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

  • A good Monday, looking forward to Tuesday.

    I went down to the supermarket and i was going to do have a chicken salad but I decided to have a lazy dinner of a chicken sandwich enabled me to use up the lettuce I bought on Sunday along with the tomatoes on a multigrain bread. I was going to buy some blueberries but the ones they had there were, well, underwhelming ebcause they look like they had shrunk because they had been in the cooler for too long. Instead of getting the blueberries I decided to get some fresh dates instead – I’ve put them in the fridge and I’ll be able to have a couple each day as a sweet treat.

    When 26.4 was released by Apple I installed it on my Macs but before I did that I deleted off Chrome so then i coud go back to giving Safari another try. I’ve gone back to using Chrome and the one thing I noticed is the performance improvement of running Chrome on 26.4 when compared to 2.6.3.1 (a) – it feels like there has been an improvement in responsiveness regarding thread and process performance. On Tuesday I’m looking at maybe setting up Workspace for a trial run to see how it performs when compared to iCloud but I’ll see how I feel.

  • Panther Lake improvements and AI reality check.

    I’ve been following what the x86 working group have agreed upon and one of the big changes was the inclusion of FRED that has made an appearance in Panther Lake and will be appearing in the Zen 6 based CPUs rumoured to be coming out in late 2026 or early 2027. At the moment I haven’t seen any discussions over whether FRED made its way into Windows yet (we may not see it until 27H2 with the new system based around 29000) however Linux have had the necessary patches merged with the kernel.

    Over on Phoronix they have released a FRED benchmark with the latest Linux kernel (link) and the results so far look very positive. It would be interesting to see how over time the performance improves once APX is merged along with memory memory tagging. Although there was an attempt at a more radical change with the x86S the decision was to create the x86 Advisory Group where they probably took many of the ideas explored with x86S and see how they could deliver those changes without being disruptive. As others have pointed out, the cost of legacy support is very small and most modern operating systems don’t even touch the old legacy stuff.

    I love seeing Ed Zitron pop the hype cycle when it comes to AI – every time I see what is happening in the AI space I can’t help but get the feeling of the accounting scandals of the 2000s. Promises of datacenters and funding but not actual contracts being signed, GPUs being shipped to datacenters but not being plugged in because there isn’t the infrastructure needed. Then add to that is emerging technology in the form of TPUs that Google have demonstrated to be more efficient at inference work as well as building the LLMs thus questions about the long term viability of brute forcing GPUs when there can be bespoke hardware that can do it more efficiently in much the same wat that bitcoin mining now uses Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) instead of GPUs because they’re more efficient.

    The thing that is also ignored is the fact that AI is a means to an end not an end in itself – you integrate it into your products to make those product do things better. No one buys AI for AI sake but they do so because it enables them to do something that either they couldn’t do it before or if they could do it before it was a laborious process., I also question long term whether many of these stand along AI companies will last long term and I would hazard to guess that many who are ingesting into them are making the big gamble that a bigger player will buy them out in much the same way that Loopt was bought out by Green Dot. One thing to keep in mind – AI is more than just LLMs and there is plenty of legit and interesting work that is being done and we’re still very much at the beginning but unfortunately far too many on Wall Street appear to lack a well tuned BS detector to pick up when promises are being made with very little grounding in reality.

  • End of the week.

    The end of the week couldn’t come soon enough but I’m now relaxing on my bed with my laptop updating my blog. The weather was looking a bit overcast so I still go out of bed today but instead I spent the morning tidying up around the house, hoovering the floors, dusting, hanging up clothes that are dried, folding the washing that would be put away in drawers. The benefit of getting up at at recent time is being able to get those things out of the way rather than getting up late and by the time I get around to do it I’m basically in the mood of not wanting to do anything. I’ll be getting up at 10am on Monday and my goal is to set that is the time every for the week and then eventually it’ll stop becoming a new routine and then becomes the default routine going forward.

    What I think is amazing is how once again New Zealanders voted in a National led government and are now acting surprised at how useless they are when it comes to tackling the current energy crisis that is being faced. For those who don’t keep up with New Zealand politics, there was a study conducted by the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission where this study said that around 60% of spending on infrastructure should be allocated to making the existing infrastructure work better and the remaining 40% spent on new infrastructure. Long story short, if you’ve got an existing road for example the Hutt Expressway (officially known as Sate Highway 2) then it would be better to upgrade that road by replacing the lights with over passes etc. so that traffic can make use of the road more efficiently.

    Another example of investment would be to invest into rail – upgrade the Wellington network to 25kV (to bring it inline with the Auckland network), standardise signalling system, platform height etc. then eventually electrify from Wellington all the way to Auckland along with double tracking where it makes sense (not to mention completely electrifying the whole network outside of the main trunk line from Wellington to Auckland). In other words, take your existing infrastructure and it make it work more efficiently, don’t go out and build new infrastructure while neglecting the existing infrastructure. What have the National led government done? resuscitated the ‘roads of national significance’ aka a giant tongue kiss to the trucking lobby and the worse part about these new roads is that they have the most abysmal ROI you could possibly imagine.

