Matisyahu's Blog

End of another week, I’m gradually getting back into the groove of being in the office 3 days a week and at home 2 days a week – a change from 2 days at work and 3 days at home. I have to admit the one good thing about going into the office are the free snacks and drink as well as being able to pick up some top notch savoury scones and/or muffins before work. Reminds me when I used to work in Wellington years ago where I would pick up a large mochachino along with some savoury scones.

I’ve updated Chrome and AdGuard to the latest version – AdGuard is improving with each new release with version 5.0.113 being released recently (for some reason it hasn’t been updated on their github page). It’ll be interesting to see how things improve as TSWebExtension v2.3.0-alpha.0 and TSUrlFilter v3.1.0-alpha.4 libraries mature over time which will translate to improve content blocking.

Back to politics, it is interesting to see that the people who voted for the current government are now finding out that elections have consequences – public transport spending has been cut, increased spending on roads and there is greater focus on making use of PPPs and tolls for new roads (there has been a reaction in a heavily National Party area – it is almost as though people don’t see the link between who they vote for, what their policies are and the impact of those policies). That doesn’t even touch on the number of people who didn’t turn out to vote – throwing a temper tantrum because Labour squandered 6 years but some how thinking that if they sit this election out and no vote it will some how send a message even though they (the vote) are going to be more negatively impacted by a National lead government.

Intel has launched their Lunar Lake super efficient SoC with all the videos I’ve watched so far appears to beat Apple silicon in specific benchmarks but I can’t help but get the feeling this performance may be improved in the future based on what one saw with the Zen 5 SoCs (AMD SoCs getting a boost due to Windows receiving optimisations as part of the update that’ll be made available soon). It’ll be interesting to also see is the role that ‘Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture for the Future’ (link) will play in the future given that the specification was recently updated in June 2024 and the recent simplification of their CPU architecture by getting rid of hyper threading (also known as SMT) which may open the door to seeing further simplification of the architecture which will allow more efficient power usage.