reason

China is already experiencing a fever for ultra-technological electric caravans and the reason is simple: they are better than combustion ones

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China wants to attract tourists. And he wants his tourists to bet on the national tourism. The objective, evidently, is to attract money and promote internal consumption in the country. So much so that in 2025 tourism generated 16% more income than the previous year, according to data from the country’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The movement, of course, has promoted the use of the train or the plane. But it has had an unexpected effect: the fever of electric caravans. “To take a nap”. It is, according to Daniel Wu, global director of brand and marketing at XPeng, what some people do when they finish their work hours. “Many people go to their cars to take a one-hour nap. After work, they stay in the car for an hour before returning home, doing things they like—for example, playing—simply because it is a very comfortable space,” he explains in words reported by Bloomberg. And the American media has focused on the Chinese camping fever. Since the Covid-19 crisis, this type of tourism has spread throughout the country as it offers an alternative to much more expensive hotels and adds the flexibility inherent to this type of tourism. The reasons for prioritizing camping tourism are exactly the same ones that we have defended in Europe and that have fired these types of proposals since the confinements due to the coronavirus crisis. The difference is that, in the Asian country, manufacturers are specializing in making the interior of the car its own space where the wheels are the addition. In Xataka Spain changes the rules of the game for motorhomes: they will be able to park where any car parks best electric. The big difference is that a good part of this fever is being channeled through fully electric or extended range vehicles. These types of vehicles allow functions such as “camping” or “sleep” modes to be incorporated, making life easier for the user who finds greater flexibility in this type of vehicle. In fact, the chinese media themselves They highlight that the boom is concentrating on models that offer more “high quality and comfort” options. According to their data, in 2022 this business moved 113.47 billion yuan but in 2025 it reached 250 billion yuan. A good part of this result lies in the fact that users increasingly opt for this type of vehicle when they have to rent them. To understand the fever for this type of vehicle, in ChinaDaily They reported that orders for “new energy” vehicles (as they call electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles there) are growing at a rate 10 times higher year after year and the rental period is increasingly longer. In Xataka Pebble has created the mother of all electric caravans. It parks itself and has a propulsion system A substantial advantage. Both in Bloomberg like in chinese media like People They highlight that these electric caravans are more sought after because their huge battery expands everything that can be done with the car. Users rateFor example, being able to carry appliances and all kinds of cooking utensils that only require a gigantic battery on wheels. There are some that even use 4K projectors inside so that passengers can enjoy wherever they go. A good example of this is this caravan that they collected in esquire with the interior space divided into two floors, refrigerator and induction hob, a compact toilet and karaoke, a highly sought after feature in all types of cars. Or this other one from Changan capable of fording rivers wave Geely Farizon. In addition, the possibilities for keeping the interior at a constant temperature are much greater than in a traditional vehicle, making it especially interesting for those who travel with pets. In Xataka It is no longer enough for luxury motorhomes to be huge. Now they have their own garage (with a car inside) The Millennials. One of the reasons given for this increase in the use of electric caravans is, evidently, the savings they represent compared to hotels. They are the travelers born from the 90s those who travel the most with this type of automobile. In fact, 53% of travelers were born during this decade. During May Day holidaysrentals of this type of car skyrocketed again but not only among caravans. And it is that car manufacturers are increasingly likely to include camping modes of use and sell a greater number of accessories to make these cars a realistic option with which to go camping without having to invest in a motorhome. In Xataka If the question is whether you can live in your caravan due to impossible housing prices, the answer is simple: it depends. Chargers everywhere. Of course, all this would not be possible if the charging network were not there. And the huge batteries that serve refrigerators and kitchens would no longer serve their main purpose (moving the car) if, for example, they did not have a dense network of chargers. They collect in Bloomberg that the country has filled gas stations and rest areas with plugs at a devilish rate. Growth is sustained at over 50% each year and there have already been more than 21 million chargers distributed throughout the country. Photo | Geely In Xataka | This image of a Tesla pulling a trailer hides a secret: an entire house in a ridiculous spaceeither (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news China is already experiencing a fever for ultra-technological electric caravans and the reason is simple: they are better than combustion ones was originally published in Xataka by Alberto de la Torre .