    Then add to that the latest idiotic underinvestment into public transport resulting in a situation now where we’re poorly situated to deal with the current energy crisis that is unfolding. Heck, that doesn’t even touch on the lack of investment into renewables, the dopey LNG terminal costing $1 billion and the cutting of electric vehicles tax credits that would encourage people to get off fossil fuel powered cars. You’d think that this would be a wake up call to make ourselves more energy independent so we’re no longer impacted to the degree we are when there are energy supply shocks – it appears that the National Party never learn from their past mistakes and New Zealanders also fail to learn from their bad voting decisions resulting in the movie plot of ‘ground hog day’.

    Monday I’m going to head down to my favourite cafe and grab something for lunch – a nice walk down the road and back which is around 3.2km but I like to try to get some walking in even if it small amounts at a time. I may walk down to the mall after brunch and have a look around at the stores – pick up a few things for dinner if I can’t find anything I like in the fridge. I’ve got some fish that I picked up on special at the supermarket but what I really need is some fresh lemon, maybe even some lemon better, tin foil and maybe a white sauce for the fish. I want to work through what I’ve got in my freezer before doing any big grocery shopping so then I can get some sort of stock take and then work out what I have, the types of meals I want to cook for the next couple of weeks and then work out what I need to purchase.

  • Almost there.

    At the half way point and looking forward to finishing up for the day. I’ve been following through some interesting videos of people who claimed that Trump was the pro-peace candidate are suddenly having a moment when they realised they made a really foolish decision. Unfortunately there is a human toll being paid because of people who vote based on vibes – the Republican playbook has always been the same: a) tax cuts b) deregulation c) privatisation d) start a war, that has been a consistent play book for over 50 years and yet the people who vote for the Republican Party and their president candidate convince themselves that this time it’ll be different.

  • End of the week.

    I was expecting wet weather this week but it has been pretty quiet but I was able to get in some walking over the last few days. On Sunday I’m going to get up at around 11am and go for a walk before work then after work I’ll go for another one. Tonight for dinner I got out some chicken from the freezer because it had been sitting there for. while – I have to admit I wasn’t all that enamoured by it because the marinade that it came in was pretty mediocre. I cooked it, had it with some steamed vegetables – baby carrots and edamame with some garlic butter. The only reason why I got the chicken was because it was on special due to it expiring soon but I think I’ll avoid it in future in favour of getting the Turks nibbles whose marinade is a lot better tasting along with freezing a lot better than what I got from Woolworths.

    I’ve been having some fun with Safari – enjoying all the fun ways in which YouTube doesn’t work or how its Microsoft teams it has a built in spell checker, you click on the word, select the correct spelling and then nothing happens resulting in the incorrect spelling remaining. At the rate things are going I’m wondering whether the testing process at Apple is ‘if it compiles, ship it’ followed by ‘if it load the Apple website and the Google front page then it is good enough for me’. I’m going to spend the weekend (Monday and Tuesday) having an another go with Chrome because for better or worse it has pretty much become the ‘default runtime engine for the internet’. There is also the fact that the benefit of the Google ecosystem is that it is heterogeneous by design where as with iCloud, sure you can theoretically have it word with Windows but the experience is never as smooth.

    I was having a look back at some of the predictions I have made in the past and one of the predictions was that the low cost device that Apple would launch would be called the iBook and run a version of iPadOS. It appears that I got part of it right which was the idea that Apple would release a low cost laptop but what I got wrong was the operating system because I assumed that macOS would be ‘too heavy’ for a smartphone SoC. With the launch of the Apple MacBook Neo it is interesting how it is becoming the gateway device for people who may have an iPhone but never really thought of getting an Apple laptop. I think the big question is what happens with macOS 27 and whether with the rumour of it being. ‘Snow Leopard’ style release which is focused on optimisation and bug fixes that we’ll see it perform better on devices with only 8GB of memory.

  • Two more days to go.

    Work was good today – went into the office to do my two mandatory days however I think next week what I might do is start doing three days in the office and two days at home. The other change I’m going to make is rather than having two walks a day I’ll get up at 10am, go for a 8 walk, come back home, have a shower, get dressed up for the office and then head in but when I come back from work I won’t have a walk at night. I think the more productive thing would be to get to bed earlier, wake up earlier and work in a work out before work which will wake me up fresh for the day. I think a good night sleep and getting in a good routine will help in the long run – particularly on my day off where I can enjoy more of my day off rather than wasting away half the day then missing out on the things I want to do.

