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

  • It takes time to turn around a tanker.

    As most of you probably already know, Meta are launching Instagram Threads and along with that launch comes the detractors (with good reason mind you) but I think it is also important to remind ourselves of a few things:

    a) Turning a large corporation takes time so even if you are sceptical that they’re going to change one also must remember that it takes time for a corporation to change directions. A good example of that would be Intel and the move from Pentium 4 to the Core based architecture which didn’t hit the mainstream until 2006 for the desktop. In the case of Meta, add the complexity of oversight by both the FTC in the United States along with various agencies in the European Union, it is understandable

    b) Taking what someone says flippantly in their teens or early 20s is hardly representative of where one is in that moment. There is the infamous quote of Mark Zuckerberg when he was 19 years old – colour me surprised that maybe in 20 years later he has changed because he has matured and realised the responsibility the he has inherited when it moved beyond just a little rinky-dink website for his classmates at university. I’d hazard to guess that many of us have made off handed remarks which, on reflection, we’d cringe that we had said it in the first place was made public.

    c) Unlike Twitter, Meta is still part of the European Union agreement to stamp out disinformation online and Christchurch Call but Twitter is only a signed up supporter of the Christchurch Call, one really has to wonder as to the sincerity of Twitter when they are in one but not the other. Will Meta or any other organisation involved in both of said organisations get it right all the time? nope, they’ll make mistakes because shocker, corporations are filled with humans and humans are fallible, they make mistakes – the question is whether there is malicious intent and how they respond when they fall short of what is required of the organisation in terms of protecting user privacy, dealing with extremist content etc.

    d) CEOs of large corporations talk to politicians of all stripes because part of running a large organisation is maintaining a good relationship with the ‘powers that be’. Just because an executive is speaking to a politician does not necessarily mean that they’re ‘in the bag’ for that politician.

    e) What is reported on what is taking place within an organisation on many occasions does not accurately give all the nuances regarding how it happened in the first place. I’ve worked in organisations where the media will report one thing and having been privy to what is going internally the report paints what took place being the result of menevelency rather than just a run of the mill cock up. Remember the old saying “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” or sometimes it is a matter of a company getting legal guidance from counsel, they believe they’ve interpreted the law correctly but then later find out that there is more to it than what they expected – see the anti-moneylaundrying laws which required on going conversations between the Department of Internal Affairs and businesses impacted by the legislation regarding whether the safeguards meet their legal obligations. Some companies didn’t confirm not because they were being menevelant but because they genuinely believed that they were in compliance with the law.

    I think it is important when reading the above points that I’m not defending Meta but rather it is important to understand the motivations and incentives in place, to understand that corporations don’t have a ‘will’ of their own but instead decisions being made ‘by the corporation’ are made by people who believe they’re trying to strike the right balance between the various stakeholders. This is where Instagram Threads is going to have leg up – the sort of amateurish way in which Elon Musk is running Twitter doesn’t cut the mustard particularly when social media is a way in which businesses develop relationships with potential customers while retaining existing customers through brand engagement. If your platform is overrun with crypto bros, alt right ‘influencers’ and the like then don’t be surprised that brands decide that the platform’s toxicity isn’t something you want being associated with your brand. Toxic people exist on every platform, the question is whether you allow them to over run the platform or whether you regularly push back so that they’re the exception rather than the rule.

    Just to round up the blog post, here is a good article over on The Verge regarding Instagram Thread (link).

    And one more thing, I always love it when financial experts making claims then those claims crash and burn such as this one (link) “According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.” which reminds me of of the claims regarding the Intel Itanium taking over the markets, that by this time the the market would be worth billions, that it would destroy the UNIX rivals etc. etc. and what happened many years later? none of that came to fruition. It truly is amazing that there are people out there who pay these organisations whose reliability is worse than mine – but at least when I put out my opinions I don’t charge a fortune for them, they’re free of charge.

  • Trump supporters support Trump because he is Trump.

