Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • Firefox 127.0.2 and macOS: Working well

    I’ve installed Firefox 127.0.2 along with uBlock Origin and so far things are going pretty good – as much as the ‘all Apple’ ecosystems nice I can’t help but get frustrated by the crippled experience with the new extension model that is being pushed upon users over the next year with Chrome at the head of that change. At the moment the only real alternative to the current direction that Chromium and Webkit browsers are taking is to embrace Firefox. Do I think that it’ll make a huge difference to the market share of Firefox? well, it comes down to the percentage of users who depend upon extensions, the ‘technological vanguard’ if you will, the sort of early adopters who adopted Firefox early, who jumped on Chrome early, whether they make the first move and maybe bring along the tech enthusiast crowd (people who aren’t necessarily technically inclined but are interested in technology).

    I don’t see Firefox market share ever getting back to where it was pre-Chrome but I could see them maybe (at least on the desktop) getting to 15-20% (which would be around 13-14 points higher than where they are based on the numbers over on Stat counter (link)). If they eventually get to 20-25% (me being super optimistic) then I could imagine it would force the big platforms to maintain compatibility with Firefox – for all the criticisms that people may have of Google, I don’t see Google being like Microsoft and forcing people to use Chrome because at the end of the day if you’re using Google services then why would it matter whether it is being accessed via Webkit, Firefox or Chrome.

    Side note: At the moment I’m still recovering however I will be going to the doctors on either Monday or Tuesday to find out what is wrong and whether they can prescribe something – I’ve emailed them with all the details because I’ve lost my voice but I’m going to have to ring them up tomorrow when I wake up if I don’t see an email response to the email I sent I’ll phone them up and try with the croaky voice I have at the moment.

    Side note to the side note: It would be nice if Apple was forced to open up iOS to allow the Firefox web engine to run on iOS outside of the European Union. That being said, the Pixel 9 is going to be released within the next couple of months so it’ll be interesting to see what Google has in store in terms of hardware. It is also interesting that the first batches of Bluetooth tags that are compatible with the Google service are now shipping. I guess it is a bit like Microsoft – when you don’t do everything yourself and depend on third parties. I guess for a lot of silicon valley with the downsizing bought on by higher interest rates, and growth slowing, that the sort of pet projects or products that couldn’t be justified are being reassessed – don’t expect earth shattering new features coming out but rather the consolidation of products, a simplification of back end maintenance by consolidating on a core set of technologies while focusing on fit and finish. The WWDC keynote this year gave a good insight – it isn’t about novelty technologies but delivering on AI in a meaningful way for end users outside what are neat demos but are entirely useless for the average person.

  • I’ve arrived back in New Zealand and recovering.

    I should have posted it yesterday when I did arrive back in New Zealand but I was so exhausted after almost 32 hours of non stop travel (including the waiting at London, Dubai and Brisbane). I did sleep on the plane but the sleep was horrible with the constant waking up, the uncomfortable chair (I was in business class which softened the worst parts of travelling but honestly if there was a train that went through the earth and took 4 days to get there and I was staying in a Caledonian Sleeper room (link) then I’d sooner for the train option).

    It was a great experience overall but over there I ended up getting a chest infection (it started in the first leg of the flight), the made worse with stress and anxiety while travelling but lucky I was able to speak to a doctor who gave me some medication which cleared it up within 5 days..or so I thought. I was cruising along with the bus feeling quite good about myself that although others were coughing on the bus that I should be all good…until I wasn’t which meant the last few days were horrible and travelling back made even worse being sick – constant coughing up phlegm etc. I’m taking a rest over the next few days but if it ain’t cleared up by Monday I’ll head to the doctors office and advise him what happened in the UK, the medication I received and whether it is the same thing I gotten again.

    Would I go for another intense one month trip again? no, I think for me I’d sooner have smaller shorter trips that are more narrowly focused where I can take my time rather than rushing between things I want – avoiding the stress of doing too much in such a small space of time. As soon as I am better I’ll upload the photos along with explanations on what happened on that day/that event.

