Today is winter solstice in my part of the world. Humans from times immemorial have celebrated this day as the turning point of the year, from the bleakness of winter towards the fruit of spring and summer. I wish it was so easy. Here’s some good news to warm you while you wait for redemption.

Please forgive me this rant about how great my coding agent is.

I use AI for research, for snippets. And I have autocomplete turned on. All the time. I write to be understood, and for that I need all the help I can get.

In this week’s Good News Sunday, we have some firey good news that’s about 400,000 years old, a museum that’s 225 years old is finally to give birth to a spinoff, and Dick Van Dyke, star os TV series we watched as kids, has turned 100 years old. But we’re not old. Oh no.

Trump’s rant against the European Union has gotten some on my side of the Atlantic spooked. But while the White House seems to want us back to the free capitalism world of poisoned air, poisoned water, and poisoned minds, the EU has other plans.

Lately, it’s become more and more apparent that AI companies are causing issues when crawling our clients websites. They’re eating up CPU cycles big time. But contrary to traditional search engine indexers, AI crawlers deliver our clients nothing.

We’re a small software company. Specialised in Django, but we also do frontend frameworks, like Next’s. And as a company, we have a website, and a blog. Recently a new cyber threat surfaced, and of course we were on it for our clients. But we fixed our own blog just a little too late…

In this week’s Good News Sunday, we celebrate Frank Gehry, legendary architect, who passed at 96, a child prodigy who’s just 3, and New Zealand finally getting their very own Ikea after being on the waitlist for 80 years.

We might already be using AI a lot, but for those involved in foundational research, we’re just skimming the surface. The ultimate goal is Superintelligence, or what is otherwise called AGI. This is me trying to understand what it is, and what’s in in for us little people.

Like many of my generation, a substantial part of my intellectual upbringing was religion. Yes, I now consider myself an atheist, but formative years are not called formative for nothing. Religion is a strong force that continues underground even when you think it might be conquered.

Am I a music lover? I used to be. As a student, there was little else to talk about. Too young for the Stones and The Beatles, we were on about Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Style Council, Einstürzende Neubauten. That music is made behind a computer is no news. But now, increasingly, by AI.

This Good News Sunday, a nasty museum guide that does a museum good, a poor country that has the worlds best performing beverage packaging recycling programme, and a politician who is making the news for something personal.

Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI, is now leading Safe Superintelligence Inc. The goal is to create superintelligence capable of solving all our problems. But you don’t have to be smart to realise that we don’t need superintelligence for that. Just consensus and perseverance.

I like to think of myself as relatively creative, but a recent encounter with My AI reminded me that I’m actually just another single-minded old guy.

The digital marketing archive we built for our client is one of the linchpins of their success. Now we’ve come up with an idea to take it to the next level.

Some weeks are golden. Most are not. This week, with the US once again demanding Ukraine surrender, a COP30 just barely making a deal, weak as it is, and the turmoil and uncertainty in business and in life, was again awash with anguish. But here’s some specks of gold I found in the pan.

Every time I ask My AI a question, I am astounded by the length of their answer. I get whole essays to comprehend. Millions use AI. Millions upon millions, even. Each interaction adding to the global data store. It won’t end well.

We’re a small software company using AI coding agents big time. But as we use them more, the costs are rising.  I wonder, given that the coding agent companies that we’re using are startups, and startups tend to lose money as they, well, start up, how much does it really cost to run a coding agent?

Language-based AI is what we all work with, and play with. Sometimes it looks pretty smart, intelligent even. But researchers are also looking at other approaches that may get at the core of what intelligence really is. For example Jeff Hawkins and his team at Numenta.

I know China dominates rare earths, what I didn’t know is how China dominates aluminium production, and is about to dominate extracting rare earths from the aluminium byproduct called red mud.

It’s Good News Sunday, with good news from Brazil, China and Australia. The COP is returning to Brazil. Held almost annually since 1992, we’re now at COP30!  China’s emissions have flat-lined 5 years ahead of schedule, and three peregrine falcon chicks, followed by millions, set out into the world.

This week COP30 is set to start. 193 countries, plus the European Union, have registered a delegation for the summit. Not the US. But guess who couldn’t care less? China. The number one manufacturer of solar, and generating 60% of the world’s sustainable energy. The forerunner by far.

It’s no secret. The European Union is lagging far behind in the digital realm. In AI, in connectivity, in digital public services, and more. Plus, the services used in the EU are American. Or Chinese. That’s why the Digital Decade was launched in 2020. But what’s the deal, now that we’re halfway?

AI makes it so much easier to create a prototype. Using vibe coding, you can create a proof-of-concept in minutes or hours. And they're created the millions. Many fail. In fact most fail, must fail, there is no space for millions of successful products. Where do they go, these failed prototypes?

We’re a small company but we use AI big time. Or maybe we use AI big time because we’re a small company. Some are frustrated by the fear they might lose their jobs to AI, some are frustrated by the failures of AI in their work. We’re not. We’re changing though. Becoming all-rounders.

