Week 2025 at Year's End

Jan 06, 2026

Today’s newsletter is special. It covers the final stretch of last year while being the first issue of this year. @vlkodotnet

Week's Non-Highlight: Time to Start Blogging?

Are you making New Year’s resolutions and have room for one more? How about starting a blog? You might think it doesn’t make sense in the age of AI, but it’s actually the opposite. AI saves you time at work, so you can dedicate those saved hours to writing and publishing your thoughts. Isn’t that the whole point of why we’re so focused on AI? To use our time as creatively as possible — and nothing is quite as creative (and perhaps frustrating) as writing articles.

If I still haven’t convinced you that blogging is worthwhile, here’s an article with 9 more reasons. It does mention that blogging can help create a stable income, though I wouldn’t count on that. It certainly hasn’t worked out for me yet — but at the very least, it’s something that will sharpen your skills.

Self-Development Insights

I don’t know about you, but at year’s end — when there’s more time for reflection — I always go through a period of self-examination. Some might call it mild burnout, but maybe it’s just searching for existential meaning. The following article is about exactly that. If you’ve been feeling lately like nothing excites you and you’re completely burned out, maybe you just need to find new meaning. The article says this means stepping outside your comfort zone.

The start of a new year is great because that’s when we’re most motivated to change something. Here’s a theoretical guide on how to do it:

And one very practical, printable guide to help you plan your upcoming year. Find two hours — it might change your life.

BIZ Insights

It might be surprising, but the value of music copyright has doubled over the past decade. With all those streaming services, you’d expect the opposite. The article contains 2024 figures but was published in December, so it doesn’t include information about how AI-generated music affected the market. Maybe we’ll find out next year.

For some industries, Google Ads have stopped working. It doesn’t matter how much you increase your budget. If you’re targeting young people, TikTok and Instagram should be your channels. The author runs an entertainment agency, so his experience might not apply to everyone. Still, it’s interesting how much things we’d gotten used to have changed over the past year.

Instead of dealing with acquisition problems with Groq, Nvidia simply bought their intellectual property and employees. What’s left is an empty shell that will maintain their cloud services. By the way, Groq develops Language Processing Units (LPU) architecture that achieves high token generation speeds for small and medium-sized models.

Elon Musk is planning mass production of Neuralink brain chips. Testing is going well, and they’ve achieved full automation of brain implant insertion that doesn’t require removing part of the skull bone. The machine performs the procedure without surgical assistance and with quick recovery time.

AI Insights

At year’s end, Z.ai unveiled a new model called GLM-4.7. It’s particularly good for us developers, and they’re still running a Christmas promotion for annual Max subscription at $288. That is, if you don’t mind sending your data to China.

Google introduced a new project called A2UI that “agentifies” your UI to make it easily understandable for AI agents. It’s essentially a converter between what we see and machine-processable data for agents. Angular, Flutter, and Web Components are supported so far.

Claude Code added LSP (Language Server Protocol) support. This means it will understand exactly what’s wrong in the code without having to analyze source files.

You’ll probably never use this, but there’s a Micro Language Model for the Z80 processor.

Link Drop

CES is currently underway, which will definitely be the main topic of next week’s newsletter. For now, here are a few of the most interesting announcements. First place definitely goes to the new Pebble Round 2 — the round version of the watch with an e-ink display. The battery lasts weeks. It doesn’t have a heart rate monitor, but it has two microphones for voice-controlled AI assistants.

Clicks Communicator is essentially a Blackberry-style device running Android.

IPv6 just turned 30. It was created because of concerns about running out of IPv4 addresses. That shortage is even worse now, yet IPv6 still hasn’t achieved enough adoption to replace IPv4. Maybe in another 30 years.

There are still a few days left before we’re back to the grind at work. If your TV has a browser, you can try GamingCouch. Fire up a game on your TV or computer, pair your phones, and enjoy some couch gaming fun at home.