Spanish cities are full of a tree that litters everything with flowers and fruits. They have a reason to be there

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If during these weeks of summer you have walked through the streets of your city, it is very likely that you have stepped on a dense carpet of small creamy white flowers. The person responsible for this summer floral rain is an old acquaintance of the urban trees that we popularly know as “Japanese acacia” and scientifically as Styphnolobium japonicum. Its usefulness. If you wonder why the city councils of cities like Zaragoza, Barcelona or Murcia insist on planting this species on paved avenues, the answer It is in its extraordinary adaptive physiology. Something that is supported by the technical sheets that classify it as a species highly tolerant to urban pollution. It is a tree that successfully withstands traffic pollutionheat islands, drought and poor or highly compacted soils. Added to this is its ability to provide dense shade during the harshest months of the year, making it an ideal candidate for road alignment design. It’s not perfect. The only negative point that this tree may have, despite the long list of advantages, is the annoyance that the massive drop of its flowers and later of its fleshy fruits can cause in pedestrian areas. This is something that can end up being quite annoying and making cities very dirty, which is why it requires good maintenance and cleaning. Late flowering. While most urban trees bloom in spring, the Styphnolobium japonicum Save your energy for the summer. Specifically, flowering occurs in the hottest months, between June and August. Its small papilionaceous flowers not only create that characteristic “carpet” impression on the ground, but are highly melliferous. For weeks, the canopy of these trees becomes a hotbed of bees and other pollinators, fulfilling a vital ecological function in the urban ecosystem during a time when other sources of nectar are scarce. Its fruits, strangled legumes reminiscent of a pearl necklace, remain hanging on the branches for a long time, extending their ornamental value well into winter. The identity crisis. One of the great myths around this tree is in its popular name because it is not an acacia. But around his Japanese origin, his epithet “japonicum“was historically misleading, as its native range is not found in Japan, but in the central and southern regions of China. It was introduced to Europe and East Asia much later, where it became greatly popular due to its biological characteristics. Its toxicity. In the field of ethnobotany and traditional Asian medicine, various parts of this tree are have attributed medicinal propertiesand the reality is that it has been seen to have compounds with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antibacterial properties. But the problem is that some parts of the tree, such as the raw fruit, are toxic, so their management should be left to the pharmaceutical industry and moving away from home remedies. Images | Bianka Becsi In Xataka | In the 19th century it was planted in parks for its beauty: today this tree is one of the trees that breaks the most pipes and sidewalks in Spain

The PSP is more than 20 years old and has no reason to move ‘Counter-Strike’. A developer has decided to try

