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

  • Software efficiency: The programmer’s time vs additional overhead.

    A few ideas have been rolling around in my head for quite some time so I thought I may as well put them out there – I could very much be wrong (most likely) but I’ll ‘put them to paper’ then see how embarrassed I am within a few years. A topic that I see regular come up in conversionsations is in regards to software quality, performance, memory usage and general efficiency is the lamenting over how ‘inefficient’ modern software is while waxing poetically about ‘the good old days’ (while ignoring back in the ‘good old days’ the same accusations of ‘inefficiency’ was levelled at the very software that people today consider efficient) how the software was more efficient. The whole discussion reminds me years ago learning about the different generations of programming languages and how with each generation the underlying technology is abstracted which enabled portability, removed the need to manually manage memory and a lot more in the name allowing the programmer to be more efficient with their time.

    The benefit of abstracting the complexity away means that programmers can focus on functionality that end users want rather than spending large amounts of time dealing with issues that for the end user they’ll never see. It is no different than abstracting away version management to an intelligent piece of software that keeps track of source code, changes, associating changes with bug reports and who is assigned to take care of said functionality being added or bug being fixed. Abstracting complexity away and allowing the computer to take care of the details makes programmers more efficient – freeing up time so that they can focus on their work rather than having to spend that time on ‘house keeping’.

    Apple for example created Objective-C 2.0 garbage collection but it was only available on macOS but that then was replaced with Automatic Reference Counting which was available on all platforms (for Swift and Objective-C) – all the benefits of abstraction without the overhead associated with it. Another good example of abstraction is Grand Central Dispatch to make concurrency easier (the functionality has been ported to other operating systems) – the rough equivalent of that would be Thread Pools on Windows. We moved from a situation of single cores and dual cores to now we’re in a world where on my laptop I’ve got 12 cores. Most applications were single threaded or limited in the number of threads being used because of the added complexity and at the time it make much sense because there was limited benefit given most were just running dual core or maybe quad core. The problem is that if you want to deliver more performance and responsiveness thus a better experience for your end users then it will require you to make greater use of threads to make use of extra cores. The solution? hand some of that complexity off to the system to take care of.

    When it comes to AI and LLM it makes me wonder whether the direction over moving to Java and .NET with garbage collection, just in time compiling etc. is being overshadowed by new memory safe languages such as Rust and Swift along with in the future the use of AI and LLM for C/C++ code based being able to traverse large amounts of source code then establish relationships between parts of the code base to then pick up the sort of issues such as memory bugs that result in security vulnerabilities. I personally I don’t see ‘vibe coding’ replacing programmers but what I do is AI and LLM being used to make programmers more productive because they’re not having to spend their time doing ‘housing keeping’.

    I bring this up because there is a big push by many within the technology space to make data centres a lot more efficient – yes, there is the environmental benefits but there is also benefits to the bottom line with less power being used and more profit being made. The benefits of abstraction means you don’t have to deal with a whole heap of things you’d have to hand code but that abstraction sometimes comes with an overhead cost – for the end user the difference isn’t probably that noticeable but if you’re running a large data centre that overhead can be measured. There was a great comparison a few years ago comparing Perl, Python, Java, .NET and a few other frameworks/languages when compared to modern languages like Swift and Rust – the differences were staggering and that was with the using the latest techniques such as Python with Just In Time compilation which certainly improves performance but there is still the matter of the overhead of using a JIT model.

  • A really good start to the weekend.

    I went to sleep last night, slept in until around 12 noon, woke up, had something to eat for lunch then headed down the road to pick up a few essentials and then got in contact with mum regarding what was happening. Had a chat with mum and it turns out that my sister had he account hacked and money emptied but thankfully she got onto it quickly so hopefully it’ll be tracked down. It appears that the money was transferred to a one of those new fintech bank accounts which isn’t surprising because where I work in my day job customers who were hacked the money was sent through to the same fintech that operates in Australia – maybe the hacking scene is related? a coordinated scamming launched at multiple targets from different backgrounds but done by the same group of people.

    Funny enough, the chicken I was going to have for dinner I ended up taking to mum’s and we had that with some baked potatoes and salad along with a berry apple crumble with ice cream for desert. On the way hope I picked up some groceries – the sort of items that would have been difficult to carry home myself. Normally if I’m unable to get a ride with mum or my sister I’ll just order it online and get it delivered because the cost of delivery is roughly the same amount it would be if I did the grocery shopping in two trips (to spread the burden over to trips).

