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A man paid $23 for a PC case at an auction. He discovered inside a 24-core CPU and an RTX 3080 Ti

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Online auctions are full of unexpected opportunities, but few stories surprise as much as this one. Imagine entering a local second-hand platform with the idea of ​​​​getting a simple computer case. You’re not looking for anything spectacular, just a large chassis for future projectssomething functional and cheap. You place a low, almost token bid, and expect nothing more than a basic item wrapped in cardboard. However, when you pick it up, something doesn’t add up: it weighs more than expected, it sounds different, and what seemed like a routine purchase becomes the beginning of an anecdote that sweeps Reddit. The story broke through Redditwhere the buyer posted the find on r/pcmasterrace. According to images published by “LlamadeusGame”, the box was not empty nor did it contain old parts, but rather a complete high-end computer. In its photos you can see a TRX40 AORUS Pro WiFi motherboard with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X 24-core processor, accompanied by 256 GB of RAM and a graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Although the interior shows accumulated dust, the screenshot shared by the user indicates that the system works and recognizes all hardware. When a cheap bid turns into treasure The details of the operation are available on the Capital City Online Auctions website, where the lot is still published. It is number 123 and describes a box Fractal Design Define 7 XLpriced at $317.99. The final bid was $23.50 plus commission, according to the official listing. The images associated with the advertisement only showed the box inside a cardboard and a catalog photo, without giving any clues as to its real contents. The contrast between the price paid and the real value of the components is striking. According to AMD and NVIDIA launch prices, only the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X processor It was originally sold for $1,399.while the RTX 3080 Ti It exceeded $1,100 at its release in 2022. Even with current depreciation, the complete set can fetch thousands of dollars on the secondhand market, especially because of the large amount of RAM. The Capital City Online Auctions ad included clear warnings: all items were sold “as-is,” with no warranty or return option. He also insisted in what bids had to be based on the written description and not in the images, which could be archival. Pickup was in-person only, with no delivery option, and the site’s rules state that any dispute must be resolved through arbitration in Ohio. The case raises an interesting question: how far does a buyer’s liability go in such a situation? The user paid what the bid indicated and picked up the item according to the rules, so they have not broken any auction rules. However, some commenters on Reddit wonder if they should have notified the company to correct what appears to be a cataloging error. Capital City Online Auctions’ policy makes it clear that sales are final, but the ethical debate remains open: take advantage of luck or return the find? Buying this PC case remembers that in online auctions there is always a component of risk and surprise. In this case, the buyer obtained high-level equipment for the price of a chassis part. Beyond the stroke of luck, the story underscores the importance of reading the fine print and reviewing lots before any move. Images | LlamadeusGame (Reddit) | Capital City Online Auctions In Xataka | Corning succeeded by manufacturing the “armored” glass in our phones. Now it has become Nvidia’s whim In Xataka | Nvidia’s superpower is not having money, it is making everyone work for it: Foxconn is the latest to join A version of this article was published in September 2025

In 2026 there are still people throwing messages in a bottle into the sea. A man keeps finding them in the Caribbean

