important

The laptop is still important in the age of AI

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Samsung has reserved the Mobile World Congress to announce the arrival in Spain of its new batch of laptops: the Galaxy Book6 series. This family is made up of three models, namely Book6, Book6 Pro and Book6 Ultra, and its objective is not so much to compete in specifications and price, but also to position itself as one of the fundamental pillars of the AI ​​ecosystem that the firm is developing. The news. Samsung has announced the launch in Spain of its new laptops. The Galaxy Book6 will start at 1,149 euros, the Galaxy Book6 Pro will start at 1,799 euros and the Galaxy Book6 Ultra will start at 3,399 euros base. It will be available from March 11 and its specifications are as follows: Galaxy Book5 Galaxy Book5 pro Galaxy Book5 ultra SCREEN 14 inch IPS Anti-Glare WQXGA+ (2,880 x 1,800 pixels) 350 nits brightness — 16 inch IPS Touch WUXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) 350 nits — 16 inch IPS Anti-Glare WUXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) 350 nits 14/16 inch Touch AMOLED Anti-reflective panel 16 inch Touch-AMOLED Anti-reflective panel WQXGA+ (2,880 x 1,800 pixels) 1,000 nits DIMENSIONS AND WEIGHT 14 inches: 313.4 x 221.1 x 14.9mm 1.48 kilos — 16 inches 357.1 x 248 x 16.8mm (touch) 357.1 x 248 x 16.8mm (non-touch) 14 inches: 314.2 x 220.6 x 11.6mm 1.24 kilos — 16 inches: 356.9 x 248 x 11.9mm 1.59 kilos 356.9 x 249 x 15.4mm 1.79 kilos PROCESSOR Intel Core Ultra 5/7 Intel Graphics NPU up to 49 TOPS Intel Core Ultra X7/7/5 Intel Arc Graphics/Intel Graphics NPU up to 50 TOPS Intel Core Ultra X9/9/X7/7 Intel Arc/RTX 5060/5070 Graphics NPU up to 50 TOPS RAM 16/32GB LPDDR5x 16/32GB LPDDR5x 16/32/64GB LPDDR5x STORAGE Up to 1TB PCIe SSD Expansion port Up to 1TB PCIe SSD Expansion port (16″) Up to 1TB PCIe SSD Expansion port (16″) FRONT CAMERA 2MP 2MP 2MP BATTERY 61.2Wh 45W USB C fast charging 14 inches: 67.18 Wh 16 inches: 78.07 Wh 65W fast charging 80.2Wh Fast charging 100/140W OPERATING SYSTEM Windows 11 Home Windows 11 Home Windows 11 Home CONNECTIVITY Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth v5.4 802.11ax 2×2 USB Type-C x2 USB Type-A x2 HDMI microSD RJ45, S-Lock combo jack Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth v5.4 802.11 be 2×2 Thunderbolt 4 x2 USB Type-A HDMI 2.1 port (8K@60Hz) combo jack Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth v5.4 802.11 be 2×2 Thunderbolt 4 x2 USB Type-A HDMI 2.1 port (8K@60Hz) combo jack OTHERS Stereo speaker Double microphone Dolby Atmos Stereo/quad speaker (16″) Double microphone Dolby Atmos 6x speakers Double microphone Dolby Atmos Haptic trackpad PRICE From 1,149 euros From 1,799 euros From 3,399 euros The mobile as the center. Galaxy phones, especially Galaxy S and, more specifically, the Galaxy S Ultraare the central axis around which Samsung’s product strategy pivots. The thread that unites the entire ecosystem, that is, tablets, watches, headphones and, of course, computers, is artificial intelligence. This is how Samsung makes money: the secret is in the IPHONE Samsung Galaxy Book Series6 | Image: Xataka Samsung’s idea is that our devices know us better and anticipate our needs, being proactive when it comes to suggesting data or taking action. In that sense, the more complete the ecosystem is, the more capacity to react it will have. It is something that Motorola and Lenovo They have also understood and that companies like Apple, in their own way, have been working for years. Samsung wants to connect everything and knows that in its enormous ecosystem it has a great competitive advantage, so it makes sense that it wants to continue exploiting it. And it works for them. According to internal data shared by the company, the laptop market grew by 9% in value in Spain last year. Samsung, for its part, has been the brand that has grown the most, with 88% in value and 93% in units. It is possible that AI PCs have not taken off as the market would have liked, but perhaps that is because the real value It is not in the execution of AI models locallybut in how products integrate with each other in the age of AI. Samsung Galaxy Book Series6 | Image: Xataka The role of AI in Book6. Samsung’s new laptops integrate Galaxy AI and Microsoft Phone Link. What does that mean? That the user can use the mobile phone from the PC, transfer files and synchronize devices to, for example, use a tablet as an external monitor. You can also use AI features such as generative editing, AI Select, voice file search, writing assistant, as well as all the Copilot+PC options. To do this, Samsung relies on the cloud, but also on the NPU of the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 that the three laptops mount inside. Roughly speaking, this allows certain functions to be executed locally, which increases privacy. The Ultra model, for its part, mounts NVIDIA RTX 5070/5060 GPUs, so, at least on paper, it should also excel in gaming and graphic tasks. Samsung Galaxy Book Series6 | Image: Xataka The importance of the laptop. And, although AI has proven to be a valuable ally in mobility, when it comes to productivity the laptop continues to be the reference device. The mobile phone is fine for doing things on the go, but when it comes to being really productive, a larger screen and a proper keyboard win out. Brands, aware of this, are working to ensure that their devices understand each other better and better and have found a way to achieve this in AI. AI cannot and should not be seen as something isolated, but as a common thread between devices that, for better and for worse, are condemned to understand each other. Images | Samsung In Xataka | Samsung has a plan for all its factories: have humanoid robots controlled by a central AI work