I’m a huge fan of Douglas Engelbart. In the heyday of American creativity he pioneered most — maybe all — of what took computers to the next level that until then, cost millions but could do no more than a pocket calculator. Engelbart’s goal was “Augmenting Human Intellect”. And he did.

Mamdani, wins for US democrats, mayors of the world unite against climate-sceptic populist politicians, and even more people reaching a ripe old age. That’s our Good News Sunday this week.

Some say AI is the main cause for the massive amounts of layoffs in the software industry. Some say AI is used as an excuse. But there’s a rebound happening. And with the EU aiming to spend 300 billion on digital sovereignty, tech as a profession isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I took me a very long time to learn programming. Granted, I started rather late. I’d already build myself a career before the internet even started. But learn it I did. It’s paradigms, structures, syntax. Enter AI. Does all I learnt through hard study in a flash. I should maybe retire. But wait…

I’m reading “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins, founder of the AI company Numenta. It’s complicated stuff, but luckily Hawkins can explain it in simple terms. Today I want to talk a little about one of the core statements in the book, which is that intelligence and movement are intricately linked.

When the story of the annexation of Nexperia by the Dutch government surfaced, I initially quite wary of the deeper reasoning behind the move. And especially wary of US involvement. But as it turns out, there were signs that couldn’t be ignored.

This week’s Good News Sunday is a little more upbeat than last week: Amsterdam is building, Australia is acknowledging their indigenous peoples, Maldives is banning smoking, and Ireland has a new president. And in our own country some good news as well: sanity has prevailed.

“You disappear every time you leave the room“. I’ve googled, but was unable to find that line, from some movie, which has stayed with me for decades. What does it mean? For me, it’s about the trust that you don’t leave, and won’t, that make our relationships work, in business and in life.

The elections here in the Netherlands were yesterday, and it looks like the far-right, anti-immigrant party didn't get the most votes. But the difference is minimal. Distrust in government is driving the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment. Distrust in the internet. Distrust in anything big.

Today is election day in the Netherlands. A crucial vote, which I hope will lead us away from the hard right turn we made two years ago. And back into community, democracy. The name of the operating system of the internet is Ubuntu, which means unity and community. Lets celebrate.

The AI we use daily is but one of the approaches to AI. It’s truly useful, as we know within our software company. But it’s also terribly inefficient, and prone to catastrophic failures. Jeff Hawkins’ company Numenta has been investigating a much more efficient alternative for 20 years.

The European Union is missing that one defining factor that makes a nation a whole: a common language, spoken and understood by all citizens. But that is changing rapidly. Within a couple of generations, everyone here will speak Pan-European English.

Every Sunday, I try to find snippets of goodness in the news. Might be that I’m doing some a disservice, but this week, I just can’t find them.

Some — mostly those who are quite removed from actual production — say that AI will take away our jobs. We who are using AI in our day-to-day realise that far from replacing us, AI is making us see more clearly where our value lies. Which is simply being human.

In the media is the news that Prince Harry and Meghan have signed a decree to ban Artificial Superintelligence. But neither they nor we understand what intelligence really is, let alone how to create a superintelligent machine. It’s easy to sign off on a ban for something that might never exist.

The European Union’s Digital Decade is an ambitious project to level up digital proficiency on par with the US and China. But it’s challenged by mismanagement, corruption and outright sabotage.

I’m spending my last days in New Zealand with my eldest sister after a family member’s funeral. But what’s that noise next door? Oh, it’s Diwali.

In 2020 the European Union launched what it calls the “Digital Decade”. China has becoming digitally sovereign in its 5 year plan. But if you look at the dominant digital force, it’s the USA by a long shot.  The cultural and economic dominance of the US may be waning, but not its digital dominance.

Can AI be held accountable? It’s a conundrum that the European Union has been discussing for some years. There are laws proposed to define the personhood of robots and AI, if any. For me, it’s still about people though. Not some machine.

I used to think of China as an unwelcome stopover on my trips from Amsterdam to my family in New Zealand. But I am getting more and more interested. Next year I hope to visit.

I’m fascinated by history and if and how it repeats itself. I like to divide into periods, I did that when I was younger when there was no internet but there was music. Is there anything to be gleaned from the history of popular music that could tell us something about the future of the internet?

Cherish your mistakes. That’s rule 1 of any entrepreneur or inventor. Analyse them, learn from them. AI, as we know it now, is so hungry, whole towns could be powered from the energy needed for a single training run. Could still turn out to be a costly mistake.

In this week's Good News Sunday, good news for century-old plants buried under factories in Canada, good news for GenZ protesters, good news for Christchurch New Zealand, and good news, the best, for Gaza.

We are all captivated by the latest revolution, AI. But while investment in AI is ramping up fast, it’s now sitting at a humble 3% percentage of the investments in previous revolutions: steam, electricity, mobility, telecommunications, and internet. It’s a tiny revolution.

Every cultural shift changes the language we use and the way we think. We can trace those changes through the centuries, we might read about them, but the lived reality of times past can never be retrieved. We just don’t have the words.