house

Two architects fled the chaos of New Delhi to build a mud house in the Himalayas. Now it’s an Airbnb

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“Book only if you are comfortable hiking for 1.5 km in a forest with a backpack and want to experience raw nature and slow life with beautiful views.” This is one of the most striking Airbnb properties in Rishikesh, India. The house is the work of two brother architects who fled the savage capitalism of the city to end up creating the most coveted refuge on the mountain and a symbol of the gentrification of spirituality. Two brothers in search of peace. In Business Insider They tell the story of Raghav and Ansh Kumar, two architect brothers from New Delhi who worked for a German architecture firm. The brothers felt trapped in a relentless routine, with endless days, and a work culture that glorified burnout. During the pandemic, they made a radical turn and decided to leave the city and go to the mountains, specifically to Rishikesh, the city known as “the gate of the Himalayas” since from it come the pilgrims starting the Char Dam route. Build with your hands. One of the reasons for this change in life had to do with the disconnection caused by being locked in an office, away from the construction process, so it occurred to them to return to the most analog process possible. They drew the plans for the house intuitively using sticks directly on the ground and to build it they used the traditional technique with coba mixture of mud, straw and water, all materials extracted from the same area. For the construction they had four full-time workers, but they also had the help of more than 100 volunteers who signed up through the Workaway exchange platform. The walls are 45 centimeters thick and were increasing about 15-30 centimeters a day. In total, it took 18 months to build it. The irony. The brothers wanted to escape the “architecture of money, efficiency and productivity” and capitalist corporate exhaustion, but they ended up building a spiritual refuge to monetize on Airbnb for $140 a night, a fairly high price for the average in the area (we have found entire houses for 50 euros a night). Added to this is the paradox of materials: local communities and the government itself usually reject these mud houses as they are considered a symbol of poverty, preferring cement as a sign of progress and prosperity. That the brothers are charging tourists a premium price to sleep between the same mud walls that locals are trying to escape heightens the irony to the maximum. Essentially, they have fled the corporate hamster wheel to package and sell their “disconnection” to the same stressed workers they intended to distance themselves from. Spiritual gentrification. The adventure of these brothers does not occur in a vacuum, but is part of a wave of gentrification that is transforming the region. As we said, Rishikesh is historically known as a pilgrimage destination and the yoga capital of the world, but today it has become a objective for real estate investors and expatriates seeking to acquire second homes or open lucrative businesses that exploit precisely that aura of spirituality. The government is aggressively urbanizing the mountainous area to sustain this new wave of tourism and digital nomads. Recently, they have promoted and modernized infrastructure including widening roads, building multi-storey car parks to combat traffic congestion, and setting up commercial operating bases for sports such as rafting. Image | Airbnb In Xataka | The “tourist cages” arrive in Valencia: holiday gentrification in Spain goes up a gear

Would you let them clean your house for free in exchange for filming it from top to bottom? This startup thinks you’ll say yes