    I’ve decided that what I’ll be doing is 5 days of walking then followed by two days of relaxing – being able to enjoy those two day of really allows me to recover for the 5 days of walking I do after work each day. Had a great day and I guess it is a habit I need to get out of which is punishing myself because god forbid I want some time off to rest and relax – trying to get rid of a life time of bad habits and embrace moderation.

    uBlock Origin Lite version 2025.1123.1640 has been released – waiting for it to appear in the Chrome and Edge store however it ready now in the Apple App Store. It is amazing how Apple does a pretty good job at getting it approved a lot faster than Google and Microsoft. I updated y mum’s computers and my sister’s as well – I’ve decided it would be best to keep them on the previous version of macOS and iOS until version 26.2 is released which, by that time, should be pretty stable.

    A great interview of Yanis Varoufakis by Tom Nicholas – it is interesting how the feudal lords and landed gentry had their power come from the land that they owned but it appears that the feudal lords of today in this age of neo feudalism the idea of ‘land’ is virtual in terms of platforms in a virtual space where like in the past the seek rent from those who toil ‘the land’ in the virtual world where the feudal lord take a cut (in the form of data) and the ‘peasants’ pay the lord for that privilege. Then again if you’ve been following technology for the last 30+ years like I have then you’ve lived through the major leap forwards with each generation to now silicon valley mega corporations are stumbling around trying to find the next growth opportunity. The problem is that these attempts have fallen flat – the metaverse and AR/VR headsets no one cared about because such virtual worlds already existed in the form of Second Life which had a limited audience, wearable devices like glasses are rejected because they’re expensive and they make you look like a dork, AI services that are losing money even on the most expensive plan with many experts pointing to LLMs are limited by design no matter how many data centres and data you throw at the problem and that doesn’t even start on the fixation on autonomous vehicles because god forbid we tax these damn corporations to build a decent mass transit city for metro as well as intercity transportation (there is already autonomous trains).

    Daily writing prompt
    Name your top three pet peeves.
    View all responses

    Here are my three plus a bonus one because I like to rebel against the system.

    1. The mixture of ignorance and arrogance – it is one thing to be ignorance, we’re all (including myself) are ignorant of something(s) but it is made worst when it is married with arrogance. The whole ‘influencer culture’ and the ‘prodcast bro culture’ being two examples of such behaviour.
    2. If you’re stating an opinion then don’t phrase in a way that it makes it sound as though you’re making a declarative statement – if is your opinion then make it clear it is your opinion, don’t phrase it in a way that gives the impression that you’re stating a fact or otherwise you’ll come off sound arrogant.
    3. If you don’t know the answer or the topic al that well then there is nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know” or “I haven’t looked into it” – there is nothing wrong with saying you don’t have an opinion on something or are indifferent. it appears that these days apparently you’re meant to have an opinion on everything even if you’ve never glanced at the topic in your life.
    4. Boot lickers and those who defend millionaires and billionaires as if they’re going to receive a silver dollar as a reward for their sycophancy – people who convince themselves that they’re temporarily embarrassed capitalists who are just one step away from being ‘wealthy’ then spend a good portion on their life defending millionaires and billionaires online while voting for policies that harm themselves but they’re convinced that one day when they become rich they will benefit from those policies.

  • Back into the weekend.

    The weekend has finally arrived – finished work today then went for my nightly walk and picked a couple of sandwiches for dinner then came back home, watched some videos while eating dinner. It was a long week but I think this coming week will be a lot easier – getting back into the routine of going for a walk each night. After having not doing it for almost two weeks can be difficult because the temptation of doing nothing is a lot stronger than my desire to want to exercise but that being said I like the benefits that come from regular exercise.

    Qualcomm has release a control panel (you’ll need to install the latest .NET runtime because it depends on it) which also includes the ability to update the GPU driver (link) which has a slight performance improvement although WDDM 3.2 isn’t supported. It’ll be interesting to see whether with the release of the Qualcomm X2 whether there will be a GPU driver upgrade that’ll cover both the X and X2 – I guess we’ll need to see what happens when the laptops start shipping next year which is the rumoured time which falls inline with the release of Windows 11 26H2 where new hardware support is added (it’ll be interesting to see whether the release of Panther Lake will result in FRED support being added to the Windows NT Kernel/HAL).