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Those afternoons began with a simple gesture: turn on the computer and open ‘Counter Strike‘. Sometimes it happened at home and other times in an Internet cafe, still decisive in places where domestic connection was just beginning to spread. Then came the servers, network games and scenarios like de_dust2repeated until each hallway was familiar. For those of us who lived through that stage, “playing a Counter” did not just describe a video game, but a specific way to pass the time. In 2005, the PSP was beginning to make a place for itself among players when ‘Counter-Strike’ had been on the PC for years and its version 1.6 had already become a reference. Sony’s laptop belonged to that same technological culture, but never received an official delivery of the Valve title. They shared a time, an audience and many hours of playing, although their paths did not cross. More than two decades later, a developer has decided to bring them closer through a project that does not go unnoticed. The way chosen to bring Counter-Strike closer to the PSP is called OpenStrikea project that looks familiar on screen, although under that appearance something completely different works. We are not looking at Valve’s commercial game running on the laptop or a direct port of its engine, but rather a new implementation that recovers maps, rounds, shooting and combats against bots. Each user must provide the maps and textures from their own copy, while the movement, rules and rendering depend on a base created expressly for the project. Behind that base is Yifeng Wang, known as doodlewind on GitHub, a developer linked to open software, interfaces and web technologies. Its objective was to test PocketJS and Pocket3D and demonstrate that that architecture could go beyond interfaces to support a 3D game in real time. As he explained when presenting OpenStrike, he chose the PSP because its hardware does not allow it to disguise an inefficient architecture with more memory or power. If that worked there, the demonstration would be much more convincing. The first obstacle was elementary: the PSP cannot directly run a program created for the PC. Your processor uses a MIPS architecturedifferent from the one for which ‘Counter-Strike’ was compiled, and they also change the system, the libraries and the way of communicating with the graphics hardware. Copy the executable to a memory card would be like providing written instructions for another machine. You had to recompile and adapt the original code, emulate its environment or, as Wang did, build a new implementation that spoke the console language from the beginning. Once the barrier of architecture was overcome, an even tighter fight remained: making everything fit and respond in time. The PSP-1000 had 32 MB of memory, of which the programs could use 24 MB, and its processor reached 333 MHz. Everything necessary for the game to work had to coexist within that margin. Maintaining 60 images per second meant doing all that work in about 16.7 milliseconds per frame, with no room for unnecessary calculations. The solution was to prevent the PSP from calculating during the game everything that could be prepared in advance. OpenStrike incorporates the map lighting into the geometry itself, adapts the resources to the console format and takes advantage of the pre-calculated visibility information of the BSP maps to limit rendering to potentially visible areas. According to Wang’s measurements on a physical PSP, the test run on dust2 remains at 60 FPS, also during combat. It is still, however, a proof of concept without multiplayer, purchase phase or all the systems of the original game. As shown in the demo published by the projectthe crossover between ‘Counter-Strike’ and the PSP no longer belongs solely to the realm of the imaginable. OpenStrike is still far from reproducing the full game, but it delivers on the essential promise: recovering a recognizable part of that experience. That is the true scope of Wang’s work. Not to demonstrate that the laptop hid an unknown power, but rather that its limits could still become the starting point for building something new. Images | Yifeng Wang In Xataka | Microsoft wants to preserve Xbox games and has chosen an unexpected path: officially emulate them on Windows

In China, taking a taxi is already cheaper than using your own vehicle for one reason: electric cars

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China is experiencing a peculiar situation: on its streets, it is now cheaper to get around by taxi than by private car. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Transport collected by the Reuters agency, lTaxi trips grew by 6% since the outbreak of the Hormuz crisisa phenomenon that coincides with the increase in fuel prices and the enormous electrification of urban fleets. This percentage translates into more than 3,050 million taxi trips in the month of May alone, demonstrating that the international geopolitical situation has a great impact on people’s daily lives. The context. The war in Iran and the situation in the Strait of Hormuz have caused Chinese crude oil purchases to reach historic lows. Last June, oil imports had a collapse of 41.3% year-on-yearwhich placed them at their lowest level in a decade since October 2016, with only 29.27 million tons (about 7.12 million barrels per day). Added to this is also the low production that the national refineries are having due to a fairly low internal demand. All of this has created the perfect cocktail to generate a shortage situation that has skyrocketed prices, among other things, of gasoline. The secret is in the electrical. This is where the taxi comes into play. Although fuel prices rise every day, the rates for this type of transport in China are becoming cheaper. This is because, as Reuters indicates, almost half of the country’s taxi fleet is electric (a condition that in cities covers almost 100% of the car supply) and, therefore, is not as dependent on volatile oil prices, making it an effective shield from China. in front of shock of Hormuz. But not only that. In recent times, the increasingly easier access to an electric vehicle and the slowdown of the Asian country’s economy has pushed many Chinese citizens to take the leap to be independent professionals and look for work in the mobility sector as drivers with their own car. According to Reuters, companies like DiDi, the main Chinese MaaS application, have grown thanks to this phenomenon. In this case, the company has incorporated more than 2 millions of hybrid or electric vehicles in the last year, which represents a total of more than 8 million fossil fuel-free models in its fleet. Thus, there is more supply and more competition and the rates, consequently, are much cheaper. The user wins. This new trend has already flooded the Asian country’s social networks and, in addition to the lower rates and savings on gasoline, many Chinese citizens point out the comfort of the trip and the ease of not having to look for parking as other benefits of opting for a taxi, as expressed by Yang, owner of a gasoline car, to Reuters. However, not everything is risk-free, since these economics professions in demand -such as those of a professional driver, riders and couriers – are in high demand and could end up saturating the market. A change forever? Since the crisis, it is no secret that the world is getting used to living with a 9% less oil which previously passed through Hormuz. Like many other countries, China is now seeking to be less vulnerable to international volatility and rely less on fossil fuels.. It does so in a very clear commitment to leading decarbonization by dominating the global production of solar panels, batteries and, of course, electric vehicles. The big question is whether this change responds solely to the rise in oil prices or whether it will end up consolidating a change in habits in the mentality of Chinese citizens even when the energy market stabilizes again. Cover image | Teresa Wang In Xataka | China has so many electric cars running on its streets that it is going to use them to generate energy for homes