The Spanish philosopher who defends that what is important is in the simple things of everyday life

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Anyone who has visited Bruges and wandered through its streets has ended up coming across a wonderful little park surrounded by white houses. He Belgian city beguinage It is, along with twelve others spread throughout Flanders, a World Heritage Site since 1998 and no wonder. Although “it is not known how this movement began,” as Silvana Panciera explainedsociologist and author of a book about them; The truth is that since the 12th century and for centuries, “they proposed that women exist without being wives or religious, emancipated from any male domination.” The curious thing is that the beguinage, like convents and religious writers, are becoming fashionable. Very fashionable. And no, I’m not talking about the Catholic ‘revival’. In recent weeks, the temporary “coincidence” of ‘Sundays‘by Ruiz de Azúa or ‘Lux‘ from Rosalía, had raised the murmur that “Catholicism was back“But, really, I don’t talk about that. As books like ‘Mystics’ by Begoña Méndezwe are talking about something deeper: something that, behind the Catholic trappings, speaks directly to an entire generation of young women. Something that, in the words of Jorge Burón“opens common horizons instead of individual ones.” Saint Teresa was right. Saint Teresa of Jesus may be the most important Spanish thinker in all of history and, very often, readings that are excessively attached to the Christian background prevent us from appreciating the philosophical power that is hidden behind it. Today, when the tensions between personal life and professional development are especially intense in a generation of women that has abandoned traditional frames of reference without yet embracing new ones, Teresa de Cepeda’s ideas are especially relevant. “Between the pots.” A well-known example is in the ‘Book of foundations’when he says that “…understand that, if it is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots, helping you internally and externally.” In that passage, Teresa defends that there is no war between inner life and outer work, that the underlying criterion is not what we do, but how we do it. However, it is not a defense of “everything doesn’t matter.” On the contrary, what he rejects is the automatic superiority of the “elevated” over the “everyday.” Seeking God (the meaning of life, who we really are) is not something we demand the most absolute solitude: It is something that must be done wherever it is necessary. Where it touches. It is not a cliché: a few days ago we argued that the feeling of the end of the era, acceleration, saturation, existential anxiety or problems of legitimacy are something inherent to our days. The feeling that the future is a fiction is the order of the day. Therefore, it can surprise no one that Saint Teresa is more alive than ever encouraging us to take charge of our day. Image | Teresa, the body of Christ In Xataka | The Catholic Church changed the psychology of Europe. Unintentionally, it sparked an era of technological innovation

“studying humanities will be more important than ever”