  • Update 3: Arrived in Ireland and then left to.

    Over the last few days I’ve been travelling through Ireland then through Wales, here is the map of the tour:

    I’m currently in Chester and heading off to Cardiff tomorrow then two days in Plymouth then back to London where I’ll be flying back to New Zealand. As promised I’ll be uploading photos with more complete commentary but I’ll wait till I get home because then I can use my desktop computer which I prefer to use when writing for long periods of time not to mention I’ve got a tonne of photos (on my iPhone and digital camera) that I need to work through. On a side note, my chest infection got sorted out – a combination of stress, flights etc. but thanks to the NHS I was able to get a course of antibiotics and an inhaler which has allowed me to recover – It took a few days to take effect but it has allowed me to enjoy 3/4 of the trip without any sickness.

  • Update 2: Arrived in London and started the tour.

    The thing I left out of first update was that I was sick after arriving in Paris – unfortunately it always happens when I go for a long trip, be it by via train, road, airplane, whether it is a short journey (Wellington to Auckland) or a long one (Wellington to Sydney then to Dubai etc). I’ve been fighting through it but it isn’t something you can fix up in a rush – the body will heal when it wants to heal, there is no fast forward button to speed up that process. I’m slowly getting there but them’s the breaks or brakes – the show must go on.

    We took the Eurostar from Paris to London then from the St Pancras to where I was staying (it was a hop, skip and a jump) and lodged myself in for the night. The next day I organised a 2 day Tootbus explorer London pass which allowed me to jump on and jump off at all the major sites I wanted to see: Tate Modern, the new Shakespeare’s Globe, Battersea power station redevelopment, London Transport Museum (I was going to go to the British Museum but it was shut early due to an incident but I couldn’t find more details other than that). I had a lot of fun over those two days – if you are going to visit London – Apple Maps work great but remember to download an offline version if you’ve got roaming turn off or if you are roaming wanting to keep data use to a minimum. One thing to always remember is to make sure you leave plenty of slack in your schedule – not everything is going to go according to plan all the time so you always need to ensure that you take a seat followed deep breath then relax and just go with the flow.

    On Sunday I joined the ‘formal tour’ that I signed up for which includes accommodation, food, guides etc. because I’d sooner let someone else sort out the details required than trying to do it myself and losing my cool in the process. So I jumped on the bus at London on the way we stopped off Oxford University, then Stratford-upon-Avon to visits Shakespeares home, drove pass Anne Hathaway’s Cottage then we popped up to York now through to Edinburgh where we visited many sites.

    We then started going though the lowlands and highlands of Scotland – it is interesting learn about a distinct culture that exists. I took a tonne of photos but holy crap the accommodation was appallingly bad – when you’re a guy who is 188cm and trying to sleep in a single bed with your legs dangling off the edge of the bed, the experience overall is bad. I’m going to provide feedback to the tour operator – at the north of Scotland there is a limited range of accommodation so maybe the tour operators should team and up and establishment hotels with a decent minimum standard rather than dealing with hotel operators with a captured audience doing the least amount humanly possible. Tonight I am happy that I have a double bed all to myself so I can finally have a decent night sleep.

    Going to head out tomorrow – the Irish leg of the tour is beginning which will be particularly interesting given half my family have Irish heritage. I’m going to have a shower, crawl into bed and chill out watching some YouTube videos – thank goodness for free wifi.

  • In the category of ‘this shouldn’t surprise anyone’.

    Yes, even when I am on holiday I am following the latest technology news – I don’t want to sound snarky but I predicted this a while ago, there will be the early adopter phase with lots of hype then it’ll be relegated to a niche. Now, I’m not saying that foldable phones suck – I quite like the foldable flip phones but the reality is that their price drops to the point that people have two phones the same price (a foldable and non-foldable of the same specs) side by side then it falls into the “why the hell not” rather than the current situation of a price premium with people asking “is my life going to be different if I spend the extra money”.

