Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.)

Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did.

• Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it?

• Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite.

• Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode.

• EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28.

• Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average.

• Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap.

I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026.

Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash

The first time I ever used dial-up internet was sometime in the 1990s. Some of you will remember that a company called CompuServe used to mail out floppy disks with "10 free hours." And I still remember the feeling of amazement the first time I tried it. Suddenly, I could chat with people from around the world. Remember a/s/l? It was so enthralling that those 10 free hours certainly didn't last very long.

Fast forward to more recent times, and I got that exact same feeling of amazement when I started diving into crypto. The first time I created a wallet, logged into to a service (using only the wallet), and then transferred funds around, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a fundamental shift in how the world works." A lightbulb went off. And I still feel this way about crypto, which is why I remain long ETH.

But now I'm also excited about AI (along with the rest of the world). With every new model release, it gets that much more impressive. Last week I wrote about Gemini 3 and, since then, I decided to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and move all my activity over to it. I'm sure that a better model will get released before we know it, but for right now I'm having a lot of fun creating just about everything.

Here's a cartoon isometric of Toronto that I prompted to include "landmarks" and the day's weather.

Here's a photo of a woman standing in the middle of a street in Tokyo wearing a trench coat and holding an umbrella. My prompt also asked it to make it look like a "grainy digital photo."

And here's a knolling shot (new word I just learned) featuring the gear of a global citizen (or globizen if you will). I prompted each of the objects, down to the white panel on the Blue Jays hat.

It's not perfect. Text remains an issue. If you look closely at the front of the passports or the text on the Fujifilm camera, you'll see that it's AI. But it's only a matter of time before this goes away. These kinds of images used to require a lot of time and effort. Now I can create them with one hand on my phone while I'm eating a bowl of cereal and having a morning coffee. There's zero marginal cost.

Thank goodness I've got more than 10 hours of usage.

Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.)

Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did.

• Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it?

• Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite.

• Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode.

• EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28.

• Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average.

• Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap.

I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026.

Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash

The first time I ever used dial-up internet was sometime in the 1990s. Some of you will remember that a company called CompuServe used to mail out floppy disks with "10 free hours." And I still remember the feeling of amazement the first time I tried it. Suddenly, I could chat with people from around the world. Remember a/s/l? It was so enthralling that those 10 free hours certainly didn't last very long.

Fast forward to more recent times, and I got that exact same feeling of amazement when I started diving into crypto. The first time I created a wallet, logged into to a service (using only the wallet), and then transferred funds around, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a fundamental shift in how the world works." A lightbulb went off. And I still feel this way about crypto, which is why I remain long ETH.

But now I'm also excited about AI (along with the rest of the world). With every new model release, it gets that much more impressive. Last week I wrote about Gemini 3 and, since then, I decided to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and move all my activity over to it. I'm sure that a better model will get released before we know it, but for right now I'm having a lot of fun creating just about everything.

Here's a cartoon isometric of Toronto that I prompted to include "landmarks" and the day's weather.

Here's a photo of a woman standing in the middle of a street in Tokyo wearing a trench coat and holding an umbrella. My prompt also asked it to make it look like a "grainy digital photo."

And here's a knolling shot (new word I just learned) featuring the gear of a global citizen (or globizen if you will). I prompted each of the objects, down to the white panel on the Blue Jays hat.

It's not perfect. Text remains an issue. If you look closely at the front of the passports or the text on the Fujifilm camera, you'll see that it's AI. But it's only a matter of time before this goes away. These kinds of images used to require a lot of time and effort. Now I can create them with one hand on my phone while I'm eating a bowl of cereal and having a morning coffee. There's zero marginal cost.

Thank goodness I've got more than 10 hours of usage.