game

Controlling a video game with your mind seems like an empty advancement. It is the door to treatments for depression or anxiety

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Although a good part of the technology industry is focusing on innovations that we are not very clear about how they can help us (there is the waste in AI and humanoid robotics), there are those who are researching something that can open an unthinkable door for thousands of people: brain-computer interfaces. That’s where they come into play brain chips. Neuralink It is the product with the best-known commercial name and the one that seemed to open the way in a more public way, something that China has followed with an important boost in these brain chips. The technology has been tested on humans for years, but there are two problems: it is a very invasive technology and, furthermore, learning to master this computer implanted in the brain It is a complex process that requires training. Yale University, however, is developing another way: an external, non-invasive brain interface that wants to fix these two problems. The problem is that it is not as pretty as it sounds. Work with the brain, not against it A few days ago, researchers at Yale University they published a study in Nature Neuroscience in which they detailed that the idea of ​​this project is to take advantage of the natural geometry of neuronal activity and not fight against it when a user can control software with their mind. The one of the fMRI-based BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) (functional magnetic resonance) is a field that has been explored for some time, but has an efficiency problem. It requires many long training sessions for a user to end up achieving modest results at best. Additionally, up to a third of participants never mastered the software. The twist that the Yale researchers have taken is to use the natural geometry of the brain. That is, taking advantage of the “consolidated pathways” of our brain activity so that technology works in favor of these existing pathways instead of forcing the brain to create completely new pathways. Result? Less friction and faster, more efficient learning. For landing it, we are not talking about a brain chipbut to introduce a person into an MRI machine not to do a standard scan, but so that that person can take advantage of the capabilities of real-time MRIs to move something in software. In this case, an avatar in a video game. That is to say, it does scan, all the time, in fact, while another program reads the data on the fly. To do this, they used a series of their own algorithms to discover the individual geometry of each person and, from that unique “map”, they created a closed system that read the user’s brain scan every two seconds and translated the data into video game movements. They tested three configurations: One based on the most natural pathways used by the brain. Others based on also natural routes, but less dominant. And a third based on pathways that the brain does not produce naturally, but that it builds. According to researchers, it’s like paving a road from scratch. The result was very positive: Participants learned to control the avatar using thought alone in less than an hour when the BCI interface aligned with that more natural brain map. Sometimes even in less time. When the system moved away from natural geometry, participants could control the avatar, but the time spent was much greater. The conclusion is that using this adjustment between the machine and the natural pathways of each individual’s brain, a physical reorganization of the brain has been observed to align with what the interface is demanding. The researchers observed that this reorganization spread even to brain regions that were not being used at the time, demonstrating that there is a kind of domino effect in the brain as it adapts to the changes. It’s very promising, but there is a problem: the necessary equipment. We are talking about that, to achieve these results, users had their heads inside an MRI machine, huge and very expensive equipment which is far from being as practical as brain chips claim to be. That is to say, it is not so much a “street” technology that allows people who need it to find an improvement in their abilities, but that does not mean that it remains a mere discovery. Something like this has interesting implications that can open the door to various applications in fields such as mental health (noting that it can be effective in developing treatments for depression or anxiety), motor and communication disorders or even cognitive improvement. Something more “clinical”, not common at home, although Erica Busch, first author of the study, opens the door to the construction of new generation video game systems controlled directly with the mind. But well, in the end, more than a commercial product, Busch herself points out that This discovery is more useful in the field of research. “We spend a lot of resources trying to become better versions of ourselves through education, practice or therapy. Understanding the structure of our own mind and brain can help us do this much more effectively.” Images | Yale In Xataka | Synchron is Neuralink’s great rival in the race for brain chips. Now you have an ace up your sleeve: ChatGPT

