Matisyahu's Blog

Well, it was meant to be posted at the end of last week.

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1 February 2024

Another day another dime and this morning Santa came late and dropped off a chest freezer that’ll be put into my office (no room in the kitchen) where I’ll gradually build up a good supply of food so that there is less temptation to buy take outs. It’s been a week of taking this approach and the net result has been two weeks where no takeaways have been purchased which has not only benefited my budgeting my also help my general health overall so I’m going to keep pushing forward, focus on improving my cooking skills to the point that cooking at home is enjoyable rather than a burden.

I’ve finally filed the leave with my boss where from 27 May to 27 June I’ll be heading over to Europe for a month – flying into France then takin the Eurostar over to spend time in London then offf on a 22 day tour around the United Kingdom. I’m gradually saving up money for spending money while I am over there but something that I am going to do, which I don’t normally do, I’ll be taking photos. Yeah, I have a bit of an aversion to taking photos of myself but I’ll be happy to take plenty of photos of the trip because I’ll see sights worth photographing.

Am I getting to that point in my life that I am finding myself less and less interested in watching the latest television series – the stories are predictable and with each release I am becoming less and less excited to the point now that what used peak my interest is now a shoulder shrug. I can also see the benefit of traditional television where you just flick it on and watch what ever is scheduled without having to go through the drama of trying fo find something – someone else has made that choice and nine times out of ten it is good enough to pass some time as background noise as I am updating my blog. I’m also feeling that way when it comes to politics and news in general – it’s getting the point that it feels as though I’m stuck in loop like the movie Groundhog Day where it is the same day over and over again.

Chrome 121 was released recently then there was a update from 121.0.6167.85 to 121.0.6167.139 today and so far things are working well and along with that update Nothing has released Nothing OS 2.5.2 (Android 14) for Nothing Phone (1). At the moment they’re doing a staggered roll out with those who participated in the public beta receiving it first (link) and if past releases are like they’ll roll it out country by country but there will also be the option to download it directly then sideload it (which is what I’ll be doing).

Personal, Politics, Technology
Updates aplenty.

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23 January 2024

Woke up today and checked email before getting up then checked my software was up to date and to my surprise Apple has released updates for all their platforms as well as Firefox 122 being made available on their server so I updated them both. Looking into a bit of detail for the macOS 14.3 update it appears that Apple is moving more of their drivers into user space particularly those that are making use of USB such as USB to Ethernet adapters. I think long term what we’re going to see is that when Intel based Macs are deprecated that going forward the requirement will be that all drivers will have to be user space drivers.

As a side note, with the release of the Mac Pro, there is nothing stopping nVidia from providing a CUDA accelerator card for the Mac Pro and create user space drivers but I have a feeling that going forward we’re going to see more work being pushed into the cloud where you ‘rent’ time using hardware rather than having go out to purchase hardware that you may use infrequently (thus making it a difficult purchase to justify). All this makes me wonder whether the Mac Pro is going to be around for the long term or will the eventual future Mac for ‘serious people’ will be the Mac Studio.

Firefox 122 was released so I updated it – it is amazing how far Firefox has come because now at the point at least for me it is faster than Chrome on both of my Macs (still waiting for Firefox 122 to come through for Android). The only extension I have installed is uBlock Origin which is working great on all my devices and no bugs have appeared when testing out all the websites I use on a regular basis except for the Skype web interface which I’ve reported (apparently if you change the user agent to Safari it works so it definitely isn’t a situation of Firefox 122 missing functionality) because it comes up with a message that functionality is missing when using Firefox and that I should use Microsoft Edge (I’m open to the idea as so long as Microsoft decides not to get rid of MV2 support but so far they’ve announced they’re in lock step with Google).

Technology
Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2024: My take on the event.

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23 January 2024

I was watching the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event – after all the excitement had died down. I may be interested in technology but I’m not going to get up at some ungodly hour of the morning (yeah, I’ve stopped doing it for Apple events as well). Side note, I really do wish that Samsung would create an Android TV set top box with a decent SoC inside it rather than the tyranny of choice between Google selling a woefully underpowered dongle or an nVidia Shield that is practically ancient with no sign that nVidia are going to sort themselves out and update it any time soon. Anyway, getting back to the video in question:

What I thought was interesting is the much closer relationship that Samsung has with Google these days when compared to a few years ago where they appeared to be getting a lot more chummy with Microsoft (see Samsung preloading Microsoft apps, Microsoft selling Samsung devices through Microsoft stores etc). I’m having a guess that part of rebuilding of the relationship between Google and Samsung has been probably the sharing of revenue when cloud based AI starts to become a paid for service at the end of 2025. Part of Samsung’s goal has been to sell more higher end devices but I think another part their long term strategy is to also have more revenue streams to smooth out the product release cycles which is where the revenue sharing comes in – see Google Play revenue sharing which was recently disclosed (link).

