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

  • Apple releases updates..many improvements.

    Admittedly I am late to the party but Apple released updates for all their platforms but the more interesting aspect to this is the progress that Safari is making in terms of fixing bugs and improved compliance with the work being done with the Interop 2023 team (link) (link). The interesting part is how a few bug fixes in combination with work being done by AdGuard Safari Extension developers is producing a more consistent content blocking experience where as in previous version of Safari I would routinely find that ads would be slipping through. It’ll be interesting to see what next version of Safari will be like given the stuff that has been added over the last year and can be tried out in the Safari Technology preview. For example, in a year Safari 16.2 passed 67.3% of tests over on wpt.fyi to now around 91-92% for Safari 17.2 (on Safari Technology Preview 184 it is sitting at 97%).

    End of the year get to together is fast approaching and the good part of all this is I’ve been able to pick up some overtime from work which will give me some extra money along with picking up a lieu day. Things are finally getting back on track and part of this is saving up for spending money when I go over to Europe, the UK and Ireland – the travel and accomodation is all taken care of so now it is a matter of putting some money on my travel card. I am tempted to start buying up Euros and British Pounds when the price is good so then if there are any currency swings that aren’t in my favour I would have at least got some put aside when the price was good.

    Next year I’m going to organise a servicing for my scooter along with updating my registration because at the moment I didn’t think it was worth paying for a rego if I’m not going to use the bike so I put it on hold. When you put your rego on hold if you renew it in 3 months then you have to pay for those months on hold where as if you renew after 3 months then it is from the day you renew. The big thing next year will be the company moving in to Wellington so I’ll be choosing to take in the train because there are too many crazies on the road at the moment so I’d sooner keep myself and avoiding running into such folk. With that being said, it can be annoying when I’m trying to do grocery shopping by catching the bus particularly on Sunday so that will be one thing I’m happy that I won’t have to deal with once I get my scooter up and running.

    One of the things I hadn’t realised until a few nights ago was how much more expensive on peak fares were. The price had always never occurred to me because I work 1130 to 2000 and 1330 to 2200 so when I go to work and return it is always in the off peak hours so I’m only paying $1.51 one way where as if I go into Wellington on peak it costs $5.52 but off peak it is $2.76 using snapper.

    The powers that be have decided to scrap the $3 billion ferry and infrastructure plan put forward by Kiwirail and although $3 billion sounds like a lot of money one has to take into consideration that a ship can be in service for 20 years (I’m sure these ones will be a lot longer given that they’re modern designs) so if you break it down then it works out to be $150 million per year. Lets take a more pessimistic costing and round it up to $200 million per year to include interest then the amount is still going to be cheaper than the tax cut the government is going to give to property speculators who are buying up existing housing and turning potential home owners into renters for life. I can’t help but get the feeling that this will be yet another ‘penny wise but pound foolish’ move by our new government and unfortunately the voters will find out in the future when Labour comes in once again to clean up the short sighted mess created by the three headed hydra (National, ACT and NZ First).

  • Plagiarism on YouTube and my 5 cents worth on the topic.

    Once again Harry has put out a tour de force on an issue of plagiarism along with a second video pointing how a prominent YouTuber (according to the videos author) just made stuff up (or a less polite way he was rectum plucking rumination from their nether regions and presenting them as fact) because the narrative was more important than what the facts actually say.

    I’ve been on the internet long enough to see how these sorts of situations turn out and each time they start there are many opportunities for the parties involved to deal with the situation they have found themselves in by backing out with at least a minuscule amount of reputation still in tact. The problem is that I find is that those who do get themselves into this situation convince themselves that they’re the smartest one in the room, that they can outsmart everyone, that they have a silver tongue and can talk themselves out of any trouble (see recent reports of how Sam Bankman-Fried cannot stop talking (link) as an example of this “I can talk my way out of anything”). Part of this delusion is fuelled by the individual surrounding themselves with people who are ‘yes men’ and defend them whenever there is any criticism being made. One of the golden rules of the internet that I’ve always lived by is “someone out there is always going to be smarter than you” – that doesn’t mean you need to be perfect but you should at least live your life in good faith and when you screw up you should admit it, make amends, demonstrate contrition then move on.

