The Tech Industry’s Illusion of Innovation
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Oza-Cesuras, 4th December 2025
There’s a moment in every hype cycle when reality taps the industry on the shoulder and whispers, “This isn‘t working.“ And every time that moment arrives, tech responds with the grace of a cornered raccoon.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones and Lila de Alba
It’s not your obedient chatbot anymore. It’s a proactive and goal-driven system. It plans and reasons. It uses tools like browsers, APIs, and code editors. It keeps working until the job is done. Often, it requires zero human hand-holding.
Think: a tireless, hyper-competent underling who takes care of everything. They book your Provençal villa and negotiate the rate. They also curate restaurants and arrange transfers, all while you’re already on the rosé.
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Sir Afilonius Rex, Martyn Rhisiart Jones, and Lila De Alba
Madrid 3rd December 2025
(Mel Brooks: “Ladies and gentlemen… QUANTUM! The only science where nobody knows what the hell is happening, including the scientists!”)
(Dave Chappelle: “Man, every time somebody says ‘quantum’, my wallet hides in the corner out of fear.”)
When people hear “quantum,” they think of a super-computer so powerful it could fold reality, solve climate change, and somehow still lose to your gran at Sudoku. But no — the PR departments insist — that’s tiny baby quantum. Now we’re in Quantum 2.0, which sounds like a direct-to-DVD sequel starring a different actor.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
A Coruña, 2nd December 2025
Agentic AI refers to advanced AI agents. They are capable of independently chasing ambitious, open-ended objectives. These agents break tasks into steps and reason iteratively. They wield tools and persist through obstacles with minimal human guidance. In summary: think of a less obedient tucan. Imagine a more relentlessly competent understudy. This AI can orchestrate your travel, chase invoices, or conduct desk research. It does all this while you’re on the Amalfi Coast with an Aperol spritz. The phrase du jour in Palo Alto marks a shift. Assistants move from being responsive to becoming genuinely proactive. Your to-do list may soon sort itself out as if by magic.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones and The Political Contrarians
A Coruña, 17th November 2025
Both AI and quantum computing face distorted incentives from venture capital, conferences, and media that prioritise revolutionary hype over realistic timelines and incremental progress. Yet, sober expectations, acknowledging that true breakthroughs may take decades and enormous resources, are essential to responsibly realising their genuine, upward trajectories.
In the annals of tech-wreck evangelism and boom-and-bust bullshit, few phrases are as reliably lucrative as “paradigm shift”, “exponential progress”, and “the next electricity”. Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing have both been honoured with these accolades in recent years, complete with nine-figure funding rounds, breathless TED talks, and the occasional greed-driven billionaire divination. Both fields are genuinely necessary. Both are also surrounded by a fog of exaggeration so thick that even seasoned observers struggle to see the road ahead.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones and the GoodStrat Editorial Team (Alex S., Marcus S., Stewart L., Dawn F., Jenny S.)
Brussels, EU, 14th November, 2025
As 2026 creeps in, it resembles a broken-down delivery robot experiencing hallucinations of depression and dread. The big tech news isn’t flashy new features. Bells and whistles, and bullshit aren’t prominent anymore. Instead, AI has quietly infiltrated everything. It’s like mould, cynicism and cheap furniture in a rental apartment. Suddenly, it’s “infrastructure.” This is what people say when they mean, “We can’t get rid of it now.” Even if it starts insulting customers, peeing on the C-suite carpet, and revealing the fraud of our makers.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
A Coruña, 12th November 2025
CONSIDER THIS: DATA AS A MIRROR OF HUMANITY
Friends, Roman, Countryfolk! In an age where every tap on a screen, every fleeting glance at a smartwatch, and even the subtle rhythm of a resting pulse are silently collected as data, what does this immense and glittering digital mosaic reveal about our innermost selves and the selves we have yet to inhabit?
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Ana-Celina Alba de Borbon
Madrid, 7th November 2025
The question: Does social media serve to surface mental health issues?
The answer: Yes!
Yes, social media serves to surface mental health issues, both by exposing underlying problems that might otherwise stay hidden and by amplifying or even creating new ones.
Here’s a breakdown with evidence from research and real-world patterns:
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Spain, 2nd November 2025
Five years ago, I wrote a piece called Bullshit at the Data Lakehouse, which caused quite a bit of a stir on social media, so I’m taking this opportunity to revisit it and revise it and to offer it as a historical reference with ramifications for today and the future.
My piece began in this spirit and then progressed rapidly.