    I know it sounds redundant to make that glaringly obvious statement but it appears that those who are pushing the narrative that ‘Ron DeSantis is Trump but without the chaos’ ignore why Trump supporters support Trump in the first place. The video below does a great analysis of what is happening on the campaign trail:

    The DeSantis campaign is making some pretty obvious mistakes right from day one, firstly they launched on Twitter in the belief that it’ll tap into younger voters in the belief that the noise making reactionaries on Twitter some how represent a large segment of the primary voter (when in reality they don’t). Secondly, they’ve pretty much set up their campaign as a reflection of the right wing culture wars that are raging on the internet but here is the problem, the internet is not the real world.

    Let’s take the Daily Wire which as of the end of 2022 they had slightly over 1 million paid subscribers so let’s assume that the total audience size is 4 times larger (keeping in mind that the number of views on YouTube is around 1/8th the number of subscribers based on the most recent video that has been out for a month), even at 4 million that is miniscule when compared to the size of not only the Republican base but the number of independents that the winner of the primary will have to win over in the general election.

    Thirdly, Ron Desantis believes that to beat Donald Trump he needs to move to the right of him but if you move to the right of him not only are you tapping into an even smaller percentage of the electorate you’re almost guaranteeing that you’re making yourself unelectable in the general election. The further right you go the less electable you are not only in the primaries but also in the general election. Sure, Trump rallies against ‘the woke’ but he sprinkles it on in moderation where as Ron DeSantis is ‘woke, woke, woke, woke’ not to mention the Churchillesque speech of fighting the woke in various locations as if it were some sort of fight for survival. At some point even the most ‘anti-woke’ Republican is going to ask the obvious question “is this all you have for us?”.

    Regarding people who invoke arguments based on low poll numbers for Joe Biden need to be reminded that low poll numbers doesn’t necessarily translate to people looking to vote for someone else – it is possible to be unhappy with Joe Biden for example the lack of progress for student loan forgiveness and yet for that same person to recognise that the alternative is so much worse that people end up voting for Joe Biden (long term it maybe a problem of Republicans stop nominating drop kicks in favour of candidates who have a broad appeal rather than the narrow single issue voters that the Republicans appear to fixate on). Low approval does not automatically mean “so therefore I’ll vote for the opposition” any more than people being unhappy with Nicolás Maduro automatically means that those people support Juan Guaidó – sometimes the ‘devil you know is better than the devil you don’t’.

    For all of Joe Biden’s flaws, I think the focus by those wanting to push for change, they should focus on senate, congress and local elections where the agenda is very much pushed. Joe Biden isn’t the obstacle to change, the obstacle to change are those who are voted in as ‘blue dog democrats’ who believe that being a corporate sell out is synonymous with being moderate when in reality the way you win is you focus on the ‘meat and potatoes’ issues in much the same way that John Fetterman did in his election campaign.

  • Tidying up my blog and back to work.

    I’ve tidied up my blog by making sure that all the posts I have made have a title. In the past I used to use a blogging client but these days the web app for WordPress is powerful enough to replace a native application. I also deleted all blog posts before 2020, nothing of any value was lost plus most of it out of date anyway.

    There is a rumour that Meta will be launching Threads (a Twitter alternative) on Thursday (link) which will make for interesting viewing as high profile users that use both Instagram and Twitter decide to delete their Twitter account because why bother with a platform with a few hundred million monthly active users when Meta has 3.74 billion active monthly users. Many of the government departments and emergency agencies also use both platforms and might also leave given that Threads is a good enough drop in replacement then add on to that the third party social media management services that’ll be upgraded to handle Threads, I wouldn’t be surprised if Threads ends up speeding up the demise of Twitter. So Twitter is falling apart and Threads is going to drop in as a replacement – I’ll make sure I have some freshly popped popcorn and a front row seat for everything to unravel.

