invented

Michelin has invented indestructible airless tires. And no, you will not be able to mount them in your car.

by

Tires that don’t get punctured… because there is no tube to puncture. That’s what Michelin engineers have in mind and that, in fact, you can now buy. Of course, there is one small (big detail) that you should keep in mind: you cannot mount it on your car. And it’s not because they don’t fit the measurements. tweel. That’s what it’s called Michelin’s airless tire. For years, the company has been researching formulas to put airless tires on the market and the Tweel are the first commercial option that you can buy within the company. Of course, they are tires that are only available for vehicles and machinery with very specific functions. For example, they are available for lawnmowers, skid steers, all-terrain vehicles that are only used in the field, or golf carts. But also for military vehicles. What do you mean without air? Indeed, these Tweel tires consist of two clearly differentiated structures. The first of these is the tread that the company calls a shear beam. It is responsible for rolling on the surface and partially absorbing the irregularities of the terrain. Inside, the tire structure is radialwith plastic elongations that reach inside the tire. These are flexible so the tire can overcome curbs and other elements that clearly deform its interior. However, its technical capabilities allow it to return to the traditional rounded shape once the obstacle has been overcome. And for what? As we say, Michelin has these tires developed to be mounted on vehicles that are not going to step on the asphalt. The idea is that with them you can move over unstable terrain or terrain that presents continuous obstacles without the risk of suffering a puncture. But where it is really interesting, explain the colleagues of Motorpassionis in military applications. First because, as we say, its ability to overcome obstacles is very great but above all because, lacking an air chamber, it cannot receive a shot that leaves an entire armored vehicle out of combat. In fact, this technology is also being studied by the ‘Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center‘, one of the programs that the United States Department of Defense has open. Additionally, brands like Bridgestone either Hankook They have been researching them for years. And my car? At the moment, bringing airless tires to passenger cars is still not working. Michelin presented the Uptis in 2023a prototype tire with which they have been testing but which, for the moment, is far from being able to dress the wheels of our car. Putting a rubber of this type on the market continues to be an enormous challenge. And it is that air is essential to cushion small irregularities of the asphalt, reducing noise in the cabin and increasing comfort. Airless tires for these tasks are still too uncomfortable. But in addition, rolling the tire at high speed generates so much heat that it is also a problem for the materials used. For this reason, at least for now, they are only available for vehicles that circulate at a moderate speed and the bulk of activity is carried out at a very low pace. Photo | Michelin In Xataka | China conquered the European cheap tire market. The EU has just put the brakes on it

The fried pizza looks like something filthy from the US. It was actually “invented” to save Naples after the Second World War