Theker achieves 74 million to beat China at its own game

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74 million euros they just got up those responsible for the Barcelona startup Theker. The amount is far from the multimillion-dollar rounds of Silicon Valley AI companies, but it is a vote of confidence for a particularly ambitious project: compete with the Chinese robotics giants from a different perspective. What Theker does. The company was founded in 2022 by Carla Gómez Cano and Jia Qiang Ye Zhu. Unlike traditional industrial robotics, which performs mechanical and repetitive tasks, Theker automates processes where objects constantly change. One of its latest achievements is to automate the process of folding textile garments, an extremely complex task for a robot due to the different textures, thicknesses and materials. A milestone. The financing round obtained by Theker becomes one of the largest venture capital operations in the Spanish technology sector so far this year. The startup, born with the ambition to recover part of the microelectronics production in the West, will use these new resources to expand its production plants in Catalonia, hire talent and accelerate the distribution of its high-precision robotic arms in Europe and the US. This round is added to the one the company obtained in July 2025, which was 18 million euros. Fashion bets on technology. The round is led by the American fund CRV, but Spanish funds such as K Fund, Itnig, Mission and Kibo Ventures also participate. There are striking surprises in the shareholding, which now includes two giants of the fashion world: on the one hand, LVHM. On the other hand, attention, Inditex, which already supported the company in its beginnings. Robots made in Spain. The great contradiction of Theker’s business model is trying to surpass China in terms of price using labor and engineering developed in our country. The European industry has focused on super-specialized and very expensive software or robotics. How to compete with China. Meanwhile, Theker has designed a super-efficient automation architecture that theoretically drastically reduces assembly costs. Their idea is simple: logistical proximity and optimization of algorithms can neutralize the competitive advantage that China has with cheaper labor in its factories. Of humanoid robots, nothing. In an interview they conducted with Itnig, the two co-founders they explained that humanoid robots like the Tesla Optimus are not mechanically prepared to be used industrially: by seeking to be light to walk and use batteries, they use less durable materials and weaker reducers. For industrial applications, where the floors are flat, it is much more efficient to use a robust industrial arm with wheels, capable of operating connected to the power supply uninterruptedly. Humanoid robots, of course, will end up finding their market in household tasks. Artificial vision to adapt to any situation. The real jewel in Theker’s crown is its intelligent automated soldering system for printed circuit boards (PCBs). This company’s robots integrate artificial vision systems (they develop their own Vision-Language Model) and combine them with deep learning algorithms. With these two components, the robots are capable of adapting their movements to the millimeter in real time. Errors under control. This technology, they say, allows imperfections in assembly lines to be corrected without having to stop production. It is an advance that provides operational flexibility to companies that use these robots, since it reduces the rate of defective components to minimum levels. Ideal moment. This financial takeoff of Theker comes at a very significant moment: both Europe, the US and China are seeking their technological sovereignty. Past trade tensions and logistics bottlenecks have demonstrated the risk of outsourcing all hardware. The Barcelona startup proposes a very interesting alternative for Western industries, and benefits from this ambitious trend. Image | UOC In Xataka | Humanoid robotics are striking, but China is clear about which robots make money

Comparing Apple’s AI to ChatGPT or Claude is a mistake. Apple is not playing that game