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To give us an idea, more than half a century ago, in 1959, Guinness launched 150,000 bottles to the Atlantic to celebrate its bicentennial. Many decades later, in the era of networks and algorithms, some continue to appear on beaches in places as different as the Caribbean, Canada or the Arctic. People keep sending the messages. History remembered her the New Yorker a few days ago. In the era of WhatsApp, TikTok and instant messages, there are people who continue doing something that seems straight out of a 19th century novel: writing a few lines, putting them in a bottle and throw them into the ocean waiting for someone, somewhere in the world, to find them. The surprising thing is that much more happens than it seems. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer estimates that millions of bottled messages have been thrown into the sea since the mid-20th century, and some continue to wash up decades later on remote beaches. What’s more, in the Caribbean, a man named Clint Buffington He has been obsessed with finding them for almost twenty years. What started as a coincidence ended up becoming a kind of emotional archeology of the ocean: messages written by strangers, couples who broke up, improvised memorials, jokes, goodbyes and small capsules of humanity carried by impossible sea currents. The bottle hunter. Buffington lives in Utah, far from the sea, but spends much of his life studying ocean mapstides and currents to locate beaches where floating objects may end up accumulating. Walk for miles in brutal heat in the Bahamas or Turks and Caico Islands searching for something extremely unlikely: a bottle with a message still readable. Of course, most of the time he finds nothing. Or worse– Find trash, empty bottles or papers destroyed by salt water. But every now and then something extraordinary appears. Ha recovered sent messages from freighters, love letters, confessions written under the influence of alcohol, vacation memories and even tributes to lost pregnancies. For man, each bottle is a kind of human trail floating between continents. He does not look for material treasures, “I look for stories,” explained in the report. Internet before the Internet. Part of the fascination is that the bottles function as a kind of very slow, analog version of modern social networks. A stranger writes something for someone they don’t know, throws it into the void and waits for a response. The difference is that here the algorithm is ocean currents. For example, a Japanese woman found a bottle sent years before by a french sailor and ended up reconstructing his identity thanks to an absurd human chain that involved tourists, hairdressers and neighbors in different parts of the world. Another bottle thrown from an American lighthouse during the pandemic appeared six years later in the Bahamas, after probably traveling thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic. The ocean thus becomes a kind of chaotic postal network where any object can disappear forever or reappear in the most unlikely place on the planet. The sea as an emotional archive. I remembered the NY The most striking thing is that many of these messages do not contain practical information or real requests for help. They are simply deeply human impulses: to leave a fingerprinttalk to someone unknown, demonstrate that one existed at a specific time. Some authors write philosophical reflections, others leave money, cigarettes or small objects inside the bottle. There are messages written by sailors crossing straits out of superstition, bored tourists, lonely people or couples in crisis. There are even real marriage stories emerged thanks to a bottle found on another coast decades ago. For Buffington, that’s the true meaning of it all: the human need to connect with someone, even if it’s in the most unlikely way imaginable. The ocean continues delivering messages. If you like, the story also has something melancholic. Many bottle hunters They believe that the phenomenon is disappearing because cell phones and social networks have destroyed some of the patience and romanticism necessary for this type of slow communication. However, the bottles keep appearing. Some were launched a few years ago, others have been traveling between currents, storms and reefs for decades. Buffington even has found remains of that distant campaign Guinness promotional from 1959 that still surfaces on remote beaches. The ocean preserves these objects like erratic time capsules, battered by sun and salt for years. And every time someone find a bottle intact and manages to read what is inside, something strangely powerful happens: two people separated by thousands of kilometers and several years away manage to connect thanks to an ocean current and a piece of glass floating in the Atlantic. Image | Snapwire In Xataka | 45 years ago we sent a “message in a bottle” to space in the Pioneer probes, today they are making a replica that you can buy In Xataka | We already know how thirsty artificial intelligence is: a 100-word email consumes a bottle of water

Almost 2,000 years ago a man died with a mysterious case while fleeing Pompeii. We finally know his secret