    Regarding plagiarism, for me it is like winning a computer game by cheating. Sure, you might get to the end and win but the win doesn’t feel satisfying because part of the process of winning is overcoming obstacles and that feeling of success that comes from knowing you have overcome it all through grit, determination and hard work. The whole process is the feeling of triumph of eventually accomplishing what you set out to achieve and achieving it where as if you cheat, you have won but it feels hollow, you feel like a fraud, an imposter who doesn’t deserve it (that is assuming that the individual has a moral compass and is capable of feeling guilt).

    It is interesting how watching certain content creators give me bad vibes in much the same way that a car covered in dents driving down the road gives you the vibe that you should steer clear of it – you’re unsure how that car got so many dents but it is best no to find out. Many of the claims being made by those who make videos are opinion being passed off as fact or simply passing off falsehoods as facts because it serves the interest of the narrative they’re trying to build rather than it being the result of it being factually accurate.

  • Almost there..taking it one day at a time.

    It’s been over a month since making the move to Firefox due to the Chrome development team becoming increasingly hostile to end users and their ability to run content blocking extensions by creating a crippled extension framework in the name of ‘security and privacy’. The one thing you quickly learn as you get older is to be sceptical of those who claim that they’re doing something in the name of ‘security and privacy’ in much the same way when politicians start to take away your privacy and individual rights either in the name of national security or some moral crusade that believe they’re fighting on behalf of. With that being said, it is important not to become paranoid and end up down the rabbit’s hole only to end up with the real loonies such as the anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers etc. but a healthly level of scepticism is always warranted when those in power make decisions then try to justify it in a paternalistic way.

    Next year at the end of May 2024 I am looking at travelling to France then through Great Britain on a guided tour and part of that has been making sure I have enough hours for the trip which means I’ve cancelled the extended time over Christmas which is ok since Monday and Tuesday are my days off which are also Christmas day and Boxing day which is good enough – I might ask my boss whether I can work from home over Christmas and New Years. I’ve also decided to not take the day off before I fly out along with giving me an extra day after I come back which saves 32 hours. Long story short, I’m now only 8 hours short which can easily be fixed up by working a few holidays to make some extra money and a lieu day.

    When it comes to finances, things are going very well, things are back on track and although it is going to be a tough year ahead I believe that ‘short term pain for long term gain’ will pay off in the long run if it means that I can focus on putting a good amount of money aside in my Kiwisaver for retirement – although I have a feeling I’ll try to work as long as I can to keep myself occupied. The other part is getting into good health, losing some weight which will help when travelling and then finally if everything remains on track then the end of next year there will be the Pixel 9 and I’ll upgrade my phone to that assuming something remarkable didn’t happen such as iCloud allowing more than 3 email addresses per domain or by some miracle Apple fixes up the extension framework shortcomings that makes running uBlock Origin on Safari impossible because of the missing functionality that uBlock Origin needs so that it can run.

  • Elon having a normal one.

    We’ve all probably heard about Elon Musk and the message he sent to advertisers. Personally I think that Ari Melber is being far to generous as to the motivations behind what Elon said when he was interviewed at the New York Times DealBook Summit. I’m a great believer in Occam’s razor – “the simplest answer is usually the correct one” and in the case of what has taken place we see an overgrown child showing defiance to what perceives are the advertisers punishing him like a parent punishes and unruly child when they get out of line. What is his response to this? he believes they’ll eventually capitulate in the belief that not being on the platform hurts them more than it hurts himself which is the equivalent of a child threatening to hold their breath if they don’t get their own way. It truly is amazing how people put him on a pedestal when he has the maturity of a mushroom and an emotional intelligence of an orange.

    If he cannot see the link between a toxic platform and why brands don’t want to be associated with him and his platform’s toxicity then it appears that simply either doesn’t have a clue or he sees himself as a victim (like many conservatives do although he strenuously claims he’s a centrist (which we all know is code for conservative (link))) when the situation moves from the ‘fucking around’ to the ‘finding out’ phase but rather than accept responsibility he claim’s he is a victim of an orchestrated campaign against little ole him. The problem is that in any normal universe he would have fallen face first into a wall but unfortunately he has enablers who keep funding this lunacy but that is quite alright with me because I’m over on Mastodon where such idiocy doesn’t take place.

