Odds and ends
Reflections on the year past and what is ahead
I haven’t built or written anything over the last few weeks while spending the holidays in Ireland. I did however, read a lot. Here is a rundown of what I found interesting.
In non-tech news, the talk of many folks in Ireland was of inevitable future war between the EU member states and Russia. I’ve noticed how the tenor of conversation has shifted over the last few years in a pretty significant way. In three short years, conversations have gone from “there is aggression in Ukraine” to “ war on the continent is inevitable.” It seems military leaders from the EU are also sounding similar alarm bells. It is easy to see in hindsight how the events leading up to World War II lead to full scale conflict across the continent and one has to wonder if we are in the middle of a similar chain of events, unable to see where this leads us. We often take it for granted we are living in the single longest period of peace in human history. It could soon be coming to an end.
As we look back on 2025 the AI dominated landscape seems to have churned out even more bad content than ever before. A few gems stood out:
This slidedeck reflecting on crypto trends from the past year from a friend in venture is fantastic and makes me optimistic for the future.
Perps took over crypto, this is a great explainer.
Data centers are being built at a record pace, but many are being built in areas with unsustainably high temperatures.
Hyperliquid dominated the crypto landscape, this proposal for HIP-31 has some interesting learnings on where the future of generated yield for all of crypto might go.
Everyone is becoming much less weird.
Abu Dhabi2 is turning into an important center or at least interconnected piece of global finance.
Of all the AI related news over the last few weeks, I can’t get this one out of my head. An internal team at Anthropic built a vending machine entirely run by AI and it sort of goes nuts and performs really poorly. I applaud the transparency but I question how this is helpful marketing for the product itself. There is a really fascinating video on the subject.
Looking forward to 2026 there are always lots of year end prediction posts written, two stood out.
This rundown of trends that will continue is great because of the amount of data included3.
a16z crypto offers a series of crypto specific trends they are excited about.
Finally, with so much doom and gloom being written, I loved this take on “How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.” I couldn’t agree with the conclusion more. This will definitely be a bit of the focus of my fun personal projects in 2026.
Admittedly this is very very very in the weeds and detailed on a niche topic
I’m also noticing their investment in trying to export culture. In the world of sim racing (a personal obsession), they paid to have the local race track included in the nearly four year old GranTurismo 7 game and will host significant sim racing events there in the future. It might seem like a small thing but years of investment into these types of things with a younger audience will go a long way to making the average person aware of Abu Dhabi in the future.
While I am skeptical of many of these, interesting food for though all around.
Nice job.