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Get in the situation. It’s any day of any month and you are at home doing something when suddenly you hear screams in the street. You look out the window and see people running away in terror. Not only that. In the distance you see how the ash and burning rock rise from a volcano that both you and the rest of your neighbors thought were immersed in unalterable lethargy. What would you do in the face of such a scenario? something similar They lived 1947 years ago the Pompeians. Now we finally know what one of the unfortunate people who did not manage to save himself did: hold on to your briefcase of doctor. When Vesuvius woke up. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered long ago several centuries and archaeologists have been unraveling its mysteries for decades, trying to know above all what happened that fateful August 24, 79 AD (some versions speak of October) in which Vesuvius erupted and condemned the city of Campania, along with other towns such as Herculaneum, Stabia and Oplontis, asphyxiated under a layer of ash. However, despite all the research and rivers of ink that have flowed on the subject in recent years, the ruins of Pompey continue to retain their ability to surprise us. A figure in Ortho dei Fuggiaschi. One of the corners that has aroused the most fascination is the Ortho dei Fuggiaschithe ‘Garden of the Fugitives’, where we have found the remains of some 13 victims of Vesuvius. The reason is very simple: thanks to the method archaeologist molding Giuseppe Fiorelli20 centuries later, their corpses continue to starkly reflect the desperation of those men, women and children who tried to save themselves while their city was eclipsed by a dense rain of ash and lapilli, the walls collapsed and Vesuvius spewed pyroclasts. We knew that the victims who ended up perishing in the Ortho dei Fuggiaschi were probably seeking refuge, we also have a fairly precise idea of What were your last moments like? before dying. Thanks to Fiorelli’s plaster mold method we can even visualize the scene. The big question is… Can we go further? Who were those people? What did they do? What did they do before leaving their homes on the run? They are fascinating questions. Especially because, before perishing, some victims of Vesuvius they left us clues about your routine. There are cases, for example, in which the scene suggests that the victims were carrying jewelry and coinswhich leads us to think that they were trying to keep their most valuable possessions safe, perhaps so as not to lose them. Perhaps to start a new life in an impulse not so different from the one we would have today. Clinging to the medicine cabinet. Now researchers have discovered another story in it Ortho dei Fuggiaschil. More than 70 years after the first excavations and thanks to the use of To be more precise, scientists have identified a small box of organic material with metal parts and a series of instruments “compatible with a medical kit.” For example, a slab of slate that could have been used to make medical or cosmetic substances and surgical instruments. The x-ray and tomography examination has also shown a cloth bag with bronze and silver coins and a mechanism with a toothed wheel that allowed the box to be closed. Those responsible for the site stand out Furthermore, the study was carried out without putting the molds at risk. The decline of a doctor? That is the hypothesis with which the researchers work, who believe that the briefcase gives us a clue as to who the person who died next to him was. “He was probably a doctor, a victim of the tragedy while trying to escape, taking with him some of the tools of his trade,” he explains in a statement the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, which insists that the instruments located inside the case provide us with “a valuable and rare clue about his profession.” “2,000 years ago there were people who were not limited to practicing medicine during office hours, but were doctors at all times, even when fleeing the eruption, which was thwarted by the pyroclastic cloud that reached the group of fugitives who were trying to leave the city through Porta Nocera,” reflect Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “This man took his instruments with him to be prepared to rebuild his life elsewhere thanks to his profession, but perhaps also to help others.” Images | Pompeii Archaeological Park In Xataka | 2,000 years later, Pompeii continues to reveal fascinating things: the latest is a blue room for unknown uses

Claude has helped a man recover $400,000 worth of bitcoin he lost 11 years ago. Logged in and forgot password