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Your floor like the jets of gold down your face. In principle, this is how good the proposal sounds. shifta service launched in New York that offers comprehensive home cleaning services. Is it perhaps an NGO? Well no, the company does not charge in currency: an operator enters your house to the kitchen (literally) wearing a recording device that allows him to record his movements on video during the entire cleaning session. That video is then converted into training data for robotics and AI. In other words, the user does not pay with money, they pay with data. This exchange is not new by any means, but the saying “if something is free it is because the product is you” has gone from the screens to the most intimate part: your home. Clean your house and pay with your privacy. The mechanism is direct: a service in exchange for data. According to says Harry KilbergShift’s US CEO on his X/Twitter profile, upon your request, the company sends a “verified” operator to clean up and leave. In exchange, it records the cleaning so that robotics companies have access to those movements and, through training, their units can replicate it. In other words, there is a camera monitoring the movements of the operator and in the background, your dirt, the rooms of your house and each and every one of your things that are visible and can be cleaned. The Service FAQ They detail that the recordings are anonymized before being processed and that they blur any information that could identify you. But of course, “anonymized” is not the same as private: There is research that shows that anonymized data is not so anonymized: it can be re-identified quite often when crossed with other sources. And in a house it is even easier: the distribution of space, objects and your routines They make up a unique image of you, your tastes and your habits.. Anonymizing the video does not eliminate that trace, it only hides it in plain sight. How does it work? shift Why is it important. Because the home has historically been the last stronghold of privacy. You may post photos of yourself having brunch on a terrace in Malasaña, but you might think twice before sharing your breakfast muffin in a cup of Mr. Wonderful with a cosque while wearing a threadbare robe with cheese stains from last night’s pizza. It is true that the fever of connected devices and wearables had reduced that redoubt, but Shift goes one step further: it is an active recording of the interior of private homes made by an outsider and that is expressly dedicated to a market. The company accumulates a huge amount of information about you: how you live, what you have, how you behave in private. In return, you have a vague idea of ​​what he does with your data and you don’t know who he sells it to or how he uses it. It is, in short, an imbalance of information from which there is no turning back. On the other hand and as Shift explains, home cleaning and its automation towards an eventual service carried out by robots is just the beginning: there will be an expansion towards home maintenance, repairs and errands. If the model scales, the volume of private indoor data that would be generated would be enormous, an asset as valuable as it is sensitive. Context. The closest examples of the digital attention economy are well known: Google and Facebook have built their respective empires by offering free services in exchange for behavioral data, only Shift takes it to the physical world, one step further, more intimate and more complex to revoke. Its business model is part of the trend of training robots by knowing how humans move and how we perform in real spaces, something that companies such as Figure AI either Physical Intelligence (Pi) because in reality, we are living in a race to obtain this information. How they do it. Its operation consists of three steps: verifying the operators, recording during service and anonymization before processing. The Shift project begins in New York and on its website it announces its presence in 15 countries (although it seems that it is more of a promise of deployment than a reality). Its beginnings are common in these times of social networks and virality: respond to the publication with “Shift” to receive early access and gain visibility. Of course, what is not publicly explained is the technical architecture behind data anonymization, which third parties receive the data, the security standards applied to the devices carried by the operators or the audit mechanisms (if they use them). Yes, but. In fact, as explained it would not meet the standards of the GDPR European (article 5 refers to the fact that any processing of personal data must be transparent, limited and justified). One of Shift’s slogans is: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins.” One thing must be given to the startup: it is honest from the beginning when it comes to making it clear that the recorded data is going to be commercialized. How many conditions of use of applications that we use daily are less clear when it comes to talking about the destination of the data. Of course, informed consent is weak precisely because of the opaqueness behind it and because of an obvious reality: a recording of your home is not a tweet and the consequences of sharing it are much more serious. In Xataka | Have I been Trained: how to know if your data and work has been used to train an artificial intelligence In Xataka | AI has become the best example that if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product Cover | shift with Gemini

In China they want humanoid robots to do household chores. The problem is that a house is not a factory

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For years we have seen humanoid robots do somersaults, danceppractice martial arts or move through factories with increasingly striking capabilities. The next step seems almost natural: taking them home to do the laundry, prepare a bed or support elder care. The problem is that this transition is not as direct as it seems. A factory is designed to reduce uncertainty; A home, on the other hand, is full of small exceptions. And for a robot, those exceptions can be exactly the difference between a flashy demo and a useful product. The concept. SCMP account That GigaAI has introduced the SeeLight S1 as the country’s first general-purpose home humanoid robot model, developed in collaboration with the Hubei Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and the Hubei Humanoid Robotics Industry Alliance. In images released by the company, he appears performing very recognizable tasks: cutting vegetables, frying eggs, loading a washing machine, hanging clothes, making a bed or opening curtains. The company also plans to test it for free in homes in Wuhan in the first half of 2027. A house is not an assembly line. That is the fundamental difference. In a factory, the robot can work with known references, pieces always placed in the same way and movements that are repeated thousands of times with very few variations. In a home, on the other hand, nothing guarantees that the shirt is where it was yesterday, that the chair has not moved or that a pet does not cross in front of it just when the robot is trying to complete a task. Much movement, little understanding. Xinhua itself collects an idea that helps cool down the epic of the demonstrations and that does not only affect China, but humanoid robotics in general: humanoids have greatly improved in their “cerebellum”, the part linked to control and coordination, but they still have major problems in their “brain”. In other words, they can execute complex movements, but it is difficult for them to understand what a scene means and what function each object has within it. Home is also a data problem. Now, for these systems to work better in real homes, they need to learn from real homes, but the home is precisely one of the places where it is least easy to collect data. We are not just talking about room maps, but about objects, forces, angles, routines and physical decisions that are difficult to simulate. Advances and challenges. According to NSFCthe country expected to exceed 10,000 humanoid units sold in 2025, with a year-on-year growth of 125%, and there were already pilots in industrial manufacturing, delivery, catering and services. The important nuance is that none of this automatically turns this industrial career into a successful deployment within homes: the sector itself locates the path prudently, first industry, then logistics and commercial uses, and only later the home. A future easy to imagine, difficult to materialize. The difficult part is demonstrating that this can be done usefully, safely, and at reasonable cost outside of a prepared demonstration. There is the real border. China and other countries around the world can accelerate prototypes, pilots and production, but a home does not forgive clumsiness in the same way as a controlled stage. To get home, the robot will not have to understand human life better. Images | GigaAI In Xataka | In China there are already “schools” for robots. Its objective is the same as schools for humans: to teach them to work