It took 15 years for computers to improve the productivity of companies. AI may take longer for one reason: sabotage

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We keep hearing that AI is going to replace employees in their jobs and that this will mean an apocalypse in the labor market. While it is true that a paradigm shift is coming, even the most ominous voices they have toned down their speech by slowing down the real impact about employment. Four decades ago something similar happened with the personal computer. The offices were filled with computers that did the work of various accountants, but the companies’ balance sheets they didn’t notice its benefits nothing for years. Just like collect Fortunea Goldman Sachs economist has just reviewed that history with a magnifying glass and her conclusion is that AI could take even longer than computers to begin to work. demonstrate its benefits. The J-curve of PCs. Elsie Peng, economist at Goldman Sachs, has analyzed What happened after the arrival of the PC in 1981. The data suggests that in the first four years of the implementation of computers, productivity fell a little. Then, that productivity stagnated another four. Only in the eighth year did the first signs of growth in productivity attributable to the use of these new technologies begin to be noticed. Its peak came twelve years after its release. The trend that the implementation of computers in companies registered is known as J curve and, before computers, it was already experienced by other disruptive technologies in the labor market, such as the steam engine and the arrival of electricity. If AI is “the new PC”, that curve would place the first signs of impact around 2030, and its peak performance would not arrive until 2034. It’s not AI, it’s teleworking. From Goldman Sachs They admit that much of the impact of current AI is still not noticeable in official figures. This happens despite the huge investment figures that companies are making in AI systems. In the eighties with the PC it happened exactly the same: Chips and hardware were expensive and applications that brought real value, like the Internet, took years to have a large enough critical mass of users to have an impact on real productivity. In fact, according to the investigations conducted by Stanford expert Nick Bloom, the recent increase in productivity that has been recorded would not respond to the arrival of AI, but to the massive implementation of teleworking after the Covid-19 pandemic. You don’t invest in technology, you invest in processes. According to the data it collects Fortune According to the Goldman Satch report, for every dollar spent on hardware by companies in the 1990s, another dollar and seventy cents was needed for something that is not always taken into account: redesigning how people worked. In other words, it was not enough to fill office tables with computers, but all processes had to be redesigned and staff trained to make the technology have a visible impact. This expense in reorganizing did not take off until a decade after the arrival of the PC to the offices. The companies that changed their way of working won, not those that bought the hardware first. Investment in data centers for AI is growing faster than then. But the expense of reorganizing work with AI it goes slower than in the nineties with PCs. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated at about 280 billion dollars in intangible spending linked to AI in 2026. When the employee says no. However, the Goldman Satch analyst highlights a big difference between the implementation scenario of computers and that of AI: computers did not have workers against them. This scenario may still delay that peak productivity expected for 2034. Work reorganization is not done on its own, but depends on the employees. If a large part of the workforce resists, the implementation becomes complicated. A study of Writer and Workplace Intelligence to 2,400 workers found that 29% of employees sabotage in some way your company’s AI strategy. Among young people, the figure rises to 44%. Other survey of WalkMe points in the same direction. 54% of workers consciously avoided using AI tools at least once in the last 30 days. They preferred to do the work themselves. Harvard researchers they have named it. They call it self-disruptive technology. Employees do not reject AI because it fails, but because they feel that threatens your job. The study revealed that at least 30% of generative AI projects will end up abandoned due to this employee rejection. In Xataka | We thought that AI was going to take our position. The reality is that it is making us work more and rest less Image | Unsplash (Flipsnack)

Warren Buffett is ending one of the largest philanthropic relationships in history for a reason: Jeffrey Epstein

