Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve been off from work for a few days so I thought it would be best to talk to my local healthcare professional to see if it was more serious but I was advised that I need to rest and allow the body to do its thing. I forwarded the medical certificate to my boss to give them a heads up on what has happened just so they know what is going on. I’m taking it easy, keeping hydrated, eating health meals with lots of the good stuff so my body can heal but unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to speed up recovery so I’ll just be taking it easy.

Regarding Safari, a technology preview hasn’t been arrested but the one thing I do find annoying is an issue with Google Chat and having a notification in the tab that a message has been sent. If I am running Chrome or Firefox, when a message is sent and I’m not focused on that tab then where the Google Chat logo is there is a red dot to indicate that there is an unread message. The benefit of that is if I am on another tab such as writing up a blog entry (like I’m doing now) and I have a chat session open, I am forced to routinely check to see if a message has been sent because that notification doesn’t come up on Safari (I don’t want a system notification, just the dot in the tab).

When I noticed it the first time when using Chrome but it not occurring on Safari I thought that maybe it was a Chrome only feature but then I installed Firefox and it had no problems showing that red dot. I’m still waiting for that functionality to arrive but I guess it’ll be one of those things that I’ll need to wait for Apple given that I’ve reported an issue with YouShop through the Apple bug reporting form and here we are over a year later and the issue hasn’t been fixed yet (the problem doesn’t occur on Chrome or Firefox).

There has been comparisons regarding the hype around AI with many labelling it a bubble then comparing the current situation to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I disagree with that analysis for two reasons. The first reason is the fact that there was actually useful technology that came out of it. The networking equipment, the build out of fibre optic backbone, the availability of broadband etc. may have arrived before there were services that could fully take advantage of it but what it meant is that when it did arrive the foundation had already been established (normally it is the other way around, a new product or service then having to wait for the technology to catch up).

The second reason is the fact that many of the dot-coms were selling things people actually wanted rather than promises of abstract concepts of a plan that no one can nail down as to how it’ll help the average person their every day life. The whole point of many dot-com retailers was to have a massive warehouse with a lot more choice than what you would get at a store – want to find a CD from an alternative band? it’ll be there, want to find some interesting art prints? you can find it. There was a reason why people gravitated towards online retailers – there was the price (I would argue price is a smaller factor given that physical stores have the benefit of instant gratification rather than having to wait for an order to be delivered) but choice was, I’d argue, was a bigger factor at play. This is the reason why buy a lot of what I want online because physical retail stores have a limited selection where as online retailers almost have an unlimited selection to choose from.