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When a student finds himself at the doors of the PAU (University Access Test) and considers what studies to start If you want to dedicate yourself to the development of AI, you will likely opt for computer engineering or a STEM career. In a way it would be the right decision and proof of this is the high job placement rates that, year after year, mark technical engineering. However, according to Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, the humanities are the key to future of work with AI. To program Claude is already there. Less machine, more human. In a recent interview granted to ABC NewsDaniela Amodei, a graduate in Literature from the University of California in Santa Cruz and sister of the co-founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, argues that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever.” His argument is based on the same discourse that other AI executives such as Jensen Huang have been supporting for some time: “our job is to create computer technology so that no one needs to program.” Huang said. at a conference in 2024. “A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM, right? But I think this idea that there are things that make us unique as humans, understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what motivates us, that’s always going to be really important.” That is, what Amodei considers to be really valuable in the future They are not people who know how to programbut rather teach AI models to think like a human. At Anthropic they are already on that path. The president of Anthropic assured that at the time of hire new employeesalready prioritize profiles of “great communicators, who have an excellent emotional quotient and people skills, who are kind, compassionate and curious and want to help others.” For the directive, “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.” In fact, Amodei does not see the future of work as a scenario of human vs AIbut of humans plus AI. “The combination of humans and AI creates more meaningful, more challenging, more interesting and highly productive jobs,” stressed the president of Anthropic, “And I believe it will also open the door to greater access and opportunities for many people,” she added. The harsh labor reality in Spain. The job placement rate of the humanities branch in Spain paints a very different picture. According to data According to the BBVA Foundation and the Ivie, 77.6% of young university students obtain a job according to their degree. Students who study computer and software engineering obtain an average employability rate of 89.4%. Instead, according to the report ‘The employability of young people in Spain 2025’ from the Knowledge and Development Foundation (CYD), the branch of Arts and Humanities are the ones that offer the fewest professional opportunities with an average affiliation rate of 63.5%. A complicated present. Amodei foresees a very different future in which AI will liberate the technical to enhance the human. But the truth is that currently graduates in Arts and Humanities are the ones with the lowest salaries. Only 36.4% of graduates in humanities branches exceeds 1,500 euros per monthcompared to engineering companies that charge an average of 2,900 euros gross per year. In Xataka | Finding a job had always been a good way to escape poverty: in Spain it is no longer true Image | Anthropic, Unsplash (Tai Bui)

In their obsession with overprotecting them, parents are depriving their children of something very important: frustration.

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We live in the era of hyperparentingsince never before had there been so much information about parenting, and paradoxically, never had so much guilt been felt. The fact that some parents are terrified of giving a bad answer, a separation or too much screen time will irreversibly ruin their children. But the truth is that we are overprotecting children. An expert. Faced with this anxiety, child psychologist Ana Aznarauthor of ‘Educating also means saying no’proposes a paradigm shift: realistic parenting. His thesis is that overprotection is creating a generation with low tolerance for frustration and that parents need to regain authority (not authoritarianism). And given this, science has a lot to say about the true weight that parental decisions have in children’s adult lives. The myth of determinism. One of the greatest sources of anxiety in these cases may be the idea that what happens in childhood is an immutable destiny. But this is not entirely the case. A classic study that followed thousands of people born in 1958 and 1970 pointed out that all childhood variables together, such as economic status, family traits or health, only explain between 2.8% and 6.8% of the variability in life satisfaction at age 30. This does not mean that childhood does not matter, of course it does. The evidence indicates that human development is cumulative and plastic, causing subsequent factors to take a greater step in the adult phase. With this we we refer to adolescencethe first social relationships or the work environment that have great weight. Paradox of overprotection. Although the pretext, which is basically to avoid the child’s suffering, the truth is that this style of education has important side effects. This is something that has been validated by sciencewhich found that parental overprotection is positively associated with internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression. The mechanism is perverse in this case, because by “clearing the path” of obstacles, we prevent the child from Build your frustration tolerance. Recent studies link intrusive parental overinvolvement with less autonomy and poorer emotional adjustment in adulthood. This means that making a child never get frustrated by being in a constant cloud makes the adult break down at the first “no” in real life like at work. The problem of screens. Currently one of the big questions is when to give the mobile phone to children for the first time. Science suggests that the important thing is to offer it but educate about its use from the first moment. A study on the Canadian population showed a clear relationship here: exceeding 2 hours a day of recreational time in front of screens is associated with a greater probability of anxiety and psychosocial difficulties. The real thing. However, the key nuance provided by organizations such as the American Pediatric Association is displacement. The problem is not always the pixels themselves, but what the child stop doing by looking at the screen: sleeping less, moving less and socializing less face to face. The strategy backed by science is not just to “remove your cell phone”, but to “fill your life” with alternatives such as sports, sleep or free play and monitor the quality of the content, rather than obsessing only with the stopwatch. The conflict. Something that can be deeply internalized in families is that witnessing a divorce within the family destroys a child. But the reality is that the most important thing is the climate of coexistence as a study that analyzed hundreds of families points out. This clearly showed that the quality of the relationship between parents, such as support or the absence of hostile conflict, is a much more reliable predictor of child well-being than whether or not they live with both biological parents. In this way, a home with two parents in constant war is, according to PMC data, a more toxic environment for the development of children than having a single-parent family where there is calm. Images | Christian Mai In Xataka | Those born between 1950 and 1970 have a psychological advantage over other generations: they are entering their “peak”

