Things I'm looking forward to in 2026

AI wheels coming off <

Do you remember people loudly proclaiming we’ve built a sentient intelligence?

Because you should. Those people should be remembered as the first line of “intellectuals” that has fallen to the onslaught of AI propaganda. AI is a marketing term and in the last few years it has become a test, just like NFTs, testing your resilience to corporate propaganda.

Many have fallen, many are still in the trenches, slowly falling for the trick that are LLMs. I do recognize I might need to employ more empathy here. Seems AI triggers literal psychosis in some people.

Is the trick impressive? Yeah it has its moments. Did it make our computers sentient? No and you have to be a lunatic to think that. At no point was it a reasonable opinion. “We don’t know what consciousness even is so how can you tell LLMs aren’t that?” is not a rebuttal. It’s a lazy, slimy way to escape the conversation.

I can’t see a trace of sentience here. What I’m also not seeing is intelligence. What I’m seeing is the classical neural networks reaching sizes big enough to impress. Academy has been exploring these concepts for a long while but it’s the Silicon Valley that has pulled together resources to steal as much training data as they could, to setup enough data centres to actually serve this as a product to everyone and finally to build branding around the product to attract investment. Phones predict the next word you might want to type which at this point is barely helpful and hardly impressive. Scaling the idea up, using a technology that currently is the closest to emulating intelligence, while still being very far from doing that, doesn’t result in an actual artificial intelligence. It’s a very complex optimization algorithm serving us a local maximum, represented by a string of words, that satisfies a huge amount of conditions, present in our prompt. It’s math at a scale that can impress and can be helpful.

It’s been a few years into “AI revolution” and the clouds over companies like OpenAI haven’t been darker. The product stagnated. Pivoting into agentic AI was a flop, no one treats Altman’s “The next model is the real deal!” tweets seriously anymore, the returns are nowhere to be seen, there’s no vision for the future except for making what’s already there bigger with little proof that it’ll make it better. Few days ago OpenAI has announced ads will be shown to the free tier users of ChatGPT, even though he has previously stated that ads would be the “last resort” for their business model. I guess we’re at the “last resort” stage of this grift.

As Ed Zitron tries to prove it’s not even a functional business, but a black pit, letting out sad pleas for “one more billion of US dollars” and angry threats of impending doom, if the pleas go unanswered.

There’s so much insincerity, unethical behavior and straight up criminal practices around the current AI industry. It’ll supercharge misinformation and deep fake industrial complex. All of that for the low low price of everything you have. OpenAI was soft launching a government backstop, or less euphemistically: financing their grift with public funds.

You also have to watch your government sign deals with those companies, so they have access to your data and watch them take land and natural resources while destroying communities by illegally pumping carcinogenes into atmosphere. Almost forgot, they’ll also take your manager’s brain so he can start posting “I have replaced my employees with AI” posts on LinkedIn, like he’s their mouth piece.

I’m looking forward towards a correction. This version of AI will probably stay with us, with net negative effect on our society in the foreseeable future. I’m looking forward for the business side catching up with this idiocy. The investment in AI is ridiculous and its magnitude, together with other factors, might bring us a global recession. I’m not looking forward towards people suffering economic hardship but the longer this goes the worse it will end.

The RAD debugger on Linux <

How is it that we still don’t have a decent debugger? I rarely use Visual Studio but the experiences I had were not great. Linux side however is… as horrible, just for different reasons. gdb is there and it works most of the time but the user experience is severely lacking.

Casey Muratori started the Handmade Hero project, one thing led to another and we got The RAD debugger.

I have used RAD debugger with the Unreal Engine and it’s a debugger that’s actually fun to use. The current maintainer, Ryan Fleury, is quite vocal about performance being a crucial part of a good software product and it shows. He also represents a school of thought which posits that dependencies are a liability and one should be extremely judicious when reaching for a library. That shows even in the project’s build system which is relatively simple script files, instead of CMake or some other monstrosity.

It’s been several months since he mentioned the debugger works on Linux. Fingers crossed it won’t be long before we get it on Linux.

I like you gdb but you aren’t even trying.

Europe getting its shit rocked <

Under the rule of the Cheeto Prime USA’s mask has slipped. USA has been sick for a while. The grotesque man at the helm is an emanation of their ills. I have zero respect for him and his movement but I’m not American. Maybe if he stuck to his original goal of becoming more isolationist it’d be harder to care. Apparently when this administration says it wants to be more isolationist what they mean is that they’ll start picking a fight with all of their allies, in between invading their enemies…

Lately it’s the topic of Greenland which exposed an ugly side of US. That side of US will never accept anything less than US supremacy and all the benefits that come from it. Europe finds itself in an abusive relationship with a mentally ill partner.

