decisions

When medical dramas seemed to be in the doldrums, ‘The Pitt’ appeared. And that has forced Netflix to make decisions

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The Pitt’ has become one of HBO Max’s biggest critical and popular successes in recent times. And Netflix has reacted to the discovery of its rival by incorporating the 15 complete seasons of ‘ER’ into its catalogue. It is not an isolated case. They have been released six new medical dramas during the 2024-2025 season on different networks and platforms. The pattern suggests that the long and intense format recovers part of the space that short seasons, in the style of HBO’s prestige series, had imposed in the last decade. The phenomenon. The series created by R. Scott Gemmill is sweeping: a 93% on Rotten Tomatoestwo Golden Globes (Best Drama Series and Best Actor), five Emmys (with thirteen nominations)… and the audience figures are just as strong: the first season averaged 10 million viewers per episode, but The second is multiplying that data by three.. Quite a bombshell that is generating a predictable shock wave. The reason for success. Its technical and artistic virtues, needless to say, are very notable, with its feverish portrait of a night in the ER, mixing inconsequential cases with authentic life-or-death medical challenges, seasoned with circumstances that complicate each season (shootings, avalanches of patients, blackouts). But the format also explains part of the success: each episode represents one hour within a 15-hour shift in the ER, that is, fifteen chapters for a single work day. The real-time structure, a reformulation of ’24’ in a clinical format, allows overlapping medical cases to be followed as staff deal with lack of resources and ethical decisions under pressure. Emergency professionals on websites that collect viewer opinions, such as IMDBhave highlighted the technical precision of the series, a rare detail in the genre. Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO Max, explained that the production model of ‘The Pitt’ allows seasons to be released twelve months apart, compared to the 24 months required by series like ‘The House of the Dragon‘. “This model could be applied to future productions,” he declared. ‘Emergencies’ on Netflix. In response, Netflix has added to its lineup the complete 15 seasons of ‘ER’. While its genuine successor reaches record figures, Netflix recovers the title that established the rules of the genre three decades earlier. ‘ER’ aired on NBC from 1994 to 2009 and Michael Crichton, a novelist and doctor, wrote the original script in 1974 based on his experience as a student at Boston General Hospital. Studios rejected it for years as too technical and fast-paced, but when it finally came to the screen thanks to Spielberg’s production, the show racked up 124 Emmy nominationsan all-time record for a series, and won 23 statuettes, including best drama series in 1996. The influence of ‘ER’ on later series is indisputable. ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ (on Disney+) adopted its structure of weekly cases combined with long dramatic arcs; ‘House’ (on Netflix, Prime Video, Movistar and SkyShowtime) took the procedural approach applied to complex diagnoses; and ‘The Good Doctor’ (on Netflix, Movistar and Prime Video) inherited the balance between medicine and personal drama. Avalanche of doctors. Until six new medical dramas have come to streaming in recent months, some thanks to the success of ‘The Pitt’, others being more or less contemporary with the premiere of the first season of the HBO Max series. Fox premiered ‘Doc’ (Movistar), which reached 15.6 million viewers in its first 11 days. NBC launched two proposals: ‘Brilliant Minds’ (Movistar), focused on complex neurological cases, and ‘St. Denis Medical’, a comedy in mockumentary format. CBS developed ‘Watson’ (Movistar), where Sherlock Holmes’ legendary sidekick investigates medical mysteries instead of crimes. Netflix produced ‘Pulse’, his first English-language medical dramaset in a Miami trauma center. The platform also premiered ‘Heroes on Guard’, a Korean series about a traumatologist who tries to reorganize a university hospital. Both projects arrived in 2025, the same year that ‘The Pitt’ was consolidated on HBO Max. Some analysts point out that the COVID-19 pandemic focused collective attention on health workers and health systems. Five years later, once the trauma is over, we can allow ourselves to frivolize the dynamics of ER with almost detective plots. Why they succeed again. Critics point to a couple of possible reasons for this type of drama to return to the grid. On the one hand, it is a alternative (especially ‘The Pitt’) to the predominant format in recent times of “complete story that unfolds in eight chapters.” Here we have, in many cases, a multitude of microstories/patients (in the case of ‘The Pitt’ sometimes they are almost sketches) that begin and end in the same episode, a traditional television structure but one that is not usually seen in successful series. The formula also allows for something rare on television today: watching competent professionals solving problems. Each episode features new medical cases while personal arcs progress in the background. The viewer knows that Dr. Robinavitch will save lives on the night in question, even though his personal trauma takes fifteen episodes to resolve. The combination of cases that are resolved immediately and the slow development of a secondary plot also draws on series like ‘ER’ or ‘House’. In Xataka | We thought that cortisol was the biggest enemy of sleep: it is actually the key to making your body perform better during the day