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to whom They rule out Apple in the AI ​​raceeye. The company may have arrived late and it certainly may have little to show today, but its evolution over the last three years reveals three interesting things. The first, that Apple does have its own AI models. The second, that they are very far in performance from the best of OpenAI and Claude. Third, that may not matter at all. Three years of evolution. The trajectory of the technical documents shared by Apple in recent years reveals a series of more than relevant changes. In 2024 its initial proposal was limited to small models of about 3,000 million parameters (3B) specialized in solving basic tasks like generating Genmojis or text summaries. In 2025 the company launched its MLX framework to the developer community to facilitate the integration and use of local models. Now, in 2026, They propose a hybrid infrastructure based on a basic principle: Simple requests: they run in small local models on the device, you don’t even need an internet connection Complex requests: the system delegates the task to be processed in the cloud privately through Private Cloud Compute A (maybe) great idea: NAND can help. The most relevant milestone of Apple’s new approach lies in the design of its AFM 3 Core Advanced model. In today’s mobile phones we have a big bottleneck with the execution of capable (large) AI models because these devices have a very limited amount of memory (12 GB on some iPhones). To be able to fit a model with 20,000 million parameters (20B), Apple has decided to store that model in the internal SSD unit, not in memory. In the AFM 3 Core Advanced model the “experts” are in the mobile’s SSD. They are preselected and loaded into RAM to be used dynamically, optimizing model execution. Experts by prompt, not by token. It then activates a series of pruning techniques (Instruction-Following Pruning, or IFP) to activate only between 1,000 and 4,000 million parameters in a sparse manner (sparse), somewhat similar to what is done in models with Mixture-of-Experts architecture. But Apple selects these experts at the beginning of each prompt, not token by token, which allows it to avoid the slow bandwidth of the mobile’s NAND storage compared to its RAM memory. Privacy by flag. If for something Apple’s approach stood out from the beginning It was for his privacy.which is implicit when using local models. But if the request is complex, the system redirects it to the AI ​​models in Apple’s cloud, the Private Cloud Compute (PCC). Unlike other platforms and infrastructures such as those of OpenAI or Anthropic, conversations with Apple’s AI are encrypted and are totally private according to the company: this data is not shared with third parties (because not even Apple can see it) and it is not used to train its models. Five models with the help of Gemini. Although Apple is obsessed with total control of its products, this time had to give in and ally with Google so that their Gemini models could “show” Apple the way. The result is a third generation of models that are developed in collaboration with the Mountain View firm. We have five models in total: AFM 3 Core: 3B parameter dense model AFM 3 Core Advanced: sparse model of 20B parameters with activation of 1B to 4B parameters depending on the task AFM 3 Cloud: a powerful but also efficient and fast model that runs on the Apple cloud. ADM 3 Cloud (Image): for generating and editing images, the heart of both these options and the new Image Playground AFM 3 Cloud Pro– Apple’s most powerful cloud model is for autonomous agents. It has been trained with Google TPUs and runs on Nvidia GPUs within Google Cloud infrastructure Performance, an unknown. Unlike what other companies usually do when they present their models, Apple has not published metrics on known benchmarks. Instead, it shows “human preference” metrics in which it compares user satisfaction when using its models versus competing models. The comparisons are also with previous versions of these models, which does not clarify much what can be expected from them. But they are not in the race for the best model. In 2025 yes there was comparison with open weight models of that time (Qwen-3-4B locally, GPT-4o or Llama 4 Scout in the cloud) and then they seemed to be at a good level in reference to those options. Expect them to be behind the most recent models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google itself, and it’s unclear how they compare to the new Chinese open weights models. One thing seems clear: Apple is not very interested in having its own Mythos, at least for now. Your objective is different. Apple models from 2026 are “preferred” more than those from 2025. Logical, but also useless when it comes to understanding how good these models are compared to the competition. But integration is important. Apple’s big ace to compensate for this difference in capacity is that its models have full access to the user’s OS, apps and hardware. AFM models are integrated with iPhone camera sensors, notification history or local app permissions. This allows useful tasks to be carried out that an LLM that is “disconnected” from the hardware will hardly be able to replicate. Here the integration of the models with the hardware and software of the device is (or wants to be) fundamental. Beware of mediocrity. This approach focused on integration and privacy is especially striking and differentiating from its competitors, but there are risks. Among others, the product is limited by its functional capabilities compared to the competition. If local models do not solve and cloud models also do not behave reliably, Apple runs the risk of having an AI that is secure and private but technically mediocre in its responses. Siri has already been criticized for being especially stupid: Siri AI must precisely eradicate that perception. In Xataka | Apple has designed Siri AI so … Read more

In 2019 no one gave a damn for it, and today it is one of the best adaptations of a video game

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Nobody was betting much on an adaptation of the mythical blue hedgehog from Segha’s games in 2019 when Paramount published the first trailer for its film and unleashed a storm of memes. Five years and three deliveries later, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’which reaches Netflix on June 10, can boast $492 million at the box office and two stars like Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves on board the franchise. And the cherry on top: critics, for the first time in the saga, have sided with the hedgehog. We all remember how a avalanche of memes It ended up giving rise to a film that not only succeeded in fleshing out the schematic plot of the original games, but along the way grossed $319 million at the global box office. Three films later, the series has grossed more than $1.2 billion worldwide. ‘Sonic 3’, produced with a budget of $122 million, became the highest grossing of the franchise and closed its career as the tenth most watched in 2024. It is the second most lucrative video game adaptation in history, behind only ‘Super Mario Bros. The Movie’. In this new installment we move to 1974: a meteorite with an alien hedgehog on board, Shadow, falls on Earth. Professor Gerald Robotnik, grandfather of the villain of the series, subjects him to experiments in a secret facility, where the hedgehog befriends the scientist’s granddaughter. When an accident kills the girl, Shadow is left in suspended animation for fifty years. In 2024 someone frees Shadow, who wakes up furious and attacks Tokyo uncontrollably. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles try to stop him without success, forcing them to turn to Doctor Robotnik himself to stop him. On Rotten Tomatoes, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 accumulates 86% (and 95% of the public). Jim Carrey’s double role and the fast-paced pace of the film are responsible for these ratings, well above the scores of the previous installments, which do not reach 70%. The presence of Keanu Reeves has also been highly praised, as he provides an astonishing gravity and dramatic component to Shadow, a secondary character in the video games who here takes a particularly threatening form. A fun and fast-paced puzzle in which, for once, all the pieces seem to fit together. In Xataka | Scorsese signed one of his masterpieces with this film whose new version in series format arrives on streaming today