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For almost twenty years, Warren Buffett took advantage of the summer break to convert part of his Berkshire Hathaway shares and donate them for philanthropic purposes. For much of those two decades of giving, the Gates Foundation had been the main recipient of the billions distributed by the veteran investor. However, last year something changed and the 2026 cast confirms it: Warren Buffett no longer trusts the foundation of his former friend Bill Gates. Like every year, the “Oracle of Omaha” has made his annual donation and, for the second consecutive year, the Foundation of his old friend Bill Gates has been left without a single dollar. The reason has a first and last name: Jeffrey Epstein. A promise for life. In 2006, Buffett signed a commitment that he himself described as irrevocable. In your original letter To Bill and Melinda Gates, the millionaire investor promised to donate shares with several conditions. As Pulitzer-nominated journalist Tim Schwab relates in his book ‘The Bill Gates problem‘those conditions were: The funds had to be spent within the year they were received, discounting the 5% of assets that foundations must donate by law. Bill, Melinda or someone from the Gates family he had to remain active at the head of the foundation. The donations had to be counted as charitable contributions, which for tax purposes taxed differently to gifts and donations. Those conditions made Buffett the foundation’s largest individual donor. According to the official statement of Berkshire Hathaway, this year has converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares, but with a totally different destination than usual. Epstein changed everything. The first cracks in the relationship between Gates and Buffett began with the Bill and Melinda divorce in 2021. The veteran Omaha investor was very close to Melinda’s values ​​and her management skills. Those cracks soon they became a breakup when the Department of Justice declassified documents that revived doubts about the Gates contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier convicted of sexual crimes. In their statements to Congressadmitted that meeting with Epstein put his reputation and job at risk. Buffett, for his part, described that relationship as “unpleasant” in an interview with CNBCalthough he clarified that he has also made a mistake when choosing friends. His children take over from Gates. Buffett insists the decision is not just about Epstein. According to what he told Reutershis three children Susie, Howard and Peter already they have instructions to manage the distribution of his fortune. This year the distribution has gone to four family foundations. The bulk, 9 million shares, went to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, in honor of his late wife. The rest has been divided between the Sherwood Foundation, which Susie runs, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which her middle son runs, and the NoVo Foundation, run by her youngest son, Peter. Goal: spend $140 billion by 2034. The most striking thing about the distribution of donations this year has not only been the confirmation of the break with the Gates Foundation. Warren Buffett has advanced the schedule to divest his entire stake in Berkshire Hathaway, some $140 billion. In previous communicationsthe millionaire claimed to have planned to distribute it ten years after his death. According to your own releasenow “My goal is to dispose of all of my Berkshire shares within approximately eight years… I am hopeful that all three of them will be able to complete the distribution of my shares by December 31, 2034.” Buffett himself acknowledged that “Of course, mortality is unpredictable, but my remaining shares will be donated to all four foundations in one form or another by December 31, 2034.” His children will gradually sell his remaining shares, some 188,290 Class A shares, until they exhaust a fortune that for almost twenty years was linked to the projects of the Gates Foundation. In Xataka | The True Legacy of the Duty Free Founder: How Chuck Feeney Inspired Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Image | Flickr (Statsministerens kontor, Fortune Live Media)

GPT-5.6 is probably the best AI model in the world. And precisely for that reason, the majority does not need it.

