reminded of what George Carlin said: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

    I’m waiting for a delivery from the United Kingdom but I was silly enough to choose UPS rather than going through DHL which I normally would. The estimated time is 7-10 business days and the package hasn’t landed in New Zealand but I wonder whether it has been delayed given that normally parcels coming to New Zealand from the United Kingdom and Europe tend to go through Dubai but given what is happening over there I wonder whether it has been diverted through the United States meaning it is bouncing across the United States and then down to New Zealand.

    On a side note, I woke up this morning and there wasn’t a Chrome update so it’ll probably get released on Thursday (Wednesday New Zealand time). When it comes to the next update for Apple’s platforms, a couple of days ago Apple released 26.5 Beta 3 with speculation being that the final release will be around in May but keeping in mind that such speculation is based on the schedule of previous x.5 updates being released. On a good side I have organised time off in June starting on the 8th so I can spend some time chilling out at home, following the WWDC keynote although as I’ve said in past blog posts my main focus is on ‘Platform State of the Union’ that goes into more technical details than what the keynote does.

  • Things are hopefully getting back to normal.

    Over the last 3-4 days the weather has been crazy in the Wellington region – even in Lower Hutt there has been non-stop raining, my drive way was flooded but I’m happy that my house is raised rather than the new style ‘slab on the ground’ types’ that get built these days. It is still raining outside and I think this isn’t the end of the weather given that the Metservice has noted that there is a. lot of uncertainty. On a good side though I did do a decent shop today where I picked up a whole heap of food although I forgot all about using my $50 voucher I got from work but I’m going to make use of it along with the $15 Woolworths voucher I earned because of the Everyday Rewards programme I’m signed up for. Its good to have food in the house so that even when I am lazy and don’t feel like doing any cooking that there is an easy solution available.

    The National Party had a confidence vote regarding whether Chris Luxon should remain as leader of the National Party (link). It is never a good idea to call a confidence vote because it instantly feeds into the narrative that you’re not confident of your position. It reminds me of the old saying “Any man who must say, “I am the King”, is no true king.”, if you need to assert your authority through calling a confidence vote then you’ve already shown that you’re uncertain about your future not to mention that any opposition within the party have already got a easy test regarding how far they are away from actually replacing you.

    There was an interesting point regarding just that by the YouTube Channel ‘The Sloan Zone’ (link) regarding what happened in Australian politics when Liberal Party leaders did the same thing – when you find out that only 57% of the caucus supports the leader and that was done with no work then it tells anyone wishing to topple the leader that one only needs to move the numbers by 10 points to roll the leader – before the vote the numbers weren’t known but now the numbers are known it is then possible to develop a strategy targeting those who appeared to be weak in their support for the party leader.

    I’ve installed uBlock Origin Lite 2026.419.1519 on Chrome and things are going well and I’ve enabled ‘User Scripts’ so it’ll be interesting to see whether there will be ‘User Scripts’, either bundled with uBlock Origin Lite or distributed separately, that will appear sometime soon. On the issue of Chrome 148, that is probably still at least 1-2 weeks away but tomorrow there will probably be the usual update on Tuesday that’ll be filled with bug and security fixes. As I’ve said it in the past, Apple really do need to seperate Safari from their operating system so that improvements made available in the ‘Safari Technology Preview’ make their way into macOS in a timely manner even if it means that they split the Webkit into two versions, the rapid release and stable release where the rapid release comes with Safari then moved to the stable version with the release of the next version after extended testing to ensure apps that rely on the Webkit framework don’t break.

    Ubiquiti has released ‘UniFi Network Application 10.3.55’ – they’re gradually rolling it out but if you put your channel into ‘release candidate’ you can download it. I’ve instaalled it and then rebooted my Cloud key afterwards and everything is working as it should It is a minor update in many ways which is good given that I prefer my networking equipment to be predictable and dependable partically given that I work from home. The interesting party has been the release in the early access channels an update for UniFi Gateways 5.1.5 and the feedback I’ve read so far has been that there aren’t any issues appearing but then again it has only been available for around a day so we’ll probably see more feedback in the next few days and if it works out to be a solid release then it’ll graduate to the release candidate area and then available as a stable update.

  • Keeping safe inside.

    In the Wellington region the weather has gone crazy over the last few days with a lot of very serious flooding in Wellington suburbs with the Hutt Valley (at least Lower Hutt) not too badly hit although the Hutt River is getting pretty high as you get closer to Silverstream and heading into Upper Hutt. I’ve ben keeping an eye on what is happening along with ensuring that I have plenty of food and water to tide me over if there is a loss of power or water. As I’ve said on previous blog posts, we’re starting to see the beginnings of climate change in weather events that are becoming more and more frequent.