    I’ve been looking through what Chrome 115 has in store (link) and Topics API is being enabled by default so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it is adopted by developers. For me, I have setup Chrome to reject third party cookies so I’m already a fair way of the way there already. There are also other APIs being made available particularly regarding protecting sensitive information regarding end users which serve as a much larger tapestry of functionality being added which will try to balance up being able to protect user privacy while also also ensuring that when ads are shown they’re relevant to the end user.

    WordPress has delivered Mastodon integration:

    And based on what we know about threads, it should be possible to post to Instagram threads timeline as well by using the @username@threads.net handle. As to whether I join Instagram and start using Threads? I’ll sit back and see how things turn out.

  • Synchronising music from macOS to Android and finding a better music player.

    Apologies for the lack of a short and snappy title but I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find out why ptpcamerad kept relaunching every time I killed the process – one option was to run this command in the background:

    while ; do; kill -9 $(ps aux | grep “[p]tpcamera” | awk ‘{print $2}’); done

    Now, that kind of worked but wasn’t exactly an elegant solution. I then tried disabling it from the terminal then reboot:

    sudo launchctl disable gui/501/com.apple.ptpcamerad

    The problem with that is that although it was disabled at boot time the problem is that it kept being launched by an application wanting that service to be enabled. With some more Googling I quickly found what the culprit – Google Drive app that one uses to synchronise on macOS – it did ask me whether I wanted to synchronise my photos and I said to ignore it thus I made the assumption that it shouldn’t interfere with OpenMTP or any other application that was trying to connect to my phone using MTP – how wrong I was. Once I quit out of Google Drive I then tripped over another issue which was MTP appears to have issues with files that have “, !, * and ? in the file name so then I had to do a bulk rename to remove all the “, !, * and ? out of file names which then allowed those files to be copied across (it appears to mirror the Windows file system restrictions restrictions).

    On a side note, I don’t use YouTube Music to store my music because unfortunately it re-encodes even if the file format you upload in is a streamable format. I could handle that if it was possible that I could upload my music collection that I keep as a backup in FLAC format (ripped from my CD collection) that I keep in the cloud on my Google Drive but the problem YouTube Music still has a limit of 300MB for a file and one of the tracks is 306MB. Long story short, this is the reason why I needed to get the issue sorted out with OpenMTP and my phone so that I can copy my AAC music collection directly to the device.

    I also don’t use the YouTube Music app on my phone because it doesn’t handle large library of music stored locally all that well – indexing the music, very slow to navigate etc. I guess Google probably assumed that most people don’t have large music collections like me or use music subscription service (where all the indexing etc. is stored on the server and kept track 0f) so it is rather a none issue. Instead of using the YouTube Music app I bought a copy of Poweramp Music Player (it’s NZ$7.99 so it isn’t going to break the bank) – it handles my large music library perfectly, it has a great equalizer (I like to boost the bass), the navigation is fast and fluid (there are some negative reviews but one thing to keep in mind that because Android runs on many different hardware combinations then add OEM customisation, what may impact one end user may not necessarily impact others).

    The one thing I do need to buy is a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack. With my workplace moving into Wellington next year and me deciding to take the train into work each day, I want the ability to listen to some music on my ride in (which can take 35-40 minutes). On the good side though, when I go into work and come home I’m travelling on the off peak times so I get those cheap fares which work out cheaper than taking my scooter.

  • The good, the bad and a whole lot of meh.

    Let’s start with the bad, I woke up this morning all ready to head off to work and found that my scooter not only has a flat front tyre but also a flat back tyre as well. I guess the saving grace being that I can work from home which meant it was a giant fiasco but still it is something I could do without given the current focus on getting my financial house in order. I guess what I’ll do is not this pay, nor the next but the one after I’ll take it in for a serving along with sorting out the tyres at the same time.

    The good, well at least as far as I am concerned, was the release of Nothing OS 1.5.5 which boosted the security patch level to June 2023 although the Play Store update for the month comes at the beginning of the next month aka June arrives at the beginning of July. The speed and responsiveness of Nothing OS has improved with each release not to mention the improved battery life. I showed my phone off to a few friends at work and they seemed interested in getting it. The case I have on it I ordered from Walmart but I had to get it delivered through YouShop because Walmart doesn’t ship to New Zealand directly.

