Matisyahu's Blog

  • Reorganising and getting ready for tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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  • A cold and rainy day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • A rainy and overcast day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Off to bed.

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

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

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

  • Feeling under the weather.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a walk then came home, had brunch however I had this painful feeling in my stomach so I rushed to the bathroom – it felt as though someone had kicked me on the stomach it hurt that much. I ended up having to lay on my side – that that point I rang up my boss and advised him I wouldn’t be in work today because I wasn’t too sure how long it would last and whether it would reoccur later on in the day. I’m unsure what could have caused it but if it reoccurs then I’ll get in contact with my doctor but I’m sure it is something minor.

    Before getting up this morning at 6:34am there was an earthquake (link) – it was a sharp jolt and I braced myself for another shake but it didn’t come. I’m lucky in that I’m a single story small single unit so there was no damage – one of the benefits of having houses built of wood is that it allows movement when there is an earthquake. It is something that you get used to when living in Wellington.

    I mentioned last night that I was watching the last episode of Silo season 3 and at the end of the episode when Congressman Daniel found out the name of the women he keeps seeing when he wakes up from his deep sleep – the name of the woman is Helen Drew. He finds who she is that out after completing the operation regarding Silo 17 – he realises that may she may have been in Silo 17 or maybe Silo 18 or any of the other Silos. The moment that he realises that his actions are no longer divorced from his own personal life is the moment I think he realises the horrific thing he did to Silo 17. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Silo season 4 when it is released and his character arch – does he fixate on just Helen Drew or does he have an epiphany which changes how he makes decisions in his role.

    I’ve been listening to a few episodes of ‘The Ezra Klein’ show regarding how liberalism used to be a revolutionary force of upending the old order and pushing a better future but gradually it has become the very thing that it was rallying against. There was a more recent episode entitled ‘The reason why people hate government’ which kind of builds upon the larger thesis of why liberalism has failed. I would argue that liberalism in the United States has failed because it has failed to evolve and what it has evolved into is social democracy and democratic socialism which as been built outside of the liberal movement. Social democracy and democratic socialism are the natural evolution of liberalism resulting in those who call themselves liberals today have become what the conservatives were at the time liberalism came on the scene.

    The problem is that the liberals in the United States today are more or less repeating the same talking points that conservatives made 40-50 years ago – liberalism has evolved into social democracy and democratic socialism but liberals want to maintain the privileges they have accumulated. What has essential happened in the world of liberalism is a group of people have decided that they’re now in a position of privilege, they wish to protect that privilege and as a result you see the massive push back within the Democratic Party against anyone daring to promote policies that would be considered mainstream in any other country in the world – single payer health care, paid paternity and maternity leave, making collective contracts and unionism the default rather than the exception plus many more policies.

    As I’ve said in the past, what one would call the ‘corporate democrats’ are essentially the Rockefeller Republicans from 50 years ago – they’re in the Democratic Party because they’re too embarrassed to be associated with the Republican Party so they took over the Democratic Party instead. What is the net result? the corporate media play up the rebranding with the nonsense of calling these former Rockefeller Republicans the so-called ‘moderate wing’ of the Democratic Party because the ownership class want to convince the middle and lower class that the Rockefeller Republicans are now the new moderates which has resulted in the whole Overton window being pushed to the right thus labelling what used to be centre-left policy as being on the far left.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best and worst airport you’ve been to?
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    The worst airport has to be Dubai – it is like the labyrinth which is made worse when you’re travelling from Australia to France via Dubai then finding you’re having to trek from one gate to another gate with the mixture of uncomfortably hot trains to numerous escalators and lifts. The easiest would be Heathrow which was easy to navigate particularly when I wasn’t feeling the best and having to take the train out the airport then from there I was able to find the check-in desk the locate the lounge with the flight being close by.

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  • Spring is looking good.

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    Woke up this morning and there was a good amoujnt of rain so I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of going for a walk then suddenly getting caught in a downpour. I had my breakfast then caught up on some news then when the weather improved I opened up all the windows to get some fresh air in – something I’m getting myself into a habit each day so I can get some fresh air in while working from home then closing them all once the sun goes down. Another perk of things warming up is that I can now turn off my heater – the evenings aren’t cold and my place keeps the warmth overnight without the need for additional heating.

    The one thing I just tried then was weather the ‘Daily Writing Prompt’ issue had been fixed with Safari 27 Beta but unfortunately it hasn’t been fixed. I’m not holding out much hope that the issue will ever be fixed as I’m unsure whether it is an issue related to Safari or WordPress but it hasn’t been fixed. I guess it is very much like what Microsoft experienced with Edge (the non-Chromium one) where people would give it a try then find that the moment that their favourite website wouldn’t work proplerly that they would give up and go back to what they knew would work which was Chrome.

    At the moment I’m watching Silo season 3 episode 10 which is the latest episode in the season. The show starts where episode 9 finished off which gives a lot more context as to how these Silos came into being, the rules, the purpose of them etc. There has been only glimpses in previous episodes with many speculating online what these hints could mean but this final epsiode answers a lot of questions but still leaves many unanswered. I’m looking forward to season 4 when it is released which will be the final season.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
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    Characters who make painfully stupid decisions that are clearly going to result in a bad outcome or failing to listen to those who have more knowledge results in the whole group or family survival being threatened. This is really common in dystopian television shows where there is always someone who ignores someone offering advice who has far more knowledge then the someone in the group insists “but we must save them” only for the group to end up losing 2-3 people in the process trying to rescue that one person who refused to follow advice.

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  • A rainy start to the day.