  • What is said on the election campaign trail vs the reality of being in government.

    Below are two videos talking about the fiscal direction of New Zealand and changes – watch both of them then compare what they have said, now that they’re in government, when compared to what was said on the campaign trail because I think what you’re going to find is that the sort of rhetoric about cutting large number of public servants and spending has quickly found what happens when rhetoric slams head first with reality – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that reality ends up winning in the end no matter how much you’d like that not to be the case.

    There was big talk about reducing the core public service head count by fifteen thousand but now we’re seeing a realisation that a slash ‘n burn approach will have a damaging impact on the government to be able to govern – yes, even if you’re a ‘classical liberal’ party you need public servants to implement your policy, they don’t just magically happen at the wave of a magic wand then ta-da it happens. What you’ll probably see is a hiring freeze, move people around to different positions within the public service where there is the need for more staff, offering voluntary redundancy and allow a head count reduction through a combination of natural attrition and maybe investments into more technology to encourage the use of more self service options.

    The incoming finance minister is also going to have to look at the books and it appears that the sort of talk similar to that of David Seymour is going to confront reality when the reports start rolling in regarding each of the ministries in terms of budgets and head counts. If you want to improve productivity then you’ll need to make investments which means front loading costs for long term savings, are the government willing to do that? if so, that will potentially mean a larger budget deficit in the short term, are they happy to explain to the public that the deficit maybe large over the next few years but savings may not appear until 2-3 years later?

    As for the ‘repeal amendments to the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act 1990 and regulations before March 2024’ (link), It would be so much easier if Luxon just took the libertarian position in regards to smoking laws by saying “Should we ban alcohol too? Yes smoking kills, but that’s the choice of the individual.” As someone who is economically centre left but socially libertarian, it really rubs me the wrong way when I see politicians going on moral crusades (along side politicians who pass laws that make themselves feel good but do little in the way of addressing a problem or it ends up exacerbating the problem) in the belief that they have some sort of mandate to ‘protect the little people from making decisions I disagree with’. Smokers already pay taxes on tobacco that more than offset the cost of smoking and even if one were to imagine a scenario where everyone who smokes stops smoking tomorrow then there is the additional cost of living longer in the form of pensions and the loss of revenue from the loss of tobacco exercise tax. Yes, some people make choices that you and I may consider bad choices but part of living in a free society is respecting that an individual has a right to make choices that we disagree with. On a side note, the government does subsidise products that help people to give up smoking (link).

  • Conservatives really do love playing the victim.

    For those who haven’t been keeping up with the latest ‘trend’ on the right I’m unfortunately going to take away the small joy that you have because you didn’t know about this phenomenon. The phenomenon I am referring to is the whole ‘trad wife’ (aka ‘traditional wife’) movement and like all movements that start online it leaves me with confusion more than anything else. There is a great video that goes into detail called ‘Fundie Fridays’ where this topic was touched on.

    This blog entry isn’t addressing necessarily what was covered in the video but rather using it as a jumping off point to address a weird psychology that exists on the far right of getting angry not at the people who oppose them but instead they really dislike the people who are indifferent to their lifestyle choice – neither supportive or condemning but rather simply not caring (which is where I fit in – I simply don’t care, it’s their life, they can do whatever they want).

    So what do they resort to? playing the victim by creating scenarios in their head of some imagined opponent so then they feel as though their life has meaning because they’re not only fighting for something but they’re also fighting an opponent(s) – the ever present feminist who is around every corner, condemning their lifestyle choice, criticisms from randos on the internet being conflated as if they were prevailing mainstream culture even though the very lifestyle that they’ve chosen isn’t a rebellion against the status quo but instead the re-enforcement of it. It reminds me of Paul Joseph Watson quip about ‘conservativism being the new punk’ when in reality the very views he holds onto are re-enforcing the status quo.

    Side note: If your sense of security about the lifestyle you have embraced is derived based on feeling as though you’re rebelling against the status quo then essentially you’ve allowed the status quo to define you by virtue of your identity based on reacting in opposition rather than a wholly original identity created on its own terms where you do not feel the need to look for third party re-enforcement.

  • Rick Santorum’s grizzle and whinge.