    When it comes to politics I tend to avoid hopium (like copium but for hope) because all too often the narrative in the media tends to not be reflective of the mood out in the real world. There is a lot of stories in the media regarding the impact of Trump’s policies, the negative impact of those policies but I can’t help but get the feeling we’ve been here before when John Kerry ran for president and a lot of noise in the media about how unpopular George W Bush was but as we all know he was voted in for a second term. As cliched as it sounds, the only poll that matters is on election day (in the mid terms) because that shows not only the number of people who are unhappy (or happy) with the status quo but also how much of the population is motivated (either by anger or support for the status quo) to turn out to vote.

    On a side note, I find it funny how the liberal pundits are twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to explain away Zohran Mamdani’s win in the election – it is amazing how these people must get paid to avoid the most obvious explanation in favour of coming up with long winded excuses. The simple fact of the matter is that Zohran Mamdani won because he talked about the ‘meat and potatoes’ issues, the ‘bread and butter’ issues, the kitchen table and pocket book issues. If there is something that Democrats need to take away from Zohran Mamdani’s win that can be taken nationally it is the laser focus on the issues that matter to people regardless of their background – don’t get bogged down in boutique identity politics issues and push back when Republicans try to change the topic back to culture wars by dragging the conversation back to ‘meat and potatoes’ issues that matter to the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

  • Almost there, one day to go.

    Another day at work and then went for a my usual walk. I really do love this time of year, not too hot, not too cold, a cool breeze, things aren’t too chaotic around where I live and I’m looking forward to a few work get togethers over the next couple of weeks and then my holiday starts on 15 December where I’ll enjoy two weeks off. On my walk I was thinking about taking a week off in June next year over the WWDC – it’ll be interesting to see what the focus will be – maybe we’ll be lucky and everyone has realised that the AI hype was over the top and the industry finally gets back to dealing with the issues that end users want addressed instead of saying AI related gibberish to increase their stock price.

    I couldn’t be bothered watching Real Time with Bill Maher – when you can’t even get the facts straight when talking about a group of Democratic politicians saying to those working in defence that they don’t have to obey an illegal order (link), why should I waste my time watching your show? Btw, within the defence force you don’t need to be a legal expert but there is a chain of command, processes to fallow and outside groups that can provide free legal advise so his ridiculous scenario he gave of a 21 year old in the Overtime segment of is show is, quite frankly, a load of crap and he should feel ashamed for putting out such nonsense in the first place.

    I was watching a video regarding the iPad Pro and the video presenter was complaining how it isn’t a Mac replacement – for some reason he has convinced himself that if Apple doesn’t give him what he wants then Apple has let him down rather than it being the fact that the device was never designed for is use case in the first place. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the iPad Pro isn’t a drop in replacement for the Mac because they cater for difference audiences. First thing off I have to point out, the term ‘Pro’ lost any real meaning years ago when it pretty much became sort hand for “this has all the bells and whistles that the standard version lacks” not that it is designed for ‘professionals’ (who is considered a professional and what a professional needs is like asking how long a piece of string is).

    The iPad is designed to be an appliance, a device for the every man who simply wants a computer where they can turn it on, do what they want and then turn it off. The audience for an iPad is someone who wants a device that enables them to do a set of tasks but abstracts the details away and with that abstraction comes a lack of power and flexibility by virtue of enabling such power flexibility invariably means adding complexity – something the target audience doesn’t want to deal with. Long story short, the iPad is for your mum, your brother who wants something they can check out the football scores, your nana who likes sending emails and keeping in contact with her knitting group on Facebook.

  • Two more days to go.

    Work today was uneventful and after all that I went for my usual 11.6km walk which funny enough I did quicker than 1 hour and 50 minutes. I received a text message from my doctor regarding a 3 monthly blood test to keep track of how things are progressing to ensure that there isn’t any spike in blood sugar numbers. I’m unsure how much of a regular thing it’ll be but it is good to keep track of ones health. As my doctor noted, there are a whole heap of downstream problems that come from high blood sugar so it is best to get it under control. For my numbers my hba1c went from 89 to 42 and then to 37 with my personal goal being that I’d like to get it down to the low end of the thirties or even the high twenties which will get me in a health normal range with enough head room.

    I’m getting myself back in a routine, taking each day one at a time – getting back to having a walk every night and although it has taken a bit of effort to be motivated to get out of the house after working all day I have to admit that afterwards I feel a whole lot better. I’m going to get really focused on getting back on track and then not next week but the week after I’ll go in for my blood test – I don’t see any major change because I’m feeling pretty good at the moment.