    I’m not a fan of people who say that xyz is “doomed I tells ya, doomed!” but what I can say is that it’ll be relegated to a niche just as the Apple Vision Pro will be relegated to a niche along with the whole Metaverse visual world being a niche (yes, we’ve already had such a service in the past – it’s called ‘Second Life’). For introvert like me the idea of dealing people even in a virtual space is just as bad as dealing with people in the real life – thank you but no thank you. Yes, I understand that the size of the market has increased but eventually those markets where it is growing will eventually hit a wall and growth will die off.

  • Trip to France, United Kingdom and Ireland: Update 1.

    I left home on on Monday so I could chill out a few hours at the Qantas lounge – a nice way to start a long trip. I’m of two minds when it comes to planning a long trip – do you have a single flight and be in the air for 20+ hours or is it better to break up the flight and having rests in between those flights. In the case of me I took a 737 from Wellington to Sydney – the seats in business class are nice but the toilets, holy crap, if you’re 6’2″ then god help you – whether sitting or standing, skinny or chubby, it’s a nightmare. Maybe I should see if there is a surgery to knock a few inches off my stature lol.

    Then from Sydney to Dubai and then Dubai to Paris we were on an Airbus A380 by Emirates – business class with nice comfortable seats, I’m able to have a proper nights sleep by laying down completely rather than trying to sleep sitting up. The meals were nice and of course I treated myself to some deserts from their night service and then had a good night sleep – something I learned though, when you put your chair down don’t put it all the way it is flat because the aircraft isn’t flying flat so you could imagine the sleep wasn’t that good.

    Oh, and when I was in Sydney I indulged in their wonderful array of deserts – around the world in a dozen deserts with my favourite being the passionfruit cheese cake. It was delicious, it was sweet but not too sweet and the flavour wasn’t over powering. There was a wonderful chocolate mousse desert in the shape of a mellow puff. To quote the great YouTube philosopher im_kankan: “I’m here to get my money worth”. I’m on holiday so I might as well indulge.

    When I arrived in Paris I relaxed on my first day because the weather was overcast so the next day, after having a decent night sleep, I went to the Louvre although we couldn’t buy ticket online because when mum tried to use her BNZ card to purchase it but because the BNZ app wasn’t setup on her phone this resulted in us not being able to buy tickets but if was any consolation we walked from the hotel to the Louvre (around a 40 minute walk) that there was a massive line, looking through the pyramids the place was completely packed so even if I could get the tickets I’d be dealing with a massive crowd. On a good side I went on one of those hop on/hop off buses which allowed us to get a good amount of photos taken from great angles – I just went crazy taking as many photos as I could and then I’ll upload the best photos to WordPress when I get back to New Zealand.

  • United States Republican Party and their love affair with Russia.

    The narrative I typically hear through the media is the sort of simplistic answer that is normally given by a talking head explaining why people vote for Trump, “Oh, they’re racist”, sure it is an answer but it is the sort of answer one would give if one didn’t want to look any further than and wanted a simplistic answer to why a voters vote a certain way akin to the explanation being “they’re a bad person”. Personally, it fascinates me finding out the motivations behind why someone makes a decision – what their thought process is to explain why they hold such a world view.

    There is the lines thrown around that the Republican Party is the part of Putin, party of Moscow etc. but hearing this I thought to myself that there has to be something more to do this than just an admiration of strong men in charge of a country – is there a policy difference but the media is more concerned with simplistic representation that actually doing a deep dive into what I believe their position is and why they believe that is a better path for US and Western security.

    The first faction within the Republican Party are those who wish to separate Russia from China because they see China has the greater ‘threat’ in much the same way of Nixon opening up China to the world ended up driving a wedge between China and Russia, their aim being to drive China and Russia further apart than what occurred in the Sino-Soviet split. What this faction of the Republican Party believe is that China is a greater threat to the US and the West primarily due to the productive capacity that China has along with the gap that has closed between China and the West when it comes to current technological developments for example Quantum computing and next generation artificial intelligence.