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An X user named Cprkrn recently told of his odyssey with a (very) happy ending in X. In 2015 he bought five bitcoins (BTC) when the price was around $250. In a fit of university euphoria he decided that his password should be an anti-establishment manifesto and changed it to the phrase ““lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”. The problem is that he did it completely stoned, and when he got up the next morning he realized that his money had disappeared. He then began an odyssey to try to remember that password. One with a happy ending. Eleven years of despair. For eleven years, those five bitcoins remained lost while their value continued to increase. Today its value is around $400,000, and our protagonist has not stopped seeing how this fortune had slipped through his fingers. To try to recover the password he tried everything, especially brute force attacks to try to guess the password with thousands of combinations. He looked through old folders that he had saved without success, and then something occurred to him: turn to Claude. Claude didn’t hack your wallet, he was just a spectacular detective. What Cprkrn ended up doing was ask Claude to analyze 1 GB of iCloud backups, old Apple notes, emails, and forgotten system files saved on a computer I had used in college. The challenge was not to “crack” the password, but to find the trace of how it could have been created. Order within chaos. What Claude did was organize all that data that was scattered to turn it into a perfect structured file that could be analyzed. After evaluating all the information, the AI ​​model realized that it was trying to open the wrong file. He located a file called wallet.dat from before the password change that caused the nightmare, and crossed it with a mnemonic phrase that the user had written down in an old notebook that he had discarded. That allowed that password to be reconstructed, and in less than an hour Cprkrn had recovered his fortune and regained access to your BTC wallet. Money safe. The first thing he did after discovering that password was move those bitcoins to another secure wallet to avoid problems: every conversation we have with Claude or other chatbots is recorded on the servers of those companies in plain text, so Cprkrn covered his back to prevent that information from being used to avoid scares. Blessed Darius. The joy of having recovered those five bitcoins led this user to publish a message on Twitter telling the whole adventure. In said message promised who would name his future son “Darío” in honor of Anthropic CEO, Darío Amodei. Needles in the haystack. History shows that great language models are extraordinary tools for finding needles in haystacks. Traditional tools helped, but AI’s ability to analyze information and find patterns is once again amazing. This anecdote is linked, for example, to recent rise of models like Claude Mythos Preview to find security vulnerabilities that seemed impossible to find. Again, everything is based on the ability of these models to “understand” the data provided to them, organize them and extract what is needed from them. Being a digital Diogenes has a reward. For years the recommended practice for those changing or upgrading equipment was “delete/format the old, start from scratch with the new.” This story changes the focus, because in the age of AI, messy data from 15 or 20 years ago is not digital garbage: it can be a treasure that helps us review our past and reveal data that we no longer remember. The story, however, contrasts with that of James Howells, who for years struggled to try to recover the hard drive with thousands of bitcoins that ended up in a landfill. He ended up giving up after the court’s refusal to give him permission to search for that hard drive. Image | Kanchanara In Xataka | The NYT claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto and the evidence is as conclusive as ever: little or nothing

A man is making a fortune selling Yu-Gi-Oh cards he found in the trash. Or that’s what he says

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When it comes to collectible card games, the first one that comes to mind is ‘Magic: The Gathering’but he is not the only one. There are other highly sought-after games in the world of collecting such as Yu-Gi-Oh, the card game based on the Japanese manga of the same name and the protagonist of this crazy story. What has happened? They count in 404media that a Texas man claims to have found a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster, valued at almost $1 million. What at first seemed like a peculiar stroke of luck has unleashed a drama, with part of the community accusing him of having stolen them and his mother intervening to defend him. The beginning of the drama. In late March, several uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh cards appeared on eBay, Facebook, and TikTok. It immediately attracted the attention of the community because it is very rare for these types of leaves to appear for sale. The usual thing when there is a printing error (for example, a color does not come out correctly or a plate is misaligned) is that those sheets are destroyed and in fact Konami, the company behind Yu-Gi-Oh, is very strict about this. They do give out sheets of 3×3 cards as prizes in some tournaments, but they do not allow their sale and in the past they have intervened when they have detected this type of products on online sales platforms. In total, the “stash” consists of more than 500,000 bulk letters and at least 400 uncut factory sheets, almost nothing. Suspicious. Besides the rarity of what he was selling, there were other factors that were highly suspicious. Instead of selling slowly and at high prices, it began to sell at prices well below its value and very visibly on different platforms. In the ads there were blurry photos with hundreds of sheets of ultra-rare letters, piled up like trash. Each of these sheets can cost thousands of dollars, so their value is enormous, and selling one sheet occasionally is one thing, selling hundreds set off all the alarms. Theft accusations. The seller, who claimed on Facebook to have already made “over $60,000 on these damn Yu-Gi-Oh! cards out of the trash,” had very erratic behavior: he posted ads with titles that didn’t match what he was selling, deleted posts, and posted strange comments. The case reached Uncut Sheet Collectors Facebook Groupwhere the majority agreed that the letters had to be stolen, something that did not please the seller, who commented insisting that he had found them in the trash, but no one believed him. Maternal intervention. “Well, let me ask you all: if you found the same thing that was found in the trash (the uncut sheets, the cards and so on), would you try to sell it or not?” said the seller’s mother in one of the posts in the Facebook group. In addition, he asked that a video compiling several advertisements published by his son be removed because it was exposing “his past history.” Until that point, no one had looked into the seller’s past, but the mother’s message caused a Streisand effect and they discovered that he had a criminal record for theft. What was missing. What if in the end he told the truth? It’s not entirely clear, but there are hints that the dumpster story could be true. The strongest one is that the mother owns a company in Dallas, which is where one of the factories is located. Cartamundi, company dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of collectible cards. Furthermore, some of the prints he sent were in very poor condition, which would be consistent with having found them in a container. In redditthe consensus is that they really came out of the trash and that the seller was inexperienced and was overwhelmed by the situation. The last thing known about the seller is that on May 4 he posted on Facebook that he was “back in business.”