two researchers have found how to approximate it within the game

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‘Minecraft’ seems, at first glance, to be the last place we would go to look for a mathematical constant associated with perfect circles. Its world is made of cubes, its landscapes rise block by block and almost everything we see in the game has edges. That is precisely why what Molly Lynch of Hollins University and Michael Weselcouch of Roanoke College have done is so striking: finding a way to approximate π within Minecraft without turning the game into a conventional calculator. What are we trying to calculate?. π It is the constant that appears when comparing the length of a circle with its diameter. It is an irrational number with infinitely many non-repeating decimals. On paper, it seems like an idea inseparable from continuous geometry, of clean circles without edges. ‘Minecraft’ plays in another terrain: everything there is represented by discrete units. That is why the challenge is not only to obtain a number, but to translate a mathematical idea into a gridded world. Too heavy a possibility. ‘Minecraft’ has already proven to be Turing complete, a technical way of saying that, in theory, any program can be implemented within the game if the right mechanisms are built. This opens the door to calculating π as a machine would do, with logical instructions transferred to the universe of blocks. But Lynch and Weselcouch didn’t want to solve the problem by brute force. Translating records, logical operations and steps of an algorithm into ‘Minecraft’ actions would have turned a teaching idea into a huge and inaccessible construction. The choice. Choosing was not a whim, explains Spektrum. Lynch and Weselcouch wanted to bring mathematics closer to young people, and they saw the game as a particularly useful tool to do so. The point was not to demonstrate that Minecraft could replace a computer or to search for a particularly brilliant approximation of π, but rather to take advantage of its internal rules to construct a comprehensible explanation. That’s why his work explored relatively accessible methods for calculating known constants within the game, without turning the experiment into a difficult-to-follow technical demonstration. The darts method. The mathematical key chosen by Lynch and Weselcouch was a technique known as the Monte Carlo method, which the aforementioned publication explains with a very simple image: throwing darts at random against a circular target inscribed in a square. If all the impacts fall within the square, but only some within the circle, the proportion between them allows us to approach π/4. Then it is enough to multiply this result by four to obtain an estimate of π, although we are always talking about a statistical approximation. The translation to the game. Lynch and Weselcouch brought that idea to ‘Minecraft’ by first building a kind of red circle with a radius of 11 blocks, then enclosed within a blue square. From there they needed random events that could be counted, which they found in two creatures in the game: the slimes, which continue moving even if there are no players nearby and change direction at random, and the zoglins, which kill them. To record these eliminations, they used hoppers, funnel-shaped blocks capable of automatically picking up objects that fall on them. The final figure. The researchers recorded 619 dead slimes, of which 508 were eliminated within the circle, and with that data they arrived at π ≈ 3.283. To do this, they compared the deaths recorded within the circular area with the total deaths in the square. It is not a particularly precise approximation, and Lynch and Weselcouch do not hide it: the method would gain precision with a larger structure and with many more recorded deaths. But that limitation does not ruin the proposal. On the contrary, it helps to understand that the goal was to turn an abstract mathematical idea into something visible within Minecraft. Images | minecraft In Xataka | If you had any hope of buying a Steam Deck OLED at a good price, the RAM crisis has something to tell you

The Ferrari Luce is a game of lies. And that says a lot about the problems that all electric supercars have.