by

I love to cook, even though someone wants to banish the kitchensand I love to see cooking videos. However, the algorithm sometimes gets confused and shows me videos of people putting raw pasta with tomato sauce into a container and baking everything, or a lot of fried things. They are videos of Americans cooking, of course, but when I see someone frying a pizza, it doesn’t offend me for one simple reason: it’s almost as old as the Neapolitan pizza and played a fundamental historical role in post-war Italy. Feeding a city in which the ovens had been destroyed. Because Neapolitan pizza may be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but fried pizza is the lifeblood of the city of Naples. The statutes of pizza. Italians are very particular about food. I have shared many trips with great Italian colleagues and they are very wonderful when they defend what is theirs. It’s great, but they are the first to burn the coffee (although we Spaniards are not here to give lessons on this, of course). Now, don’t let a Neapolitan get the pizza. He ‘I will discipline‘is the bible, the table of commandments which includes everything you need to know to make a Napoletana pizza. What types of ingredients, quantities and heart that should be put inside and on top of the dough. On a recent trip, talking about pizza and after eating in a fairly competent Parisian pizzeria, the topic of fried pizza came up. What would clearly be an affront to the pride of that Neapolitan boy caused a smile to appear on his face. And, as we say in Xataka, it makes sense. Zeppole. Long before Disciplinare and baked pizza, in Naples there was already an important tradition of fried dough. In it freedom from coquina from the 13th century describe fermented doughs, fried in oil and served with honey, but if there is a predecessor of fried pizza, it is the zeppole. They are like fritters that date back to sometime between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century and have some variants, but a well-known one is filled with pastry cream and decorated with cherries in syrup. Although this is a dessert, there are also salty varieties to which other ingredients such as anchovies are added. Although they were eaten in several Italian cities such as Rome or Calabria, in Naples they caught on well and, when the more formal pizza began to appear, they became popular. started to differentiate between the pizzaiuolo (the one who makes baked pizzas) and the zeppolaiolo (the one who makes the fried foods, including fried doughs). Emergency. During the 19th century, texts began to appear that included recipes for stuffed and fried calzoncini as a more satiating product than the sweet variant and an explicit distinction began to be made between “pizza al forno” and “pizza fritta di cicoli.” Fried pizza was already establishing itself in the Neapolitan language before the 20th century as a street food to take advantage of leftover meat and fish, but then came the Second World War. The conflict devastated Naples and the postwar period was no better. The situation of extreme poverty and the destruction of the kilns by Allied bombings combined with a lack of wood. The city had to be rebuilt or the furnaces fueled, and the priority was clear. Furthermore, even if they wanted to make some pizzas, everything was missing and the ingredients were expensive due to the shortage. So, many Neapolitan families began to look at the zeppole and were occurred that they could make large disks of pizza dough, fill them with cheap ingredients like ricotta, vegetables and leftover meat if there were any, fry them and… that’s it. Fried dough with the ingredients on top “A ogge a otto“. Workers could take this as a filling lunch for breaks, it was economical and became a symbol. In the absence of “real” pizza, the new “pizza del popolo” was the one that helped in the reconstruction of the city and became a symbol. coined the “a ogge a otto”, which came to mean “eat today, pay eight days later”, reinforcing that role as a symbol of poor post-war Naples. American Coffee. Therefore, fried pizza was not invented in the postwar period, since there was a previous context of fried doughs, but it was the time of the popular explosion due to necessity. This Neapolitan boy was particularly proud when telling me the story because, although less known, Neapolitan fries are also a traditional dish, but the one that lifted the city after the war was… pizza. And it’s funny how my first impulse was to think that fried pizza was just another thing about Americans determined to fry things, when really it’s even something cultural for certain people. These types of stories are always fascinating to me, like the one about American coffee that we can think was invented in the United States when, in reality, it was an invention of the Italian baristas of the Second World War who they added water to the coffee because the American soldiers did not like the concentrated flavor. In Xataka | The pizza that is successful in China does not have pepperoni or pineapple: it has a fruit that smells like rotten eggs and sewage

In a display of technical superiority, France has just invented traditional white towns. We, however, have forgotten about them

by

At this time of year, in the hardware stores of the French Midi, it is impossible to find a very specific product: ‘blanc de Meudon’, a classic cleaning product in French drugstores since the 18th century and which in Spain would be equivalent to traditional crushed chalk. And no, it’s not that they have a sudden fever to have everything clean and spotless. As we said in Magnetis that in the middle of a heat wave, with maximum temperatures above 40 degrees and blackouts in much of the country, thousands of French people discovered that they could mix this powder with water and paint their windows with it. With the milky glass, the light reflects and the houses could shave a few degrees off the country’s struggle with climate change. In a matter of days, in fact, it has gone viral. And does it work? Of course it works. Chalk is calcium carbonate, a pigment that barely absorbs light and therefore reflects almost all solar radiation. It’s the same logic Purdue ultrawhite paints or the whitewashed towns that dot the Mediterranean. These are things that seem basic to us, but that no one thinks seriously about until the thermometer goes completely crazy. Luckily, ‘blanc de Meudon’ is widely used in the country. The other option would have been to pay attention to the Loughborough University and start spreading yogurt on the outside of the windows. According to the researchers’ calculations, with the “lactic approach” the temperature of the houses dropped by 0.6 degrees on average (and up to 3.5 on sunny days). A lot of laughter, but they still found a different approach, right? No. The data is clear: “complete shielding” with blinds, curtains or even aluminum foil lowers the internal temperature by 5 to 6 degrees, almost double that of yogurt or chalk. For this reason, images of Paris with thermal blankets on the windows have also gone viral. However, this is only the most striking curiosity. If I bring up the French fever for painting the windows, it is because there is something more interesting hanging from that problem: that, little by little, we are forgetting that architecture is something that has to adapt to the place where it is. All cities are the same city. For years, walking through the center of a European city has been a very curious experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s Paris, Lisbon, London, Prague or Berlin, they all look more and more alike. They are mimicking. They are losing their local peculiarities to repeat over and over again the same franchises or international stores: Primark, Zara, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Ale Hop or Calzedonia… But it doesn’t just happen in the centers, of course: experts have been wondering for years why all new constructions look the same regardless of which part of the country (or the world) hosts these new buildings. In Spain, specifically, ‘zebras’ have become a huge problem. A decade ago there was a very interesting debate about how the doctors’ series had promoted a whole series of practices that were dangerous for health professionals and patients. Things like wearing a stethoscope around your neck or not wearing anything below your elbows are simple rules that the cultural image of TV doctors eroded (and caused problems). With architecture and urbanization the same thing happens. A pending reflection. Often, when we decide to conserve our architectural heritage, we choose to protect unique buildings. And it makes sense, mind you. The problem is that, along the way, we forget about techniques, structures and decisions that are, in reality, profound adaptations to the climate in which we find ourselves. That Mediterranean towns are white is not a whim, nor is it a whim that their houses have the structure they have. It is true that some of these characteristics are due to technological limitations of the time in which they were built, but not all. And that is the heart of the problem: if we do not start thinking about our urban heritage as a tool, we will find ourselves in a few years painting the windows white. And, in short, we will not have searched for it by hand. Image | Anthony DELANOIX / Veronika Hradilová In Xataka | Beyond gazpacho and salmorejo: Spain’s hidden summer dishes that are crying out to become popular