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    Woke up before my alarm to the sound of heavy rain – I checked the weather before heading off to sleep last night but I wasn’t expecting the wind and the rain. I’m happy I’m staying at home and keeping warm because having to go into town would be an unpleasent experience. I opened up Chrome to check for updates and Google has released another update for Chrome which bumps the version from 152.0.7977.76 to 152.0.7977.83 (link). An early release of Chrome 153 has been made avaiable to a small group of testers however I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t end up seeing it maybe until next week at the earliest.

    I’ve been catching up on the news and the discussion regarding the United States bond market in regards to the interest rates going up and attempts by the administration to push the rates back down. I’m not one to speculate on what could happen in the future but I do think that 50 years of reckless spending and borrowing by the United States will eventually catch up. There will eventually be a day of reckoning when the market will say ‘no more’ and the American people will be forced to have a serious conversation about taxes, spending and the distribution of power in their system.

    Right now the United States government is spending 20% of their revenue servicing the interest on their debt when compared to 9% for New Zealand. I don’t know about you but maybe the credit ratings agencies and commentators in the media should focus on the bigger train wreck to the tune of $40 trillion and a budget deficit of 6% of GDP which should be of a greater concern than than the piddly 2.1% of GDP that the New Zealand government is currently running at the moment. There is a much higher likelihood of things going bad in the United States whose economy is based on the average American carrying a mountain of consumer debt (that is total debt minus their mortgage) than what is happening down at the bottom of the world. The capacity for the United States to behave recklessly is contingent on the rest of the world being willing to bankroll that reckless behaviour.

    Getting back to more positive news – Google is working on moving more devices over to Android with the announcement that Google Meet devices will be moved over to it (link). The announcement is in line with the move to replace ChromeOS on laptops and mini-pcs to Android with the eventual goal being a single operating system that spans their entire product portfolio from top to bottom which should result in more frequent updates as well as better integration into the Google ecosystem as well as the devices integrating with each other.

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  • End of another day.

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    The night finished pretty easily – no major issues apart from the usual customers who have been using our service for years if not decades yet still cannot wrap their head around the policies of what we offer. On a good side, I was able to clear out the emails and other office stuff which should make life easier for the team tomorrow. For lunch today I had some salmon, tuna, banana and a protein bar. The salmon I bought was the Diplomats Salmon Fillets in Brine with Lemon which were the last two but I prefer to get the teriyaki version but unfortunately that wasn’t available. I’ve had a search online to see if it is available but there are no stockists with the only ones available for purchase being the brine with lemon.

    Out of curiosity I download and installed Safari 27 for macOS Tahoe and Safari 27 for macOS Sequoia beta 5 to see what things are like with the latest beta of Safari when compared to the Technology Preview. The Technology Preview release is the most bleeding edge of releases which means there is almost a guarantee that something will be broken or buggy because that is where all the action is in much the same way the OpenSolaris used to have a release which was more stable than the more frequent builds that would come out more often but many times something broken. I have to note that when you install the beta of Safari 27 it does replace the existing Safari installation rather than it being a slide by side installation like how the Technology Preview is done.

    What has been the experience so far? fairly reliable but the issue with NZ Post YouShop area remains however the error with Microsoft Teams hasn’t appeared although I’ve had false hope in the past only for the issue to reappear. I’ve got uBlock Origin Lite enabled on it and I haven’t noticed any regressions but it has only been around an hour or so since installing it but I’ll keep testing it out. It gives a good overview of what to expect when version 27 of Apple’s platforms are released hopefully within the next month or so. Next week is the ‘Surprise and shine’ on 10 September at 5:00 am which will hopefully be the event they announce the release date of their platforms – I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing a release candidate next week and then it being released the following week – assuming there aren’t any show stopper bugs that suddenly appear.

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  • A tasty dinner, almost finish the shift.

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    I got up today at 9:00 am and went for a 9km walk because I had some extra energy and time up my sleeve. Before heading off on my walk I put the clothes I had ordered into the washing machine and set it to wash while I was alway on my walk. When I came back the walk I hung the washing out on the line and opened up all the windows in the house to get some fresh air into the place – something that I can enjoy doing now that spring is here and summer isn’t too far away either.

    I logged into work and I had talk to my boss about seeing whether I can get Christmas off – no guarantee but I may as well give it a try. I’ve been working through the usual drama during the day – plenty of emails and other office work but because the team I’m on are always keeping up paper work the net result is that we haven’t gotten overwhelmed. Towards the end of the year things start to pick up but I think with the improved system in place it should result in a smoother experience for employees as well as the customer.

  • A good first day back at work.

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    I went for my walk today and felt great when I came back home however I had a look at my work email and unfortunately due to a muck up on my part I haven’t been able to get time off over Christmas but I guess all is not lost because I’ve still got that time off in November when I travel to Australia where I’ll have a week off. Long story short, we have two systems, one for the work schedule and one for payroll – I put it through the payroll rather than the work schedule and it was only picked up around 2-3 weeks after I had submitted it incorrectly.

    I mentioned about writing a post about liberalism but it kind of links up with a link I saved of a video regarding the building of suburbs in New Zealand and how society became more atomised as we become disconnected from each other. There is a lot of talk regarding how society is is fractured, that the third spaces that would bring together people from different walks of life such as religious institutions, unions, community centres etc. have disappeared. When you have a society that is already fractured then it is easier to sew distrust because the usual mechanism of picking up on nonsense because you have first hand experience seeing people from different walks of life has disappeared.

    I’m looking forward to the final episode of Silo Season 3 and season 4 will be the final season – personally I like where there is a definitive season length so then the show doesn’t feel like it is being dragged out simply to keep it on air. I’m lookig forward to the return of ‘The last of us’, ‘Foundation’, ‘Severance’ and many other although I am tempted to have a look at a few series that didn’t catch my eye when they were initially launched.

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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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