a man just discovered that robotaxis can do it too

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It is an automatic thought when we check a suitcase: please don’t let me lose it. The airlines They have improved baggage managementbut millions of incidents continue to be recorded every year and it is something that has happened to practically all of us who have taken a few planes. What is not so common is that the person who loses your suitcase is a robotaxi, or rather we should say the one who steals it from you. what has happened. They tell it in Futurism. A few days ago, a man ordered a Waymo robotaxi to go to the San Jose airport in California. The journey went well, it was upon arriving at the airport that the problem arose. The passenger was able to get out of the taxi without problem, but when he tried to open the trunk to retrieve his suitcase, it did not open and the robotaxi left, leaving him without the luggage that he had prepared for his trip. Waym’s responseeither. The first thing the passenger, whose name is Di Jin, did was call Waymo customer service in the hopes they could get the taxi back with his suitcase. However, the person who assisted him told him that the car was on its way to the warehouse and that it was impossible to change its route. Jin decided to take the plane anyway and later tried to get Waymo to send his luggage, but the response was that he had to go pick it up himself. In statements to NBCJin states that “It doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t my mistake (…) I pressed the button to open the trunk and it just didn’t work” Why is it important. When autonomous driving is questioned, we often focus on safety and overlook incidents like this. What happened to this passenger perfectly illustrates that there is a whole dimension of failures more focused on user experience in unexpected situations. These are errors that a human driver resolves intuitively and quickly, but in this case it became a very complicated situation full of obstacles. The problem is not just security. In China, a system failure caused more than 100 taxis will stop in the middle of the city. In California, several passengers were trapped inside a Waymo because a passerby attacked the car and it crashed. Self-driving taxis have proven to be a safe and effective means of transportation, myself I tried one a few days ago in China and I was surprised how integrated it is into the dense city traffic. What we are seeing most lately are not so much accidents, but problems of this type more related to practical problems that do not affect a taxi with a driver. Image | Xataka In Xataka | The robotaxis did not need a driver, but Waymo has ended up paying delivery drivers to close ajar doors

A young man has solved a mathematical problem that lasted 60 years in 80 minutes with ChatGPT. That’s the least interesting thing about the story.

