Hi everyone!
I can’t believe 2025 is almost over. It flew by!
As the year winds down, I hope you’re all finding some well-deserved time to unplug and enjoy some quality time with friends and family.
I wanted to say a huge thank you for reading my newsletter this year. I hope you enjoyed the monthly snippets of random yet cool stuff, and I hope you'll tune in next year as well.
Enjoy!
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
Hutter Prize
This is a long-running competition challenging researchers to compress 1GB of Wikipedia text into the smallest possible file. Why? Compression serves as a benchmark of artificial general intelligence. True understanding is considered the ultimate form of compression.
Japan's laser weapon
A Japanese warship is now equipped with a 100-kilowatt laser weapon designed to shoot down drones. It will now be tested at sea to evaluate how it performs while dealing with challenges like ship movement, wind, and atmospheric conditions.
You're not burned out
This article argues burnout isn’t caused by too much work, but by too little meaningful work. Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed that having a purpose in life was the key to survival. With a “Why” in your life, you can bear almost any “How.”
Airbus flying to European clouds
Airbus wants to move its most sensitive data to a European cloud. Why? They want “digital sovereignty”. The company wants to ensure its critical information remains under European control. The catch? One executive thinks there’s only an 80% chance they’ll find a provider that offers everything they need.
Goldfish have a good memory
Challenging the popular myth of the 3-second memory, scientists at Oxford University have showed that goldfish possess impressive navigational skills. In an experiment, fish were trained to swim a specific distance for a food reward. They consistently remembered the distance even when cues were removed and start points changed.
People walk faster in cities
Here’s a fun fact: the bigger a city, the faster its residents walk. Research into “urban metabolism” suggests that people in larger, denser cities walk faster because of sensory overload and a psychological need to reduce “social interference”.
Five eras of our brain
A study of nearly 4,000 brain scans revealed our brains develop through 5 distinct “epochs,” from infancy to old age. From birth to age 9, the brain consolidates its network. Until age 32, it enters a phase of refinement, where the wiring becomes more efficient. Between the ages of 32 and 66, our intelligence tends to plateau, and around age 66, there’s a gradual decrease in brain connectivity as the wiring declines.
⏳ On this day...
1831 - Charles Darwin sets sail on HMS Beagle, a five-year journey that provided the critical observations for his theory of evolution by natural selection.
1845 – Dr. Crawford Long uses ether as an anesthetic for childbirth for the first time. This discovery laid the groundwork for modern surgery.
1922 - Japan commissions the Hosho, the world's first aircraft carrier. This milestone revolutionized naval warfare, shifting the focus from massive battleships to mobile airbases.
1945 - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is established to oversee the global financial system. It remains one of the most influential organizations in maintaining international trade and in helping countries during financial crises.
🛸 Space
Crashing Starlink satellites
SpaceX de-orbited 472 Starlink satellites between December 2024 and May 2025. While that sounds like a responsible thing to do, it’s also creating a problem. When the satellites burn up, they release aluminium oxide into the upper atmosphere, which can destroy the ozone layer and contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Datacenters in space?
A few tech CEOs have proposed putting datacenters in space because they could harness solar power around the clock. This article was written by a former NASA and Google engineer, who argues this is a “catastrophically bad idea”. His main reasons? It’s hard to radiate away heat in space, chips are vulnerable to space radiation, and getting everything into orbit will be a huge undertaking.
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
What AI datacenters are doing to your energy bill
US companies are spending enormous amounts of money to build AI data centers. This comes with a huge question: where will the electricity come from? The sharp increase in demand and relatively slow increase in generation is leading to higher bills for everyone. This investigation traced one person's rising bill directly back to the boom in AI datacenters.
AI Slop = Paperbacks?
Worries that AI slop will take over the internet? History might have the answer. Cal Newport compares AI slop to the rise of cheap, "thrashy" books in the 1940s. It didn't kill literature. It grew the entire market for reading. I found this a very interesting perspective.
Nvidia acquires Groq
While Nvidia dominates the AI market, it's not resting on its laurels. The company acquired Groq, maker of Language Processing Units (LPUs). These chips are architected for speed and efficiency in inference, sometimes running models 10x more efficiently than standard GPUs. This could be Nvidia reacting to Google's TPU chips, which are also more efficient.
Word of the year
Merriam-Webster has named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as low-quality digital content mass-produced by artificial intelligence. This term captures the flood of AI-generated media, from absurd videos and junky e-books to fake news and corporate reports. The word, which originally meant “soft mud” or “food waste,” now reflects the public’s perception of this content as digital junk.
⚡️ Energy & Environment
CO2 batteries
An Italian company, Energy Dome, has created a novel “CO2 Battery” to store excess renewable energy. The system uses a giant inflatable dome to hold 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. To store energy, the CO2 is compressed into a liquid. To release it, the liquid is expanded back into a gas, which spins a turbine to generate electricity.
Microplastic filters
A single household washing machine can release 500 grams of microplastics each year from clothes. These are notoriously hard to filter out. German researchers looked to how fish solve this problem and created a filter based on how sardines filter plankton from water using their gill system. The result? A filter that can remove up to 99% of microplastic from laundry water!