Musk doesn’t have the best model or the best product, but he has something more important in the AI ​​race: SpaceX

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Elon Musk has done it again: he has changed one of his companies from the right pocket to the left. In 2016, when his company Solar City was in the doldrums, he took advantage of the fact that Tesla was going like a rocket to save the company. Now it is xAI that needs a push in the age of artificial intelligence and, after a few brief rumorsconfirmation came: SpaceX has purchased xAI. Or what is the same: an Elon Musk company has bought another Elon Musk company. It’s an ideal move, but also a morrocotudo mess. In short. The announcement came late into our night. As part of a vertical integration, aerospace will absorb the operations of xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. It was an extremely rare agreement. When it occurs a business purchasewe know the numbers, but here we only have some ideas about the goal. Musk has been deliberately opaque and has justified the movement as a restructuring to guarantee “freedom of expression”, with a story based on energy, the development of technology and something we have been talking about for some time: the need for exploit outer space as a source of energy and giant heatsink for the increasingly numerous data centers. One million satellites. In fact, the operation came shortly after we learned that SpaceX had filed with the US FCC a project to launch one million Starlink satellites. Currently, there are about 9,000, plus another few thousand companies like Amazon or chinese satellites and Europeans…and astronomers are already complaining about how difficult it is to observe beyond low orbit. With a million satellites from SpaceX alone, the amount of potential space debris will increase stratospherically, but Starlink is not a simple satellite system to have Internet anywhere on the planet: They are potential data centers. Musk himself, when companies like amazon either Google They began to be very vocal about the need for moving data centers into spacepointed out that SpaceX already had them and that it was easy to convert its satellites into computing centers. In space there is Unlimited, uninterrupted energyheat dissipation is much simpler because air or water is not needed as on Earth and the information is transmitted to terrestrial centers using lasers, eliminating the need for Expensive fiber optic interconnections. SpaceX works. And, in Musk’s statement, it is stated that this demand for energy and computing power to feed AI is almost impossible to cover with terrestrial solutions, so the most logical thing is the space exodus from data centers. And, of course, one plus one equals two: SpaceX has the infrastructure and xAI needs it. But beyond the synergy, there is another reality. SpaceX has become a solid and profitable company. It is the only one that, right now, can routinely transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. It has become an essential piece for both NASA and the Department of Defense and, in addition, it has the aforementioned Starlink system that has crept in, perhaps too much, into the communications infrastructure of countries like Ukraine. xAI burns money. On the other hand, xAI shows the symptoms of a company focused on artificial intelligence. This valued at more than $230 billion and has raised several tens of billions in several rounds of financing, but is burning money at a rate of approximately one billion a month. This is typical, as we say, of companies in the growth phase, and the executives themselves have stated that they have plans and resources to keep spending aggressively, but everything has a limit. xAI requires enormous amounts of energy, resources, computing and is developing its own chips. All of that costs money, and putting data centers in space with existing infrastructure like Starlink’s can help ease the burden. In the economic and energy sense, it is a brilliant operation. When other technology companies want to start filling the space with their data centers, SpaceX will already be there. Morrocotudo mess. Therefore, and in the end, what Musk has done is unite a company in an aggressive investment phase with another that is solid and has established contacts with the US government. SpaceX is the highest xAI carrying vehicle and it looks like a win-win manual. Now, it’s also a tremendous mess. Because xAI is not just xAI: it is (Twitter), and now SpaceX has all that power under one umbrella. xAI manages military intelligence and we have already mentioned that Ukraine threw itself into the arms of Starlinkrelying on its infrastructure during the conflict with Russia. SpaceX is no longer just an aerospace company, it is that and much more: a brain, a social network with private data of tens of millions of people. And in a Europe that is fighting for their technological sovereignty and information protection, SpaceX can go from being a partner for a specific mission to something to look askance at. Image | The White House (edited) In Xataka | From $100 billion romance to silent divorce: NVIDIA and OpenAI’s relationship is disintegrating

Taking an important call in a traffic jam is the order of the day. In 1990, a company in Barcelona already offered this service