    I saw a video of Paul Thurrott regarding the whole debate online in response to a Microsoft executive talking about making Windows an agentic OS.

    I have to disagree with Paul although I do agree there are people who will fight tooth and nail against any progress there are legitimate issues being raised with many at the end of the tether because they’ve been saying the same thing for years and just being ignored by Microsoft. There is a push back to Microsoft AI fixation because ever since Windows 8, Microsoft has clearly decided that the concerns of the user base play second fiddle to what ever happened to the the latest trend of the moment. Touch screens for example being the archetype of faux futurism where Microsoft hoped that a touch first user interface would spur on greater sales yet here we are years later and the overwhelming majority of computers don’t have a touch screen and end users went through a whole lot of disruptive pain for nothing worthwhile. Then the two releases per year under Windows 10 with ‘Windows as a service’ (a great idea in theory assuming you’re not dealing with a spaghetti code mess but instead everything is clean and modular) where a small prayer was required before installing an update in a hope that the software gods will bless oneself with a stable platform and nothing broken. When people look at Windows 7 as a ‘golden age’ it wasn’t that people are saying Windows 7 was perfect but it did get the basics done well and just got out of your way to allow you to use your computer with minimal disruption.

    The issue isn’t about new features, the issue is about the misplaced priorities with Windows 11 for example being released in October 2021 and here we are 4 years later, very little progress on the UI in consistencies (see inconsistencies regarding dark mode as one example), the Windows Settings introduced in Windows 10 release 10 years ago and they still haven’t gotten rid of the Control Panel or clearly lay out any sort of road map regarding dealing with legacy components of Windows. That doesn’t even touch on things such as the MAX_PATH limitation where you can enable long path names but Windows Explorer (for example) doesn’t support path names longer than 256 characters. If these issues were addressed (and more) or being addressed in a timely manner than most users would view this whole AI thing as something they would disable or just ignore (assuming it doesn’t keep pestering them) but when power users and developers see the basics not being done well mean while all the focus is on features very few people give a flying continental about then it shouldn’t be surprising that people online are voicing their concerns via the modern day equivalent of writing a letter to the editor.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your two favorite things to wear?
    View all responses

    My two favourite items of clothing are zip up hoodies and hoodies in general along with Dickies trousers with the double patch on the knee. I prefer to have my clothing baggy and comfortable – even when I was slimmer I still preferred baggy clothes because I found fitting clothing too restrictive and rather uncomfortable. Oh, and heavy cotton shirts I also like – not a fan of cotton shirts that are thin, feels like I’m going to rip the shirt if I look at it the wrong way. Oh, while we’re at it, I do like skate shoes – preferably black or a dark colour.

  • Going on three days.

    Keeping on track with the third day going for a walk – I decided to spice it up a bit and change where I walked tonight. It is good to make changes so then it isn’t the same old same old. Taking each day at a time and set goals that are achievable rather than having massive aspirations, fail to achieve them and then feel bad about not achieving those goals that weren’t really all that attainable. It is about finding a middle ground, moderation if you will, rather than swinging from one extreme to another – from binge to austerity then binge again, attempting to undo a lifetime of bad habits and conditioning but reprogramming oneself is easier said that done.

    Samsung has released the November 2025 update for their S25 Ultra – the size is around 569.89MB and it took only a couple of minutes or so to download then install. After rebooting I checked for the October 2025 Google Play Services update but nothing came through – stuck on September 2025 but then again an update may come in the next few days so I guess I’ll need to wait and see what happens. The kernel has been updated where it has the same linux 6.6.77 kernel which indicates to me that there weren’t major updates other than security fixes. One UI 8.5 is being worked on at the moment with reports that it’ll be based on Android 16 QPR2 with the focus by Samsung to bring about a release schedule that’ll line up with the Android QPR (Quarterly Platform Release) schedule.

    In a follow up to the post I made yesterday about the fall out regarding the whole ‘agentic OS’ fiasco, Microsoft responds in the only way out of touch silicon valley types can respond – telling end users that they’re ignorant rubes who don’t understand how wonderful their vision for the future is. At this point they sound like religious zealots convincing you that they have the truth and the reason you don’t accept it isn’t because what they’re telling you as a load of crap but rather because some super natural force is stopping your from accepting it.