Tenerife was known for the sun and its beaches. It will soon house one of the five most powerful supercomputers in Spain

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Tenerife will have a new supercomputer. I already had two with the names of Teide and of Anagaand they will now be joined by a new and promising project called the Atlantic Supercomputing Center. With it, it is hoped to turn the Canary Islands into a new nerve center for retaining and attracting talent in the technological field. Up to 10 million euros of investment. This new project It is a collaboration of the Cabildo of Tenerife and the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies (ITER) with the German technology giant Bechtle. It will have an initial investment of 5.5 million euros, which could rise to 10 million as its four phases are deployed (two for storage, two for computing) oriented by the demand for the center and its resources. The expansion is flexible and Bechtle will supply the latest technology available at the time of project execution to avoid the use of obsolete components. The fifth supercomputer by power in Spain. By integrating with the existing nodes, the Atlantic Supercomputing Center will achieve a combined power that will place it as the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the entire national territory. It is also expected to enter the prestigious TOP500 list which brings together the most powerful supercomputers from around the world. Hybrid architecture. The rise of AI has meant that the project has an architecture that will allow working with both more conventional workloads and those intended for projects in the field of artificial intelligence. Thus, its architecture will be hybrid: CPU: although it has not been specified which processors it will use, it has been indicated that the supercomputer will have 13 nodes with 288 cores each, which will allow for more than 3,000 process cores to execute scientific tasks, for example. GPU: there will also be four specialized nodes with a total of 32 Nvidia H200 NVL cards, which will allow training of large language models and the development of AI projects. Performance: this expansion is expected to provide between 1.3 and 1.4 PFLOPS of global computing power (close to 300 TFLOPS in CPU and almost one PFLOP in GPU), indicated those responsible for the Cabildo de Tenerife and ITER. Hours instead of months. The president of the Cabildo, Rosa Dávila, stood out that local laboratories, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of La Laguna among others will be able to access these resources to be able to compute in hours what previously could take months. Juan José Martínez, from ITER, recalled how during the pandemic the Teide-HPC supercomputer It was one of the five centers in all of Spain who sequenced and monitored the biological variants of COVID-19. From the audiovisual sector to the aerospace sector. Among the sectors that will benefit from this computing capacity will be those associated with the audiovisual industry. The Teide-HPC infrastructure was for example used to render scenes from the film ‘Tadeo Jones 2: The Secret of King Midas‘. It will also be the core of the project management of canary satellite constellation. Attracting talent. This facility also wants to become an element that reinforces the role of the Canary Islands as a technological hub. Having a supercomputing infrastructure like this wants to help attract technology companies that promote highly qualified young employment and therefore retain and attract new talent in this sector. Efficiency. Although the power of Teide HPC will greatly benefit from these new resources, advances in photolithography will mean that the new supercomputer will occupy only a quarter of the previous physical space. Its environmental impact will also be zero: the infrastructure will be located in ITER’s own facilities, and will be powered entirely with clean energy from its wind farms and photovoltaic plants. Image | POT | ITER In Xataka | The muscle of many supercomputers depended on GPUs: China is trying another way to surpass the best in the US