    The interesting part, based on a YouTube video from ‘The Electric Viking’ about how there has been a decrease in the number of second hand electric vehicles which there being a big uptick that coincides with the cost of petrol going up but that being said it was also increasing before the war in Iran. Although the United States have imposed ridiculous tariffs on cars coming from China, there are many other countries that are more than happy to take Chinese electric vehicles – China doesn’t really care about the United States market given there is plenty of demand for their vehicles outside of the United States. Given how competitive their vehicles are and the shortage of cars in the second hand market it appears that the US’s decision to go to war in Iran has help boost demand for electric vehicles from China – insert meme of President Xi “do nothing, winning”.

    I’ve decided to spend a bit of time tonight being productive in terms of looking for a new job. Yeah, I’ve been moaning about the job but moaning doesn’t change anything other than being unproductively venting with things still remaining the same. I’ve seen a few jobs that I’d be all good to apply for although I’ll need to write up a new curriculum vitae given that I’ve lost the one I used originally to get the job I’m in. Although it isn’t the ideal time to start looking for jobs it does allow me to have a sense of control over what is happening in my life rather than forever complaining but never doing something along with the fact that it gives me the opportunity to see what opportunities there are. I’ll need to check with my team leader who I put as a reference but at least I’ll get the sense of having some control on where I am going.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.419.1519 has been released this week and there are quite a few changes in store. The one that stands out to me is the ‘Add support for custom scriptlet filters’ change so it’ll be interesting to see, once they’re made available in filters, how well they perform. I say this because when it comes to complex pages given how in my experience AdGuard there have been stalls in terms of webpage responsiveness on Chrome – maybe it is just an AdGuard issue or is related to how the ‘User Scripts’ are implemented. The update is available on the Apple App Store as well as the Microsoft Edge Store but it is still waiting for approval on the Chrome Store.

  • Thank goodness it is the end of the week.

    Today felt as though it had dragged on for longer than necessary but parts of it sped by but on my break I ordered a few things – pumpkin soup, some fresh fruit and I paired that up with the bagel that I put in my freezer last week, put garlic butter on it, wrapped it in tin foil and then heated it in the oven while I microwaved the pumpkin soup. Although the pumpkin soup I get is quite tasty I do like to add some cracked pepper and chilli flakes to give it an extra kick. The other thing I also like to do is sprinkle some chilli flakes on the garlic bread because not too long ago you used to be able to get garlic and chilli butter but they stopped selling it but standard garlic butter plus sprinkling on some chilli flakes does a good job without too much fuss.

    It has been raining on and off today but the temperature hasn’t dropped by much so maybe this is a good indication that there will be a mild winter this year. I haven’t been able to go for a walk for a few days so instead I’ve done some exercises at home – squats, free weights etc. I think that as I move into winter there will be plenty of days where I’ll need to do some exercises inside because the weather is too wet to go outside – gradually start building up more of a routine particularly on my day off.

  • Lousy weather but almost the end of the week.

    Sunday is almost here and it’ll be the end of the week. There has been nothing but crazy raining on Friday night and then all day today (Saturday) however it has now stopped it looks like it is going to start up on Sunday and then on Monday. Meanwhile I’ve finally used my toaster for the first time – I got it as part of those kettle/toaster combo deals from Noel Leeming but I never felt motivated to cook some toast but today I did and found that it works perfectly. The only downside of cooking Vogel bread from frozen is that you have to toast it twice but other than that I’m a happy lad and look forward to maybe getting some crumpets and/or muffins (preferably the cheese ones I can have with marmite).

    I’ve finally sold my old Surface Laptop 7 online, I’ve held onto it but I’ve sold it so I’ve cleaned it all down, boxed it up but before doing that I did a reset and clean install of Windows so that when the new owner gets it they can start using it I’ll be sending it off on Monday via overnight courier – the cost will probably be something like $30 or so but the benefit of courier is that it also includes insurance so it covers any sort of problems because we all know Murphy’s Law.

    Oh and funny enough there was an update to my U7 Pro Max access point which upgraded the firmware to version 8.5.21. Everything is going smoothly although I was caught off guard when my Wi-Fi connection suddenly dropped out.

  • A good day at work.

    Today was a good day at work, nothing out of the ordinary but for some reason I was feeling some good vibes throughout the day – I think it is due in part that the number of customers were regular but not overwhelming so that there is sufficient enough of a gap between serving one customer and then moving onto the next one. Being able to work from home makes it a bit more comfortable although I do like to go into the office so at least get out of the house.