Another interesting observation has been the downplaying of Bixby which makes me wonder whether in the long term that we’re eventually going to see Bixby is moved to the Google developed AI model for both on device and cloud based processing. AI will become one of those areas of technology where you either have to ‘go big or go home’ because as more people use AI the better the models become which then forces businesses to rationalise whether ‘going it alone’ is a viable business model or whether teaming up with a major player to share the burden of product development which ends up benefiting both parties. I could imagine that Bixby ends up being a Samsung branded frontend to Google’s AI along with gluing the ‘internet of things’ ecosystem that Samsung has developed which will use Bixby as the mediator.

One of the announcements regarding the use of AI was mentioned in the documentation that after 2025 that certain AI functionality won’t be free of charge. Although I have no evidence for this I am guessing that they will keep the local AI free however charge for cloud based AI (it is mentioned in this article that some AI features will come to older devices (link) but I have an inkling that it’ll be purely cloud based as older devices probably lack the hardware required to do local AI processing) due to the cloud potentially being faster with the latest AI models – I could imagine the AI model on the phone being updated maybe on a quarterly basis but the cloud will always have the latest model being used. It’ll be interesting to see how many people end up signing up for it or whether Google will revamp their Google One subscription product to include AI functionality along side cloud storage, YouTube and YouTube Music subscription etc. etc. but we’ll need to wait until 2025 to see what Samsung and Google have instore. For me, I’m currently paying a subscription for Google Workspace but it’ll be interesting to see whether in the future when AI hardware becomes optimised enough that the cost drops close enough to that of a web search query that Google decides to bundle as part of their Workspace service and bump up the plans a couple of dollars to offset the additional cost.

I haven’t had any hands on experience with the Samsung S24 series of smartphones but when they make their way to the stores I’ll pop in to see what they’re like but my main concern is the amount of crapware that Samsung seem to be hell bent on ramming down end users throats. What do I mean by crapware? the insistence by Samsung to duplicate functionality even though Google already provides said functionality, for example Samsung insisting on having it’s own bespoke mobile phone app (to make calls with), contacts, calendering etc even though Google themselves already provide such apps which integrate into Google services a lot better. Something Samsung doesn’t seem to realise is that at least for me is this: an Android phone is a means to an end and that end is to access Google services so anything that gets in the way of me achieving that end goal isn’t particularly all good as so far as what I wish to accomplish with my phone.

Technology
Budgeting and getting better organised.

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15 January 2024

I headed down to the local Harvey Norman to look at a small chest freezer but before that mum shouted me brunch at the local cafe/bakery – eggs bene with salmon and wilted spinach on toasted ciabatta. It is a treat that I look forward to because for all my culinary skills I am horrible at poaching an egg so in the end I like to leave it up to ‘the experts’ who can do the job a lot better than I can. I might head down there on Monday/Tuesday to pick up something fresh – assuming that it isn’t raining or otherwise I’ll need to jump on the bus.

Anyway, getting back to the freezer, the reason for buying it is budgeting. When you have a chest freezer it is possible to bulk up on food that is on special witht he added bonus is that if I have a variety of food at home I can choose from then I’m a whole lot less tempted to get take aways when a great tasting meal is only 30 minutes alway in terms of cooking it myself. I really do wish that Pak ‘n Save would do home deliveries like Countdown but unfortunately at this stage they don’t do pickups. I am tempted, after getting my scooter back on the road, at the idea of getting something like a trailer where I can put my grocery shopping for a fortnight – one shopping trip reduces the need to do smaller shops and the extra things that get picked up in those smaller shopping trips.

Over on YouTube there is an interesting video from ‘Politics Joe’:

Although the video is entitled ‘Jon Ronson breaks down why the right are abandoning the culture war’ there are a few topics that were touched on such as how a person on social media start off pretty normal and then start going down the rabbit hole only to end up in the craziest part of the internet. I find it rather concerning isn’t the fact that people go down rabbit holes because at the end of the day we all make stupid decisions in our life but the fact that there is an army of vigilantes online hell bent on moving what has taken place online into the real world by finding out where people work and getting them fired. The problem is with such vigilantism is that it is incredibly difficult for someone who has gone down the rabit hole, had an ‘ah-ha’ moment then tries to back themselves out of what they’ve found themselves in only to find that there is no way to repair relationships and their reputation.

If we want to get over the sort of divisive culture war conspiracy theory laden nonsense that emanates out of the United States and manifests itself in other countries in a localised format then at the very least we as a society need to accept that people make mistakes but like the prodigal son they return to the fold and realising the mistake that they made. If we as a society are going to keep holding peoples past mistakes over them then how as a society are we ever going to advance forward beyond where we are today?