The trackpad on laptops is a real pain. So Logitech has invented the foldable mouse to put an end to it

by

I have always thought that technology should be used to solve everyday problems, not to create artificial needs. And one of those small problems that I had in my daily life was not finding a mouse that could truly accompany my laptop without taking up space or being uncomfortable when carrying it. It turns out that Logitech has just solved this problem, knowing that many of us are fed up with trackpads. The pot. I am not from wallet easy, but when a product comes on the market whose purchase I don’t hesitate for a second, it’s usually for a reason. Logitech just released the Mobi Folda foldable and ultra-compact mouse. Specifically, we are talking about a mouse that, when folded, has a height of just over two centimeters and a length of six. Pretty crazy. When unfolded, it doubles its length, all while weighing just 79 grams. The tech. The Mobi Fold has simple specifications, with a sensor resolution of 4,000 DPI. In case it sounds Chinese to you, DPI (Dots per Inch) basically indicates the sensitivity of the mouse and the more the better. In fact, if we compare with high end mice of the brand, such as MX Master 3we have just half the DPI. What is it noticeable in? In that the greater the amount of DPI, the less we have to force our hand. What sets it apart. A mouse is a mouse. Or that’s what you think until programmable buttons are discovered. This is one of the main features of Logitech mice, and despite the ridiculous size of this Mobi Fold, two programmable touch buttons have been incorporated under the sliding surface. For example, as I write these lines I copy and paste links with the two programmable buttons on my mouse. But you could also take screenshots, open applications, or adjust any app or shortcut to these buttons. For what and for whom. In my particular case, I usually take my laptop out of the house a lot. Events, travel, working away from home… And carrying a bulky mouse like the MX Master 3 (or any other high-end mouse) is not a realistic option. This Mobi Fold completely solves this problem: if your office mouse is horrible and you want a small, programmable and quality one, this is an option. How long does this last?. Durability is one of the keys in any folding product. In the case of this mouse, 50,000 folds are promised. According to Logitech, if we folded and unfolded it eight times a day, it would last a whopping 15 years. In addition to this, the device is capable of detecting how much it is raised and when it is not so that, when closing it, we cannot make accidental presses. And yes, when you fold it it turns off by itself, so you don’t even have to keep an eye on the battery (which lasts 32 days according to Logitech). Price and availability. The Logitech Mobi Fold It can be purchased now for 79.99 euros, in the colors Lilac, White and Graphite. Image | Logitech In Xataka | Best gaming mice: which one to buy and 8 recommended models