    It has been raining today so I’ve had a quiet night in – for dinner I had some Mexican salad. I was going to save it for Monday but I thought it would be best to have it for dinner and grab a fresh bag of salad mix the next time I’m down the road. Although technically on the salad it has the best before date of 24 April, the reality is that salads tend to start to get sadder the closer to the best before date. One thing to always keep in mind is that the best before is just a recommendation rather than an expiry date that says something about the safety of the food.

    I did a fresh install of macOS and iOS – I noticed that with the clean install there has been a bit of a boost to performance but I’ve also noticed how the Mail app has all the aliases appear in the email addresses one can choose from when sending an email. I’ve also did a fresh install of iOS and noticed a slight boost to responsiveness (I did a DFU install – clean install). I also got rid of Chrome and went back to Safari because although Chrome works great on macOS the problem is that the integration isn’t all that good on iOS. I installed uBlock Origin Lite and disabled ‘prevent cross-site tracking’ in the Safari settings because

    I’ve had a look at the Apple for business to see what the t’s and c’s are. It appears that there are limitations on what Apple for business supports vs what iCloud support in terms of Apple Pay support etc. so what I’m going to do is stick with iCloud+ and if I do need extra aliases then I can either create a subdomain using the existing domains I own or I can easily buy another domain given that the price of having one is around 50 cents per week The one thing I have noticed is that rather than having to manually copy and past details into WordPress, Apple now makes use the of the WordPress API so that iCloud makes a link to WordPress then automatically adds the necessary DNS records to make the whole thing work.

  • A good day at work.

    Got up tody at 9:30am and went for my dail walk, I arrived home, had a shower, watched a bit of television and then headed into town to the office for the second of the two mandatory days in the office. Work dragged on – I need a good night sleep tonight and I’ll probably go for. walk after work but other that that I really need a good night sleep after dealing with a long day that I really didn’t feel like I wanted to work. I’ve been at the same job for the last 8 years and it hasn’t gotten any easier but I always keep reminding myself about the pay each fortnight because it isn’t the work itself that motivates me.

    Before heading home I picked up some food from the supermarket – a couple of salads along with some sliced carrots and cumcumbers along with some hummus to dip them into. I also bought some blueberries and raspberries as a bit of a sweet treat. I’ll be working from home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I’ve decided to have Friday off from going for a walk but I’m going to use that time to get a good night sleep and then get back into the swing of things on Saturday by getting up at 9:30am and going for a 13.8km walk but I’ll see how things turn out. I might go for a small walk on Friday before work but nothing too strenuous.

  • An early start to Wednesday.

    Last week I started getting up on Wednesday and Thursday at 9:45am and on the other days at 10:45 but this week I’m getting up 15 minutes earlier so then I have my alarm go off at 9:30am and 10;30am which gives me 15-20 minutes or so to get up, have a drink of water, wash my face, get dressed in my work out gear then do some stretches before going for my walk. The weather for today is nice, the sun is out and there is a good vibe in the air which gives a nice start to the day – there is even a nice cool breeze as well which will make working out a whole lot more comfortable.

    I checked for updates this morning and Google had released an update for Chrome which upgraded the version number from 147.0.7727.56 to 147.0.7727.101. uBlock Origin Lite beta version has been released although there aren’t any big changes noted although that could change between now and the final stable version. Apple released the second beta for 26.5 which has modest improvements with any sort of major improvements going to be helld back for version 27 that we’ll see being announced at WWDC (rumour as it that it’ll be a ‘Snow Leopard’ release which will place a heavy empahasis on bug fixing, optimisation and making what already exists work better).

    Regareding why I keep utilising Chrome, I just find that I keep coming accross things that don’t work properly on Safari but work perfectly fine on Chrome. When it comes to Microsoft Teams the built in spell checker and autocorrect doesn’t work – click on the mispelled word, click on the correct one and the word isn’t replaced with the correct one. When it comes to Google Chat for example, if a friend sends a movie file (in a supported format) it will keep perpetually loading (in the movie box it is grey with circle going around) but on Chrome it loads normally and I can press the play button (the issue doesn’t occur on Firefox so it tells me that the issue is with the browser not Google).

    On the matter of ‘how do we know it is a bubble’, when a shoe companie ‘pivots’ to focus on AI then you know that all sanity has left the building (link). Remember the number of businesses who mentioned bitcoin wold find their stock would go up or yearrs earlier would talk about how they were a ‘dot-com first business’? I think there is an older example of when your taxi driver has a stock ticker then it is time you should exit the market. The longer this collective dellusion continues tha harder the correction is going to be then combine that with the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, I would buckle up because the ride is going to get a whole lot more bumpy.

  • A productive weekend.