    Another good thing that has happened has been the GIS Geek Maps (link) has been updated with the latest map information regarding cell sites and what services are offered, broadband cabinets, which cabinets have fibre backhaul, point to point links etc. It’s a good way to find out whether a mobile phone carrier has a cell site to where you live and what services they offer on it which can give an insight as to the quality of the service one may receive. A lot of the information has been updated particularly regarding 2 Degrees and One NZ which use 900 MHz for both 3G as well as 4G (Spark uses 850 MHz for 3G however with the closing down of the 3G network towards the end of 2025 (link) I wouldn’t be surprised if 850 MHz is redeployed for 5G and maybe by that time VoLTE will be standardised rather than the mess today where handset vendors have to have specialised settings and testing for each VoLTE implementation).

    From the ‘good news for the average person but bad for speculators’ it appears that the middle man grifting maybe coming to an end as cheap credit dries up and investors are now expecting businesses to turn a profit rather than expecting to get money on the cheap. In this case Airbnb revenue has collapsed 50% and expect things to get worse before they get better (link) – speculators believing they can make a quick buck are going to quickly exit the market because of demand cratering and cheap credit now making those beach houses a whole lot more expensive to pay the mortgage for. Then add to that numerous cities and countries have crack down as many who ran Airbnb were running them as a side hustle but not paying the appropriate council rates, failing to properly pay tax on the profits being generated etc. they’re quickly finding that it’s coming back to haunt them.

    Long term I wish that we would stop labelling middle man grifting operations as something nobel or branding them as a ‘tech company’ (when in reality their relationship with tech is tangentially not the core of their business) when in reality they only use technology to achieve their primary goal as an organisation (technology isn’t the end goal, it’s the means to achieving that goal). We’re seeing the consequences when you have a free for all system that drives down people’s wages and job security, when councils seen uber as some sort of substituted for public transport so they underinvest into public transport, when councils get sucked into nonsense such as the ‘hyperloop’ which turn out to be all hype no loop.

    Regarding the ‘meh’, nothing exciting so far happening in my life other than work – hopefully as things settle down and the weather gets better. Everything these days is in a state of flux, shortages, inflation, high interest rates etc. so people are pretty stressed at the moment not to mention the election that is coming up towards the end of the year.

  • One more day to go.

    One more day to go – working at the moment (Saturday) then one more day (Sunday) before the weekend. Although it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea I love working Wednesday to Sunday and having Monday/Tuesday off for my weekend because having two week days off gives me the ability to chase up errands that need to be done, shopping at a leisurely pace etc.

    I always find it interesting when Republicans come out of the woodworks declaring how a second Trump term would be horrible but when asked “ok, but will you still vote for him and support him if he is the Republican nominee” they collapse like a cheap lawn chair and fall in line. P J O’Rourke at least had the backbone, when asked whether he would vote for Trump, stated that he would vote for Hillary because at least she was wrong within the acceptable parameters of being wrong.

    If Bill Barr came out and said, “I can’t bring myself to vote for a Democrat but I’ll…” followed by a) leave it blank b) vote third party, then I might have some respect but alas it appears that Republicans don’t actually believe in anything other than power for power sake. Sure, we on the left or nominally left want power but power to achieve a set of goals that improves the lives for all people – even the so-called neoliberals at least try to strike a win-win where as Republicans in the US only ever seem to want power for power sake, for their own personal enrichment as demonstrated by the rank hypocrisy demonstrated by the so-called ‘freedom caucus’.

    Regarding how politics is going in New Zealand, the difference between the United States and New Zealand is the fact that swinging voters make up a huge part of the electorate so there is a lot more effort by the different parties to win people over because there the percentage of persuadable voters is a lot higher than in the United States. At the moment the Labour, Maori and Greens could form government but not too long ago National-Act could form government so the poles are all over the show with many (I include myself as part of that cohort) who only make a firm decision closer to the election once the announcements are made, analysis in the media is done and one has looked at the policies directly.