Move over, big data hubris, data mesh revisionism, and data lake stupidity, there’s a newer, thicker and far bigger arsehole on the block. And it goes by the unbelievably idiotic name of data lakehouse. It is being hailed as a new paradigm, but in reality, it is a naive, dishonest, and disruptive fraud. So what’s occurring?
The gutter-snipes, hustlers and useless pundits who failed to make big data and data lakes the success of the 2010s have set their vulture-eyed sights on data warehousing. It’s not smart, it is not funny, and it does no one any service.
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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
2nd November 2025
Suppose you enjoy, abhor or are simply bored with the massive surfeit of hype surrounding degenerative AI. In that case, you might just hate these less-than-faithful quotes as well.
If you enjoy one or two of the quotes, well, then that’s an acceptable bonus too.
So, to begin at the beginning…
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Martyn Jones and Celine de Santiago
Madrid, Spain – 2nd November 2025
The world of generative AI is full of definitions, terms, buzzwords and monikers. Here are the definitions for twelve of the most important, pertinent and impressive terms found in the fantastic, exciting and revolutionary field. Enjoy the ride!
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Sir Afilonius Rex
Manhattan, New York, USA
1st November 2025
Inspired by conversations with Selina AItana Goya
Move over, data scientists, those earnest souls hunched over Jupyter notebooks, nursing lukewarm flat whites and dreaming of p-values. The new aristocrats of the algorithm have arrived, and they speak in barely audible breaths. Whispering AI specialists, the hushed virtuosos who coax meaning from murmurs, have quietly annexed the crown once worn by the “sexiest job of the 21st century”. (Apologies to Harvard Business Review; even the sexiest jobs suffer from inflationary pressures.)These soft-spoken savants are not merely surviving the generative-AI rollercoaster; they are redesigning the ride, adding velvet restraints and mood lighting. To avoid being flung into the souvenir shop of obsolescence, you must master ten career-extending hacks. Consider them the conversational equivalent of whispering sweet nothings into a supercomputer’s ear: intimate, precise, and oddly lucrative.
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27th October 2025
Galicia, Spain, European Union
Every age has its prophets. The Victorians had their mesmerists, the 1990s had their dot-com futurists, the 2000s had our wacky and dishonest Big Data clowns, and we — lucky us — have our AI influencers, the brave souls who can turn a prompt into a keynote, a hallucination into a business model, and a buzzword into a lifestyle.
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Barnice Mucko, Sir Afilonius Rex, Klammy Hans Sauerbraten.
“AI will make you unstoppable” voice — intentionally sycophantic and self-serious…
By Barnice Blaar, Gretel Grumbleguts and Nifan Farc.
Every so often, a technology comes along that completely reshapes how we work, create, and imagine. Just a few years ago, “artificial intelligence” sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie. Today, Generative AI isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the most transformative force of our time.
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http://www.goodstrat.com/books
X Is Dying In Europe: Here’s Why
I asked X about its massive losses in Europe.
“@grok, can you explain the massive drop in interactions in Europe with X?”
This is what Grok had to say and updated for today.
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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan
The 2030 Agenda, officially known as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, is a global framework adopted by all United Nations member states in September 2015. It aims to address the most pressing global challenges and promote sustainable development by 2030. The agenda is based on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 specific targets and covers three key dimensions: economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection.
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Full-Private Number-One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colours.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
I am a sceptic, part of the awkward squad of troublemakers.
Such as, “What the hell is that all about?”
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Martyn Richard Jones, Galicia, 14th May 2025.
I’m feeling generous, so I would like to introduce you to my top eight list of foolish things that people say about data.
I think that data does have a role to play in some businesses. I also believe that some of the basic distributed file store and text search technologies used in data can be usefully employed, in non-traditional indexing, counting and correlation. However, there is an awful lot of nonsense said and written about data.
So, onwards and upwards.
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Martyn Richard Jones, Galicia, 14 May 2025
Amid artificial intelligence’s clamour, the discourse ranges from the delightfully absurd to the soberingly wise. Here are some of the most outlandish and refreshingly grounded reflections on AI from voices across the spectrum.
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Hold up, folks! You’re going to love these! They are amazing, beautiful, classy, dazzling and eminently readable. And that’s an absolute understatement of Mel Brook’s proportions.
As a writer, I have several works to my name. This post highlights some of these works. It also offers a quick link to the Amazon platform, where you can get your editions.
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ChatGPT
Martyn Richard Jones, often referred to as “Mister Data,” is a renowned strategist, leader, and coach specializing in data, information, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). He offers expert advice on processing and utilizing business data to derive insights, reflect organizational performance, and develop data-supported responses to strategic challenges.
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