Anthropic does not offer its services in China. So China has invented a black market for Claude tokens

by

Claude has become in the most desired model by the most demanding developers and engineers, but it is not available in mainland China for regulatory and safety reasons. The demand there remains notable, and to satisfy it, an underground token economy has emerged that allows local developers to access models such as Claude Opus 4.7, avoiding all the measures imposed by the blockade. No paying with Alipay. One of the measures that Anthropic imposes to prevent the use of its models in China is to only accept international credit cards such as Visa or Mastercard. Their payment gateways reject local payment methods like Alipay or Wechat Pay, giving Chinese users a first and important hurdle. One that they have already overcome. Virtual cards. What they are doing in China to overcome this problem is using virtual credit cards (VCC) like DuPay or WildCard. With these services it is possible to obtain Hong Kong or US credit cards financed with cryptocurrencies or through local transfers. This makes it possible to deceive the billing systems of Anthropic and other companies that offer banned services to Chinese users. SMS verifications They are also solved through “SMS farms” that also avoid this problem and even others such as identity verification that also have implemented in Anthropic. The “Transfer Stations” arrive (中转站). Another problem is that even overcoming that first barrier, latency and micro-cuts mean that the use of Claude in China is affected by continuous connection problems. To avoid them, so-called “Transfer Stations” have emerged, which are nothing more than servers that act as a bridge between foreign servers and Chinese users. These gateways receive requests from China and forward them to Anthropic servers as if they were coming from an authorized location. The latencies are also relatively low, which means that for Chinese users the experience is basically identical to that of a user in the US or Spain, for example. These stations are publicly known and do not only appear in listings on GitHub: there is a ranking with the best. Claude is almost free in China. The surprising thing about these methods is that they don’t just give Claude access in China: they do with ridiculous prices which can be 10 and even 5% of (growing) original price of the service thanks to those transfer stations. The question, of course, is how it is possible to access Claude at those prices. The almond tree trick. Thanks to the transfer stations, developers can access Claude at a price of 1 yuan for every dollar of tokens, or in other words, up to a 90% reduction in the official price. It is something that is discussed publicly and that makes it clear that several methods are used to achieve this: Mass purchase of capacity, Use of accounts created with stolen or fraudulent cards, Use of promotional credits, and A simple hook: providers lose money with Claude, but they manage to attract developers to whom they then sell more profitable local models like DeepSek. Am I really using Claude? One of the growing risks in the cheap token market is direct fraud. Some Chinese resellers have been caught red-handed offering what they call the “Claude API” when in reality what they were providing were much cheaper and mediocre models. For a user to detect this type of deception it’s very difficult unless you are working with complex tasks or you have already used models and know more or less what to expect from them. For victims, the effect is clear: they believe they are paying for the intelligence of Opus 4.7 when in reality they are receiving answers from a low-end AI model. Goodbye to privacy. When a user purchases tokens at one of these transfer stations, they completely give up the confidentiality of their data. All queries and responses end up passing through the intermediary’s servers, which can and apparently does use them to sell them to AI companies that use them to post-train their models. So everything they do and say when using these models is filtered and used as training data without the user knowing. A double business. For these providers, this business of reselling conversations is especially interesting in the face of the famous “distillations” of US models that take advantage of this data to “copy” the capabilities of those models and apply them to Chinese models. Anthropic can read us, but (theoretically) it doesn’t. It is true that the conversations we have with Claude (from Spain, for example) are also stored on Anthropic’s servers, but the company makes it clear in your privacy policy that does not use that data. In fact, we can even explicitly prohibit the company from using them in the privacy settings of Claude’s account. The game of cat and mouse. At Anthropic they know very well what is happening and they are trying to prevent it. For example, they have begun to intensively block IP ranges associated with VPN services or data centers known to be used in these transfer stations. Even so, Chinese providers usually respond with an “elastic” architecture that allows IPs of domestic residences to rotate, making the traffic appear completely normal. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | There is a thing called “Ornn price index”, it is out of control and it is bad news for everyone