The house of Open Source is collapsing because of vibecoding

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When it arrived, GitHub was miraculous for Open Source developers. Not only did it allow you to have a platform on which to host your code and always have it updated thanks to the version control software on which it was based (Git), but it did so with a social network component that definitively boosted its growth. Everything was wonderful, but suddenly it wasn’t. When GitHub didn’t exist. Developer Armin Ronacher I remembered GitHub before GitHub. When your Open Source software was on SourceForge, you had Trac running and that segment was filled with decentralized and anarchic Subversion repositories. It is a good way to remember how important the arrival of GitHub was, which solved almost all the problems that existed for these developers and became the backbone of the Open Source community. The Ghostty Earthquake. Although there had already been criticism and complaints in recent months, there has been a before and after in this situation. It happened this week, when Mitchell Hashimoto, developer of ghosttyannounced that left GitHub. This terminal emulator is a project with notable popularity on GitHub (more than 52,000 stars), but its creator has become fed up with the platform’s unreliability and has declared that “this is no longer a serious place to work.” GitHub acknowledges the problems. Last March, GitHub CTO, Vlad Fedorov, admitted in an article on the company’s official blog that the platform was indeed suffering availability problems. Hashimoto’s post seemed to set off even more alarm bells, because the same engineer published an article shortly after titled “An update on GitHub availability.” In it he apologized again, but also explained that the problems have a culprit. At GitHub they wanted to explain that the availability problems are due to the brutal growth they have had in software creation in recent months. Source: GitHub. Damn AI agents. This engineer indicated how in recent months they have realized that they need a redesign of GitHub that can scale by multiplying its capacity by 30. “The main reason for this rapid change is in how the software is being developed. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated significantly.” The vibecoding phenomenon and the rise of Claude Code and other agentic development tools have caused companies and new users to develop more and more software, and that has caused reliability problems in a platform that was not prepared for this avalanche of code. They promise to fix the problem. At GitHub they know what to do: “Our priorities are clear: first availability, then capacity, then new features.” They are going to focus entirely on that to improve the behavior of critical services and optimize availability that in April has fallen to 85%, something unacceptable for a service on which millions of developers depend. The official history of its availability makes it clear: too many yellow and red updates. GitHub has no CEO. There is one more element that worries in the future of the company. In August 2025 Thomas Dohmke left office CEO and Microsoft did not replace him. Instead of that distributed management functions among several executives and integrated GitHub into the CoreAI division. Meanwhile, Dohmke announced in February the creation of his new startup, called Entire, which is precisely intended as an evolved successor to GitHub that proposes solutions for the new flow of software development that has emerged with AI. The alternatives are fine, but. There are, of course, very valid alternative platforms. Among them is including Plastic SCM, from the Spanish Códice Softwarewhich in turn was purchased by Unity in 2020. There are others like CodeBerg or GitLab even more popular among the community, and even OpenAI seems want to create your own platform. Whether you do it or not, the problem with all of them is the same: GitHub had become a social network for developers, and it showed that in this case centralization provided more advantages than disadvantages. If the community now spreads out, project discovery and contributions will become fragmented. Image | Rubaitul Azad In Xataka | AI came into our lives under a “freemium” model: GitHub and Claude are clear that the future is paying for it

If you live in Madrid or Barcelona, ​​it is possible that a Latin American bookstore has opened next to your house

