Martyn Richard Jones
Our man in Spain.
A Coruña, 13th December 2025
As 2025 winds down, the tinsel comes out. It’s tempting to imagine a quieter, saner digital ecosystem on the horizon. Call it festive optimism or a data professional’s annual catharsis. Here are twelve wishes for 2026. They are equal parts hard-edged realism, FT Weekend reflection, and Wired-grade futurism.
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The Oracle of Delphi and Editorial Team
Spain, 10th December 2025
In the sprawling digital bazaar of 2025 and the impending and interesting 2026, where every second-domain site peddles AI hype, data fakehouse, data mess or crypto snake oil, goodstrat.com stands out as a refreshingly unapologetic intellectual fortress.
It’s not a glossy corporate brochure. It is not a paywalled newsletter farm. It’s the online HQ of Martyn Richard Jones. He is a grizzled data, information and knowledge architect and self-styled “Data Shouterer-in-Chief.” He’s been dissecting the guts of information systems since the dial-up era.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Somewhere in Spain, 10th December 2025
Oh, brilliant. Gather round, comrades. It’s time for another installment of “Tech Executives Discover That Computers Need Electricity.” This time, they’ve dressed it up in a shiny frock and called it “2026 Data Trends.” Christ almighty, where do we even start?
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By Martyn Rhisiart Jones
For Energy Unplugged – a Cambriano partner
Walk through any tech conference today, and you can feel it: the hum of inevitability. AI will cure diseases. It will drive cars and write novels. AI will run governments. If you believe the BS booth graphics, it will probably solve loneliness, too.
The problem is, we’ve been here before.
Artificial intelligence has been promising to change everything since the 1950s. And every decade or so, we rediscover the same fundamental truth: machines don’t magically create wisdom. They just scale whatever understanding, or misunderstanding, we feed them.
I know this because I spent years building the early stuff. Neural networks, parallel distributed processing, and automatic feature extraction. The “deep learning” of 1987 with less RAM and worse haircuts. The technology was exciting, even miraculous. But back then, as now, it struggled to live up to the grand claims that surrounded it.
And today, the hype is louder than ever.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Galicia, Spain. 7th December 2025.
Darlings, it’s December 2025 and the party is now officially sweaty. The champagne has gone warm. Someone’s been sick in the ficus. The DJ is playing the same four AI remixes on loop. He is frantically checking the fire exits. Here is your updated field guide to the seven trends. These were going to “reshape humanity.” Now they are mostly reshaping venture capitalists’ therapy bills.
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The Christmas Special Editorial Team
Madrid, 8th December 2025
Imagine the stage is almost completely dark. One spotlight, maybe two. Our favourite standup philosopher stands perfectly still for eight full seconds. He just breathes through his nose. It’s like a man who’s just found a half-eaten kebab in his coat pocket from 2009. Then, very slowly, he begins.
Thank you… thank you for coming… to our Good Strat and LinkedIn dog and pony show.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
A Coruña, 6th December 2025
Here is the full content of Popular AI Terms Explained, transcribed as clean, readable text tables, organised by section.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Sir Afilonius Rex, Lile de Alba and our agentic intelligent actor, Selina Savant.
Spain, 6th December 2025.
A hybrid renaissance is quietly rewriting the future of trustworthy artificial intelligence. The great folks here at Good Strat humbly champion this movement. In the fevered race to build ever-larger language models, a counterintuitive truth has begun to emerge from the labs. Surprisingly, sometimes the best way to make AI smarter is to shackle it with centuries-old logic. Modus ponens is that dusty Latin phrase from Aristotelian syllogism (“if P then Q; P, therefore Q”). It is enjoying an unexpected second act. It has become one of the most promising tools for keeping generative AI honest. It helps make AI coherent and, dare one say, responsible.
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Sir Horatio Pollox with the collaboration of Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Lila de Alba and Sir Afilonius Rex
London, Paris, New York and A Coruña, 5th December 2025
Autonomous AI agents are goal-directed systems. They show planning, tool-use, long-horizon reasoning, and continuous execution. This signifies a phase transition in the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
Recent benchmarking (e.g., GAGA-MAGA, GAIA&GAIA, WebSerena, and AgentBotch) shows state-of-the-art agents now outperform human baselines on multi-step, real-world tasks by margins exceeding 1040 %.
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Why Data Warehousing Is the Boring, Brutal, Beautiful Future of Data
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
A Coruña, 5/12/2025
The modern enterprise data stack looks less like technology and more like cyberpunk plumbing. Pipes are rerouted through pipes. Valves are attached to valves. Layers are placed on top of each other until the whole thing resembles a drawing. It’s like a creation made by a caffeinated child let loose on a whiteboard. Data lakes are here. A data mesh is over there. A lakehouse is balanced precariously on top. It resembles a loft extension built by someone who learnt carpentry from TikTok.
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