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Yesterday OpenAI publicly released GPT-5.6its new family of AI models with three variants: Sol, the most powerful, Terra, more balanced, and Luna, the most cost-efficient. One idea stood out in that release: that GPT-5.6 is probably the best model in the world. And precisely for that reason, the vast majority will never need it. As part of the launch, he published a nice video in which he showed how a farmer in Japan, an entrepreneurial couple in New York and a mathematician in Poland had used it for their work. Then we go back to the video and those three scenarios. But a preview: two of those three stories demonstrate just the opposite of what OpenAI wanted to demonstrate. In the official announcement OpenAI also told us about how this was the most capable family of AI models they had ever released and they included the traditional huge string of internal benchmark results to prove it. According to internal tests, GPT-5.6 Sol is the best existing AI model both in programming and in the use of agentic tools in the terminal (among many other scenarios). Source: OpenAI. Their data revealed that we are facing what theoretically it is the best AI model in the world currently. And the interesting thing is that independent studies like those of Artificial Analysis They corroborate it: in several of its tests GPT-5.6 even surpassed Fable 5, Anthropic’s frontier model that until now was the great reference in this industry. Source: Artificial Analysis. The model certainly appears to be spectacular. Those responsible for ARC Prize, that benchmark in which most AI models repeatedly crash, commented how GPT-5.6 Sol was still the first frontier model to solve one of the puzzles of their new benchmark, ARC-AGI 3. No other had come close to that milestone, and according to this organization “it is the best model when it comes to orienting yourself in a situation that you have never encountered.” All that these tests validate is the idea that we are facing a prodigious model. And the problem is precisely that: that most users will probably never need it. Too powerful for most of us Let’s go back to the video at the beginning. Of the three use cases mentioned, two are quite trivial. GPT-5.6 helped the Japanese farmer create a remote control system for his greenhouse with a Raspberry Pi. He helped the New York couple build a curious cereal box business. Nothing in those two tasks seems to require the best model in the world. In fact, they are precisely the type of projects that have been being resolved for months with much cheaper models. With the third scenario, that of the Polish mathematician, things change: this academic was trying to solve a conjecture that he had been working on for three years. No previous model had been able to help him, but with GPT-5.6 he managed to reveal a totally new idea, he says. One of his final comments precisely makes it clear who GPT-5.6 Sol is for: “If you have that kind of audacity to try to do something really big, you won’t be scared of the incredible computing power because you can organize it with the model.” That is the key to the issue: most users are not trying to solve mathematical conjectures that are almost impossible to solve. Most we use tools in a much more everyday wayand that is completely logical and reasonable. That’s why there are many more more modest and affordable models, and why the GPT-5.6 Sol, even if it makes sense, will be a very unprofitable model for most people. It is not a model for counting R’sof course. In fact, every time a new model comes into our hands, It is very difficult to appreciate if it is really better than the previous ones because the tasks we propose are usually solved very well with the existing ones. There are cases in which differences are seen—in especially complex programming, for example—but here we are faced with a situation that we have lived before on several occasions. This happens, for example, with modern hardware: very few people need the most advanced processors or an RTX 5090 to play, because more modest CPUs and GPUs give access to a truly fluid experience. We don’t usually need a camera either. Hasselblad of 15,000 euros for our vacations, and a good cell phone of 500-1,000 euros at this point solves the problem wonderfully. The good thing about all this is what also happens with those examples that we mentioned before: what is extraordinarily expensive and powerful today will end up no longer being so because other even better (and probably more expensive) AI models will appear on the horizon. The question is no longer “which model is more “intelligent”?”, but “Which model is smart enough to solve this task at the lowest cost?“. That explains why there are variants like Sol, Terra and Luna. Maybe in two years GPT-5.6 Sol will be the cheap model we use to correct an email or plan a vacation. The recent history of AI invites us to think precisely that: today’s frontier models end up becoming tomorrow’s everyday models. Perhaps that is the true meaning of GPT-5.6. Not that today almost no one needs so much intelligence, but that in a few years we will probably we all take it for granted. In Xataka | OpenAI just launched GPT-Live: ChatGPT voice mode has learned to listen, shut up and respond better

There’s a reason China doesn’t fire nuclear missiles from its most dangerous submarine. You just broke that rule

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The greatest strength of a nuclear submarine is not its firepower, but that no one knows where it is. This ability to remain hidden for months has made these ships the most important pillar of nuclear deterrence since the Cold War and explains why each movement related to them is analyzed with a magnifying glass. It wasn’t just any test. China has insisted that the launch was part of its annual training and that it had previously notified the countries of the region. However, few maneuvers generate as much attention as the ballistic missile shot from a strategic nuclear submarine into the Pacific Ocean. Not only that, since it was an action practically unpublished in decades. Beijing had been avoiding a public demonstration of this type for years and, precisely for this reason, the test has been interpreted as a message directed far beyond the military exercise itself. The letter that is never shown. Missile submarines are the most discreet and valuable component of any nuclear power. Its main advantage is in remaining hidden for weeks or months, guaranteeing a retaliatory capacity even if the country suffers a first attack. This need to maintain secrecy explains why China has barely made public launches from this type of platform and that each demonstration has enormous strategic weight. The signal was directed to the United States. