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 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.

  • Almost the end of the week.

    Apple released a series of updates for all their platforms with the system firmware and wifi firmware being updated with the latest update with many security bugs being fixed in macOS (link) along with bumping the Safari version from 17 to 17.1. There have been some improvements in Webextesions support, there is still a lot of work going on in terms of standardising parts of the emerging Webextensions API MV3 (link). It’ll be interesting to see what happens next year (and the coming years) as many of these APIs are eventually agreed upon – most of the time Chrome implements them the quickest due to having most of the ground work already laid but Safari lags in terms of implementation because they’re having to be implemented from the ground up.

    Android 14/Nothing OS 2.5 is rumoured to be released at the end of this year but it is interesting to see how other OEMs are taking the release of Android 14 extra seriously based on the number of beta releases that Samsung have put out. The most recent beta is beta 9 of One UI (the brand that Samsung market their customised version of Android 14 under) with rumours that it’ll be released a week after beta 9 was released but that is all speculation at this point. There was a recent interview linked to on the Android subreddit where the developer talked about changes internally (the development process that occurs within Google) which makes me wonder whether we’re going to start seeing features being announced then pushed out through ‘Project Mainline’ where Google can add features without having to go through the OEMs to get the features on the phone.

    Qualcomm made some big announcements in the area of bringing the Oryon core to the laptop space along with announcing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 which will find their way into the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series which will be released some time early next year.

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the new government is sworn in particularly when there are negotiations at the moment along with a minibudget that Nicola Willis that she announced on the campaign trail. It’ll be interesting to see whether the tax cuts are delivered. Personally I think they’ll deliver bracket and IETC adjustment along with the revenue enhancing measures but they could kick the can down the road when it comes to mortgage interest deductions on rental properties. The one thing to keep in mind is the fact that they never gave a time line which means they could do it incrementally or come up with a compromise – assuming that it turns into an National-ACT-NZ First coalition government.

  • End of a long week.

    The week felt a lot longer than normal but it went off without a hitch. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting things organised for a big OE (overseas experience) to Europe and the UK. I’ve been fluffing around for years and I think this is the time I really should make use of the leave I will have by next year because otherwise I’ll get to a point where I’ll look back in regret for not taking that opportunity when I had it. I’m going to time it before the Paris olympics as I want to avoid the chaos of trying to visit landmarks then finding I cannot get in.

    I’m using my work provided laptop at home when I do work from home (WFH) however what I’m looking at is getting a new desk then move my old desk into the extra bedroom which I’ll turn into my ‘work office’. I’d prefer to use my own computer however work has required us to use the work provided laptop – for security and privacy reasons given that if people are using their own devices then the company cannot be assured that there isn’t a virus, malware etc. not to mention that the device is secured and meeting the corporate IT security standards.

    At the moment the company I work for uses Chromebook/Chromebox however they’re eventually going to move to Windows and Office 365 which will mean that my laptop will be replaced but that being said, an ideal situation is getting the office setup preferably before Christmas or maybe sometime after Christmas. Long story short I prefer to keep a separation between work and my private life in much the same way that people who work from home (either running their own company or employed by someone) may setup a ‘granny flat’ to run their office out of and when they finish work they have the psychological feeling of having ‘left’ work much like the television show ‘Severance’ where one disconnects from work when one leaves the office.

    I had a look online and I realise I can buy my favourite flavoured coffee direct from the company, $33 for 10 sachets of Irish Cream flavoured coffee. What I’ll do is order it next week when I get paid because they’re a nice treat when working either at home or in the office. There are quite a few things that I’m going to buy direct because although Pak ‘n Save is saving me money there are thngs that they don’t have such as the Swisse iron supplement and if I’m going to buy it from Chemist Warehouse I might as well buy the flaxseed oil as well.

    It is interesting to see how technology companies are adapting to the new environment of higher interest rates when comes to slimming down and prioritising the development of products and the reduction in the number of ‘moon shot projects’ that don’t lead anywhere. One thing I have noticed, at least from the outside, is how Google appears to be a lot more focused – developing their current product line ups (see recent work around Google Messages), working on Android in terms of quality of life improvements, consolidating products under core brands such as establishing YouTube as entertainment brand for music, videos, podcasts, television etc. So maybe the moderating influence of higher interest rates has forced businesses to get

  • New Zealand election post-mortem.