    The second faction in the Republican Party are those who see the culture war as the primary motivator for their involvement in politics – the belief that the sort of policy they wish to pursue can not be achieved unless their is a cultural change. This is very much inline with the idea of Andrew Breitbart which goes: “politics is downstream from culture”, if you want to change the politics you need to change the culture. For some they view Putin as a symbol of traditional values – not that Putin necessarily believes it but rather it is the myth of the nation that used in much the same way that neoconservatives used ideas of democracy, freedom, family, traditional marriage in their pursuit of power.

    The reason why Nixon was able to accomplish what he did was because the capitalist class and politicians who align their politics with the interests of the capitalist class because it benefited both politicians and their bakers along with those who saw strategic benefit of driving a wedge between the USSR and China. In the case of the capitalist class, it allowed them access to a cheap labour force to maximise profits but are the capitalist class willing to stand behind the Russian position? what do they gain out of it? it’s the reason why there is unity between the capitalist class that support Republican and Democrats regarding the current position towards Russia.

    One thing to keep in mind that on the ‘Russia supporting’ side, let us not assume that those who wish for a change in relations doing so for benevolent reasons – Russia is hugely rich in natural resources and many see it as an opportunity to curtail China’s dominance when it comes production by cutting China off from raw materials. One thing to keep in mind is that those who may take such position may hide it behind the whole culture war ‘Putin represents traditional values’ but in reality they don’t care one way or another when it comes to the culture war – the only war they’re waging is the war on the working class.

    There is a large portion of the Republican base that are reactionary in nature who are lining up with Putin because they view him as a leader of ‘traditional values’ as a reaction to modernity and post modernity. This reactionary can take two manifestations, the first being very much a ‘shallow end of the pool’ where people are attracted because of the aesthetics of traditionalism but little to no understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of such a world view – they see the world changing and they don’t like it, they don’t feel as though they belong and they want things to go back to ‘the way they used to be’. When I mean by going back to ‘the way things used to be’ I am not referring to the restoration of Jim Crow laws but rather the rose tinted view of the past that they remember as a child aka a view of the past in no way representative of reality.

    The second manifestation is one that is more troubling which is the white nationalist underpinnings that we’ve seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the links that have been built between white national organisations in the United States and Russia. The most prominent was a white national leader during the 1990s who visited Russia to build white nationalist links with white nationalists in Russia – giving Russians the ‘stamp of approval’ that they’re certified white people and they are brothers with the same philosophical outlook.

    Let us assume that you’re able to win the argument that China is the greater threat than Russia, that the capitalist class see China as giving them short term profits but long term it’ll come back to bite them in the backside. The question one then asks is how you deal with Putin, how do you bring him over to your side? do they realise that the Russian system of government is more than just Putin, that if Putin disappeared off the radar do they really believe there isn’t someone else who can step up to take on the role of president that would continue business as usual? there is a reason why it is it called the Putin regime – there is a whole apparatus setup around him, their own capitalist class that have benefited from the regime that you also need to convince that it is in their interests to ‘switch sides’. I’m skeptical that it’ll happen given that Europe had tried for years to bring Russia closer to the European Union but Russia steadfastly refused to move closer, clean up their legal system, deal with their minefield of regulations, deal with corruption etc.

    I haven’t covered everything but these were some thoughts running around in my head so I thought it would be best to get them down on my blog.

  • AdGuard Extension for Safari update released.

    AdGuard for Safari has been updated to version 1.11.18 which includes Scriptlets being updated to to v1.10.25 along with all the dependencies related to Scriptlets. I cleared all the cookies and cache then synchronised with the latest filters that are available – I’m subscribed to all the filters exception for the ones that are labeled ‘problematic’. There is talk about moving away from Electron – maybe they’ll make use of catalyst (link) but I haven’t see anything appear yet as so far as a public beta but I’m sure they’ll around to it.