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The indomitableopened four months ago in the Madrid neighborhood of Prosperidad and directed by a Mexican. A few meters from Retiro Park, the now classic The Retreat of Lettersowned by two Colombians. In Arganzuela, the Argentine bookstore Mandolin It inaugurated its first Madrid branch a year ago. It is not an isolated or spontaneous phenomenon. It responds to an accumulation of demographic, editorial and economic factors that go beyond the folklore chronicle. From rookies to veterans. In this panorama, the most recent projects coexist with initiatives that have been established for a few years. The Mistral It opened in 2021 in the hall of the old Arenal Theater, two minutes from Puerta del Sol, by the Argentine Andrea Stefanoni, and was considered the most beautiful bookstore in the world by National Geographic that same year. His fame allowed him to organize a short story contest that received 150 manuscripts from different countries. Closer in time, in 2020, a couple of Venezuelans inaugurated The little beings also in Madrid, where they sell new and used books with special attention to Venezuelan and Latin American production. Olavidefounded by two Argentine journalists, combines book sales with cultural activities. AND Late Space It simultaneously functions as a bookstore, cafeteria and headquarters of Late, an Ibero-American network of narrative journalism founded as a cooperative by professionals from Colombia, Spain and Cuba. Repeating pattern. Although they are founded by Latin Americans, these bookstores do not operate exclusively with the diaspora as clientele. They are neighborhood bookstores in the most classic sense: children’s collection, independent labels and a personal relationship between bookseller and customer. They organize workshops and reading clubs. Sometimes they even serve cuisine from their places of origin. As a reflection of this phenomenon, the Madrid Book Fair of 2025 dedicated a table of its Meeting of Independent Ibero-American Bookstores to the phenomenon. The figures behind the phenomenon. The most recent breakdown by Latin American origin available, the analysis of the Elcano Royal Institute Based on INE data as of January 1, 2024, there were 4.25 million people born in Latin America residing in Spain (9% of the total population and 48% of all immigrants). The trend behind that figure has not slowed down: during 2024, the largest increases in the foreign population were once again concentrated in Colombians (+98,057), Venezuelans (+52,555) and Moroccans (+48,306), according to the INE. in December 2025. The accumulated result is that as of January 1, 2026, Spain has exceeded the 10 million inhabitants born abroad. A community of that magnitude, concentrated in large cities, generates cultural demand. But… why is this demand channeled towards the opening of own bookstores and not only towards consumption in establishments that already exist? The distribution obstacle. Part of the answer lies in how the transatlantic publishing market works. That Spain and Latin America share a language does not mean that they share a catalog: for example, El Retiro de las Letras imports directly from publishers in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina to make authors visible that do not reach Spain through conventional distribution channels. Combed Cana bookstore specialized in Latin American fiction with offices in Barcelona and Madrid, recognizes that half of its titles are not distributed in Spain and that These copies cannot be returned if they do not sell.. It is a risk of excess stock that large chains are not willing to assume. The bookstore Juan Rulfoproperty of the Economic Culture Fund of Spain, and the Ibero-American Bookstoreopen in Madrid’s Barrio de las Letras since 2004, have been covering that specialized niche for decades. To those establishments have been added in recent years dozens of projects promoted by immigrants that multiply the offer, from bookstores specialized 100% in Latin American narrative to hybrid spaces with a focus on culture. Relief in the sector. The context of the book sector in Spain is not immune to this phenomenon. There are 2,754 independent bookstores active in Spainand although it is a figure in permanent declinethe business going well in economic terms: In 2024, the Spanish publishing sector had a turnover of 3,037 million euros, 6.3% more than in 2023, in its eleventh consecutive year of growth and with the highest figure since 2008. How do you explain that establishments fall while turnover rises? 85% of closures are caused by the retirement of the bookseller. Latin American booksellers are occupying a space where replacements are scarce, in residential neighborhoods of large cities where the traditional bookstore has closed. The limits of the phenomenon. It is advisable not to exaggerate the scope of the phenomenon. A few dozen bookstores founded by Latin American immigrants in Madrid and Barcelona do not reconfigure the Spanish publishing ecosystem. Spanish book exports in 2024 reached 381 million euros, aimed mainly at Ibero-American countrieswhich indicates that the flow of books between Spain and Latin America continues to be mostly in the opposite direction. What these bookstores do represent is a symptom: that of an immigrant community with sufficient cultural roots to invest in a business with fair profitability and that demands a very high vocation. A sector where the main problem is that retirements are multiplying and where there is a Latin American catalog with four million potential readers who continue to need intermediaries willing to cross the Atlantic. In Xataka | The 24 most beautiful bookstores in the world

In 2023, an exclusive Rolex was stolen from Keanu Reeves’ house in LA. A year later they found him in the most unexpected place: Chile

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In September, Rolex, the luxury when it comes to watches, filed a patent application that gave an idea of ​​the house’s problems with thefts and counterfeits of its most legendary models: they sought use NFT chips and certificates of authenticity based on blockchain to identify the models. The story (with a happy ending) of Keanu Reeve’s watches has surely only reinforced that idea. John Wick’s watch. The story begins several years ago, during the filming of the film ‘John Wick 4’ that the actor played. At the end of filming, Reeves pays tribute to himself with an exclusive Rolex Submariner valued at $9,000one with the engraved words “2021, JW4, thank you, The John Wick Five” next to the actor’s name. In December 2023, someone entered the artist’s house in Hollywood Hills (Los Angeles) taking several high-value jewelry, including the exclusive model from the Swiss luxury house. Enter Keanu’s house. Curiously, It wasn’t the first time it happened.. In fact, in 2014 the home was broken into. up to two times in three days. The first time, Reeves confronted an intruder in his library, the second, the cleaning staff found an intruder in his pool. But there is more. Early last year, Reeves requested a temporary restraining order against a man who allegedly trespassed on the actor’s property at least six times between November 2022 and January 2023. In one case, the alleged stalker left a backpack containing a DNA testing kit, one he intended to use on Reeves to prove they were related in some way, according to the order request. An unexpected find in Santiago. The news broke in December 2024 in the city of Santiago, where Chilean police recovered three watches belonging to the actorincluding the Rolex Submariner from the action movie and two other models described by authorities as “valuable.” Apparently, during a series of raids on four homes, Chilean authorities seized high-value jewelry and watches, including those three models that belonged to Reeves. According to CNN reportslocal authorities collaborated with US officials to establish the link between the watches and the robbery at the actor’s residence. As a result, a 21-year-old man is under arrest. Cinematic irony. The media has not stopped repeating a curiosity these days: the parallelism with the plot of the saga itself ‘John Wick‘, where Reeves’ character begins his story of revenge after a robbery (and the death of his dog) at his home. Outside of this trivial detail, the famous actor does not seem clear about returning to the role in future installments of the saga. The reason? Mainly age. Although his heart says he wants to do it, Keanu Reeves he joked shortly after in an interview that his knees might not be ready for another film due to the physical demands of the character. The symbolism of John Wick’s Rolex. As for the recovered watch and beyond its economic value, the Submariner represents Reeves’ appreciation for his team, known in the industry for giving away personalized watches as gestures of gratitude after finishing filming. In this case, the actor had kept one model and had given the rest to the doubles who played him in the film. Submariner, luxury on the wrist. The Rolex model is an icon of watchmaking and the first diving watch reference Truly functional. Launched in 1953 and designed specifically for divers, it became a symbol of innovation for its water resistance up to 100 meters (later extended to 300 meters) and its durability in extreme conditions. Its timeless design, with a unidirectional rotating bezel to measure immersion time and its legibility underwater, has established it as a standard in both the professional and fashion fields. In fact, before Keanu Reeves, the model He has been associated with many other historical and cultural figuresfrom ‘James Bond’ to marine explorers and other celebrities, a symbol of technical excellence and style that maintain it as one of the most recognized and desired watches in the world. In some cases and as we see, excessively. Image | Dr.K. In Xataka | He forgot some AirPods in his Ferrari: the unexpected trick that helped recover a stolen supercar In Xataka | New York has a problem with car theft. The police’s solution: give away some AirTags A version of this article was published in December 2024