    All I can say is this, Apple must be pretty happy right about now knowing they’ve side stepped the whole unfolding situation in the AI world (or more specifically the LLM segment of the AI market) but then again Apple put out a white paper note too long ago regarding the limitations with the LLM approach. I can’t help but get the feeling that when Apple makes a entrance in the AI world it’ll be off the back off a new approach – meanwhile they can pay Google for their Gemini model, improve Siri and take their time so then at least using Gemini will mean they won’t lag behind the competition.

  • It felt good getting back into a routine.

    I finished work then headed off for a 11.6km power walk which I did in around 1 hour and 50 minutes then I arrived home, had a big glass of cool water then jumped into the shower. I love this time of the year where it isn’t too hot and you can go for a walk with tracksuit pants and a t-shirt with the temperature just at that right level of warmth where it is warm enough to wear a t-shirt but not too warm to the point you end up sweating profusely. I guess I’m lucky in that I go for my walk after 10pm when the day starts cooling down at around 8pm

    I was reading through the fall out from the ‘announcing Windows is becoming an agentic OS’ that was posted on X/Twitter only for the head of Windows to hear people, to put it politely, voicing their concerns about the future direction of Windows. It appears that Microsoft have learned nothing from the Windows Vista and Windows 8 debacle – if you lose the tech enthusiasts, who also are product boosters (see NPS and the role that customers who are ‘promoters’ play in promoting your brand), then you lose your ability to win over the non-tech savvy audience who make up the majority of consumers out there. The tech enthusiasts tend to be the ‘friend whose good with computers’ and what they have to say carries weight – you lose them then you lose their willingness to advocate on behalf of your company to their friends and family.

    Well, after receiving constructive criticism he then took onboard the feedback and made the appropriate changes…ah ha, I almost got you, nope, they didn’t change direction but instead paid lip service that Microsoft was listening and then double down on the idea that as end users we’re idiots and we need masterful geniuses such as the head of Windows to take it upon himself to make those critical decisions and lead us to the promise land of features we didn’t know we needed. I’d love to meet the people he apparently talks to who are demanding this agentic OS vision he has because survey after survey show that consumers don’t care about AI (only 7% of phone users consider it to be a factor when purchasing a phone) so who is demanding what they’re pushing? an example of shoving something down a customer’s throat relentlessly and then eventually they’ll give in and embrace it?

    I can see that they’re working on improving the user interface consistency, making the system more reliable regarding drivers and trying to move things into the user space where possible but ultimately they’ll have to start to deliver on this promises then maybe then their most loyal fans will star to cut them some slack. When neglected the core competencies of your operating system then it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a sizeable number of enthusiasts who see this fixation regarding AI and agentic operating system as a distraction from what Microsoft should be focusing on – making sure they get the basics done well before branching out into other areas.

  • And now for something completely different.

    I thought I may as well add do another post before I head off to bed. Today was a good day in terms of sticking to my diet – one thing I made sure of this week was making sure that I had a good variety of food at home which avoids being tempted to sneak off down the road mid week or getting groceries delivered which ends up leading to buying stuff I probably don’t need. I guess it is one of those things where you’re on a uphill battle fighting against a life time of bad habits but that being said there is the balance of ensuring that life isn’t some sort of death march where every day is miserable and there is nothing worth looking forward to.

    Things are going well with using Chrome and Google Workspace so I don’t think I’ll ever change to Microsoft 365. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of the whole bringing Android to the laptop – I have a feeling that what we’ll see is Android with desktop mode simply being the mode it automatically boots to, the same mode that you see with Samsung phones and DeX where you can use it like a desktop computer. What will also be interesting is whether we’ll see Android desktop box like how there were Chrome box because I am reminded of the Qualcomm X2 launch and some of the mini pc designs that were being shown at their demonstration booth. Could we see a Qualcomm X2 based desktop running Android? I imagine we could but it’ll be interesting to see whether Google opens up Chrome for Android to support extensions given that the business I work for relies on extensions as part of the work flow such as using 1Password to store passwords (or in my case, if I were to have a desktop I’d want to be able to utilise uBlock Origin Lite).