As humans we are never static, we’re always changing, evolving, we acquire new information and discard old information that may not be relevant any longer but if we someone makes a mistake but we maintain that once you make a mistake there is no chance of redemption then where is the incentive to admit past wrongs and do better in future? how does society benefit when a system is setup where no one is given an opportunity to get better so people instead will just double down on what they already believe? sorry to be the bearer of bad news but eventually some of Trump (and others that have gone off the rails outside of the United States) supporters are going to eventually leave his cult of personality and realise that they were sucked into the BS vortex – shouldn’t they be allowed to rebuild their life and be welcomed back?

I have my own theory why there are a number of people who take this ‘you screwed up once, no second chances’ position – their politics isn’t about transformation, isn’t about addressing issues by advancing policies that actually address real world material issues but instead they treat politics as a performative vehicle where by they can engage in moral and virtue posturing about how they’re the enlightened ones who got it right the first time. That being said, occasionally there is justice in this life because many times when those engaging in such posturing online ignore at their peril the oldest rule on the internet – the internet never forgets but eventually your past catches up with you.

Personal, Politics
Firefox a few months later.

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9 January 2024

I made my move to Firefox a few months ago as my main browser (I had it sitting in the background while I waited for the outcome of what Google were going to do with MV3) on both my computers, MacBook Air M2 (24GB RAM) and Mac Studio M1 Max (32GB RAM), and the over all experience has been pretty good with only Microsoft Skype giving me a message that features are missing but everything else including Google Workspace apps are working great along with the great experience on Android with the icing on the cake being the ability to run uBlock Origin on it (there was a new version released recently, version 1.55 which is available via the Firefox extensions store).

As much as I promote the idea that people should remain politically engaged, sometimes one can get overwhelmed by the avalanche of news with much of designed to get you angry rather than being enlightening. It is important to achieve a balance, yes remained informed but it also important that we don’t get overwhelmed that you end up feeling as though everything is doomed. How does one avoid that? limit yourself to only the bare essential news required and avoid click bait commentary whose focus is on ginning up outrage rather than promote a better understanding of the world. Always remember the golden rule of social media and websites in general – their business model is based on ads and the more they dominate your attention the more money they make so why give them that satisfaction?

I’m going back to work tomorrow, back to a normal 5 day week but thank goodness things have quietened down at work with the whole Christmas and New Years with many families going on holidays over. I’d say that things aren’t really going to get back into full swing until the second half of January when people return from holidays and get ready for the new school year. It’ll be an interesting year with the moving of the office into Wellington along with massive system upgrades, new laptops etc. which will hopefully result in a better customer experience and higher productivity because one is not having to deal with the currency legacy system which is a hodgepodge of systems trying to work together.

I’m gradually constructing a list of things I need to get sorted out because now that I’m in a better financial situation I can deal with the fact that normal things I would purchase have been put on the back burner while other issues too priority, for example, I need new shoes, shirts for work, undies, socks, along with many other things that need to be sorting out. I guess I can chalk 2024 up as year of rebuilding and focusing on getting ready for the future.

Personal, Technology
End of another week, beginning of a new.

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8 January 2024

Well, that was a long week, a six day week with one day off – hopefully when my pay comes through next week that the extra dollars will make the fortnight feel a whole lot better. It’s taken a while for me to get over my flu – almost three weeks and I’ve still got a bit of coughing but nothing like the ‘I’m going to cough up a lung’ that had the sound of someone coughing who smoked 3 packets of cigarettes per day. I’m going to work from hope this coming week primarily because I only have $3 on my snapper so I’ll give my boss a heads up that I’ll be all good to come in the following week.

As much as working from allows me to sit in my pjs all day there is the mental health aspect of getting out of the house and socialising – sometimes I catch myself turning into a hermit so I have to remind myself to get out of the house of my days off to get some exercise, maybe head to the shops and chill out. Now that the weather is good I might head down on my day off to the local dutch bakery to get some savoury muffins and a mochachino. It’s the saving grace of where I live, I’m within walking distance of a bakery which makes me thankful that at least where I live we don’t have the sort of car centric suburban development which would make something I take for granted a real pain the backside.

Personal
A new year, a refreshed me.

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3 January 2024

Well, it’s the start of a new year and things are looking good so far – the focus this year isn’t about trying to make big changes but instead making incremental improvements because it is easy to get overwhelmed then eventually throw ones hands up in the air because it feels like one is fighting a losing battle. I have created a list but ordered them from most important to least important then gradually working my way through that. For example, at the most important is getting my scooter back on the road which means getting two new tyres, oil change plus any other serving required along with updating my registration (at the moment it is on hold, I wasn’t going to renew it if I wasn’t able to use it). Once that is sorted out I’ll then move onto my next goals – sorting out my wardrobe and finding out where I stand on a variety of different clothing I have then draw up a plan from there.