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Nowadays, as soon as we have some down time, we turn to our mobile: either to scroll infinitely on Instagram or to catch up on email. Although what defined the basis of today’s smartphones was the first iPhone in 2007, the professional point began before, with the blackberry 5810 and your email in 2002 or we can even go back to Nokia 9000 ’96, which introduced the keyboard and its business approach. The late 90s were the beginning of turning the mobile phone into an everyday object. I’m driving and I need a call now. Of course, back in the 90s, carrying a cell phone in the car and answering a work call was unthinkable. Or not, because someone thought of it an exclusive telephone service for drivers in Barcelona pre-Olympic Games. The target audience was those people who were so busy that they could not afford to be disconnected while traveling through the congested business areas of the city. The operation. As they narrate on the Catalan regional television 3Cat, if in the middle of a traffic jam you were lucky enough to find one of those people in white overalls on a scooter, with a fanny pack and the phone stuffed in a shoulder bag, you could ask them. A uniform as characteristic as the backpacks of today’s delivery drivers, but much less common: at that time there were only five workers moving through the busiest traffic points in Barcelona, ​​although they wanted to increase it to 25. If you are standing, they leave you the headset. And if you move, they lend you the device and follow you until you complete the call. The price of the service was 25 pesetas and the minimum call price is 300 pesetas. Because? To begin with, because in 1990 if you wanted to call on the street what there was were booths and analog technology, in Spain specifically MoviLine: the first mobile operator to deploy the original 1G network, owned by Telefónica. And if we talk about devices, the mythical Motorola MicroTAC It was a status symbol for executives. A symbol measuring 23 centimeters and weighing 350 grams. Yes, there were some mobile phones, but they were heavy, with very long antennas and batteries that barely lasted a couple of hours in conversation. On the other hand, having a phone installed in the car was expensive and niche. But the business was not just the telephone, but mobility and time. As businessman Josep Marí says, his idea was “to create the need to find a mobile phone to be able to call to work, home or wherever.” Ahead of his time. This “Automatic Mobile Telephony” service was ahead of its time in that it had a vision of a future need, but faced a market that was not yet ready. As the 90s progressed, telephone technology became more refined and democratized. 1995 brought GSM to the Spanish state on the one hand and, on the other, the liberalization of the telecommunications market, which inaugurated airtel. The operators began to directly control distribution and technical service with franchises and distributors, leaving little room for local independent companies. Scooters before the scooter craze. And if the service itself is surprising, so is the means of transportation: a scooter with a gasoline engine, more specifically the Sport model. of the Go-Ped brand, but quite similar in design and concept to the electric ones that swarm our streets today. His virtue was exactly the same: moving quickly and agilely through the density of Barcelona’s traffic to be able to get in front of the client. In Xataka | This glorious imaginary version of the Galaxy Fold from the 90s is one of those gems that can only be found on the internet In Xataka | A story of pioneers: they already flirted, argued and liked on the party lines of the 90s Cover | 3Cat via Marc Vidal edited with Gemini

It’s about something much more important.