In London someone has paid 310 million for the most expensive house in history. It is proof that the luxury market has no ceiling

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In the world there are expensive houses (increasingly), very expensive houses and then houses within reach only of the greatest fortunes on the planet, like the one that has just been sold in London for a whopping 270 million poundsabout 310 million euros at the exchange rate. The figure is shocking in itself (it is the same that has been paid in other parts of Europe to build a stadium), but it becomes even more interesting when another detail is known: everything indicates that it is the most expensive home sold to date in an operation of that type, focused on a single residence. To get the keys, its new owner, an influential British businessman, had to beat three royal families from the Middle East. What has happened? that the real estate market premium has just reached one of those milestones that sound almost like science fiction, at least among ordinary mortals. The British press has revealed that a wealthy businessman in the country has closed the purchase of the most expensive home sold to date. And “more expensive” can be understood in a literal sense. Although it is not easy to talk about world records in a sector in which properties do not always go on the market nor are operations advertised, the Bloomberg agency slide which is probably the largest sale in history centered on a property of its type: a single single-family home. It is not crazy if you take into account that the transaction was signed for 270 million pounds, about 310 million euros. Some sources raise the figure to more than 315 million. What is the housing like? The property is called Providence House (formerly Gordon House) and is a huge 19th century mansion located in the Chelsea neighborhood of west London. The plot once housed the residence of the British Prime Minister Robert Walpolebut for years it has belonged to Nick Candya London businessman linked to the brick sector and the Reform UK party. Beyond its privileged location, in the heart of one of the most expensive cities on the planet, the house surprises with its figures: the house stands on a plot of two acres (just over 8,000 m2) with a lake and swimming pool and Georgian style decoration. Media like Financial Times they need which has a private cinema with IMAX screen, greenhouse and the second largest garden from the center of London. It is only surpassed by the one surrounding Buckingham Palace. Who bought it? The buyer is Sunel Setiya, co-founder of Quadrature Capitala trading firm that according to Bloomberg data obtained a profit of 411 million pounds in the financial year ending January 2025. Although with Providence House he has broken all the molds, this is not the first time that Setiya has made headlines for his taste for luxury homes… and his enormous generosity in paying for them. In his day he already paid 110 million pounds for a penthouse in One Hyde Park. And that the property, of around 1,300 m2lacked interior divisions and required works. The Times details which on this occasion has had to pay more than 31 million pounds for property tax alone. The operation certainly marks a before and after in the British real estate market. The most expensive house sold in the United Kingdom before Setiya took out his checkbook was the mansion known as 2-8A Rutland Gate, awarded in 2020 for £210 million to Hui Kan Yan, founder of the Chinese developer Evergrande Group. Click on the image to go to the tweet. And who sold it? Nick Candy, another British tycoon who shares Setiya’s taste for exclusive homes. In fact, he has a penthouse in the same complex that is also for sale for around £175 million. Nick and his brother Christian are known in the sector for the development of the complex One Hyde Parkmade up of 86 apartments and duplexes in the heart of Knightsbridge. Beyond their taste for luxury homes, Setiya and Candy are at opposite poles on an ideological level. The first (Setiya) is a important donor of the Labor Party and dedicates large sums of money through his company to fighting climate change. Nick Candy however is a prominent figure of Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s far-right party. Have there been more interested parties? Ideological differences do not seem to have been an obstacle to closing the operation. In fact, to become the new owner of Providence House Setiya had to prevail over three Middle Eastern royal families also interested in the luxurious London mansion. Given its characteristics (and amounts), the operation was carried out outside the market. The operation represents a lifeline for the luxury residential market in London, which, as remember Five Daysis not going through its best moment. According to LonRes, 2025 was the second time since 2011 that no sales of more than £50 million were closed and in February transactions worth five million (or more) suffered a year-on-year drop of 55%. The puncture coincides with a tax change that directly affects properties. Image | Jaanus Jagomagi (Unsplash) In Xataka | If the question is whether house prices will rise forever, London has the answer. And it is a warning for Madrid

This engineer found 1,351 loose photos in his grandmother’s house. He ended up building a personal Wikipedia of his entire life

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It all started with a closet full of old loose photos. Last year an engineer named Jeremy visited his grandmother’s house for the first time since the pandemic and unknowingly came across a treasure. 1,351 on paper, without order, without dates and without context. Some were in black and white, from when his grandparents were 20 years old. Others were from his mother as a baby. The last ones were from him in high school, just before smartphones arrived and everything moved to the cloud. What began as a family organization exercise became a fascinating project over the weeks: a personal encyclopedia. A Wikipedia of his own life. First, the physical photos and the grandmother. The first problem he encountered when starting his project is that physical photos do not have EXIF metadata. There is almost never a capture date (although some cameras superimposed it), there are no GPS coordinates and there is no information that allows them to be easily sorted. What Jeremy did was resort to a much more direct solution: sit down with his grandmother and ask her about the photos. Remembering that it is a gerund. In that conversation she rearranged the photos of their wedding and narrated the details while he took notes. Names, places, who was sitting where, what each ritual meant. With those notes, he set up a local instance of MediaWiki, the same software that Wikipedia uses, and wrote a page about the wedding following the same format that was used on Wikipedia to royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. Within two afternoons I had a complete article with scanned photos, captions, links to empty pages about each person mentioned, and links to the real Wikipedia to give historical context to the events. Digital photos and Claude Code to get the job done. Jeremy realized that things could get worse and took the opportunity to do tests with digital photos, which do have EXIF data with date and time and even GPS coordinates. With that information he wanted to see how far he could go without interviews, so he took 625 photos from a family trip to Coorg (India) in 2012, put them in a folder and opened Claude Code in that directory with a simple instruction: compose a Wikipedia page by browsing the images. The model used ImageMagick to create contact sheets that allowed him to process multiple photos at once, and the magic of AI did the rest. The result was a detailed draft chronicling the trip organized by time of day. Without location data, just with timestamps and visual content, the AI ​​model was able to identify the places that appeared in the photos, including some that Jeremy himself had forgotten. It even detected the means of transportation used between destinations just with what it saw in the images. When AI starts remembering for you. Then came the most ambitious experiment, when he wanted to go further with a trip he took to Mexico City in 2022. He had 291 photos and 343 videos taken with an iPhone 12 Pro with GPS coordinates in the metadata, but he also exported his Google Maps location history, his Uber trips, his banking transactions and his Shazam history. By including all that data and sources, the model was able to cross-reference banking transactions with location data to identify the restaurants where he had eaten. For example, he found images of a soccer match in the photos but did not remember which teams were playing, but he found out that information by crossing those photos with bank transactions in which he found a Ticketmaster invoice with the name of the tournament and the teams, and incorporated them into the page. He also used Shazam’s history to describe the music playing in each location. From photos and memories to a personal encyclopedia. A wonderful project that now anyone can replicate thanks to the whoami.wiki website. First the trips, then the friendships. What started as a travel documentation project evolved into something more personal. The Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp archives contained some 100,000 messages and several thousand voice notes exchanged with close friends over a decade. The AI ​​model managed to convert all this information into a unique biography, identifying vital episodes of the protagonists, then converted into pages that, according to Jeremy, “read as if they were written by someone who knew us both.” When he shared the pages with those friends, they couldn’t stop reading those stories and wanted more. MediaWiki as a master ingredient. One of the most interesting decisions of the project is the choice of software. MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s engine, turned out to be an extraordinarily suitable tool for that use case. AI models understand this perfectly because they have been trained with millions of Wikipedia pages and know their structure and functioning. Discussion pages serve to control the development of those pages, categories group pages by topic, and revision history monitors the evolution of each page. All of this infrastructure already existed, and it was not necessary to create a new platform to organize the information that Jeremy was providing. Surpriseyes. At the end of his story, Jeremy explains that after the process: “I realized that I was no longer alone working on a family history project. What I had been creating, page by page, was a personal encyclopedia. A structured, navigable, interconnected record of my life compiled thanks to the data I already had around me.” Documenting her grandmother’s life revealed things she didn’t know: her years as a single mother or the decisions she had to make, for example. Going through the history of his friendships allowed him to recover moments that he had almost forgotten and made him call some of them to remember them together. “The encyclopedia not only organized the data, it made me pay more attention to the people in my life,” he explained. you can do it too. The project has been so rewarding for him that he … Read more

For 15 years a couple lived in a house inside Disneyland. None of the visitors noticed

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When we talk about amusement parks, Disney is king. Although in recent years we have seen amazing ideas (such as the spectacular Japan’s Super Nintendo World), the Disneylands continue to have a lot of pull. In fact, some parks continue to be updated with corners like the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge that, after five years of constructionopened as the largest expansion in the park’s history. There are also additions such as Avengers Campus or Tomorrowland. Being so huge, it is normal that stories of all kinds are found in its magical corners (sometimes they don’t turn out well if you do not pay the corresponding extra), and one of those stories It is that of the couple who lived for more than 15 years in their own house within the park. It is about the marriage between Owen and Dolly Pope and his house was on the park land even before the park itself was built. Disneyland began construction in 1954 and opened in 1955, but the story begins long before that. Owen and Dolly were married in 1935 and worked performing horse shows throughout California. In 1950, Harper Goff, one of Disney’s leading artists at the time, saw the couple in one of these shows and recommended Walt – Disney – go see them. At that time, Disney was passing a bad time. They were in the middle of a financial crisis and the company saw that it had to diversify. For this reason, they began to consider entering other businesses, amusement parks being one of them. Therefore, the idea of ​​creating Disneyland was already on Disney’s mind and, after seeing the show, he arranged to have lunch with the Popes. At first, they thought that what he wanted was to hire them for a movie, but what arose were plans to build a park and Disney wanted the Popes to perform their shows there, also managing the activities with the horses. In 1951, the couple moved to Disney’s studios in Burbank, being the only ones who, along with the military who occupied the studios during World War II, lived inside them. This is what the house would look like inside when the Popes lived there. They lived in a caravan inside the studios while Owen built stables, but one day they were given the choice of a house inside the park. It was located where the Big Thunder Ranch area was later built, one of the wings of the park focused on the ‘Wild West’ theme, and they began living there three days before the park opened. Making room for a galaxy far, far away Evidently, they did not live because of the good will of Disney, but because they were in charge of maintaining everything related to the horse shows and activities with both horses and ponies. Apart from this, Disney staff visited regularly to ask how they could improve the shows and what people wanted to see, so it was a very important part of park management. With brutal financial results, Disney began to explore the idea of ​​opening theme parks in other parts of the world, Florida being one of them. So, while Walt Disney World was being built on the other side of the United States, Owen built harnesses or tackle for the horses in the new park, but from his home in the Californian park. In 1971, Dolly and Owen moved to Florida to oversee construction of the Fort Wilderness Resort area of ​​the new park, and with everything in place, in 1975 they both retired. They were the first cast members to retire. What happened to the house? Well, the story has a crumb because. It is not a decorated house, since the Pope They lived there like anyone does in our homes, but their work was much closer and they could walk. The funny thing is that thousands of visitors passed by his house every day without knowing that… well, that it was a normal, ordinary house. However, it was abandoned after the move to Florida and was not used again except for some staff meetings. There came a time when a set showing how the Popes lived was put up and could be visited at certain times, but it was time to build the Star Wars megapark. The Pope house and stables. Image of Dadlogic The area today, with the Star Wars expansion and the approximate location of the Pope house Disney has the ability to make everything a commercial product or have appeal and did not demolish the Pope housebut the transfer to an area near the park that is publicly accessible, but on Disneyland property. On its façade you can see an identifying plaque that tells its history and where the Pope’s house and stables used to be, we now have the parking lot of the Millennium Falcon. Images | Disney and Google Maps In Xataka | Drugs, betrayals and trusts: the bizarre story behind Walt Disney’s billionaire inheritance

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