The Internet has become such a hostile place that there are people making drastic decisions: go back to MySpace

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In a thread on Reddit’s r/Millenials subreddit, a user named Blue_Bi0hazard counted that had signed up for SpaceHeya curious MySpace clone, and I was happy about two things. The first, due to the personalization that this new social network offered. “I can’t stand today’s social media,” he explained. “There is hardly any personalization, everything is gray and simplified. Remember how MySpace or Tumblr was: there you really felt that your profile represented you.” Second, because of how the algorithm has taken over everything: at SpaceHey, he explains, “your feed is chronological, rather than what Facebook or Twitter think you should see, plus the damn ads.” These criticisms are not new, and for some time they have caused a unique Internet revolution. Small communities are returning to using clones of myspace as SpaceHeyor of GeoCitiesas NeoCitiesand although their scope is limited, they are the symptom of something very worrying. Beyond nostalgia Behind these seemingly nostalgic gestures, something deeper is drawn. Not only the desire to return to a retro design, but to raise a kind of digital demand. A “I want to have my corner again” in a sea of ​​feeds that no longer belong to us and over which we have no control. The return to MySpace, or rather, to something that evokes it—like SpaceHey—is actually a critical and rebellious act. It is a gesture that says “I am tired of the current Internet turning me into a consumer rather than a user, that everything I do is subject to the algorithm, the subscription and the ads.” And that’s when that return to those rehashes of the past takes on that other meaning. That of a more or less silent protest. Twenty-five years ago, opening the browser was like doing digital zapping and extremely garish. Amateur blogs were interspersed with local forums, profiles with flashing GIFs, view counters (view counters!), and pages that didn’t open on their own, but also had music on autoplay. It was the internet of the 2000s. GeoCities, LiveJournal, ICQ, Friendster, Blogger and MySpace conquered users and they did so with hardly any algorithms. Was a more hippie internetmessy and unpredictable but full of personality. The profiles were their own spaces, not showcases optimized for clicking. Now we remember that time fondly and smile when we realize that the Internet was full of defects. Loading times were much longer, handling HTML was almost a craft, and mixtures of fonts and designs often resulted in strident and garish web pages. However, they also had virtues. They let you make mistakes without charging you for it. They let you be weird without having to ask permission. Nobody (or almost nobody) had to sell anything, and nobody yet knew that they would end up selling you (or your data). It was the internet as a workshop, not as a gallery or showcase. but then standardization arrived. With Facebook, YouTube, Google or later Instagram and TikTok, we were promised order, efficiency and global connection. The Internet went from being its own territory to a service platform in which profiles became uniform, timelines identical, and rules impersonal. The “enshittification” of the internet This is how we have reached the digital fatigue that many experience today. 20 tabs are opened and the same ads, the same formats and the same giants appear. The Internet is no longer so much a “site” as a “medium” in which we only consume, and what we do more than explore and navigate is end up being victims of doomscrolling. This is where the concept comes into play. “enshittification” (“shitification”, in a loose translation) coined by writer Cory Doctorow. This neologism, as recently explained in an interview with Voxdescribes the drift of many online platforms, although it is applicable to all types of companies: “At first they are great for the end users. Then they find ways to retain those users (switching costs, network effects, contracts, DRM) and once the users are trapped, the company makes the product worse to get more value. They then use that surplus to attract business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators), they trap them and start making the product worse for the business side as well. In the end, everyone gets trapped and the platform becomes a pile of garbage. You can see this in places so like Google, Facebook, Uber and Amazon. In other words: what started out promising becomes mediocre, predictable and profit-oriented, not user-oriented. Shitification clearly manifests itself on today’s internet in various ways. It does this with mandatory subscriptions, with algorithms that decide what you see, with constant advertisements and with data that no longer seems to be yours, but rather turns you into simple merchandise. Before, you opened a blog to publish what you wanted. Now the objective seems to be to gain clicks or provoke engagement. All of this has caused users to become target audiences, consumers and even simple data. It seems that there is no more time to browseand we only have it to consume what the algorithms offer us. On Reddit someone asked if others were nostalgic for the internet of the 2000s and the comments were conclusive. The first of them, in fact, made it clear: “nothing seems genuine anymore.” Reviving MySpace That’s where platforms like SpaceHey, which appeared in 2020 and it is totally inspired by MySpace. Its creator, a young German named Anton Röhm and nicknamed “An” on the platform, is in fact the contact that by default is added to your “friends” on the platform, as on MySpace you added that of its creator, Tom Anderson. Long live the wild and original internet. Like a good clone, the similarities between SpaceHey and MySpace go much further. In SpaceHey, personalization shines, and that aesthetic of early 2000 It is evident in strident and shocking designs. The social network — which has around two million users — does not intend to compete with Facebook or Instagram, but it allows its users to recover part of that feeling of freedom and control … Read more