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He is 23 years old, his name is Liam Price and he has no advanced mathematical training. Even so, a few days ago he opened the Erdös problem websitepicked one at random and pasted it into ChatGPT. I didn’t know the history of the problem or who had tried it before. What he received back seemed like a good solution, and after consulting with a friend who was studying mathematics, the two realized they might be on to something special. A few hours later Terence Tao, one of the most renowned mathematicians in the world, confirmed that problem #1196 of Erdös, a conjecture about primitive sets of integers that had not been solved since 1966, had a solution. I had found her GPT-5.4 Pro in just 80 minutes. Not like that. This problem analyzed a question about the behavior of a particular mathematical sum on primitive sets, that is, sets of integers where none divides the other, when those numbers become very large. Jared Lichtman, a Stanford mathematician, had spent years on the problem and had made partial progress, but he and those who had tried before were starting from the same starting point that seemed like the right path. A novel idea. GPT-5.4 used another starting point. He stayed in the airmetic terrain and used a special function called von Mangoldt functiona classic tool of number theory known for its connections to prime numbers and Riemann zeta function. No one had thought about that approach to the problem, and as Lichtman explained when talking about the OpenAI model solution, “The LLM took a completely different route.” The achievement is real, but with nuances. Litchman praised the proposed solution by GPT-5.4, but there is one detail that has been omitted in many comments on this event: the raw output of ChatGPT was, in the words of this mathematician, “pretty poor.” This solution made it necessary for several experts to interpret it, detail it and extract from it the underlying idea that allowed the conjecture to be solved. Price didn’t know he had the solution until his friend read it, and he wasn’t sure until Tao confirmed it. The official repository of AI contributions to Erdös problemsmaintained by Tao himself on GitHub, classify the result as a solution generated in human-AI collaboration, not as a solution developed solely by AI. The distinction is important. A previous scandal. A few weeks ago Sebastien Bubeck, a researcher at OpenAI, posted on X that GPT-5 had “solved” several Erdös problems. That publication exceeded 100,000 views, but the mathematical community and also that surrounding the AI ​​industry criticized that statement. Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, called that statement “shameful.” What had actually happened is that the model I had found solutions to already solved problems on the web. Bubeck finished deleting the original tweet and tried to back down, but all this raised doubts about the validity of the application of AI to solve mathematical problems. AI and the mathematical success rate. Terence Tao and Nat Sothanaphan maintain the aforementioned record of all AI contributions to Erdös problems on GitHub. Each of the entries in that list or table is classified with a traffic light: green for complete solution, yellow for partial progress, and red for failure. In the category of completely AI-generated solutions with no known prior literature there are three green, fourteen yellow, and eight red traffic lights. However, the repository itself adds a unique comment: those who try to use AI to solve these problems and fail do not usually report it, so it is likely that AI has been applied “silently” to a large number of these problems without success, and those attempts do not appear in any table. There is a clear bias here because only successes generate headlines. Trying to measure what matters. In February 2026, eleven mathematicians created the initiative “First Proof“. In it they included ten mathematical problems that arose naturally in their research projects. For each one they included encrypted answers uploaded to a verification site, and they gave the AI ​​systems a week to try to solve those problems that had never appeared in any training data set. Preliminary results indicate that today AI models cannot overcome that barrier autonomously, and what happens is that there are still limits to what AI can really contribute in mathematics. But then, is there a revolution or not? Terence Tao offered a clear explanation as to why GPT-5.4 had succeeded where others had failed for 60 years. What had happened was what he described as a collective blockage of the mathematical community, because everyone started from the same origin because it was “the natural one”, the one marked by tradition. The AI ​​didn’t know that was the “correct” way to start, and that ignorance turned out to be an advantage. It’s not that the AI ​​was smarter, it’s that it had no biases about how to approach the problem. Now it remains to be seen if this novel way of trying to solve problems in unorthodox ways works. This will confirm whether what happened with Erdös’s problem number 1196 was an isolated case or whether a 23-year-old boy has managed to change our vision of how to tackle mathematical problems. Image | Universal Pictures In Xataka | There is a mathematically perfect way to cut a ham and cheese sandwich and it has been discussed since 1938.