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Unless you’ve been lost on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific for the last 36 hours, there’s a good chance you’ve had a little inkling of what’s happened to Ferrari. The brand of Il Cavallino has presented its first electric car, the Ferrari Luce. And no, I didn’t like it. The vehicle designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson has had an almost unanimous response. Undoubtedly, it has not been saved from criticism on social networks. But he has also received them from figures such as Luca Cordero di Montezemolowho led the company for more than a decade. The former president of the Italians has made statements as harsh as that Ferrari is running the risk of “destroying its myth.” But there are reasons to understand why the new Ferrari Luce is unlike anything we’ve seen from Ferrari before. It is not that we defend its aesthetics, we point out why the company seems to have wanted to completely separate this new electric line from its more sporty image. Everything seems to indicate that They are doing everything possible to find a new audience. Ferrari has preferred to put aside its intention to create a completely electric supercar. At the moment, that market does seem completely deserted in terms of potential clients. The Porsche Taycan is stuck. The Rimac Refrigerator does not sell. Brands like Lamborghini have distanced themselves from the pool when they realized that it most likely lacks water. And the electric supercar is faster than a gasoline one. Its acceleration is unmatched. Well executed, it can have a faster and more spectacular cornering than any thermal rival. But in this life not everything is numbers. And when you sell experiences, that’s a problem. It’s not perfect, it’s better than that There is something disturbing about perfection: the absence of soul. Human beings feel pleasure through the senses and enjoy experiences. He likes the tactile, he delights in sound, he tastes and smells with pleasure. And that is difficult to overcome. Even though the substitute product is more efficient and more effective. Cleaner and odorless. A Tesla Model 3 Performance is faster than most sports cars of the moment. Its 3.1 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h was impossible to match for any mass vehicle, a figure within the reach of the best. Cars worth hundreds of thousands of euros. But saying that it is a better sports car than a naturally aspirated V12 is like equating a paella made with care and love over an orange wood fire with a pill manufactured by a pharmaceutical company in seconds at a ridiculous price. Both can provide the same nutrients but I am clear about which one provides more pleasure. The same thing happens with supercars. With any sports car, in fact. And that is a problem for the electric car. Let alone for a brand like Ferrari. When someone buys a Ferrari, buy an experience. Just like when you buy a Lamborghini, a Porsche or, much simpler, a Mazda MX-5. The car is, in most cases, an object of mobility. The electric car is the best and maximum expression of that. Especially in the city. But a sports car is not only about cornering and acceleration that glues you to your seat. Guillermo García Alfonsín explains well why the electric Mini JCW is fun: because it’s not tuned well on purpose. Imperfection attracts us. A Miata isn’t especially fast, but the driving experience is one of the best. The characteristic sound of an engine, whether it is a V6, V12 or an inline five-cylinder. A precise and manual gearbox. Its metallic sound of an H shift in classic supercars. Cabin vibrations. The smell of gasoline while you refuel. All of these are unmatched experiences for an electric car. All things being equal, they are faster and more effective. But the brands are aware that their customers have enormous reluctance to this clean and odorless experience when Mercedes installs an artificial sound in the new Mercedes-AMG GT, the electric that comes to replace the roar of its V8. In their Ferrari Luce, the Italians have chosen a different path. In its press release, the brand refers to the, undoubtedly, very high performance of a car capable of developing more than 1,000 HP of power. To the innovations used to carry out our own development with more than 60 patents. The truth is that, despite everything, a Tesla Model S Plaid that costs cost Five times less is faster. But in its text, Ferrari has tried to value the experiential nature of the proposal. For example, the explanation of how sound works: The Ferrari Luce’s approach to sound is based on the key principle that it must be authentic and functional, generated from the car’s own mechanics and at the service of the driving experience. A precision accelerometer located in the center of the shaft captures the dynamic texture and vibration of rotating components while sound waves are in motion. Developed in-house and patented, this system filters, equalizes and amplifies the signal similar to how an electric guitar does, but only when functional to the driving experience. The sound will depend on the driving mode chosen but also on the use of the paddles, to simulate an experience similar to what would be changing gears with a combustion engine. Cams for a car without gear change. Lie upon lie to build an identity It must be said that Ferrari is by no means the only company that opts for these trompe-l’oeil games. We have mentioned the case of Mercedes but the speakers to filter the sound inside the cabin and comply with the noise limits outside have been on the market for years. Toyota has patents for simulate gear changes in electric cars without gear changes. Honda does exactly the same with its new Prelude. The engineering behind the automobile has been an art since its birth. An art based on engineering and product development that, … Read more

Who do you love more, bars or Mercadona? Hospitality is taking the battle over prepared food to a zero-sum game