Anthropic has not raised the price of Claude. He has invented something better: token inflation

by

“Don’t worry, it costs the same.” That was Anthropic’s message to announce the launch of its new AI model, Claude Opus 4.7. In that statement they made it clear that “the price remains the same as Opus 4.6: $5 per million entry tokens and $25 per million exit tokens“There was, however, fine print, because the model is better but to achieve it it reasons more, and that means one thing: more tokens. And the more tokens you consume, the more the AI ​​bill goes up. Anthropic already warned. It should be noted that in that official announcement Anthropic did not hide the facts. In one of the paragraphs he clearly explained how Opus 4.7 “thinks more” and that has a direct impact on token consumption (we highlight the difference in bold): “Opus 4.7 is a direct update to Opus 4.6, but there are two changes worth keeping in mind as they affect the use of tokens. First, Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that improves the model’s processing of text. This means that the same input can generate more tokens (approximately 1.0 to 1.35 times moredepending on the type of content). Second, Opus 4.7 performs deeper analysis at higher effort levels, especially in the later phases of agent scenarios. “This improves its reliability on complex problems, but also means generating more output tokens.” Or what is the same: when it responds, Opus 4.7 uses significantly more tokens than its predecessor, and that is important because the output tokens are much more expensive than the input ones. In the specific case of Opus 4.7, five times more expensive ($5 versus $25). What is a tokenizer and why does it matter?. Large language models (LLMs) do not process text directly, but rather convert it into units called tokenswhich are fragments of words, symbols or characters. The tokenizer is the mechanism that makes that conversion. Anthropic has decided to update the tokenizer in Opus 4.7, arguing that its new system improves how text is processed. The direct consequence: the prompt that previously generated 1,000 tokens now generates up to 1,350. And since it is billed per token, the effective cost rises even though the price per token has remained the same. Confirmed by third parties. Simon Willison, a well-known analyst and popularizer in this field, created a tool to measure the difference in token consumption with the Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 API. He took the official Opus 4.7 ‘system prompt’ and ran it through both models: With Opus 4.6 it generated 5,039 output tokens With Opus 4.7 it generated 7,335 output tokens This represents a growth of 1.46x tokens between Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7, even greater than that indicated by Anthropic (1.35x). For images the difference is even more extreme since the token consumption is up to 3.01x. There is an important clarification here, because there is support for images of up to 3.75 Mpixels and that higher resolution causes consumption to increase significantly. Bill Chambers, another X user, published another tool called Tokenomics that also allows you to compare token consumption between both models with any prompt. The aggregate ranking of all users who have tried this tool shows that the average increase is 38.6%, very much in line with what Anthropic points out. And also think more. As we said, this new model applies two changes in its way of acting. The first is the aforementioned tokenizer: the same input is converted into more input tokens. The second is the fact that the model now “thinks more” before responding, which means more token consumption. Opus 4.7 arrives with a new “effort” level called xhigh, located between high and max. Anthropic has decided that now the default effort will be precisely xhigh for all plans, so both mechanisms contribute to this higher token consumption. As Anthropic itself indicates, “Opus 4.7 thinks more about high effort levels, particularly in later turns in agentic settings. This improves its reliability on difficult problems, but it does mean that it produces more output tokens.” Criticisms on networks. The reaction of users has been clear and there are various examples on networks such as X or Reddit in which said users criticize the changes. On Reddit a thread titled ‘Opus 4.7 is a serious regression, not an improvement‘It already has 3,200 votes and 800 comments that sum up that this new model ignores instructions, hallucinates and lies, It’s “dumber”has become too complacent or even lazyand “talks too much”, which also contributes to the cost of each consultation. Many complain that their Pro and Max paid limits are running out faster than before due to these changes. Some users claim that Opus 4.7 is the first sign that Anthropic may has gone too fast for the first time when launching a new model. Anthropic reacts. Criticism about the cost and behavior of the model has made those responsible for Anthropic try to clarify things. Borys Cherny retweeted a message from the company in which was spoken how the “/usage” parameter in Claude Code allowed us to show what kind of things our API or usage plan is spent on. This same engineer, who is the person most responsible for the development of the aforementioned Claude Code, also indicated that since his new model now uses more tokens, in Anthropic they had increased the fees of use of the models, although without giving specific details. The pattern that repeats. For weeks now the user community he complained about what noticed a “regression” in the behavior of Opus 4.6. Although it is impossible to verify or validate it, there were many users who complained on networks about how the performance of the model had gotten worse in your tests. Now they have just launched a model that promises to be better than the previous one, but that ends up costing more to use if you are not careful. Both events draw a pattern: that Anthropic is increasing its revenue without announcing price increases as such. What users … Read more