It’s been a couple of months since I made the switch to Firefox (for both my Macs as well as my smartphone) and the experience has been great – the experience with uBlock Origin is top notch as well which is why I think that 2024 will be the year that Firefox gains market share. I don’t see if grabbing a massive market share but I could imagine over the next few years that power users and those technically inclined will make that move especially as it becomes clear that Google won’t be kicking the can further down the road, that the dates for deprecating and removing MV2 support as set in stone. The limitations of MV3 have been well documented by uBlock Origin developers (link) and there have been some movement with adding some of the missing functionality (link) but it is pretty problematic that those who are driving the MV3 development, who ultimately have the final say, have very little or no experience in writing content blocking extensions based on the sort of dismissive attitude to adding missing functionality to declarative net request or suggesting things such as limits that are so low that it is clear they’ve never used a content blocker in their life.

It’s difficult for Google to be taken seriously as it holds the line that MV3 is being pushed for privacy and security reasons when you deliberately cripple and functionality and fight tooth and nail to push back against those proposing improvements in the declarative net request api to close the functionality gap between MV2 and MV3. Maybe, just maybe, the onus should fall on the end user to do their homework before installing an extension from an unknown developer because sure, you could make browsers 100% safe by crippling the extension api so it features are limited or just remove it entirely then keep people completely safe but at what cost? it’s like the argument for the app store, sure, it keeps people safer but at what cost and at what point does the user take on the responsibility of being responsible for the decisions they make regarding how they use their device?

I was watching the following video from PBS:

What frustrated me is that they never define what is a liberal, what is a conservative, what is Republican, what is a Democrat then when it is bought up at the round table the definitions were purely on the basis of social issues with economics never touched on, no health, education, social welfare etc. There was an opportunity to have a fruitful discussion by getting down into the weeds but it was never touched on other than at the most superficial level. As long as there are superficial discussions such as what took place then it shouldn’t be surprising that these sorts of divisions keep widening while charlatans take advantage of these divisions to grift and graft their way off the back of uniformed voters whose voting patter is that of a pavlovian response to stimulus rather than an action that is consciously undertake after careful review of the evidence provided. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll write a more exhaustive post regarding the problems I see in the US political system and possible solutions.

Personal, Technology
Firefox 121 released, getting older and learning how to triage with greater vigour.

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26 December 2023

Firefox 121 was released recently with a massive laundry list of features that developers have been clamouring for and the Firefox developers have been working on as part of the web compat project such as the :has pusedo class along with many others (link). What I think is also extraordinary is the giant leap in functionality at has been recently merged into the Firefox nightly (link) for example the Web Codecs (video) went from 54.7% to 89.3% so at the moment overall both Firefox and Safari are neck and neck on 97.1% and 97.6% respectively. Long story short it appears that 20 February 2024 will be when a lot of the work merged into the nightly will hopefully appear in the mainstream release. I’ve updated the Firefox installed on my smartphone and everything is working wonderfully on there too. I really wish that there was some way to buy official Firefox merch as a way of showing support for the project.

It is interesting that as one gets older the sorts of things that I would obsess over/focus my attention on are no longer something I care about. I used to be a real tech enthusiast particularly when it came to having the latest smart phone, laptop, desktop, equipment, the novelty of having the newest technology but now I’ve kind of gotten to the point of being ‘over it’ now that other priorities have come to the forefront. With these new priorities I am forced to rethink what my spending priorities are in the new especially if one considers that I’ll be travelling through Europe in June for a month in 2024. There are also things that I need to do around the house such as replacing my bed frame and potentially my mattress as well and then there is the fact that I need to replace my work shirts because at the moment they look pretty worse for wear, new shoes, underwear, socks etc. so as a result one has to triage.

Around a week ago Nothing released Nothing OS 2.5 Beta 1 for Nothing Phone 1 (public beta, Nothing OS 2.5 based on Android 14) (link) and based on the fact that Nothing 2.5 Beta for Nothing Phone 2 was released on 11 October 2023 which was then released on 15 December (along side the beta for the Nothing Phone 1). I don’t think it’ll take as more than 2 months to get it working on the Nothing Phone 1 so I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up seeing it being released towards the end of January 2024 or sometime in February 2024 but then again that assumes no platform specific bugs appear.

Back to work on Boxing Day along with some extra hours over new years which help with the savings – looking forward to a new year filled with many positive changes taking place.

Personal, Technology
Apple releases updates..many improvements.

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19 December 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Personal, Politics, Technology
Plagiarism on YouTube and my 5 cents worth on the topic.

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12 December 2023

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

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

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

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

Politics, Social Commentary