    Once again we have conservatives in the US complain when they don’t get the outcome they wanted (link) while being being obscenely hypocritical in the process. Does anyone remember almost two decades ago when conservatives were touting the merits of democracy regarding same sex marriage and how it should be left up to the voter in the form of the state by state referendums that took place? yeah, I remember that, funny how conservatives love to ride the tide of populism when they believe they’ll get the result they want but then decry it when they don’t get what they want – enter Rick Santorum and his never ending avalanch of half baked recons and those who engage in apologietics everytime he opens his mouth.

    His grizzle and whinge comes from a position that conservatives have gerrymandered states within an inch of their life to the point now that the question isn’t a toss up between Democrats or Republicans but now it is between a horrible candidate vs a deplorable candidate in a heavily gerrymandered Republican district (aka the actual election occurs at the primaries because who ever ends up winning that is a shoo-in to represent that area). The one saving grace in all this is the fact that there are a few states that have the ability to bypass this organised undermining of democracy in favour of binding referendums where the people are able to make their input known regarding a standalone policy. What has happened so far has been conservatives assuming that ‘the state is red so therefore it is going to go the way we want it to’ ignores the fact that politics isn’t a binary aka “if I vote for this party it doesn’t mean I agree with all the party policies’.

    Now, this has been particularly interesting when it came to traditionally ‘red states’ who have voted for reproductive rights in the recent referendums. With the these referendums what it shows is that the number of politically social conservatives are a minority with a fair amount of crossover between those who are libertarian leaning but vote Republican along with those who vote Democratic. This is where I think alliances can be built as we’ve seen in New Zealand where ACT and the Green Party have worked on legislation around drug reform and more which both parties have common cause. In the case of the US there is also the ability to move the envelop and bypass gerrymandering in favour of getting people behind population legislation and what I hope is that the recent abortion wins are an indication of future changes such as dealing with gerrymandering resulting in competitive districts that force the encumbered to do more than just stand up right, maintain a pulse then throw some red meat to their base.

    Side note: Here is an article of conservatives boasting when the referendum goes their way (link) (link), I didn’t hear them complaining about how ‘this isn’t a way to run a country’ when they were on the winning side. It’s almost like it’s a variation of the Trumpian “if we win then the election was legitimate, if we lose then the election was rigged”.

  • Firefox is advancing nicely.

    Just checking out the latest Interop 2023 and it appears that Firefox development is advancing at a steady pace (link) such as the :has() CSS pseudo-class which has performance benefits particularly if you’re using content blockers that take advantage of it. It’ll be interesting to watch as the gap in functionality closes. This will become particularly important because Google has announced that their transition to MV3 is back on track (link) (link) but appears that they haven’t listened to the feedback. For starters, if you’re going to limit the number of filters then claim it is to avoid ‘regressions’, what benchmarks have they shown there will be regressions? at the moment the MV2 implementation of uBlock Origin is working quite fine with a total of 280,898 network filters and 241,518 cosmetic filters.

    The reason why I am scpetical about the excuse is because if they had also announced that MV3 exntesions were coming to Chrome on Android then I might understand the need to have some sort of limits so that you don’t have devices with restrictive hardware specifications aren’t overwhelmed with having to load large sets of filters but alas there are no extensions coming to Chrome for Android. It reminds me of what someone wrote on the github discussion about increasing the limit on dynamic rules to 30,000 (link):

    Just remove the limit on the number of rules. There is of course no need to have a limit and an arbitrary magic number is obviously always wrong since there is no way to prove that the choice is optimal or correct.

    The limit is suspected to have been added by Google for anti-user purposes (enriching their ad business at the expense of the user by making ad blockers less effective), or was possibly added due to sheer incompetence.

    I agree with the above sentiment that it appears to be an arbitrary limit or as someone else in the same conversation noted:

    Has any consideration been given to letting the user choose limits for each extension?

    Agreed – set those limits but allow the user, if they wish, to increase or remove the limit if they so wish through some ‘power user’ setting? Times like this make me happy that alternatives exist because eventually, if MV3 turns out to be as bad as what some extension developers claim, then one will need an alternative particularly if you depend on content blockers to make the web usable. Let’s hope that that things won’t be as bad as what is being claimed but given the tug of war within Google between the advertising division who is hell bent on screwing the consumer six ways from Sunday there are those on the service and product side who are passionate about technology but are let down by the advertising side of the business.

