Matisyahu's Blog

Today was a pretty normal day, nothing stood out at me but I was able to catch up on some work. Things are going pretty good at work with emails and other office work being kept on top of which will avoid them building up to the point that they become overwhelming. I think that as long as we don’t finish the day with a whole lot of stuff in the queue then it’ll give us time to catch up when customer enquiries are quiet.

Although I do whinge and whine occasionally I did log into the State Insurance website and I noticed that they’ve finally fixed up how details updated online wouldn’t properly be updated after you log out. My mum had the same issue with her email after moving from an xtra.co.nz email address to an outlook.co.nz email address – hopefully if the issue has been resolved with my State Insurance login that hopefully it’ll be fixed up for hers as well.

Apple has announced an even with the title ‘Surprise and shine’ which will occur on 10 September at 5:00 am New Zealand time. I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast and there has been much speculation regarding what the title of the event means. I might as throw my two cents worth into the discussion – the surprise refers to a new device or devices being launched and shine referring to the sunshine of a new day which refers to updated hardware. Many rumours are abound but i wouldn’t be surprised if we see a refresh of Apple TV 4K, updated HomePod, updated iPhones like ever year and maybe a foldable phone.

We’ll probably hear that iOS will probably arrive a week after the event and maybe macOS released a week after but then again I could be wrong and they might end up just releaing both of them at the same time – what Apple has done int he past isn’t always an indication of what they’ll do in the future particularly when you take into account the new executive team now in charge. It’ll be interesting to see whether 26.7 is released or whether that’ll launch after version 27 for those devices that don’t meet the system requirements for version 27.

I’m reading through the latest WECG and there was an intersting discussion regarding ‘Provide a way to distinguish prefetch requests from regular navigations in extension APIs’ which will hopefully allow improved filtering because the whole pre-fetch thing has been a problem for content blockers even in the days of MV2 even if you have pre-fetching disabled in Chrome. The WECG meetings also give a good insight regarding the enthusiasm that browser vendors have for putting some serious time and resources to making extensions on their browsers vs. those who are just going through their motions, dragging their feet every step of the way so then they can tick a box to say they’ve done the bare minimum.

Microsoft has announced that they’ve released a preview of Windows 11 26H2 – it’ll ne an enablement package which means the code is already baked in so it is just a matter of turning it on. This years update is going to be a minor update but I have a feeling that next year will be a more disruptive update because the launch of Zen 6 and Nove Lake will include some big under the hood architectural changes that require changes at the kernel level – the biggest ones being FRED, APX and ChkTag. Linux has had the functionality support added with benchmarks showing performance benefits – I assume the benchmarks are being done on preproduction chips.

Just finishing up this blog post, it is always amazing the number of people who are so arrogant in their ignorance that they don’t understand how tax brackets work. It is one thing to be ignorant because no one can ever be an expert on everything but the toxic mixture is always amazing when I see it when it comes to Americans claiming that countries have an average tax rates of 45% or higher. What makes the situation worse is that with social media is that such nonsense is amplified because it feeds into a narrative that makes themselves feel good about the fact that the US spends more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare and yet has some of the worse outcomes.

It reminds me of watching an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher and the amount of copium that his American guests engage when they try to make themselves feel better about he current situation. For example, they did a comparison between Germany and a state in the US (the name of the state escapes me) on the basis of GDP per capita which is meaningless because if you compared the median wage of Germany compared to that state, the average person living in Germany has a better quality of life. The median wage also doesn’t take into account that in Germany you have affordable healthcare, education, a well funded public transport system etc. vs being made bankrupt for simply having an ambulance ride to the A&E.

Social media may amplify misinformation and disinformation but when people are more interested in seeking out what feeds the narrative that justifies their world view then it shouldn’t be surprising that misinformation and disinformation promulgates throughout the internet. When people are faced with the facts that they find uncomfortable they can either face those facts head on or they can retreat into denial and convince themselves. The vast overwhelming majority of Americans have been raised on a steady diet of American exceptionalism and when they’re confronted with facts that challenge the years of conditioning to believe they live in the greatest country on earth then it shouldn’t be surprised when we see the sort of behaviour we see online.