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In 1999, there seemed to be a certain platonic interest in the concept of virtual/manipulated reality: that year ‘Matrix‘, ‘eXistenZ‘ and ‘Level 13‘, and a few months before he had done the same ‘dark city‘, all of them united by plots that revolved around very similar premises. Just one Of these four films he achieved the (re)cognition of the general public: ‘Matrix‘, the film of cyberpunk aesthetic and groundbreaking special effects starring Keanu Reeves and directed by the Wachowski sisters. That first installment of The Matrix, originally conceived as a solo film, was soon rewarded with two sequels (‘Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘Matrix Revolutions’both in 2003) are certainly irregular, which remain very far from the originality of the first and which, to make matters worse, taint it with numerous plot twists (if not mere amendments, or even inconsistencies). And both defects are perceived even more strongly with what would become the fourth film in the saga, the compilation of shorts ‘Animatrix’, an animated experiment with a manga aesthetic lacking internal cohesion or excessive plot consistency with the live-action trilogy. NO, The Matrix is ​​not a movie about AI But the attention of this article focuses on the status of this saga as the gateway for an entire generation to the concept of ‘artificial intelligence’. And this is certainly ironic, because at its core ‘The Matrix’ is not about this technology (or any other). First of all, let’s make a stop to bring up one of the multiple criteria for classifying science fiction works: the division between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sci-fi: Hard: Those works that give special relevance to the scientific-technical details of the narrative. Soft: More speculative works, in which the plausibility and consistency of technological descriptions lose weight compared to philosophical reflections. It must be made clear that ‘Matrix’ clearly belongs to this latter current: rather than reflecting on the functioning of artificial intelligence (we see nothing about neural networks, deep learning or some sad ‘laws of robotics‘) what worries the Wachowskis are religious symbolism. Yes, religious people, think about it: the first film has a villain called Cifra – Cypher in English, which rhymes with Lucifer – who betrays Trinity – the Trinity – and the messiah she loves… It’s not very hidden either.. At the same time, these religious symbolisms are at the service of a confusing? subtle? philosophical-political reflection on the relationship between choice and causality, and on the influence of said relationship with sociopolitical domination. Finally, evil tongues will also add that, in a fourth and deeper layer of analysis, the reflection on domination is in turn subordinated to the brilliance of the protagonists in those dazzling action scenes with bullet time in full force. How did machines create the Matrix? The story of The Matrix starts from a very similar premise like Terminator: Once they acquire self-awareness, the machines rebel against their creator, declare war on us… and win. The difference is that, in the world of the Matrix, the war is not resolved in a single day, so the UN has the opportunity to launch an apparently brilliant attack: since the machines’ greatest source of energy was the Sun itself, humans decide to cover the sky and plunge the planet into darkness. The problem is that, from that moment on, the machines stop seeking the extermination of humans and start collecting us like batteries: from then on, they will raise us in capsules to take advantage of our heat and electrical energy (you don’t have to go to the future to see something similar). But to keep us alive as long as possible, they can’t just keep us in a coma, they have to keep our minds active somehow. And that’s where an AI enters which, years later, Neo would know under the name of The Architect. He creates the simulated reality known as the Matrix and connects all humans to it, who from now on will know nothing about the outside world, nor about the war against the machines. Being a machine the designer of this new reality, it is perfect, an inhumanly perfect utopia… and, as the Architect himself explains: “A success only comparable to his monumental… failure. His ineluctable failure now seems to me to be a consequence of the imperfection inherent in all humans.” Perfection causes human minds to rebel, and virtual reality itself falls apart. It’s time to install Matrix 2.0 and restart the server: the new system takes the opposite path and inserts humans into a dystopian reality of war and violence. The result is identical. The Architect, created primarily to design the perfect electrical grid, is unable to understand how its batteries work. “Then I understood that the answer eluded me because it required a mind (…) not so limited by the parameters of perfection. The one who found the answer in a fortuitous way was another intuitive program that I had created, in principle, to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.” This program, later converted into ally of humanity under the name of The Oraclediscovers that the human mind can be dominated as long as it retains, even if unconsciously, a sliver of choice. The blue pill, which Neo will take years later (4 versions of the Matrix later, actually) will be the way to peek through that crack and leave the simulated reality. But the interesting thing about these two programs is that they show the way in which programs relate to chaotic humans: calculating all their possible decisions. Or perhaps, if the technology of the ‘Matrix’ machines descends from AlphaZero’sjust have to calculate the most probable decisions based on previous experience. Let’s remember the scene of the multiple screens with different reactions of Neo in the Architect’s office: they are not alternative worlds, but options that are offered to the human player and, when he chooses, the camera zooms in on said screen and the action continues from there. The Oracle is so efficient at this task of calculating the … Read more

Data centers are so important that Meta has spent millions on advertising to change our perception of them