    Although we won’t have an official final result until 3 November, by then all the special votes would have been counted, it is clear that New Zealand voted for change. With this vote for change the internet has been over whelemed with hot takes, bad takes and a whole lot of cope with people reading into the election result messages that I don’t think represent the mood of why New Zealand voters made the collective decision they did. For the sake of being upfront, I voted for Chris Hipkins for my local MP but I gave my party vote to the Greens.

    What we saw in the election was the result of three major problems that the Labour party failed to deal with (I use Labour rather than ‘the left’ because Greens and Te Pāti Māori had great success with a larger party vote and picking up electorate seats), those two failures are: a) failure to control the narrative – if you don’t step up and develop a narrative to explain your policy then your detractors will create their own narrative and that narrative will become the dominant one in the public discourse b) the failure to deliver on promises such as the polytech reform, dismantling DHBs, Kiwibuild and the promise to buiild 100,000 homes by 2028 (100,000 in 10 years, 10,000 per year) c) the failure to have a vision beyond the narrow confines of neoliberalism.

    Those were the big issues but then there were the smaller issues that had an cumulative effect, ministers being caught out not declaring conflicts of interest regarding investments etc, there there were ministries caught ‘spending up big’ on going away parties while New Zealanders were tightening their belt. Then there was the denial that there was a cost of living crisis (link) (link) – if as the prime minister you avoid acknowledging the blatantly obvious then don’t be surprised that the voter feel as though you’re out of touch with the needs of mainstream New Zealanders.

    As for Chippy (aka Chris Hipkins), he’s a nice enough guy but the problem is that he inherited 5 years worth of unfulfilled promises and tried to get things back on track by trimming back the exhaustive wish list in favour of focusing on the ‘meat and potatoes’. The problem is that the damage had already been done, the writing was on the wall and the electorate had already made the decision long before he arrived that they wanted a change in direction.

    ‘The Working Group’ did a great post-mortem from a left wing perspective.

  • Chrome 118 released.

    Chrome 118 was released this morning (NZ Time) with quite a number of changes (link), many of the changes involve removing non compliant implementations such as webkit prefixed APIs that have been superseded by APIs that have been officially stabilised and standardised. I guess a good portion of the removals have to do with pushing web developers away from their dependency on non standards based web technologies in favour of using the ones that are now standardised which is part of the larger Interop drive (link). Safari and Firefox are also doing the same – removing the non standard implementations in favour of the standardised or closed to standardised implementations. It is going to be long uphill slog but in the end it’ll hopefully mean that web developers can write their code according to the open standards and as a consequence it’ll work regardless of which browser the end user is running.

    I finally got myself sorted out and voted yesterday down at the local voting location – same vote I make every election, Labour for my constituent vote and Greens for my party vote. For me I see the Greens play the same role that ACT plays when it comes to forming a coalition with National – the Greens provide Labour with a backbone to do the left wing policies that they secretly want to do but are too risk adverse to actually carry out. It’ll be interesting to see what the outcome of the election is given the number of undecided voters that are being picked up in the polling. I have to admit, the whole election this year has been thoroughly unappealing – no long term vision for New Zealand. If one were to explain what it is like as a flavour then ‘dust’ would be the best description. Labour throwing unworkable ideas at the wall such as no GST on fruit and vegetables (both frozen and fresh), National offering tax cuts but when examined the numbers just don’t add up, NZ First is doing it’s reactionary anti-woke shtick to get the blue haired rinse brigade enraged, ACT is doing their reheating of Rogernomics with Greens and Te Pāti Māori the only ones advocating interesting ideas that push back against the neoliberal orthodoxy.

    Regarding the whole conflict in Israel/Gaza Strip, I’m not going to touch it with a forty foot barge pole because I’m not an expert in it, I don’t have even enough knowledge as a lay person and thus my input won’t add any value to the discourse other than showing how ignorant I am regarding the situation over there.

