#52: WHAT GIFTS ARE YOU GETTING FOR CHRISTMAS?

What's the digital gift you want for Christmas? A yearly ChatGPT subscription? Gemini? Enough tokens to power Cursor or Claude?

I've been thinking about how digital natives are celebrating the holidays this year and what subscriptions they're hoping to unwrap for 2026. Leer en español en Paragraph.

• Major power blackout in San Francisco shut down a lot of Waymos on the street. Musk said his cars weren’t affected, but those still have safety drivers so it’s not really comparable.

• El Salvador is investing in education with AI. Platzi partnered with them to offer free access to all citizens. And Grok from X is giving students access to AI tutoring in public schools. If you’re from El Salvador, go here to apply for a free year.

• Karpathy’s LLM year in review for 2025. I like his point about summoning ghosts and the merit he gives to Cursor, Claude Code, and Nano Banana. This is important reading.

• New words that we got from 2025. I found this very entertaining because language changes every year and 2025 gave us some very good words that aren’t part of my vocabulary yet, like vibecoding.

• Stanford AI center’s most popular articles of 2025. Mental health and protecting children top the list - shows where the real concerns are. Here’s the deep dive on protecting children in the age of AI and the dangers of AI in mental health care.

• Cursor’s 2025 Wrapped. Everyone’s doing Wrapped now - I got one from Tesla superchargers, Aqua voice, ChatGPT, you name it. But Cursor’s shows the real story of how I was vibing with code this year, building alongside Claude.

• Year in reviews are coming out. Jakob Nielsen and The Pragmatic Engineer both shared their 2025 highlights.

• A review of how crime stats are going down in America this 2025. This will turn political in 2026 during the midterm campaigns. Mark my words.

• More predictions for 2026, this time from Speedrun. AI University anybody? Also, Julia’s collection of quotes for Next Big Thing LatAm 2026.

• Scott Galloway is also doing his predictions for next year. I like how bullish he is on Amazon and Waymo. I hope he’s not right about the AI boom, OpenAI, and Nvidia though. Might be a bubble, but it will be harsh if this falls apart.

• The cybersecurity crisis that AI will generate will be an important discussion in 2026. I’ve seen how these tools are developing better exploits, and this will definitely find cracks in current enterprises. I believe there’s good investment in tools to defend, but we might not be even, at least for next year.

• China is living in the future with drones, fast trains, flying cabs, self-driving taxis, and battery swapping for EVs. And look at this hotel in Guilin. The video shows a futuristic hotel with Avatar-like views among the karst mountains. (Most likely the Shangri-La Guilin or Alila Yangshuo based on the architecture and location.)

• AI bathroom monitors in American high schools. Schools are spending a lot on this surveillance tech, but where’s the research showing it actually works? Do we really need AI in bathrooms?

• Gemini models are impressive, but their infrastructure: Google Cloud, Google AI Studio, etc. is still messy. Here it is described as an exercise of frustration to find a Gemini API key.

• Lovable announced their Series B. Great story, amazing branding, and they keep doing great work.

• NYTimes exposing sexual abuse problems at Uber due to inadequate background check policies in many US states. If it’s this bad in the US, I imagine it’s even worse in other countries.

Next week, I was gonna call the last newsletter of the year Week 67, just to follow the meme. But I’m not even gonna make it. This is over already. The new generation moves at that fast pace.

Writing this update from South Lake Tahoe. Not that much snow for skiing in the main resorts yet, but that’s my plan for Christmas. 🎅