Science has discovered what is the best time of day to be more concentrated and T0mar better decisions: at noon

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As with the muscles, the brain offers its best version the more rested it is. For that reason, the experts recommend Identify the most productivity hours According to the chronotype of each person to carry out the most demanding activities and tasks at that time and have a better cognitive performance. Recent studies have revealed that fatigue affects remarkably when it comes to being more productive and even in decision making. Understanding this relationship helps to better plan schedules and improve performance. An example: Jeff Bezos never program meetings Beyond five in the afternoon Because doing so would imply raising the risk of making erroneous decisions. The moment of higher performance: noon. A study carried out by researchers from the universities of Messina and Bologna (Italy) analyzed more than 104,000 oral exams and found clear patterns at the time of the day when the students had more likely to approvehighlighting a peak that was not related to the difficulty of the exam but to the time in which the exam was taken. The researchers found that the global approved rate was 57%. However, the chart of probabilities to approve drew a bell shape, reaching its maximum point in the hours near noon, especially between 11:00 and 1:00 p.m. In comparison, the approved rates were remarkably lower early in the morning (between 8:00 and 9:00 hours) and the first hour of the afternoon (between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.) without finding outstanding differences between those two moments. Without realizing it, we lose capabilities. To rule out that the downturn registered by the students at noon is conditioned by Knowledge of the subject of the examThe researchers also studied the behavior of teachers. The results of both groups led to the same conclusion: both students and evaluators experienced changes in their mental state and fatigue levels in the same time strip. This could contribute to the afternoon of the approval rate in exams is lower, since both the evaluator and the examinee are more fatigued and the teachers become more irascible and intolerant due to tiredness. If it’s 16:00, you’re guilty. The same conclusions arrived A group of researchers of the University of Columbia and the Ben Gurion University of the Neguev on the importance of the schedule in which judicial sentences and the increase in the severity of judicial decisions are issued. The investigators analyzed the behavior of several judges during the day and found that the favorable sentences to the defendants reached their peak as the pause to eat was approaching, reaching up to 70%. However, as the early hours of the afternoon progressed and the judges approached the next recess, this percentage progressively decreased to almost 0% by increasing the hardness of the sentences imposed. The “Baba” after the meal. This pattern suggests that our brain works best in mid -morning, and maintains that performance until eating. The explanation is found in the combination of biological factors such as Circadian rhythmswhich regulates energy and alert states during the day releasing more or less melatonin to the body to induce sleep state or activate alert and attention mechanisms. Researchers hypothesize that cognitive function continues This time curve naturallyimproving until noon and decreasing after eating, which coincides with the feeling of support after food. After lunch, there is a small increase in melatonin that can cause drowsiness and lower performance. Revitalizing naps. According to The published by Harvard Health Publishinga short nap after eating can improve the concentration and alert state if it lasts between 10 and 30 minutes. According to research in this regard, this type of naps increase the alert by more than 50% and competition by more than 30% compared to those who do not. However, the duration is key, and sleep more than the account It can be counterproductive. The study analyzed the behavior of Mediterranean adults and observed that making a short nap of less than 30 minutes is associated with a lower probability of high blood pressure (21%), while long naps (more than 30 minutes) are linked to the highest metabolic and cardiovascular risk (41%), as well as the higher perimeter of waist and blood glucose. Therefore, a brief nap after food, contributes to energy and maintaining mental acuity in the afternoon. In Xataka | Some neuroscientists believe they have found the trick to solve the most complicated problems: take a nap Image | Unspash (Sinitta Leunen)