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Meta has spent 6.4 million dollars on an advertising campaign between November and December of last year to convince the American public of the benefits of its data centers, according to the New York Times. The ads, aired in eight state capitals and Washington, DC, featured idealized images of American towns revitalized by these facilities. exists an increasingly significant social rejection on the installation of data centers dedicated to AI, especially due to the impact they have on the excessive consumption of basic resources like light and water. And of course, first we have to convince that they are key so that Meta and the rest of the big technology companies can continue with their operations. The Goal campaign. According to the media, the ads featured emotional stories about Altoona (Iowa) and Los Lunas (New Mexico), two locations where Meta operates data centers. With guitar music and shots of farms and football fields, the videos promised jobs and prosperity. “We are bringing jobs here, for ourselves and for our next generation,” the voiceover said. According to Michael Beach, CEO of Cross Screen Media, Meta “could have purchased these ads with the goal of influencing political decisions and reaching legislators.” Ryan Daniels, spokesperson for Meta, limited himself to say to the NYT that the company pays the full costs of the energy used by its data centers, without commenting on the advertising campaign. Meta is not alone. Just like account NYT, Amazon is funding a similar campaign in Virginia through Virginia Connects, a nonprofit created by the Data Center Coalition. From the Financial Times they point In addition, other operators such as Digital Realty, QTS and NTT Data are also acting more intensely to defend the construction of new facilities. Endurance. In the United States, social rejection has caused the cancellation of multimillion-dollar projects in Oregon, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana and Virginia. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen explained He told the NYT that the issue has become “a priority on Capitol Hill” when his voters began to complain en masse about electricity bills. Just like share The media, this month, Van Hollen presented a law to regulate the energy consumption of data centers. Even President Donald Trump spoke out on the matter: “The big tech companies that build them must pay their own way,” wrote a few weeks ago on Truth Social. electricity bill. Data centers have become critical infrastructures for the development of artificial intelligence, but there is increasing social tension over their installation. In October, Bloomberg counted that in the last five years the wholesale price of electricity in areas near large concentrations of data centers in the United States had increased by up to 267%. In Baltimore, residents paid $17 per megawatt-hour in 2020; In 2025 that figure reaches $38. On the other hand, the medium demonstrated In their research, 70% of the points where electricity price increases were recorded were less than 80 kilometers from data centers with significant activity. From Bloomberg they estimate that the energy demand of these facilities in the United States will double by 2035, becoming the largest increase since the 1960s. The situation in Spain. Our country is also experiencing a boom in the construction of data centers. The Community of Madrid, paradoxically the region with the greatest energy deficit in Spainconcentrates a good part of these projects and is expected to reach a power of 1.7 gigawatts in 2030. The consulting firm CBRE pointed out in a report that “there is no investor, operator or large technology company that does not have in its strategic plans to establish its data center project in the Iberian market.” Madrid, together with Barcelona, ​​already competes with cities such as Milan, Zurich or Berlin, although still far from the leading European group in terms of power capacity formed by Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin. What awaits us. According to Bloomberg, the forecasts they point because data centers will consume more than 4% of the world’s electricity in 2035. If these facilities were a country, they would be fourth in energy consumption, only behind China, the United States and India. Meanwhile, big technology companies are already exploring solutions such as modular nuclear reactors (SMR) to power your facilities, or send data centers to space. Cover image | Mark ZuckerbergGoal In Xataka | “The assemblies are not going to be done by AI”: we talk to the kids who have become carpenters, truck drivers and tinkerers

We will increasingly see more “verified” SMS against fraud. The important thing is to understand how they really work

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We live watching our cell phones and what appears on their screen, from a notice from the bank to a code to authorize a payment. This dependency has turned the text message into fertile ground for deception, with campaigns of smishing that imitate well-known companies and sneak into conversations that seem legitimate. The problem is not only technical, it is trust: distinguishing at a glance who is really on the other side. For years, SMS has treated legitimate and fraudulent messages equally, and that neutrality is exactly what attackers exploit. Malicious campaigns detected in Spain show how names and formats of known entities are copied to gain the trust of the recipient. These messages are designed not to raise suspicion. And often, when doubt arises, it is too late to react. Say ‘hello’ to verified messages. Faced with the erosion of trust in traditional SMS, the industry has chosen to reinforce the identity of the sender instead of placing all responsibility on the user. Verified messages introduce a relevant change: they make visible whether a company has been recognized as legitimate before the message reaches the mobile. Supported by the RCS protocolthese messages add a name, logo and verification indicators with the intention of reducing one of the main weapons of fraud, confusion about the real origin of the message. BBVA. This is how it looks on mobile. In Spain, BBVA has been one of the first large banks to show this change visibly for the user. On Android, the bank’s official messages are identified with its name and logo, accompanied by an indicator that indicates them as an official channel. By clicking on that logo, the user can verify that the associated data, such as the telephone number or website, match those of the bank. Furthermore, these communications arrive in a different thread than traditional SMS, precisely to prevent them from being mixed with fraudulent messages. Bankinter has also taken the leap. Bankinter has partnered with Telefónica to distribute verified messages. The entity explains This will improve the security of “critical communications”, such as single-use codes for transfers or online payments. Here we will also find the sender verification confirmation, the official logo and additional information such as the website and a telephone number. How verification works. Behind that visible badge there is a process much less obvious to the user. The standard defined by the GSMA establishes several preliminary stages before a company can send a single verified message. First, the entity must register its identity, with a specific name and logo, and submit it to external certification by a third party that validates that the entity can use that name and logo. This validation is not enough on its own: the authority that issues it must be included in the trusted list of the recipient’s operator. Without that complete string, the check simply doesn’t show. Who verifies who. Here the so-called Verification Authorities come into play as third parties in charge of validating that a company is who it says it is before it can send verified messages. That role may fall to private companies specialized in digital verification, mobile operators or even government entities, depending on the deployment and the country. Afterwards, it is the user’s operator who decides whether they trust that authority, something that is sometimes reflected visibly in the message itself, as occurs in an official Bankinter example, where the system indicates that the verification has been carried out by Movistar. The final verification occurs when the message reaches the phone. According to the GSMA standard, the messaging app automatically downloads the sender’s profile and runs a series of technical checks before displaying any badge. It is checked that the signature is still valid, that the authority that issued it is accepted by the user’s operator and that the data has not been altered. Only if everything fits does the verification indicator appear; If something fails, the message loses that appearance of legitimacy. Does it work on iOS and Android? This scheme is not exclusive to Android. Apple added support for RCS as a carrier service starting with iOS 18, allowing you to send and receive messages with advanced features when not using iMessage. In practice, the behavior is the same: if the operator supports RCS and the standard is implemented, the system can display the name, logo and indicators associated with the sender. Without this support from the operator, the message returns to the familiar terrain of SMS or MMS, without additional verification signals. For the user, the practical learning is simple: a verified message offers more context and more clues than a conventional SMS, but it does not eliminate the need to remain cautious. Knowing that there is a technical process behind that distinction helps us better interpret what reaches our mobile phones and be wary when something does not match. However, in an environment where malicious actors never sleep, caution remains essential. Images | Vitaly Gariev | BBVA | Bankinter | Gemini 3 Pro In Xataka | Cybersecurity experts by day, cybercriminals by night: how two professionals fell after using ransomware

