Matisyahu's Blog

Had a great day at work today – was able to clear out all the emails in the Salesforce queue exception one which was kind of hairy so I thought it would be best to chat with my boss regarding how to handle it in a sensitive way. I have to admit, I tend to over analyse what I write – always thinking about how it could be interpreted or misinterpreted because the sentences I use maybe to abrupt thus giving an incorrect impression.

Apple has released a refresh for their Mac mini and Mac Studio to the M5 bring it inline with their other M5 products plus the availability of a M6. I think the exciting part is the ability for consumer computers to run AI workloads locally, for developers to choose an open weight model that works best for them and them strap a harness to it then start using it without worrying about how many tokens they are burning through. As I’ve said in the past – the future is local for most people with some limited use cases for AI in the cloud.

There was a great video on Youtube by ‘The Tech Report’ addressing just that, most people don’t need frontier models, specialised models are better in many cases (as I’ve mentioned in the past) and consumer hardware is going to eventually undercut the advantages that cloud based AI has. The one thing to always remember is that the world runs of GET – good enough technology and unfortunately far too many tech dude bros in silicon valley obsess over the best rather than what the end users actually need which is something good enough to do the job. It reminds me of Itanium, promised to be this futuristic CPU only for it to crash and burn the moment that you could get a good enough solution based around x86-64 running Linux.

I’ve been watching the bond situation in the United States regarding interest rates rising on long dated bonds and the attempt by the Trump administration to bend the curve. Everytime I see this sort of thing take place I am reminded of the saying that you maybe able to buy some time in the short term but in the long term the market ends up winning in the end. Time and time again we see governments insist that they have more control over the situation. It reminds me of what an advisor to Nixon (the same Nixon who proudly proclaimed “I am a keynesian”) that politicians want to appear to be doing something, anything, even if the right thing is to do nothing.

New Zealand back in early 1980s had Prime Minister Muldoon that borrowed to prop up the New Zealand dollar but eventually in 1984 he had to devalue the dollar and when the new Labour government came in they floated the currency so its value was decided by the market. It was a painful process but a necessary one because just like the British Pound it become increasingly more expensive to defend the currency. I have the same feeling with what is happening in the United States – there will be a breaking point and all the maneuvering at the moment is putting off the inevitable or possibly the maneuvering making the situation worse versus if they just allowed to happen whatever was going to happen.