Matisyahu's Blog

I had today (Sunday) off from work sick but I’m now feeling a lot better – I had a sore stomach with cramps and unsure as to the reason why, maybe shifting to a higher fibre diet has give my body the shock of its life? Oh well, I made sure I rested up, drank plenty of water and when the weather was fine I was able to get out to have some fresh air after being locked inside due to the bad weather recently.

I’m still working through the ‘narratives we tell ourselves’ post and hopefully tomorrow I’ll get it out of the way but if the weather is good I’m wanting to get out of the house for a walk with my headphones on listening to music or maybe evening listening to a podcast or two. I’ve got the alarm set to 9:30 am which is 30 minutes earlier than all this week which has been 10:00 am and hopefully once I’ve done a week of that I should find it a whole lot easier to get up at that time. The mistake I made in the past is not sticking to that routine and the problem is that once I get out of the routine it is difficult to get back into it again. The one thing I need to remind myself is that I can always do that thing I want to do the next day – I don’t need to watch that video tonight or read that article tonight, that can always wait.

I’m normally pretty sceptical about AI given the over valuation that is taking place in the market but it is always good to talk about ‘good news’ and this recent good news is the Cisco Antares Open Weight AI for Cybersecurity (link). This model goes back to what I’ve been talking about recently – the future isn’t these massive sprawling bloated LLMs that OpenAI and Anthropic are doing but instead it is about smaller more focused and efficient models that follow the old UNIX principle of doing one thing and it it very well.

Oh, and I finally ordered those Peanuts merchandise off the web – it’ll have to go through the remailing service that NZ Post runs called ‘YouShop’ but from the estimated time the stuff I ordered will arrive next week at the depot NZ Post has in the United States and then I’ll get them mailed to New Zealand. I tend to avoid going through the remailing service as it can be kind of pricy so if I do purchase something through that method then it is primarily to get something I cannot purchase in New Zealand.

Daily writing prompt

If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?

View all responses

The Firm by John Grisham – I would have loved to see what actually came of the firm after Mitch provided the evidence. Not that I’m necessarily looking for a ‘happy ever after’ ending but more wanting to see what happened to the firm, did Mitch continue working in law etc. I’ve wondered whether some of John Grisham’s books could be turned into a television series – using the book as a launching bad to explore the background of the characters in much the same way ‘Better Call Saul’ looked into the origins of the characters who would later appear in ‘Breaking Bad’.