    I jumped onto Webkit to see whether they had released a new build of the Safari Technology Preview and it to my surprise they had released build 240 (link) however there aren’t any major changes. I also checked out to see what was discussed over on the latest WECG meeting minutes and it was kind of disappointing that once again Apple’s complete lack of enthusiasm to supporting another Declarative Net Request feature in the form of ‘declarativeNetRequest: matching based on request headers’. Once again Google and Mozilla were the only ones seriously making a commitment to actually implementing it. It truly is amazing seeing the amount of useless crap that is added to Safari that lead me to ask the question ‘why’ yet get minimum support for MV3 is akin to watching a kid drag their feet every step of the way to avoid having to do their chores.

  • Best to avoid getting wet.

    I left work on the train and I was hoping that by the time I got home there would be enough time to squeeze in a walk before finishing for the night but by the time I had gotten things sorted out from the day it started raining. It started raining, then it stopped then it started raining again – nope, not going to take a chance because the last time I went walking I got stuck in a downpour. At the moment of typing out this message it is still raining and according to the Metservice there are forecasts that it’ll continue raining tomorrow and the next few days so I may well get a good night sleep and maybe pick up a walk after work in the evening assuming that the weather is fine.

    I was having a read through the Chrome Platform Status page (link) and it looks like for the next couple of releases there are some big changes however it is interesting that version 148 has a limited number of features listed. The release date for Chrome 148 will be during May which is when Google I/O 2026 will be hosted which may indicate features being added that they want to home back from making public. There is the long term project of replacing ChromeOS with Android and with that comes the need to add extension support to Chrome given that there are many businesses that make use of ChromeOS desktops and laptops that also depend on extensions such as 1Password.

    When it comes to how things are progressing when it comes to the Web Extensions standard that are being developed, the best place to check out the latest progress is on the ‘WECG Meetings 2026, Public Notes’ document. It is interesting to see the discussions taking place in terms of harmonising the implementation of the various parts of the standard. I think the long term goal is to eventually get to a point where you a write your application, test it and deploy it with minimal browser specific tweaks.

  • Back in the office in Thursday.

    This morning I got up at 10am and went for an 8km walk, arrived homed and decided to work from home today then after finishing tonight I then went for an 11.6km walk which works out to be around 19.6km for the day. My big focus on the next 3 months (before my next blood test) is to get my blood sugar in the low thirties and that can only really be done with some further weight loss and sticking to a meal plan but now that I have a target I can work towards that while I remind myself during the day to ‘keep your eye on the prize’.

    I’ve also updated the my blog to include a search box again – a previous template I had been using already had it by default but I never got around to adding it back again on the left side. I’ve deleted Chrome off my computer now that Safari 26.4 really has improved substantially to the point that the gap is closing in terms of speed. The uBlock Origin Lite 2026.323.2044 update was made available and it installed without any issues.

  • At the half way point.

    I’m at the half way point of my shift and I thought it would be a good time to build upon what I posted previously. Over on Webkit.org there is a comprehensive list of changes that have occurred with Safari 26.4 (link) with the cumulative effect being that the over all responsiveness and speed is noticeable when compared to the previous version. For me, my focus aren’t on the new wiz bang features that get the headlines but having those basics done well so then what I want to do becomes the focus rather than having to focus on trying to get the software to be have the way I want it to. There appears to be a lot of under the hood optimisations such as ‘Threaded Scroll-driven Animations’ which should translate to improved responsiveness. I could imagine there is a lot of work occurring behind the scenes that we may not see until version 27 since those changes are probably pretty disruptive. Safari Technology Preview 240 hasn’t been released yet but I’d say it’ll be released in the next few days – looking out for it to be posted on the website.

    Apple announced Apple Business (link) which appears to provide a platform similar to what Google and Microsoft provides but I have a feeling that the main focus of Apple Business will be around integrating Apple devices together rather than a heterogenous environment. There are a list of features that will be available for each region with not all regions having the same level of functionality (link) but I think that is due in part to having to build out the infrastructure and launching it when it is ready rather than ‘moving fast, breaking things’. It’ll be interesting to see what the details are when it launches on 14 April regarding the number of aliases that will be allowed because I couldn’t imagine the Apple Business service sticking to the 3 aliases currently on offer with the iCloud+ service at the moment.

  • A big update was released.

    Apple released the 26.4 update today and I installed it on all my devices – the update was a pretty decent size on all the devices which points to many parts of the operating system updated. The first thing I noticed after installing is how the responsiveness of the operating system has improved – from the interface of the shell through to the bundled applications. I can’t help but get the feeling that they’ve spent a good amount of time fixing up a lot of things that should have been addressed before it was launched.

    The first thing I noticed in terms of the under the hood change has been the update of the System Firmware Version and OS Loader Version from 13822.81.10 to 18000.101.7, the firmware and driver of Wi-FI has been upgraded from version 23.41.8.0.41.51.201 to 23.50.20.0.41.51.208, the Wi-Fi stack has been upgrade from IO80211_driverkit-1540.16 to IO80211_driverkit-1555.23, I’ve also had a look through the ‘System Information’ and pretty much everything has been updated in some way. As for Safari being updated, I’ll write a longer post after work tonight when I have time but I thought it would be best to get my initial thoughts posted on my blog.