How the game invented the “Sanity roll”

by

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

Long before Real Madrid, the Roman Empire had already invented VIP boxes. And they ended in disaster

by

In the first century, the emperor Nero ordered that some shows will include giant awnings to protect the most privileged attendees from the sun, while the rest of the public endured the heat in the upper stands. That seemingly trivial difference reflected the extent to which the experience of attending an event was already marked for money and status long before modern stadiums existed. Show business in Ancient Rome. Long before modern stadiums like the Bernabéu turned sport into a crazy revenue machine, the Roman Empire had already understood the economic potential of gathering crowds and charging for access. At that time, amphitheaters were not only leisure spaces, but political and commercial tools where prestige and money mixed openly. In fact, businessmen like Atilio They saw the games as a direct opportunity for profit, betting on filling venues at all costs and maximizing every available seat. In that context, the logic of squeezing capacity (with privileged areas for the elites and crowded stands for the rest) not only existed, but was central part of the model. Raised to make quick money. In this context, it is born the Fidenae project with a clear idea: build a lot, quickly and cheaply to start earning money as soon as possible. Attilius, a freedman with entrepreneurial ambition, decided to build a huge wooden amphitheater on the outskirts of Rome, reducing costs in the most critical elements. The structure was supported on unstable ground and was assembled with poor joints, while more seats than planned were added to increase revenue. The result was a building that appeared grand from the outside, but was actually designed more to maximize profits. that to ensure safety of those who were going to occupy it. Spectacle turned into tragedy. What happened? That the inauguration attracted tens of thousands of people who came with the expectation of witnessing gladiatorial combats after a period in which these spectacles had been rather rare. That amphitheater was filled to the limitthere was no room for a pin, with the public distributed by social classes and areas, replicating a hierarchy that also had its economic reflection. Thus, in a matter of seconds, what seemed like a festive day he happened to enter sadly in the Guinness Book of a total sporting catastrophe when the structure began to give way and collapsed simultaneously inwards and outwards. It was not just an accident, since the magnitude of the collapse trapped both those who were inside and those who were trapped. were in the surroundingsleaving a balance of victims that, according to sources, ranged between tens of thousands of dead and injured. The worst sports disaster in history. From then until now, because of its scalethe collapse or collapse of Fidenae was not only a local tragedy, but the biggest sports disaster that has ever been documented, surpassing even many modern episodes in number of victims. The figures, although imprecise at the time, point to a catastrophe comparable to major battles in terms of human losses (they were counted about 50,000 deadsome lost their lives instantly, while others were buried under the rubble), something totally exceptional for an entertainment event. The speed of the collapse, the absence of evacuation measures and the fragility of the construction made any reaction impossible, turning the amphitheater into a mousetrap, a death trap in a matter of seconds. What should have been a profitable business ended up being the most extreme example of how the search for profit can multiply risk to catastrophic limits. From greed to the first rules. There is no doubt, the impact of that disaster shook the Roman Empire and forced an institutional reaction that marked a before and after in the construction regulation. The Senate persecuted the person responsible, Attilius, and sent him into exile, but, more importantly, established rules that They demanded economic solvency to those who wanted to organize shows and forced them to build on safe land. Those measures can be considered one of the first attempts to regulate structural safety in public spaces, born directly from a tragedy caused by negligence. Ultimately, the episode left a lesson that is still very valid: when business prevails over security, the show not only cannot be guaranteed, it can end up becoming in his own catastrophe. Image | Wikimedia C. In Xataka | In 1995, South Korea suffered one of the great architectural disasters of the century. The culprit: the air conditioning In Xataka | If you’re hot at home, remember that Disney made an auditorium with a huge mistake: turning a neighborhood into an unbearable oven

In 1957, Walt Disney was concerned that his cartoons lacked depth. So he invented the multiplane camera

