Matisyahu's Blog

Three days to go and I’m turning the ripe old age of 45 years old and the strange thing is that I don’t ‘feel’ older just as I don’t ‘feel’ like an adult. It is funny that as I get older I don’t feel like I’m getting older – not too sure whether that is a good or bad thing but I can’t complain because I’m having a whole lot of fun in the process. I got up this morning and went for an 8km walk then arrived back home and decided to work from home for today because why the heck not. I had my shower, got some fresh clothes on and I felt all refreshed ready for work.

I checked Chrome on my work laptop as well as on my personal computers (Mac Studio and MacBook Pro) and I found that an update had been released – version 148.0.7778.216. Google made an announcement (link) however it will be a few days before the specifics of the update will be disclosed – as I’ve noted in the past, Google prefers to wait for a certain percentage of users have updated before releasing the security fixes but I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few nasty security bugs were fixed like last weeks update – I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is making good use of their own AI model and using their experience to improve the quality of their model at picking up security flaws and locating bugs. Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes I am still waiting for uBlock Origin Lite 2026.516.1652 to be released on the Chrome Webstore.

I’ve been having a look through my electricity bill to find out what is causing it go up each month even though I’m more or less using the same amount of electricity. Within a year the daily charge has gone from 172.50 cents per day to 207.00 cents per day which is a jump of around 30 cents per day which roughly translates to an extra $10 per month in just the daily charge. The price of electricity has gone from 25.32 cents per kWh to now 26.19 cents per kWh. I’m pretty lucky in that I’m single and I don’t have major commitments but I’d fear that there are plenty of Kiwis who are really doing it tough particularly during winter and unfortunately I don’t see any plan by the opposition party to drive down the cost of electricity by bringing generation back into 100% public ownership with a long term policy of the power generators not providing the government with a dividend but for the profit to be fully invested back into more power generation to get the price per kWh down to somewhere reasonable (4 years ago the daily charge used to be 69.00 cents per day – from 69.00 cents per day to 207.00 cents per day in 4 years is rediculous).

Oh, and to round it up, I have my daily catnip of videos about AI crashing and burning – not that I am anti-AI because I’m sure there are use cases where it makes sense but I do find it funny when far too many tech dude bros convince themselves that everything is now a nail because they have a hammer.

I find it confusing when i hear businesses talking about efficiency and yet they cannot even implement basic technology that has existed for years. I worked at a bank that had a call centre located in Wellington but served the Australian market so it was quite common to get calls around tax time to request bank statements covering the whole financial year. Something like that should be as simple as logging into internet banking, specifying the start and finish dates and then requesting the statement with the server itself generating one and either providing it as a download or emailed to the customer. Did the bank I work at do that? no they didn’t, what I needed to do was put through a request to a human who then had to manually create a statement and then send it through to the customer – we had the technology to automate that process over 20+ years ago.

Another example is Spark – I bought a phone on an interest free plan (this can be applied to any mobile phone carrier by the way so it isn’t just Spark who does this) and I wanted to pay off the remaining balance. Now, you’d think that it should be just a matter of logging into the Spark customer portal, navigating to the interest free payment area and then choose to make final payment but nope that would make far too much sense. What does one have to do? get in contact with Spark, talk to an operator, ask the operator to create a request for final payment who will then get it put on the next bill. What did Spark do instead of making it so one can make the final payment online oneself? implement an AI chat bot instead and cannot even do basic functions such as what I wanted to do – why fix an actual problem when ‘more AI’ appears to be the latest buzzword MBA wizkids in the corporate world like flies being attracted to a freshly paid pile of cow dung but I’m sure the consultants will make plenty of money in the process of selling an entirely useless system that’ll get canned after a year of annoying customers.