    For me, I’m leaning party vote Greens and constituency vote I’ll for my Labour Party candidate. Are they perfect? there is no such thing as a perfect party or a perfect politician – politicians are human and parties are made up of humans. Humans are a fallible and are thrown into an imperfect world so we have to deal with reality as it exists which means accepting the fact that those who put into power are going to make mistakes, that drama occurs within the party as different factions have divergent viewpoints regarding topics that one (or more) faction believe are of the utmost importance while other factions may disagree. End of the day, a political party has to operating as a single unit which results in friction that some times boils over in a public spectacle that the media lap up aka ‘what bleeds leads’.

  • Sigh…I hate having a crook back.

    It started on Tuesday but I went to work on Wednesday because it was a late shift and they needed extra man power but by the end of the shift I had a horribly crook back then I headed back home thinking that maybe a lay down will fix it – nope, my back still feels horrible. Long story short, I messaged my boss to inform him that I will not be in on Thursday – I’ll be spending most of the day in bed to recover. I guess it is combination of age and bad luck resulting in it. Oh well, these things happen.

    I’ve changed the setting on my Chrome to disallow third party cookies (then cleared all my cookies, cache, history etc) and so far I haven’t had any issues. Although Google is slowly rolling it out (link) I would say that the vast majority of websites are already adapted to the change when Apple made the first move with Safari with Safari on iOS being a pretty dominant force in the world of drive technology change in in the area of web technologies. Right now the improvement to privacy is very much a work in motion and the details can bd found out over on the Chrome Developer website (link).

    The Chrome Developer website (link) is a great source along side the Webextensions API (link) which give a good insight into what is happening particularly when it comes to web standards – plenty more can be found over on github which range from Webassembly through to WebGPU and everything in between.

    Apple released updates for macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc. (link) which addresses two vulnerabilities – one in webkit and the other in the kernel. It’ll be interesting to see when macOS 13.5 will be released – maybe when they release iOS 17 they’ll release the macOS 13.5 update? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve installed the security update on my MacBook Air and Mac Studio – no problems with either one of them.

  • From 1 to 11 in 5 seconds..sigh.

    Well, in the last 24 hours there has been a whole lot of drama in the fediverse because a small group of admins from various Mastodon instances were invited to a meeting with Meta (home of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc) but each of the attendees had to sign an NDA. Well, the moment that a meeting, NDA and Meta made its way into the fediverse then every man and their dog had their strongly held opinions pushed out into the fediverse. Where do I sit regarding this? I’m going to wait and see – we don’t know what the meeting is about, what was discussed, whether anything was requested from the admins who attended by the representatives of Meta.

    Long story short what we have are people filling the void left by the NDA with the worse possible scenarios appearing to dominate the discourse. I think it is important to recognise the fact that if Meta wanted to scrape data out of the fediverse then they could easily do that without having to go through the process of setting up an instance of their own, working with high profile celebrities then launching it to the public for anyone and everyone to join. Until we know what the details of the meeting I think it is best to sit back, take a deep breath and wait to see what happens.

  • Almost finished work for the week.

    Only another half hour or so to go before I can clock off and enjoy my weekend (Monday and Tuesday). I’m going to head off down the road to pick up some items of dinner from the local supermarket but the million dollar question is what I’ll decide to have for dinner. I’m stuck in that situation where I’m hungry, I want something for dinner but I don’t know what I want although I am tempted to have chicken burgers with Tegel Take Outs Chicken Burger Patties Louisiana Style along with some salad on top. I’ve got some left over butter chicken in the freezer so I’ll probably make butter chicken pizzas next week – a quick and easy meal.