  • Switching between platforms.

    I’ve been watching a few iPhone to Samsung switch videos for a while and the one thing I notice is that a lot of time is spent on the hardware and software but little spent on talking about migrating from one ecosystem to another ecosystem. When I mean ecosystem I am referring to moving from the ‘default’ on the iPhone being iCloud to that of Google (maybe even Microsoft) on Android or if they aren’t using iCloud exclusively what else are they using in concert with it – iCloud plus Google Workspace or Office 365 with custom domain? If they used both services what did they utilise iCloud for – bookmarks, passwords etc. or only for ‘find my’ then use Microsoft or Google for the rest?

    The reason why I bring that up is because if you’re heavily integrated with iCloud – everything from passwords through email, calendering, contacts, custom domain (through iCloud+) then what you need to do when moving to an Android phone is going to be completely different than someone who is 99% using Microsoft or Google but use iCloud solely for device tracking, buying apps on the Mac etc. which is where I am. For me, I am 99% in the Google Workspace with my iCloud being used for ‘Find my’ and buying stuff on the App Store for my Mac.

    The other part of the equation that is also left out is this, are you on a Mac, Windows or Linux desktop/laptop? If you’re a Windows device then you maybe more open to using Samsung’s own home grown bespoke applications which only have support for synchronising to Windows whereas if you’re on iCloud then there is support in Windows for CardDAV and CalDAV support along side IMAP for email but on Android there is no CardDAV and CalDAV out of the box support.

    For me, the process is relatively simple because what ever existed on iCloud exists in Google Workspace but for others it’s a bit tricker. Looping back to the start of this post, the reason for posting this is because reviewers and switchers seem to overlook these issues because in some cases a switch isn’t merely moving from one platform to another but also rethinking who is going to be their email provider, who do are they going to synchronise their bookmarks and passwords to – should they use a paid service like 1Password? Maybe sign up for Office 365 for custom domain hosting and use Microsoft Edge?

  • Made by Google Keynote 2023.

    It’s that time of the year and Google has announced a laundry list of updates – the biggest IMHO is the 7 year software support which will hopefully push other Android handset OEMs to step up along with Qualcomm and other SoC vendors to provide support long term. Although it hasn’t launched in New Zealand they have added support for Spark, Skinny, One NZ and 2 Degrees so if you hop across the ditch to Aussie and pick on up then you’ll be able to have all the functionality in New Zealand – remember to claim the GST on your way out of Australia.

  • Back to Chrome…again.

    Well, I’ve given Safari a try for a couple of weeks with one week using Safari 17 (using AdGuard with all but the filters that are labelled problematic enabled) and so far it has been good but I run into compatibility issues with some sites not to mention the limitations of Apple’s Webextensions API implementation mean that AdGuard doesn’t do as good of a job than if I ran AdGuard on Chrome or Firefox (or using uBlock Origin which is my preferred content blocker). Although the issue with Google Chat has been fixed the problem with the YouTube shorts malfunctioning still remains which has become a real nuisance along with a few other websites having quirks when using them. I’ve been following over on Interop 2023 (link) and there is still a lot more to do be done – keeping in mind that the Interop (they’re currently working on an Interop for Webextensions API) is a work in progress but hopefully harminisation combined with developers getting their house in order will result in people choosing a given browser based on security, speed, efficiency rather than it being an issue of compatibility.

    Regarding interest rates going up to hoovered up excess liquidity to deal with inflation, I wonder whether a better solution is to split the interest rates into the interest rate and the repayment rate where normally the two would be the same but in the time of higher inflation the repayment rate goes up but the interest rate stays the same. For example, lets say a person has a mortgage and they’re paying $400 per week with interest rate of 5% but the central bank need to reduce inflation so they increase the repayment amount based on the interest rate increasing to 6% while keeping the interest rate at 5% which pushes the payment per week from $400 to $500 per week (for example). The consequence of such a split would result in excess liquidity being hoovered up by the central bank while ensuring that the mortgage is being paid off at a higher rate but interest being charged at same rate. The net result, excess liquidity is hoovered up and mortgages are paid down quicker while not attracting higher interest charges.