Marathons are so extreme that our brain makes drastic decisions, as how to consume itself

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Running a marathon implies a considerable effort that can lead to our body to its limits. Of course, our brain is no exception in this regard. Effects on neurons. A new study has shown how marathons affect the structure of neurons. Specifically, the study responsible for the study found that this type of career Reduces myelina layer layer that covers these brain cells. This substance It is composed of proteins and fatty substances. Myelin Surround the axons, elongated parts of a neuron that connect it with other neurons and through which nerve impulses are transmitted. That is why its deterioration can make nerve impulses slow down, something we see in people with multiple sclerosis. High consumption. The energy consumption of the brain is very high if we take as reference its mass, Explain the responsible team From the new study: this organ consumes 20% of the energy of our body despite representing approximately 2% of its weight. The team wanted to find out what happened with an organ as avid to consume energy in extreme situations as a marathon. In reserve. And it is that these types of contexts force our body to take drastic measures for subsistence. Prolonged exercise, for example, can make our body exhaust its carbohydrate reserves, the primary source of body energy. The following energy reserve is in the fat we store. Already in extreme cases, our body can dissolve muscle proteins to obtain this energy, explains the equipment. As the team observed, this translates into the consumption of myelin that covers neurons. This reduction occurred in an important part of the gray and white matter of the brain and that, although some regions were more affected than others, the impact did spread similarly in the two cerebral hemispheres. “The results of our study indicate that nerve cells in conditions of hypoglycemia (little glucose) use alternative energy sources, such as myelin, a fat structure that surrounds the axons or nerve fibers that communicate the neurons and facilitates the ultra rapid propagation of the electrical signals,” Explain in a press release Carlos Matute, co -author of the study. Magnetic resonances. To carry out the study, the team made various resonances Magnetic to a dozen of marathon runners. They repeated these resonances on several occasions: the day before and the day after the race, two weeks and two months later. The details of the study have been published recently In an article In the magazine Nature Metabolism. A reversible change. The good news is that this change is reversible. The study itself showed how at two months, the myelin of the runners’ neurons recovered their usual levels. Uncertain impact. The study found a deterioration of myelin but for now we do not know how or to what degree this deterioration translated into effects on the cognitive functions of the brain. We know that the absence of myelin is linked to severe neurological disorders such as sclerosis. In Xataka | More and more people participate in popular marathons. Science knows that going as optimistic has its risks Image | Mārtiņš Zemlickis / Imgmidi

Despite the controversies, Kathleen Kennedy made essential decisions for ‘Star Wars’. Your successor will have it more difficult