    On a side note, I understand websites have to cover the cost of running the website and I’m more than happy to pay a subscription (of which I have quite a few) or disable ad blocking if they don’t have obnoxious ads that take away from the viewing experience. If you’re a website owner and find people are visiting your website with an ad blocker enabled then maybe you should ask yourself “what am I doing to cause this” rather than blaming ad blockers.

  • A collection of interesting

    WebAssembly Garbage Collection is being worked on for Safari (link) as they make changes bit by bit. It’ll be interesting to see how Webextensions in the future will make use of WebAssembly Garbage Collection not to mention the increase in complexity of web based applications requiring a sophisticated framework so that a great experience can be provided to end users. As much as I loath the increasing prominence of web apps, the reality is that the industry is moving to more cloud based web apps or if theylocal applications the move to using web based technologies allow them to target multiple platforms and form factors without having to write bespoke implementations with hard coded UI for specific screen sizes etc.

    Google is integrating Google and Messages together (link) where in the long term it’ll mean the ability to setup a public profile for RCS to RCS which will make for a much more feature rich messaging experience. I don’t think that we’ll see a merging of Google Chat and Google Messages because they’re designed to achieve different goals. With Google Chat the focus is chatting within the Google ecosystem where as with RCS any sort of development needs to be done in consultation with mobile carriers, telecommunication software and hardware vendors so that support can be added etc.

    It’ll be interesting to see whether Google is succesful in lobbying the European Union in terms of getting iMessage classified as a gatekeeper and thus subjected to the interoperability requirements (link). Personally I’d like to see iMessage and RCS interoperable so that we don’t have entrenched market domiance simply by virtue of the lack of interoperability. Btw, this isn’t something new given that anticompetitive legislation requires those businesses that are in a dominant position ensure interoperability so that competition can thrive by new players coming into the space and being able to interoperate – a good example of that was regarding the European Union and Microsoft many years ago regarding protocols, file formats and file system support.

    Apple released a refresh of their Apple Silicon in the form of the M3 which is based on the ARMv8.6-A ISA but there are rumours that there is an architectural change that probably lines up with the move to ARMv9 so that’ll be interesting to see whether that translates to big improvements in performance and power per watt. In the Intel world the chiplet design is coming to their mobile processesors because they’re in the most need of the benefits that come with it but I’d say eventually with thei Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake refresh that we’ll see desktop processors adopt the new chiplet design.

    One of the major factors that cannot be overlooked when it comes to the overall experience is the operating system itself and whether the frameworks are optimised. I’m looking at the Windows 11 Canary Channel notes on the Windows Insider blog and it is interesting to see how Microsoft is slowly replacing Windows components piece by piece and replacing them with reusing the same backend code but replacing the front end with modern Windows App SDK frameworks particularly when it comes to WinUI. There is an article here (link), it makes sense to reuse known good code that has gone through years of debugging and optimising then replacing the UI with WinUI vs. what they tried to do in the past which were complete rewrites only to find that what sounds great on the whiteboard can be entirely different when it is put into action.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if what we end up seeing is jettisoning UWP in favour of going back to a win32 backend, replacing the UI, keep the back end code, and modernise where possible. Long story short, doing what they should have done right from the outset. It reminds me of Joel on Software regarding never rewrite software (link). There is a time and a place to throw out old code but I’d argue you have to have a really good reason to do so, ‘just because’ isn’t a good enough reason just as a business should avoid bespoke solutions in favour of taking an office the shelf product then customise it via the provided SDK. There was a great post made over on Hacker News:

    I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky’s earlier blog posts, but to be honest, I don’t think this piece has aged well. If anything, I’m more of the opinion now that you should almost always plan to do a rewrite, eventually. Lots of big companies successfully rewrite stuff all the time. Google is fairly well known for having rewritten large, critical pieces of their codebase over the years.

    If anything, what should be warned against is big bangs. Netscape’s problem isn’t that they did a rewrite (which eventually became Firefox, mind you) it’s that they essentially abandoned their old code too early, and similarly, they also announced the rewrite too soon.