    Apple has released iOS 17.5.1 (link) where Apple fix has the following release note: “This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.” My interpretation of that explanation was that the photo database was corrupted, the file was deleted but because database was corrupted it wasn’t fully deleted and when the update was installed it rebuilt the photo database which resulted in the photo coming back. There was a post on Reddit claiming that a photo came back from device they had cleared off but then the person suddenly deleted it the moment that their claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

    I’ll be overseas when WWDC 2024 kicks off but I’ll check in to see what improvements make their way to the platform – I’m particularly interested in seeing what is added to Webkit in particular the features that have been added to the Technology Preview release but weren’t stable and/or complete enough to go into the mainstream release. An example of that would be the switch over to the open source implementation of Webextensions API in Safari Technology Preview 192 (link) didn’t make it into the next macOS update but I could see it appear in Safari 18 as Apple close the functionality gap between the MV3 standard and their implementation in Webkit.

    Edit: You may need to delete the old AdGuard settings files in the Library directory if you find that ‘No Coin’ filter has disappeared from the Security Filters category when upgrading from an older version.

  • Google I/O 2024

    This year’s Google I/O 2024 was very AI centric but the focus of AI wasn’t about AI for AI sake but rather how integrating AI into popular Google products will improve the over all experience for end users. I remember speculating a while ago with the launch of the S24 that what we’ll end up seeing from Samsung is the use of AI on device but offer AI in the cloud for an enhanced experience – it would be free at the moment but sometime in 2025 there could be potentially a cost.

    Google announced the Gemini Nano 1.5 which will result on on device processing then two tiers above that, processional and ultra, which are available in the cloud but there will be a price tag attached. I don’t think that Samsung would be doing their own cloud computing for AI but I could imagine Google offering a revenue sharing programme in much the same way that revenue is shared at the PlayStore between Google and OEMs as a way of encouraging OEMs to provide Android updates for customers long term. The reason why I speculate is because Google announced that Gemini Nano will run on Galaxy S24 and Pixel devices. When they do start charging for cloud based AI it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll integrate into enterprise AI offerings from Google.

    Long term it’ll be interesting to see how dedicated hardware performs in terms of a cost per query (aka the amount of power required for each query the result cost of that power used) and whether, with dedicated hardware optimised for AI tasks, that Google is able to drive down the cost to the point that it becomes a standard feature as a point of differentiation. Maybe one option is to integrate Gemini Nano 1.5 in the cloud for consumers, maybe make available Gemini Pro the default for their business tier and higher with Ultra being a paid for upgrade – will be interesting to see.

    It’s incredibly difficult to guess on what time scale any of this would occur given that I’ve speculated in the past that a given technology is years away then becomes omnipresent within a matter of a year. I was expecting 5G roll out in New Zealand would be something that there was no sense of urgency but within a matter of a year all the big carriers announce the shutting down of 2G and 3G networks within the next year or two not to mention the massive improvement in 5G coverage.

    That is the problem with technology – it moves faster than most people expect. Will be interesting to see how the year progresses particularly with WWDC 2024 just around the corner and rumours of Microsoft working on its own large language model along with investing in a few AI startups to hedge their bets – the leader of today isn’t guaranteed to be the leader in the future.

  • Apple release updates.

    Last week when I heard that Apple had released the RC version of their update I was wondering whether they would hold off till Tuesday NZ time or Wednesday NZ Time to make the update available publicly – it appears that they’ve decided to release it Tuesday NZ Time. In the updates there are a sizeable number of security updates (link) as well as improvements to Safari (link).

    For me, my excitement around releases has less to do with fixes for bugs because I haven’t been hit by any nasty bugs but I do like how Safari is being regularly updated. I have kept track of features on Webkit with some of them potentially being disruptive, such as the move to the Webextensions API implementation in the source tree, which they may not enable in the mainstream branch until Safari 18 this year when it ships with macOS 15.

    Two more weeks to go and then I’m heading overseas, I’ll make sure I take many photos but I’ll upload them when I can – it may not be until I get back to New Zealand but I am taking my laptop so I can update my blog when I’m travelling (I’m sure there will be free wifi at the places I’ll stay). Side note, I love the decision Apple did to move to ARM based Macs because the battery life is so much better and the performance really is top notch even for a device (I have a MacBook Air) that doesn’t have a fan.