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Years ago ‘Star Wars‘goes to the most debatable moment of his long career. It is no longer an economic issue, but about pure creativity: new series and films seem not to arouse the expectation of other times. In this context, Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasarts since Disney bought it, leaves the company, and leaves it without a clear helmsman. Who happens is a more than complicated situation. Twelve years of decisions. In the decade and peak that leads to Kennedy company, it has not been easy, facing One of the most volatile and aggressive fandoms: He has been accused of reorienting the franchise TO THE WOKEbut it has also been said that it was excessively immobilist and was pending past glories. All his ‘Star Wars’ films They have been box office successesbut when he has tried to distance himself from the fee with projects such as’Han Solo‘, things have not done well. It could be said that Kennedy was in a position where he did what he did, he was going to be criticized. Producers against authors. What is clear is that, under his mandate, Kennedy has tried to convert ‘Star Wars’ into an author franchise … while he has collided countless occasions with his creators. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller went out to unbeatted boxes of the ‘Han Solo’ set, Patty Jenkins and David Benioff and DB Weiss were going to revolutionize the franchise and their respective projects They ended up vanished. Currently, the purpose continues, almost as a legacy of Kennedy’s plan, but she will not see it from her position: James Mangold, Taika Waititi, Donald Glover … who knows if we will see it. The Marvel mirror. Comparisons with the other superfranchice owned by Disney are inevitable. Kevin Feige, with a position comparable to the one that Kennedy has just left, has dodged the ghost of the need to find prestigious authors for his films (now the vast majority sign them creators with cut wings Or, directly, Yes-Men Like Shawn Levy), but it crosses a bump of prestige and box office comparable to ‘Star Wars’. Possibly, the first to find an exit will mark the path that the other will follow. That is why they are under the same roof. How is the situation: movies. There has been a pump, involuntary but between which they mediate seven years and a pandemic between the last film released in the franchise, ‘Star Wars: Skywalker’s rise‘And next,’The Mandalorian and Grogu‘, which will arrive in 2026. It is a parenthesis, the result of chance and bad luck, unheard of franchises whose only strategy is to primar fans with medium cooking products. It is certainly the first challenge that Kennedy’s successor will have to face: return the big projects to the saga. How is the situation: series. As in Marvel, some saturation and lack of course has taken over the television faction of ‘Star Wars’, although the results have some quality that surpasses Kevin Feige’s projects. Despite the controversies, ‘Ashoka‘or’ The Acolyte ‘have also collected good reviews, and both the first season of’The Mandalorian ‘ (especially) like pride ‘Andor‘They are among the best that the franchise has given from the films and the classic video games. Even so, these series almost exclusively arrive at the Fandom of the franchise: Lucasartes needs ‘Star Wars’ to return to mass conversation. Broken visions. Perhaps Kennedy was not the producer who needed ‘Star Wars’, who could have achieved the same box office successes but at the rate of one (or more) per year with a less ambitious approach, but it was noteworthy that Kennedy always wanted to find exploitation ways for a saga whose main characteristic is that (except ‘Andor’ and some other isolated case) repeats the same tropes again and again. His was the idea of ​​raising high Republic as a new coordinate to explore, and wanted to take Lucasfilm beyond ‘Star Wars’ and Indiana Jones, adapting new projects, such as the trilogy ‘Children of Blood and Bone’. We will not know what so much ambition would have been. Header | Dick Thomas Johnson / Disney In Xataka | The catastrophe of the ‘Star Wars’ hotel: 3,000 euros per night in an interactive film of 350 million dollars

What is High-Flyer, the Chinese fund that drives Deepseek and has been using AI for years to make investment decisions

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Deepseek is the fashionable artificial intelligence (AI) company. Your most recent language models They have challenged Openai’s leadership and have caused a real earthquake in the technology industry. These days we have known that It was founded in May 2023 and that has developed its products with a fraction of the computing capacity of some of its main western rivals. But what else is known? Let’s see it. The promising present of Deepseek is the result of years of investigation that began long before its official constitution. Its origin is found in High-Flyer, a quantitative investment fund created in 2015 by the Electronic Engineering student Liang Wenfeng with two classmates. As they count on their websitethe idea was that the algorithms became the heart of their business by allowing real -time operations. A company focused on the Chinese stock market High-Flyer completed its first stock market assisted by AI in October 2016, a movement that triggered an unstoppable effort to continue working in that regard. The company formed software and hardware research and development teams. And apparently it was the appropriate decision. In 2017 I already applied AI In almost all its strategies of quantitative investment, but to continue advancing I needed to break some barriers. They discovered that complex models training tasks required a huge calculation power. This did not discourage them and in 2019 they launched a dedicated division called High-Flyer ai to address the challenge. The group built started working with 500 GPU, then built a 1,100 GPU supercomputer A100 of NVIDIA And in 2022 he spent 140 million dollars to raise the number up to 10,000 GPU, before the entry into force of the export controls of the United States. High-Flyer was completely focused on developing its algorithmic trading business. He had his own deep learning training platform and a Outstanding computer infrastructure. Meanwhile, in the United States there was a company called Openai that bet on the generative AI and that He had surprised many with the benefits of his GPT-3 language model. As China Talk collectsLiang wanted to go beyond finance. For a long time he had been convinced that AI would change the world, and had found the opportunity to bring his effort to the next level. In 2023, High-Flyer announced that it would lay the foundations of a new organization to advance the development of general artificial intelligence (AGI). Thus Deepseek was born, with an injection of capital of high-flyer. Deepseek is a product of High-Flyer work and has obviously drunk this company. Both signatures share offices in the same building, although they seem to use different computing resources. The AI ​​startup says it has H20 chips, that are sold as donuts in Chinaand NVIDIA H800, and that has used only 2,048 GPU of this latest model to train its most recent models, an affirmation that some have questioned. Images | High-flyer | Deepseek In Xataka | “They are brilliant researchers under the control of an authoritarian government.” Anthropic’s CEO has spoken about Depseek

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