    If you’re going to do a rewrite, do it quietly, and don’t announce it until it’s close to ready, and even then you can roll out slowly. For example, the infamous Digg v4 debacle is another example, but the problem isn’t that they did a rewrite, it’s that they did a rewrite to produce a product nobody wanted, and they burned any possibility of going back after they released it.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726062

    That being said, the better solution to a total rewrite is to treat programming like the existentialist idea of ‘being in a constant state of becoming’, that there is no end point but rather a constant cycle of refinement, refactoring, more refinement and more refactoring, that there is no end point but rather a continuous and on going cycle. If it is a continuous cycle then it avoids having to do big rewrites because instead you’re always moving it forward vs. allowing code to stagnate resulting in the process of refinement and more refactoring more difficult. Long story short, it is easier to keep something moving than stopping then years later trying to start it back up again.

  • Deep breath followed by a sigh.

    Almost the end of another week, I was hoping to get 20-26 December off from work but I’ve been dragged back into doing a shift on Christmas eve. I wanted the day off but what I might do is ask for a couple of days on the other side so I end up getting off 27 and 28 December as well. I’ll have a chat with my family to see what they’re doing, I normally buy some presents for my two nieces and bring a desert (I don’t make it myself, I’m far too lazy, I buy it from a local company that ships it to me overnight), maybe bring some meat for the BBQ as well.

    One thing I noticed about YouTube is not only the change to the YouTube app but also on the website they’ve added the ‘Google Account’ from the drop down menu:

    Plus other small changes, it appears that there is a drive to integrate all the various Google services together rather than having the current situation (or at least the appearance) of a collection of disconnected applications that happen to be accessible via a Google account. It’ll be interesting to see how businesses change as higher interest rates are higher for longer – personally the interest rates were too low for too longer thus created asset inflation, malinvestment etc.

    Maybe this will be the time when debt is unwound and the change that should have happened in 2008-2009 will occur today, businesses that exist on cheap money keeping them alive will be eventually sifted out as the ‘tech dude grift’ are separated from those businesses that actually have business model that will result in profitability in the long term. Maybe Google and others are realising that it’s ‘start up’ culture of ‘run fast, break things’ is no longer a sustainable long term model if they wish to build up paid for services that they want small to medium businesses not to mention enterprise customers. For example, Google competes with Microsoft and their Office 365 offerings and something I have noticed is a focus on ‘fit and finish’, nailing down the basics, consolidating brands, reducing the duplication (see Google Maps and Waze, Google Podcasts being replaced by putting podcasts into YouTube Music (YouTube Music replacing Google Music)) etc. The sort of free spending free welding days have come to an end – where shareholders demand higher returns as interest rates go up and thus demand a premium for the risk of owning shares vs. sticking their money in the bank in a term deposit.

    On the matter of Google and the web, the proposed Web Integrity API (link) has been rejected in favour of a very much narrowly focused API called ‘Android WebView Media Integrity API’ (link). Unlike Federated Learning of Cohorts which was rebranded as Topics API I don’t see it coming back in a rebranded form. The issues that Web Integrity API was designed to address still exist but what we could see are the creation of a number of smaller more narrow in scope APIs to address the issues raised that Web Integrity API was meant to solve.

    National, ACT and NZ First are still working on an agreement amoungst themselves but that has accelerated since the final result was made known on 3 November after the special votes were counted. If I was a betting man I would say that the foreign buyers tax would be off the table but that will mean they’ll need something to bring in more money so they’ll probably keep the bright line test where it is, scrap bringing back interest only deduction, but they’ll still go ahead with a bracket adjustment and IETC adjustment.

    They (National and ACT) have talked about cutting ‘wasteful spending’, talking about abstract notions of ‘cutting back office’ while ignoring it is the back office that enable the front line staff to do their job. If you want to cut back office function then who are going to do the work that was carried out by the back office? are they going to front load spending on new technology to improve productivity? are they going to change internal processes? are they going to change policies – replace one policy with another policy that doesn’t require as much bureaucracy to administrate it for example replacing working for families with a tax free threshold which would be easier to administrate. I don’t ever see them doing something on the scale but you get the basic idea that the size of the bureaucracy reflects the type of policies the government chooses to pursue.