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Since Spain believe made the “menu of the day” official 61 years agoin Manuel Fraga’s time, workers, travelers and families have gone to bars at midday basically looking for two things, in addition to food: time savings and good prices. That sacred triad turned the menu into the great success of the national hospitality industry (with forgiveness for the omelette). Now it plays against him. The same customers who have been eating in restaurants for generations have found an alternative that offers them food at better prices and with greater flexibility: supermarkets. The hoteliers, of course, they are not willing to give up and have taken out their best weapon: regulation. What has happened? The event was intended to review the data and needs of the sector, but it ended up leading to something else: a call to attention to chains such as Mercadona or Alcampo. Yesterday, during the General Assembly of Hospitality of Spain, the president of the group, José Luis Álvarez Almeida, post against a rival that until recently was off the radar of the country’s bars and restaurants: supermarkets. Without expressly mentioning them, the head of the employers’ association complained about the competition exerted by firms such as Mercadona, Carrefour, Bon Preu or Alcampo (to name a few), which have been betting on the sale of prepared dishes for some time and, in some cases, even include dining rooms in their premises so that customers can consume the food and drinks that they previously bought in the store right there. A model, Almeida insistswhich looks too similar to yours. “Unfair competition”. “Now we have gas stations, stores, hypermarkets or supermarkets that want to be bars. That is unfair competition,” argument the president of Hospitality of Spain during an event that was also attended by the Minister of Tourism, Jordi Hereu. “What we tell them is that, from an economic and competitive point of view, they can do what they want; but we all have to play on equal terms and be equal before the law.” your words have resonated with force in the sector, although it is not the first time that the expansion of the ready-to-eat dishes business within the supermarkets themselves leads to this question: Can it be considered unfair competition? He floated the same idea in December during an interview with SER Emilio Gallego, general secretary of Hospitality of Spain. “It is a controversial question. Either you are a supermarket or you have a space for a restaurant,” argument. “If you have a space where you buy food and eat it, you obviously have to have a restaurant activity license.” The key word: merchant. That the hospitality industry has raised its voice just now is no coincidence. Although supermarkets have been selling pre-cooked and ready-to-eat food for decades, in recent years some chains are shifting towards a new business model: the merchants. It is no longer about buying a tray of sushi, a cold tortilla or some pre-cooked noodles from a factory that the supermarket sells packaged. The key is that the customer can choose what they want to eat on a counter full of steaming stews, stews, fish… and then, if they want, they can devour that same food without leaving the store. The menu dilemma. Things get complicated there for bars, especially those that rely most on the concept of ‘menu of the day’: an affordable, varied and time-saving gastronomic offer. For years bars dominated that field. Now they have to fight with heavyweights like Mercadona, which offer prices that are difficult to match by family businesses that have been juggling for some time to make their menus profitable. This change in trend was summed up wonderfully well a few months ago by a gym instructor who The World interviewed while eating in a Mercadona in Madrid: “Although they pay me for the food, this is more practical and faster. You eat for six euros and I don’t spend 45 minutes. I haven’t eaten from a menu since summer.” In that same reportage The journalist spoke with other customers who came to Juan Roig’s store to buy dishes (stews, casseroles…) that they then ate in their own living rooms or office. Two years ago they might have gone to a bar with a menu or cooked at home. Not anymore. Has things changed that much? The data is revealing. In 2025 Mercadona had a turnover of around 700 million euros in Spain through its ‘Ready to Eat’ section. It may not seem like a big deal for a corporation whose sales exceeded 41.8 billionbut it is good to keep several things in mind. First, the ‘Ready to Eat’ section is very young. It was launched in 2018 and has expanded to more than 1,400 points of sale. Second, that those 700 million of euros are just part of the cake. If we take into account the entire supply of pre-cooked products (refrigerated, trays…) and the business in Portugal, the figure rises to 3,000 million. To give us an idea, this figure exceeds the annual sales of McDonald’s in Spain (2 billion) or Burger King (1,500). In general, it is estimated that the Valencian chain accounts for a 19.7% share of value in food and beverage consumption. That is, almost two out of every ten euros What we spend on that branch ends up in the company’s coffers. A key percentage: 7.6%. To understand how quickly the prepared food business is expanding, it is good to review Algori data advanced a few days ago by theEconomist. According to the consultancy, this segment was (by far) the one that recorded the greatest growth in sales volume last year among supermarkets and hypermarkets in Spain. In general, the sale of pre-cooked and cooked dishes soared by 7.6% in volume. Above fruits and vegetables (7%), meats (6.1%) and fish and seafood (4.9%). The Valencian chain is not the only one that is committed to this business niche, although it has managed to lead it. Your … Read more