    Side note: the key to getting them extra crunchy is cooking them on a rack on a roasting pan in the oven so then the oil/fat drips through onto the baking paper thus keeping the coating dry and crispy. The next question is whether I go for coleslaw or just lettuce, tomato, red onions etc. but I guess it’ll be one of those questions that’ll be answered when I arrive at the store rather than preplanned.

    The weather in the Hutt Valley is still pretty cold, well, either that or as I age I am finding that I am feeling the weather a lot more than when I was younger. On a good side though the home is warm but the mornings can still be pretty chilly but with that being said a nice puddy is always perfect to warm oneself up after a long cold day.

    I’m gradually working through both the Google and Apple sessions – although I’m not a developer is is always interesting to see what is being talked about which give a good insight into the general direction of where Google and Apple are heading. Looking forward to Android 14 making its way to my phone in August and when it comes to the release of Apple’s next platforms they will probably do like they always do which is to announce a new series of iPhones at the end of September then ship the iOS update the week after the presentation then release the next version of macOS coming out a month later (based on when they released macOS 13).

  • I love working from home.

    One of the great things I like about my current employer is the fact that I can work from home 3 days a week and in the office 2 days a week. Sure, ones of the benefits being that I can work from home in my tracksuit pants and a tshirt but the other is working at a comfortable desk, fast computer, great reliable internet and not having to jump on my scooter and deal with the cold. There is a downside which is the fact that I have keep the home warm when working from home but most of the time that just involves setting my heater to 18 degrees celsius then combine that with good insulation and double glazed windows results in the heat being retained meaning the heater doesn’t turn on very often to maintain the temperature.

    Last night I did a small shopping (I’m getting my financial house in order so that means – debt and bills first, then everything else comes second) and I noticed some new range of soups from F. Whitlock & Sons (link)

    I’m going to give them a go – the Capscium and Corn Gumbo would sound great with some roast chicken from the previous dinner, same can be said for the Moroccan Spiced Carrot and Lentil Soup. Another quick meal is the Naked Locals Thai Green Curry, fry up some prawns in chilli and garlic butter then add it to the Thai Green Curry. Unless you’ve got a family and use the ingredients regularly it ends up costing more for a single person to have many of the ingredients hanging around in the cupboard as they’re more likely to go pass their best before date – spices deteriorate pretty quickly and lose their flavour. Tonight I’m going to have Tomato and Capsicum soup with ciabatta bread rolls heated in the oven then layer on a good helping off the garlic and chilli butter.

    Regarding Android and the Nothing Phone, it’s the six month mark and I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far – the withdrawal symptoms of not having an iPhone have subsided lol. On a good side it appears that MV3 supported version of uBlock Origin has launched to version 1 (link). I’ll keep using the MV2 ‘classic’ version of uBlocker Origin until I’m forced to move from but I hope that by the time I am forced to make the move that the Webextension API developers have taken onboard extension developers concerns by addressing the shortcomings in the various components that make it up, I also hope that Apple get their A into G so that some time in the future it’ll be possible to load the uBlock Origin MV3 version on Safari.

    Nothing has announced that Nothing OS 2.0 (Android 14) will arrive for both the Nothing Phone 1 and Nothing Phone 2 in August this year (link). What I looking forward are all the under the hood improvements such as memory management, power management, improvements in privacy with the introduction of new APIs. It appears that the sharp contraction of ad revenue has forced Google to improve the focus of their non-ad businesses. I was just thinking about the relationship between Google and Google’s Ad business has similarities to countries and the ‘Resource curse’ – during good times there is little incentive to diversify but when there are the bad times then people become risk adverse and decide that it isn’t the right time to take risks. The net result of that situation are companies that get stuck in a rut only to find out the hard way when a more nimble competitor over takes them. This isn’t unique to Google, Microsoft was in the same mindset with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows, both products feeding off each other to maintain each others dominance but that was quickly upset with the rise of Google and Apple which forced Microsoft to evolve and move outside its comfort zone. If a competitor doesn’t arise then we can always hope that a regulator is willing to knock some heads together and shake things up (link).