Tesla robotaxis are autonomous, except when driven by a man from Texas

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Taking a trip in an autonomous taxi is an unsettling feeling of a future that is already here. However, even if the driver’s seat is empty, we now know that sometimes there is a person at the controls who is controlling it remotely. It happened recently with Waymo and now we have learned that Tesla does it too. Self-employed, sometimes. They count in Futurism that Tesla has recognized (after being required by the US Senate) that it has human operators who can take complete control of the vehicle in certain situations. These operators are located at the headquarters in Austin, Texas, or Palo Alto, California. Exceptional situations. As explained in the letter sent to the Senate, this is “As a security measure in exceptional cases (…) as a last resort once all other available intervention actions have been exhausted.” When this remote mode is activated, the operator cannot exceed 16 kilometers per hour. For example, it is used if the vehicle is stuck on a road. Why is it important. Self-driving taxi companies like Waymo and, now, Tesla, have gone to great lengths to hide these types of remote interventions because it is a way of admitting that we are far from 100% autonomous driving. At the beginning of the year, Elon Musk boasted that their robotaxis were circulating without a safety monitor, but shortly after we learned that what they had really done was converting that safety monitor into a vehicle with a driver that followed each robotaxi. The Waymo case. The leading robotaxis company in the US was the first to recognize human intervention in driving their cars. It also happened as a result of authorities’ scrutiny of its technology. However, unlike Tesla’s system in which the human takes full control of the vehicle, in Waymo the human intervenes to guide the stuck vehicle, but does not drive it directly. The workers who carry out these interventions do so from the Philippines. Risks and criticisms. Tesla speaks of “exceptional cases”, but refused to give details about the frequency of these interventions, which for the Senate was insufficient since remote driving entails significant risks. If, for example, there is latency in the network, it would cause a delay in the remote driver’s orders and may have consequences. Tesla defends itself by arguing that revealing that information would “reveal highly sensitive trade secrets and confidential business practices” that Tesla needs to maintain its “competitive position in the autonomous vehicle industry.” Image | Xataka In Xataka | The robotaxis did not need a driver, but Waymo has ended up paying delivery drivers to close ajar doors

The Tax Agency has not made the income tax return manual accessible for decades. A Valencian man did it in three hours

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“Javier, has the program PADRE come out yet?” Every year, at the end of March, my father—not to be confused with my FATHER—asked me the same question, because I was like an AI alerting him that he could finally get down to it. the income tax return every year. For him that was not just an obligation. I would say it was a hobby. Almost a passion. Something to which he dedicated hours and hours in his office armed with his pens, his tight handwriting, his calculator and of course with the Nobel package next to it. He is no longer here, but if I have not inherited something from him, it is that passion for filing income tax returns. In fact, I have never done it, perhaps because as I saw that he dedicated so many hours and effort to making it perfect, that caused me some trauma. “Ugh, this costs too much,” I told myself then and I continue to tell myself now. And here I am, with a reverential fear of completing that task, which I end up entrusting to a manager because time, they say, is money. And yet, it is a small outstanding debt that I have. Last year I tried to try it, and this year I told myself that maybe with the help of some local AI model (because of privacy) I should try it again. But while I was thinking about it, these days the practical manual of Income 2025and one person decided to do something very interesting with that information: he turned it into something useful. This is how the LaRenta.es Open Source project emerged This manual, no matter how complete and detailed it may be, has a problem: it is very inaccessible. The information is there, but neither the wording nor the structure or its organization make it a particularly useful document for most users. That’s where it came into action. Paul March (@paumrch), a public administration worker who lives in Valencia and who, at 31 years old, has a profile completely aligned with the so-called civic technology. Although his training is not technical, he is a very restless self-taught person who has been “tinkering” with all kinds of personal technological projects for more than 15 years. And the latter has become especially popular. We have had the opportunity to speak with Pau and he told us that by working in public administration and being interested in the application of technology to his field, “I have always been interested in the issue of digitalization of the administration because I know it and I know the room for improvement there is and I am convinced that citizens need that improvement.” When the Income 2025 practical manual appeared, he realized that he could try to do something with it. With the experience of previous projects and the new AI tools that he had been using for months, he got the ball rolling. In just three hours, he confesses, he created LaRenta.esa web service that allows any user Know what state and regional deductions you can take advantage of in this statement. The first question of the questionnaire is important: where we pay personal income tax. The deductions to which we may be entitled depend on this parameter. To do this, it has created a very simple system in which, from a small questionnaire that takes two minutes to complete, we can obtain information about these deductions. The process is reduced to going through seven stages of this questionnaire with a few questions, from which it is possible to obtain a final summary with deductions to which we may end up being entitled. And in each of them, we will have an indicator to know what percentage of the total of each deduction we may be entitled to, as well as detailed information about each particular deduction. In these details, the information present in the 2025 income manual is used more clearly and directly, but although the language is still somewhat harsh, at least in this project only that which is directly related to that deduction is shown in a more readable format. We are therefore faced with a project that is not intended at all to prepare your income tax return, but rather to at least provide the information that exists is more accessible and easier to understand. And as March says, it is far from being a perfect project, but it certainly shows that all that information offered by the public administration can be converted into something even more useful in a relatively simple way. From idea to application in three hours These days this entrepreneur explained the process of creating this webapp in an article posted on his Twitter account (X), and as I said there, the cycle was surprisingly simple. AI was his companion throughout the project, and he took advantage of his experience with previous projects to then take advantage of several tools: The interface design was carried out with the help of GoogleStitch The programming was done with the plugin Claude Code in Visual Studio Code. He used Opus 4.6 to plan the entire project, and Sonnet 4.6 to program it, although for some basic tasks he indicates that he also used Anthropic’s basic model, Haiku. He did it all on March 19, right during the Cremá, the big day of the Fallas in his city, Valencia. The project absorbed him so much that he didn’t even enjoy the party and he spent that afternoon and part of the night polishing the errors he was detecting. The result, as can be seen on LaRenta.es, is a fully functional, fast, clear and practical web application. Not only that: it is totally private. Pau explains that no data is saved except for the email if a user wants the summary PDF report to be sent to them. The potential of civic technology When the project was finished, Pau decided post a message to share it through your Twitter … Read more