includes video game and a gift

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MediaMarkt is one of the stores that is offering the most packs for the Nintendo Switch 2. They are not official but assembled by the store itself, which gives them a wide range of options when it comes to adding video games or other accessories. We have already seen many so far and now a new one has arrived: Nintendo Switch 2 along with ‘Super Mario Bros. Wonder’ and a keychain by 479 euros. Nintendo Switch 2 + Super Mario Bros. Wonder + keychain The price could vary. We earn commission from these links New unofficial MediaMarkt pack The nintendo switch 2 It is a particularly interesting console for many reasons. Beyond the physical changes that we have seen with respect to the previous generation, especially in power and sizethere is something especially interesting, especially if we had the first Nintendo Switch. First of all, current generation is backward compatiblewhich means that you will be able to play most of the video games on the market. nintendo switch. In some cases you can do it with improvements by paying for them (approximately 10 euros) and in others you can have the best ones offered by the dock when playing on the television, but playing in portable mode. Obviously, it is not a console that only allows you to play video games from the last generation. Little by little it is adding exclusive titles of his generation to the catalogue. Maybe ‘Mario Kart World‘ and ‘Donkey Kong Bananza‘They are two of the most popular, but we cannot forget the curious one’Pokémon Pokopia‘ either ‘Hyrule Warriors: Age of Banishment‘. ⚡ IN SUMMARY: Nintendo Switch 2 offer today ✅ THE BEST The pack: The store offers you a video game for little more than what the Nintendo Switch costs alone (difference of 30 euros). The price: In general, official and unofficial packs usually sell for approximately 500 euros, something that MediaMarkt has taken into account because theirs usually sells cheaper. ❌ THE WORST Yesno possibility of choosing the video game: The pack is not bad, but the store has offered on other occasions to choose a video game as a gift from several different options. For this same reason, it is not the best pack it has had to date. The battery: The autonomy varies greatly depending on the video game, but it usually lasts approximately three hours. 💡 BUY IT IF… You want to be able to play the Nintendo Switch 2 the moment you receive it home, especially if you want to do it with a good video game from the Super Mario saga. ⛔ DON’T BUY IT IF… You are not convinced by the video game; MediaMarkt tends to renew Nintendo Switch 2 packs quite frequently, so you may be more interested in waiting for them to arrive. You may also be interested tomtoc Shoulder Bag Sling Bag Compatible with Nintendo Switch 2 Console 2025, Protective Bag Portable Travel Gaming Case with 8 Cartridge Slots, Charger and Accessories, Black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 8BitDo Pro 3 Bluetooth Controller for Switch/Switch 2 – TMR Joysticks, Swappable ABXY Buttons, Pro Back Buttons, Charging Dock, Hall Effect Triggers, for Windows, Apple, SteamOS, Android – Purple The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Alejandro Alcolea (edited), Nintendo In Xataka | The second pack of the Nintendo Switch 2 arrives with the new Pokémon: you can now reserve it in these stores In Xataka | The best accessories for your Switch: cases, carrying bags, batteries, and more

Much of the world economy right now consists of setting up data centers. And there is already a game on Steam that simulates it

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Surely what you want most when you come back from work is to turn on your PC or console to play a work game. There is not an ounce of sarcasm in this phrase, since for some time now games that are about that, about working, have become popular. And I don’t mean a ‘stardew valley‘ farm management or a ‘Animal Crossing‘mortgage payment: I mean games that are, directly, a second job. There are cleanof be an IT in a company, as a worker supermarket or of construction worker. Also being in charge of a data centerclear. With all the boom in data centers that have drunk the ram market and SSDs, it is possible that you can’t build a PC new because RAM is through the roofbut you can always fulfill the fantasy of being that person who has the power to set up servers and wire everything in their hands. Is called ‘Data Center‘, and as a game to learn how data centers work and turn off your brain, it is… interesting. The game of having an after-work job setting up data centers Don’t think of this game as a construction game like ‘The Sims‘ and the like. Here you already have the space and what you should do is internal management. You must buy the frames to install the racks, servers and switches, but not crazy, but depending on the needs of the clients who hire your services. Once you have the equipment, it is time to interconnect them with the Ethernet cables that link systems within the same rack, but that must also physically go to other platforms. The easiest thing is to pass those cables through aluminum structures hanging from the ceiling, and once you think you have everything ready, it’s time to turn it on. This is when your customers’ traffic is represented by light balls that travel along the cables. Those little balls have their reason because as things progress, Your clients will ask for more and more bandwidthand you will have to start managing and prioritizing. Equipment also breaks, so you will have to go to the PC to order spare parts or upgrades to have greater computing capacity. The idea is to create the perfect system with the best possible data flow, without bottlenecks and without wasting resources, carefully scaling to offer each client what they need and not oversizing. Those little balls represent data traffic. Each color is a customer It is, in short, a work game that can be repetitive, but that is why it works so well. In this type of titles you do not have to solve puzzles, You don’t have to be skillful with the controls or think too much. They are ideal for turning off the brain while we do a repetitive task and simply focus on what we have to do and what clients ask of us. It sounds like the most boring thing in the world, that second job that I mentioned at the beginning of the article, but they are perfect games to turn off the brain while we have a podcast in the background or something like that. In the comments of this particular ‘Data Center’, players highlight the “teaching” aspect and, despite the limitations of some systems, how realistic it feels. The store from which we must order the components Now, it is not a simulator. In the comments, players who claim to work in data centers point out that, although it is curious and represents some things very well, there are others that do not fit reality and technical options are missing such as VLAN systems or managing something as basic as power cabling. The best thing is that it costs nine euros and, if you don’t click on the first two, you can request a refund on Steam very easily. In the end, it is not a game for everyone. No game is, really.but ‘Data Center’ is one more of that much talked about wave of work games that is appearing recently. Because managing a data center may not be your thing, but for example, restore retro games or manage the latest video store of the city before Amazon eats it. Images | ‘Data Center’ on Steam In Xataka | It seemed like a game of imitating movements. It was actually diagnosing autism better than many clinical tests

