2025 In Review Mirror: AI, Wi-Fi, Love, and Hertz

It’s the end of the year, and, as a tradition, I’m going to recap what happened in my little world during the last 364 days, tech and life.

If you find this post a tad personal, that’s intentional. The point here is that this website is as real and as no-nonsense as the one behind it.

Here’s a quick joke:

• What’s one thing Wi-Fi and Love have in common?
• They are both measured in hertz.

And that’s the gist of my 2025 experience. In all, the year has been quite strange, though for me it was mostly better than the previous few, as hinted by the photos below, despite another health scare at the beginning.

Let’s start with the tech.

2025’s Tech: The year when AI blossomed into a scary menace

If I had to pick one thing in the tech world of 2025, that’d be artificial intelligence. In fact, it was so big that hardly anything else is even worth mentioning. And for all the excitement in what AI can do, the year proved more of how scary it can be.

I recently published a lengthy post on this topic, but the gist is that in 2025, the tool became all-consuming, with significant investment in money and energy, bringing about many significant changes in the tech world.

Here are a couple of examples within my areas of coverage: At the beginning of the year, Western Digital split off SanDisk to focus on platter-based storage (a.k.a. hard drives) to provide low-cost storage for AI data centers. Toward the end of the year, Micron abandoned Crucial, its long-standing and popular consumer brand, to focus its efforts on delivering system memory for, you guessed it, AI datacenters.

Nothing is real anymore

The return on all those changes and investments hasn’t been all that meaningful. In fact, AI’s effects this year were mainly worrisome, if not outright negative: nothing is “real” anymore.

We now have fake and deepfakes in all aspects of life: Fake online articles, fake photos, fake videos, fake productivity, fake progress, fake sincerity, fake justice, and fake outrage. Social media has become a playground for AI bots, with fake posts and fake engagement.

On the flip side, real original content has seriously fallen victim to AI. You don’t have to look very far: Google’s AI Overview gleans information from original content providers to synthesize (often incorrect) in-page answers, rather than providing clicks and views to the source, effectively downgrading, if not killing outright, many websites.

In short, AI has divided the world of content creation into two categories: (lazy + disingenuous and thriving) vs. (hard work + real and suffering). It’s not that hard to see which will eventually die if the trend continues.

While the lamentation above seems self-serving—I consider myself an original content creator who’s on the “real” (and therefore “suffering”) camp—there’s one thing about AI that could affect everyone equally, regardless of what they do: The rise of sophisticated scams.

The true example of “pig butchering”

Apart from managing this website, which, by the way, has largely been a labor of love, I have a daytime job running an IT consulting business in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the years, we’ve kept many clients safe from bad actors, especially ransomware, with literally 100% success rate.

Our approach is simple: We assume that all users will eventually be infected and design multiple contingency plans with backups and redundancy, both locally and off-site, so that in the case of an attack, minimal time and data are lost.

However, in 2025, a new type of attack occurred within our business circle, rendering our method useless.

In one example, a middle-aged grandparent lost a large 6-figure sum of her life’s savings by wiring it to her “soul mate,” with whom she planned to build a retirement home in a remote area where they’d spend the rest of their time together.

As it turned out, that caring middle-aged man—who first entered her life via an innocuous misaddressed text message that developed into casual daily text conversations and then a “meaningful” months-long relationship, with regular email, voice, and even video messages—never existed. All of that was done with AI. She thought she was “dating” somebody. It was “real and perfect,” as she put it.

In the end, while the lost money was painful, the truth was most soul-crushing.

How did I know all that? Earlier in the year, I was asked to set up “the best and secure Wi-Fi solution” in her apartment, likely so she could stay in touch with her newfound romance with ease.

While the system I put in functioned perfectly, which, in hindsight, might have contributed to the tragedy, unfortunately, no technology can keep you safe from this type of risk.

In the case above, the money was sent legitimately. Nobody hacked into her computer or accounts. Instead, with the help of AI, the bad guys “hacked” into her soul, and with that, nothing was safe—that’s how “big butchering” works. And she wasn’t alone. Thanks to AI, online scam is now a trillion-dollar industry.

And that’s why love and Wi-Fi, the main highway for us to get online, have hertz (lots of it) in common. (Or “hurts”, if you haven’t figured out the pun.)

Sometimes, a joke is funny because it’s true.

Be real and be aware

The lesson here is that to keep your loved ones safe, check on them regularly in person. If the grandmother in the story above hadn’t been so lonely, maybe she wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to those sweet nothings…

Additionally, here are two things I’d recommend to keep in mind in this age of AI:

1. If something seems odd, strange, unusual, or too good to be true, it’s likely not true. (Ignore those random texts, messages, or friend requests!)
2. Do not ever want to believe in anything more than you want the truth.

And the truth is often inconvenient.