    On the topic of uBlock Origin Lite, there has been a release of 2025.1116.1841 and funny enough it appeared on the Apple App Store before anywhere else then followed by Edge but we’re still waiting on it to appear in the Chrome store. On the topic of Apple, I’ve updated mum’s phone to 18.7.2 but what I’ve decided to do is wait until 26.2 is released before updating because although I’ve heard a good amount of praise regarding the stability of 26.1 I’d sooner wait until 26.2 then make the switch after seeing what the final ends up turning out like (so far Zollotech on YouTube has given Apple releases a good amount of coverage – he goes into the minutia and picks up things that most reviewers will gloss over although it would be nice if he spent some time testing Safari since it is a heavily used bundled application).

    I’ve been following Webkit development and how things are going when it comes to Web Platform Tests (WPT) and based on the latest Safari Technology Preview it appears that there is a sizeable amount of progress (from what I understand there is work on creating a WPT but for extensions which should mean that getting Safari into compliance with the MV3 should be made a whole lot easier – being able to pick up compliance/compatibility bugs while building up the functionality) but it’ll be interesting to see how quickly they’ll make it available in their stable release given that if you do a comparison between stable releases, Safari still lags behind Chrome in terms of getting those features shipped to end users.

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the Apple M5 product refresh – rumours about it being in March next year or maybe later on but I don’t see it being launched any time soon given how close it is to Christmas (generally if they are going to do a product launch for Christmas it would already be made available). It’ll be interesting to see whether they include the new N1 chip as part of it because it has many benefits but then again I’m in no hurry – at this rate I could easily wait until maybe the iPhone 18 where it is rumoured that they’ll be move their whole product range over to their inhouse mobile chip – a C2X along with a N2 networking chip.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your family’s top 3 favorite meals?
    View all responses
    1. Roast lamb with roast vegetables – lots of gravy then followed by a hearty desert such as a stick date pudding with custard or ice dream.
    2. Buttered chicken, rogan josh or tikka masala with garlic naan or roti along with basmati rice.
    3. Doner kebab – either lamb or chicken, with lots of salad, spicy sauce and for desert nothing beats baklava.

  • Another weekend gone too quickly.

    Back to work tomorrow – the weekend always ends up finishing too quickly but on a good side I did turn it into a productive time off. On Monday I walked down to the local bakery for some eggs bene with salmon and spinach for brunch, picked up a few sweet treats from the display cabinet then walked back home. Watched a few YouTube videos then had dinner with mum followed by some weekly grocery shopping. On Tuesday (today) I went for another walk, came back home, completed weeding of the garden – what I’m going to do on my two weeks off over Christmas is to pull up the garden and deal with the weed problem and then put down some fresh weed mats and rocks which will tidy it up. I also need to deal with the weeds on the footpath and I may even look at getting some greenery for the backyard because at the moment it is just a concrete slab, a bike shed and a clothes line so it would be nice to turn it into a place where I want to hang out during the summer rather than sitting inside all day using my laptop when I could be using my laptop outside in the fresh air.

    Google has released an update of Chrome a day earlier than usual so I checked out the release information on their blog website (link) and now it makes sense, two high severity security holes and one of them being exploited in the wild at the moment so if you haven’t updated yet then I’d check under settings then about and get that update installed. It appears that the lack of an update for Android is an indication that only the desktop version is impacted.

    Microsoft has released some insider builds for both the release preview channel (link) and the developer and beta channel (link). It’ll be interesting whether it’ll be released in January 2026 given that according to the November patch Tuesday there is the following note:

    Due to reduced operations during the Western holidays in December and New Year’s Day, Microsoft will not release a non-security preview update in December 2025. The monthly security update will still be available as scheduled. Regular monthly servicing, including both security updates and non-security preview updates, will resume in January 2026.

    So we may not see those enhancements for another month with December being a purely security and bug fix release which makes sense because I could imagine many people at Microsoft going away on holidays, spending time with family etc. etc. Btw, what it also looks like regarding the ‘Administration Protection’, Microsoft is pausing the roll out in the beta and developer channels which makes sense given that it is a pretty big change and it is almost guaranteed there will be bugs and software compatibility issues that either need to be worked around, fixed or documented so that the third party can address the compatibility issue before doing any sort of widespread rollout.

    On a side note, I find it funny how there are people on Twitter who are unhappy with the head of Windows talking about how Microsoft are turning Windows into an agentic operating system – replies being made by them about how they never asked for this AI nonsense, that Microsoft should just make a decent operating system etc. etc. THe reason I find it funny is that these people complaining are the same people who tune into tech influencers who were hyping AI up to the ceiling and beyond. These people then constantly regurgitating tech influencer rectum plucks as wisdom worthy of being shared as if they had come down from the heavens – the great tech philosopher has been generous enough to bestow upon his lowly audience some great wisdom.