How the game invented the “Sanity roll”

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In ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Nobody closes their eyes to a monster. Seeing it is synonymous with a confrontation (you can always run away, but without losing sight of it, just in case). But in the first test session of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, in 1981, something unexpected happened: the players began to cover their eyes, hide in corners, run away up stairs. And that inspired him to reflect pure panic in his game. The primal terror. When Sandy Petersen (zoologist by training, enthusiastic role-player, Lovecraft devotee since he was a teenager) was commissioned by Chaosium to develop a game based on the Cthulhu Mythoshorror role-playing games practically did not exist as their own genre. In 1981, the market was dominated by ‘D&D’ variants. There were terrifying monsters, undead, demons, but the mechanical framework was always the same: characters armed to the teeth who stoically absorbed the damage of their enemies. Fear had no representation in the rules. The referent. The Lovecraft stories that inspired the game ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ demanded just the opposite. Its protagonists are not heroes: they are academics, journalists, doctors from the provinces who stumble upon a truth that the cosmos has been hiding for millions of years. The simple revelation of reality does not inject them with legendary courage to face these dangers, but rather destroys them. Translating that into a game system required new tools, new values ​​to measure. How it works. Whenever an investigator is faced with something his or her mind is not prepared to assimilate, the Game Master asks for a Sanity roll. The player rolls a percentile die (usually two 10-sided dice) and compares the result with his Sanity score: if he rolls equal or less, he passes the crash and loses a smaller number of points; If it fails, the loss is more severe. The Sanity score starts from a maximum value equivalent to the character’s Power characteristic multiplied by five and decreases throughout the game with each disturbing encounter. When the loss in a single roll exceeds five points, the character suffers a crisis of temporary insanity: he may become paralyzed or develop erratic behavior that the Game Master dictates on the fly. If Sanity drops to zero, the character is permanently deranged and passes into the hands of the Director. There is a recovery mechanism (rest, therapy, certain successes in research) but the system is calibrated so that the trend is always downward. How it was born. As Petersen explainedthe direct inspiration for the Cordural mechanics was an article in the magazine ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ in which the authors proposed a kind of mental stability statistic. If the character failed a roll, that statistic went down permanently. This idea of ​​a statistic being reduced shocked him. He took the fundamental idea, called it Sanity, made it the lynchpin of the game, and instead of lowering it only on rare occasions, decided that almost every encounter and every event would reduce it, until the investigators could end up becoming mental ruins or even mindless monsters. What happened. In the first game he led after developing the system, as counted in Xwhile narrating how a horrible claw emerged from a portal in the air, something unexpected happened: one player announced that he was covering his eyes, another went to a corner of the room and turned around, and a third fled up the stairs. Petersen was taken aback: in ‘D&D’ no one would ever try to avoid looking at a monster, because seeing it implies information that could be useful. At that moment he understood the true potential of the Sanity rules: they were not just another weapon in favor of monsters, but a mechanic that pushed players to behave in a way that fit this world they were building, a far cry from the fantasy in which ‘D&D’ monsters are almost everyday. Other systems could describe fear, but Sanity made players practice it. Extreme sanity. Petersen’s initial version of Sanity was more extreme than the one that made it to the game: he initially decided that it could only decrease, never increase. It was those responsible for Chaosium who convinced him that this idea was too negative even in a game about Cthulhu. Petersen relented, but later discovered that the ability to regain Sanity makes the system more agonizing, not less, because it tricks players into believing they can save their characters. And we already know that that is very complicated. The mansions of sanity. Since then, Sanity mechanics have influenced all subsequent role-playing horror. The first video game to explicitly pick up that heritage was ‘Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem’, whose crazy effects mechanic was patented by Nintendo in 2005. Eight years later, ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ brought the mechanics to first-person horror for PC, where darkness and the sight of monsters drain mental stability with progressive visual and sound consequences. Header | Photo of Timothy Dykes in Unsplash / Thomas Quine

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