Here’s one: This AI fervor will not go away anytime soon. In fact, it might get a bit crazier in 2026 and all that implies. It’s never a good thing when a tool originally designed to make our lives easier becomes a tool for a few to profit from the rest.

You won’t need to pay attention to notice how pervasive AI has been and is going to be—it’s everywhere now. All big companies want to have “AI” in their products.

Broadcom, a major player in the Wi-Fi space, literally calls the upcoming Wi-Fi 8, the Wi-Fi standard for “AI-driven network optimization.” That might just be marketing language, but it could also mean the new standard will pack an extra dose of hertz.

With that, let’s continue with life.

2025’s Life: The year we reached the Olympia, sort of

No, we didn’t achieve anything spectacular, nor did we visit Mount Olympus. We did visit Greece, though…

But let’s back up a bit.

A scary black friday

For us, 2025 started relatively uneventfully at first until the last day of February. As that Friday night went on with the usual relaxing, happy mood ahead of the weekend, disaster struck.

During an otherwise regular, rambunctiously fun section with his older brother, our third three-year-old boy, the one who had often had respiratory issues in previous years, dove from the 5.5-foot-tall top of their bunk bed and hit the hardwood floor with the left corner of his head, right by the left eye.

It was like time stopped for a long moment.

We rushed him to the ICU for the 8th and scariest time in his life. When we arrived, they let him cut the long line during the triage, then surrounded him with waves of doctors, and subsequently, he spent many hours being non-responsive. During that time, I had to be home with the other kids, only to know later that one of the doctors told my wife that we should “prepare for any eventuality”. It was terrifying.

Long story short, he survived. However, upon returning home from the hospital, for weeks, he couldn’t fully open his left eye. It broke my heart each time he told me, “Daddy! Turn the light on, it’s so dark in here!” even during the daytime. He just couldn’t see very well.

It took him a month to recover, which was a miracle. Still, the trauma affected us deeply. My wife and I both couldn’t sleep well for weeks after the incident… But life went on, and by late April things got back to normal.

That’s when we decided to go to Greece. Everyone deserved a good vacation.

And it was the best vacation

And off we went in mid-June during the summer break with two other families. With six adults and seven kids in a group, we didn’t expect much. But it turned out to be our best vacation. Among other things, nobody was sick, bled, or had to visit a local hospital during that time, which was a big win in itself.

Then the fact that Greece was absolutely fantastic didn’t hurt.

We first went to Crete, where the beaches were kept extremely clean. Literally, we couldn’t find any human-related waste in the water. No cigrate butts, no plastic, no paper. Literally nothing but clean infinity-pool-like water, often teeming with marine life. The water was so clear that it was impossible to know how deep it truly was, as we could see rocks and even fish at the bottom.

After that, we arrived in Athens and checked off an item on my bucket list by visiting the Parthenon on the Acropolis and then the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion.

Growing up reading Homer, I’ve always been interested in the Greek Gods, and while it was super-exciting and satisfying to visit the ruins, it occurred to me how tough it was to explain Greek Mythology to my small children, with all its sordid details and epic yet often ridiculous tales of revenge and survival. But I believe I was able to make them curious enough to find out more on their own.

After Greece, on the way back, we stayed in Istanbul for a few nights, which was another memorable adventure.

Istanbul reminded me of Hanoi, with its crazy traffic (albeit fewer bicycles and scooters). Here’s an anecdote: We stayed in a boutique hotel near the Blue Mosque, and the car that picked us up from the airport took the last quarter-mile of the trip in reverse because it was “faster that way,” per the driver.

It took us about 24 hours to get used to the periodic, loud Islamic prayers broadcast over public speakers, day or night. After that, we fell in love with the sights, the history, and especially the friendly folks and fantastic street BBQs. (Hint: go for the chicken or lamb!) On our last day, the hotel manager even offered to treat us to a home-cooked Turkish meal. It was a delicious Kavurma dish.

Truth be told, the best thing that happened during the trip was that my boy showed he had indeed fully recovered from the fall. Not only could he see normally, but he behaved as generally as a child of his age. He had fun and could handle all the traveling with ease, though at times he didn’t want to walk and whined about how he wanted me to carry him instead. That I could handle.

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There you go. My 2025 has been strange, scary, and yet full of many wonderful memories. Most importantly, like usual, we kept it real.

Here’s to the hope that 2026 will be even better in spite of the threats of the abuse of AI and all that implies. On this front, we’ll learn more at CES. If you’re attending, hit me up via a message, and maybe we can chat in person!

Last but not least, I want to make sure you know how much I appreciate your support over the year through views, clicks, typo reports, donations, and subscriptions. Given the adverse effects of AI mentioned above, your contribution played an increasingly important role in keeping this website and its 100% nonsense-free promise alive. And it’s still here. So, THANK YOU!

With that:

Happy New Year 2025!