I like The Western world. We are far from perfect but we might be the closest to getting past destructive ideas like racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. We used to look up to the USA as the leaders. One could say we were always naive. One could also say that Europe isn’t without fault. We were happy to open the doors for the American business, especially the big tech. Instead of investing into Europe we took the easy way out, buying whatever US sold us.

Seeing USA like this sent a chill down Europe’s leadership spine. Will it be enough for Europe to make itself stronger by investing into local solutions? I don’t know but Denmark’s Copenhagen and Aarhus are cutting their ties with Microsoft and that’s something… maybe.

I’m looking forward to Europe continuing to bet on itself. We were forced to rethink our dependency on Russian natural gas, resulting in a complete phase out by late 2027. Now we’re forced into replacing USA exports.

I’m happy SourceHut chose Europe as their home!

Harder social media crackdown <

More countries should ban social media for kids and teenagers. I’m looking forward to Poland, which is currently looking into it, following Australia’s example of banning those.

The tech giant previously warned that the ban would cut off teens from friends and community.¹

I bet it did. Their track record shows that we should ignore anything they’re saying. Fuck those companies and fuck those platforms. They’re parasites.

Independent decentralized web <

Social media… you could have been so much, yet you chose to be just another marketing platform. There’s a lot of good on social media. I see incredible amounts of creativity on Instagram. There’s so many incredible artists on Twitter (…X). Yeah it’s the same platform where people were recently using AI to undress photos. Even though I’m not seeing that type of content (if I stick to the “Following” tab) am I supposed to you know… ignore that this app enables it?

I hope to see independent web growing further. It’s a tricky challenge to have internet split over multiple platforms, looking different, working in a different way, having different moderation rules, and finally using different protocols. What a social media platform does it restricts all those parameters. Those restrictions result in a consistent interface and a uniform type of content. Protocol stops being an issue because there’s no incentive to interoperate with other platforms. Finally, theoretically, the moderation policy applies to everyone.

Foundation of an independent web is plain old websites. Each social media replicates the internet just with more restrictions. On this page I can write a long blog post, images included. I cannot do the same on Instagram. The restriction there is “communicate through photos and video”. Obviously that comes with restrictions on what photos you can and can’t post but also with a promise that people who would want to see your content will see your content… or will they? None of this is new to you but I’m trying to demonstrate that social media is just repackaging plain old internet. We already have an incredibly powerful platform to share content, albeit with more friction. It’s harder to find consistent streams of interesting content and it’s harder to monetize them. Inability to monetize them dissuades money hungry grifters but also those who would like to make a living out of sharing content. It’s orders of magnitude easier to become successful on YouTube than it is by sharing videos on your own website.

Make your own website. Are you lazy but have a little bit of money to spare? Try micro.blog. 1 USD per month gives you your own website. If you spend a little bit more you get their cross-posting features, unlimited podcast and video hosting and newsletter. I’m giving it a shot at https://mronetwo.micro.blog/.

What’s more, try Mastodon, try Bluesky, give RSS a go (I’m using https://rss.32bit.cafe), add your website to https://personalsit.es, try https://home.omg.lol, but have your expectations in check. It’s the World Wide Web, the land of the free. It’s a tough place where bounty is scarce, but it’s an honest life. I know that this post won’t be read by many but I believe in a free and independent web and I have to do my part. Free web keeps monsters away.

Books and comic books <

Last year was great when it come to reading, for me. I read some really interesting things like The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles or There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Null by Szczepan Twardoch, a book about the war in Ukraine was emotionally difficult but a great read. If you feel like the world became more shallow and you miss depth, read books.

Comic books can also be great. Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei is marvelous. The art is amazing. It’s simple yet very evocative. On the art front there’s also Absolute Batman that deserves attention, especially Absolute Batman Annual, which was co-created with James Harren - one of my favourite artists.

Then there’s Tenkaichi: The Greatest Warrior Under the Rising Sun. It’s not particularly deep but the art is consistently solid.

It’s ironic that some people celebrate AI producing “art” (slop) at a time when we can access so much of human made art. There literally isn’t enough time to appreciate everything that people make.

Being disappointed <

No matter how much progress we make this year, I’ll be disappointed. Sometimes it’ll be a correct response, to legitimate failings of our society, other times it’ll be my impatient brain, wanting more than was possible.

My task is to keep doing my part, to the best of my ability, no matter if the times are easy or if the times are hard.