by

In 1957 Walt Disney was fed up with his animated films being so flat. He needed to make his characters go from 2D to 3D, and he and his engineers created something prodigious: the multiplane camera. The system. Its operation went beyond traditional method of animated film productionand divided each frame into several planes so that landscapes and characters gave the sensation of being represented in three dimensions. The result, as you can see in this video, is amazing. Walt Disney himself explained in a masterful way how an invention worked that solved a fundamental problem: cartoons had no depth, and they needed to evolve to have it. The difficulty. That was not easy in the 50s, of course. Today’s technology has made 3D movies almost child’s play for an industry that embraced them as the next big revolution and then killed them. defenestration of these contents almost in its entirety. The animation process they followed at Disney made it completely handmade, and each second of animation involved enormous work that required each of the 24 frames to be photographed (the number varied depending on the formats) manually with cameras that would then produce those frames to join them into the final footage. Solving. The problem was that this made it almost impossible to add that depth effect: if you zoomed in on a landscape, everything increased at the same time wherever you were. That was unreal, and for example it caused the moon to increase in size in a night landscape scene at the same time and in the same proportion as a tree close to the viewer’s position. In order to correct this and other problems and produce those 3D frames, Disney and its engineers came up with the idea of ​​creating a multiplane camera that was used in certain scenes by dividing the planes of the scene. In the case of zoom, some shots approached faster than others, which gave this global zoom an amazing realism for the time. and the solution. The same thing happened when this technique was used when creating characters for these films that suddenly gained that depth that made them able to rotate, move forward or backward in the shot and all of this was reflected in the perspective. In the first video it is Mickey who demonstrates it, but this second video with Bambi as the protagonist also reveals the wonderful operation of a simply brilliant technique. In Xataka | The new sequel to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ exists, but it is not from Disney: this is how the legal ecosystem of fan films works In Xataka | There is an open dispute over the meaning of “the stork” from ‘The Lion King’. One worth 27 million dollars

Snapchat invented the format that dominates the Internet. 15 years later it is still unable to make it profitable

by

Evan Spiegel this week sent a memo to your employees announcing that Snap is going to lay off about 1,000 people16% of the entire workforce, in addition to canceling 300 vacant positions that had yet to be filled. Snap thus hopes to save more than $500 million in annualized costs starting in the second half of this year, although the cut is expensive in the short term, since it will have to pay between $95 and $130 million in compensation. Nevertheless, the stock rose 7% in response to the layoffs. The markets have been asking for them for a long time. Why is it important. Snap’s is not a “normal” failure story. It’s much more interesting than that. It’s the story of a company that forever changed how we communicate online and yet has failed to build a profitable business on it. In 2025 it lost 460 million dollars, although it is true that in 2024 it lost more and in 2023 even more. He has spent his 15 years of life in that dynamic. It still hasn’t closed a single complete year on a positive note. The context. His paradox begins in 2013, when he launched Stories: photos and videos that lasted 24 hours, published before disappearing. A format that is common today but at that time groundbreaking. A format that freed people from the pressure of permanence, of the trail. In August 2016, Instagram launched exactly the same thing, with the same name, and with much bigger muscle behind it. Within two months, Instagram had 100 million Stories users. It had taken Snapchat four years to reach that number. A year later it had already surpassed Snapchat. Yes, but. The problem was not that they were copied. The problem was that Meta, TikTok and YouTube adopted the format with an advantage that Snap never had: data. Meta and Google know who we are, what we buy, what interests us. Snap knows much less. That’s why their advertising converts worse, and advertisers pay less for it. A vicious circle. The coup de grace was Transparency Tracking AppApple’s privacy policy released in 2021, which sank tracking-based advertising models. Meta also sufferedbut Meta had the scale and ecosystem to absorb the impact. Not Snap, so its stock went from touching $83 to trading today around $6. A drop of more than 90% from its highs, in less than five years. However, Snap has 946 million active monthly users, grows 12% in year-over-year revenue and has one of the youngest audiences on all platforms. The most coveted demographic for fashion and entertainment brands. It has cutting-edge augmented reality technology and also has Snapchat+, your paid subscription, which is growing well. That is the contradiction that a thousand layoffs do not resolve: Cutting costs improves margins, but alone does not truly monetize a platform with almost a billion users when its audience is young and difficult to convert, and its competitors have ten times more resources. There is also an activist fund in the capital, Irenic Capital Management with 2.5%, which has been pushing for months exactly in this direction: cuts. And now what. Spiegel speaks at memo to concentrate investments where monetization already works. That is, give up on markets that are difficult to grow and profitable (Spain has every chance to be one of them) and focus on more powerful ones, presumably in the style of the United States or the United Kingdom. Give up growth in search of sustainability. Snap has been trying to solve an equation that others have solved at their expense for 15 years. These layoffs are bought time to keep trying. Featured image | Shutter Speed In Xataka | Snapchat introduced its own version of ChatGPT in its app. Nothing has gone, nothing good

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.