Matisyahu's Blog

Another week is over and I’m feeling good going into a new week. Mum has asked me to help out cleaning out the rental property after the tenant left a complete mess but I guess that’ll keep me out of trouble for the day. The one thing I am going to make sure of is that when I am doing yard work that I’ll wear sunscreen because I made a huge mistake last time I did some work outside by not wearing it. Something to remember about the sun in New Zealand – you can easily get burnt on an overcast day and I was really burnt on my back resulting in blisters, peeling skin etc. it was not enjoyable dealing with a sore back.

It is interesting to see how the players in the AI space are slowly walking back their robust commitments they made publicly only to then spend an extraordinary amount of time parsing what they said when asked follow up questions by the media. As I’ve said in the past, this round of AI hype is the modern day equivalent of radium water – a lot of pseudo science around radium but eventually an actual useful use of radium is eventually found. Apple is siding with Gemini along with Salesforce any many others, Microsoft working on their own specialised models with some of the players probably gearing themselves up not to go public but to be eventually bought out by a larger company.

For those wondering, I’ve still got my Surface Laptop ARM based laptop – keeping it up to date so that I can keep abreast of the latest Windows 11 developments. As I’ve said in the past, I’m pragmatic about the platform I use because at the end of the day it is amount using the right tool for the job. I think the interesting part will be when Nova Lake is released and when Windows 11 will support the new architectural changes that both AMD and Intel agreed to. As Jim Keller pointed out, the ISA itself plays a very small role when it comes to energy efficiency so it is possible that we may see Intel and AMD close that gap between themselves and Apple’s ARM CPUs to the point that the gap is so small that it becomes a none issue for 99% of laptop purchasers.

On my Windows laptop I have Chrome for ARM64 installed and it is buttery smooth however I did try the latest version of AdGuard and it keeps hanging when it is being applied to websites. The strange thing is that when I do delete the AdGuard extension and install the uBlock Origin Lite extension then visit the same website the website hanging doesn’t occur. The other thing I noticed, which is quite odd is how Chrome is more responsive than Safari but I wonder how much of that will be addressed in Safari 26.4 when the 26.4 platform update is released.