He is the most important programmer in all of history. And he has also ended up using AI to program

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Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creatorhe found himself with some free time this Christmas, so he wanted to dedicate it to a personal project that he had on the shelf: an application capable of generating digital audio effects that he called AudioNoise. The curious thing is not that he started programming on his own, but rather what he ended up doing with part of that application. Linus tries Vibe coding. This project has a description on GitHub that holds a surprise. In the last paragraph of it he indicates that “Also keep in mind that the Python visualization tool was basically written using vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters (which isn’t saying much) than I do Python. I started with my typical “Google it and copy what I see” way of programming, but then I cut out the middleman (myself) and used Google Antigravity to create the audio sample viewer.” The best programmer programs like any other. The statement is surprisingly sincere and honest from the one who He is probably the most important programmer in all of history.. Admitting that your typical way of programming is “search on Google and copy what I see” is already curious, but part of programming precisely consists of looking for solutions from others and copying or adapting them into your own projects. AI can help. The other (big surprise) comes of course when he indicates that the visualization tool for his project was not programmed by him, but rather by the Google tool, Antigravity. This integrated development environment (IDE) allows you to work directly with Gemini 3 in different versions and even with Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.5, and despite having been released a few months ago, it is becoming one of the favorite tools of veteran developers but also of those who are beginning to make their ideas a reality without having too much knowledge. Let them tell it to me. This viewer has been programmed by Linus Torvalds. Or rather, Antigravity controlled by Linus Torvalds. testing. At Xataka we were curious to test what that viewer did, so we cloned the GitHub repositorywe asked Claude Code to explain how the project works and after a couple of quick changes we were able to test it with a small audio file. What the project does is implement digital audio effects (there are ‘phaser’, ‘echo’, ‘flanger’, ‘fm’ and ‘discont’) and then, if one wants, apply visualization. That visualization compares the original audio with the processed audio to see how the effect modifies the waveform. Subsurface Capture Linus’ other projects. Although Linus Torvalds is the person most responsible for the Linux kernel evolutionit is already common to see him develop some parallel and totally independent projects. Last Christmas he already created his own guitar pedal softwareand in 2011 began the development of Subsurfacean application to record and plan scuba dives, an activity to which he is very fond. The current GitHub repository is maintained by various developers among which stands out Dirk Hohndel, who was one of the first developers of the Linux kernel along with Linus Torvalds. AI is a tool. In a recent participation on the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channelLinus Torvalds talked about how he saw the world of AI. In your opinion: “AI will be a tool, and it will make people more productive. I think vibe coding is great for getting people to start programming. I think (the code it generates) is going to be horrible to maintain… so I don’t think programmers will go away. You’ll still want to have people who know how to maintain the output.” And it works for personal projects. That speech precisely aligns with this small “experiment” that he has used in that personal project: at the moment for projects of this type using tools like Antigravity can be a great idea, although it certainly does not seem so for larger projects in production. Thus, it does not seem likely that AI could be used to modify Linux code… at the moment. That, of course, may change in the future, but as Torvalds says, these types of developments will require notable (and probably human) oversight to validate that everything has been done correctly. Image | TED Conference In Xataka | Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds had been rivals for 30 years. The funny thing is that they just met and took a selfie

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