Bye 2025, Hello 2026!

In the dying hours of 2025, figured I had better wish a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

What a technically challenging year it has been.

• The proliferation of next-generation LLM's with Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude really shining, while smaller models start to take traction to be cost effective.
• An interesting circle (bubble) emerging with AI companies, hardware vendors and cloud providers trying to make a buck and be 'first'. This will be interesting to see how it plays out in 2026 - perhaps one will go under?
• Renewables and policy driving the price of electric vehicles and large batteries make it a compelling financial move to progress further into being able to run without reliance on the main grid.
• Questionable policies around restricting and monitoring the internet using dubious means of verification. The more these are relied on, the more Optus and Medibank scale leaks we'll see.
• Minor exodus from large-scale cloud deployments to consolidated and cheaper VPS options. This will be an interesting area to observe with much of the software I'm involved with capable of running on a suitably sized Raspberry Pi 5.
• What's up with memory prices! Might need to rock the 10th Gen PC for a while longer.

In any case, here's this year's light show display and look forward to catching up in 2026.