    It reminds me of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the tech influencers whining about Apple ‘falling behind’ even though all the surveys point to the fact that only 7% of iPhone purchasers cared about AI features. It really goes to show the disconnect from reality that the tech influencers represent – they’re little more than people who use the parasocial relationship their viewers have with them to push the latest hype from silicon valley to their audience. I really do hope that there is a day of reckoning for these tech influencers in much the same way I would like to see a day of reckoning for the manosphere dude bros who are trying to back peddle at the moment claiming that they weren’t really that ‘hardcore MAGA’ even though there are thousands of hours of clips being just that.

    The whole reason why these tech influencers gained an audience in the first place was the sense that the person was being genuine – they weren’t bought by a particular company and thus could be as brutally honest as they wanted because it was from personal experience. Something insides me wishes that the whole influencer crashes and burns but something tells me that as long as people have short memories I don’t think people will learn – keeping in mind the US voted in GWB twice, Trump twice and Regan twice, and gave Republicans a majority in both houses 2 years after their party crashed the global economy and got the US stuck in two wars, and that hasn’t resulted in Americans learning anything.

  • A productive day today.

    I woke up this morning, had a coffee then jumped into the shower, got dressed then walked down to the local cafe for an eggs bene with smoked salmon and spinach along with a bowl of mocaccino. After the meal I then grabbed a couple of items from the display cabinet of slices then headed back home. Something I must do a lot more often on my day off is going from a nice walk around the block during the day – the feeling of the sun and the fresh air certainly wakes one up.

    Regarding the political take I had either yesteryday or the day before regarding moving further to the left. For me I started off being a social libertarian but economically centre left – the basic idea that negative externalities of capitalism could be dealt with government policy that focused on protecting workers, the environment, ensuring that the products being provide meet safety regulations, a progressive tax system to ensure that those at the top end of town pay a larger portion of their income to fund universal public services that everyone can access. Basically I was a bog standard social democrat but what I have found is that as I’ve read more history I realise that we’ve been going through this cycle of trying to reign in the excesses of capitalism only to find that is undone which is then followed by an economic crisis which then necessitates the state to intervene, rescue the economy then reinstate new regulations (with those regulations being limited in scope due to political capture by the capitalist class).

    The problem is that the we cannot keep going through these cycles resulting in the capitalist class having more power after the very economic crisis they caused resulting in a consolidation of power. As a a study reminded me not too long ago, the average person has little or no influence over policy when compared to the donors who bankroll campaigns and lobby for special treatment. If we define fascism being the marriage of state power with capitalism – the capitalist class seizes control of the state then use the state’s monopoly on violence to protect its class interest, what we see a slow moving fascist transformation of the state. Then add on top of a system that is predicated on infinite growth on a finite planet thus making dealing with climate change an impossibility without system change, an economy productive enough to meet all of humanities needs but relies on the illusion of scarcity to ensure profit maximisation and that doesn’t touch on the larger issue of the fact that we have solutions to deal with climate change but because we fixate over profits the end result is that these solutions never get built because they’re either unprofitable or not profitable enough.

    What is the solution? we need to push beyond capitalism. As Michael Moore, the American documentarian, has noted in the past regarding how as humans we can land people on the moon, find cures to diseases, create marvels of technology but some how we cannot come up with a better solution than capitalism? what is that alternative? socialism but the million dollar question is what kind of socialism – if you define socialism as in ‘workers owning and controlling the means of production’ then what is governance structure? cooperatives? worker councils based around a particular industrial sector? should the market be the mediator when it comes to the delivery of goods and services or what other model could be used in lieu of a market based model? should there be currency? labour vouchers? public housing, private housing or a combination?

    What does amaze me are the number of liberals who keep chortling about how ‘socialism has never worked’ which demonstrates the fact that capitalism didn’t get it right the first time and even today it continuously needs the bailed out. If capitalism was this fabulously perfect system then it wouldn’t need to be continuously baile dout, it wouldn’t need to use clandestine operations to undermine countries that wish to nationalise their natural resources so that the benefits of those resources are used to benefit their people (see Iran and numerous South American countries just recently). I have to wonder whether liberals are so wedded to the ideology that they’re blind to alternatives to whether they have a vested interested in the status quo.