“The tiger cannot stop being a tiger but man lives in permanent risk of being dehumanized”

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“And here it matters to me what a tiger can or cannot stop doing?” That, I imagine, is the only reasonable question one can ask when listening to this famous phrase of Ortega y Gasset. “The tiger cannot stop being a tiger,” said the philosopher just before adding: “but man lives in permanent risk of being dehumanized.” This is the interesting thing: that for Ortega the tiger has it easy. Tiger is born, tiger lives and tiger dies. It’s not that I have a simple life, nothing in this world has simple lives. But, at least, there are no head warm-ups. Being a human, however, is something else. As explained in ‘The man and the people’human beings have a problem that no other animal has: they have to decide who they are going to be. It is a central idea of ​​Ortega’s thought: that the human being does not have nature (he does not have a fixed behavioral repertoire, nor a series of concrete capacities, nor a ‘way of being’ in the world that comes as standard), what he has is history. It is true that contemporary science (by pulverizing the qualitative distance between us and them) has questioned this idea, but on a personal level still makes sense. In many ways, the philosopher would tell us, we are a project that is being carried out over time. However, the idea has problems: on the one hand, it empowers us, it gives us tools to take control of our own lives. On the other hand, it subjects us to pressure and anxiety (that of being “the unique and non-transferable self”) that can be counterproductive. How not to dehumanize ourselves, then? “Dehumanize“It is not becoming bad, or anything like that: it is simply betraying our individuality. Whatever that means. What Ortega did give us some ideas about is how to avoid it. For him, life oscillates between two poles: self-absorption and “alteration”: between locking yourself inside yourself and letting yourself be carried away by what is happening around you. The key is not to fall into any of these poles: neither reject society, nor get confused with it. We have to orient ourselves within it to get closer to who we are in the midst of the chaos of the contemporary world. It is an invitation to stop living without autopilot on. The difficult thing, I imagine, is doing it. Image | ChatGPT In Xataka | What did Immanuel Kant mean when he argued that patience is not “a force of resistance, but rather one that hopes to make suffering satisfactory?”

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