    The weekend has come to an end but looking back I’m pretty happy with how productive I have been over the couple of days off. I bought a new pair of shoes on Monday, picked up a television, sold off the Apple TV 4K and my old TV then purchases a Samsung smart watch. On Tuesday I went for my daily walk to give the new shoes a try – it felt as though I was walking on clouds the whole time. The experience was so much more enjoyable when compared to the hiking shoes I was wearing for the last week. I also wore my Samsung Watch and part of that has been learning how to customise the watch and navigating. When I first setup the watch i couldn’t work out why software wouldn’t update but then I found out that Wi-Fi isn’t enabled by default but when I enabled it i then found that there were a whole heap of software updates from both Samsung as well as through the Play Store that needed up dating.

    When I went for my walk today I was able to kep track of my progress including my heart rate. Part of the monitoring was seeing how closely my estimated distance was when compared to what my smart watch says which I assume is based on GPS data. At the end of the walk i had done well over 10000 steps. I think having those statistics with me when I walk will keep me motivated along with being able to keep track of time when going for a walk. On Wednesday I’ll be getting up at 9:30am which gives me 15 minutes to get changed into my work out gear then get going for a walk – keeping track with the goal of getting it done in 1 hour and 20 or 30 minutes although funny enough I find that the walk in the morning tires me more than if I did the same walk in the evening.

    Still a lot of hype regarding AI these days and the more I follow the development the more I see AI models eventually becoming commodified where the value won’t be in the LLM itself but instead who can deliver it competitively. What do I mean by that? those who end up winning run the model in a data centre with bespoke hardware so that the cost of delivering is done more efficiently than the current use of GPU to brute force their way through it (see how bitcoin mining went from GPUs to ASICs). Then once they get it doing the learning and inference as efficiently as possible (Google is already making big leaps forward with their own bespoke hardware) the next important factor is how it is integrated into their product portfolio – AI isn’t the end point but it is a means to an end.

    Then there is providing it as a service to third parties through turn key solutions such as APIs that abstract the complexity so that third party developers can build their product utilising the cloud platform while making use of the underlying AI model. The other benefit of abstracting that complexity means that in the future it will allow the provider to upgrade the underlying LLMs with the products sitting ontop making use of it to inherent the benefits without having to write an additional lines of code.

    What I do find funny are the number of executives who are quickly back peddling as they realise the whole ‘vibe coding’ ends up creating unmaintainable AI slop resulting in even more time and money being spent trying to clean up a pile of coherent barely legible code. It is always funny when I see executives get suckered into the sales pitch because rather than heading over to Amazon to buy a few books to understand ‘System Analysis and Design’ along with programming principles, they instead rely on consultants who have a vested interest to push whatever happens to be the product that their business partner is trying to push – see OpenAI and theim entering into multiyear partnerships with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini and McKinsey & Co (as reported over on CNBC (link))

  • A very productive Monday.

    Today was very productive for a Monday – I was a man with a plan and I stuck to it. I woke up at 10am, my sister picked me up so we could head down the road to pick up the television. It was a pretty decent sized television size – considerably bigger than my old one which was 49inches. I’ve got an art print on the wall behind it so when mum comes back from her trip I’ll ask her for some help to move it to the right so that it isn’t being covered by the television.

    Once i got home I moved the old television and Apple TV 4K out of the way and setup the new television – I wanted to see what the One UI was like before making a decision to keep with the Apple TV 4K or whether I should go all in. It had been over 10 years since I had used the Tizen based smart television software so I was hopeful that there had been a fair amount of changes and I was proven correct. I setup a Samsung account, setup the television and then updated the software to the latest version (itc came with version 1160 and was upgraded to 1260).

    One of the first things I dd after navigating around to see how responsive it is was when compared to not only my old television but when compared to the Apple TV 4K. I found that it was more responsive. When it comes to the YouTube app, out of the box it supports AV1 CODEC that neither the Apple TV 4K or the Google Streamer support. What I also liked is the inclusion of a web browser so it is possible to visit Democracy Now! website to wtch their daily news show which unfortunately isn’t availabl in the full format on YouTube. Long story short the experience has been great.

    After lunch I then jumped on the train down the road to pick up a new pair of running shoes – I got the same brand as before, New Balance, and they were the same price as last year. I did a walk around at the store to see how they felt and it was a major improvement over hiking shoes I had. On Tuesday I’ll walk into town so then I can mix some exercise into my day because there are a couple more things I need to pick up and while i’m down there I’ll treat myself to a coffee and a scone while I’m there.

    I also took the jump and bought a ‘Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra’ and I’ve updated the software to the latest version. When I go down the road on Tuesday i’ll give it a try to see how well it performs in tmers of keeping track o how many steps, km walked etc. I’ll keep the blog updated on how things progress.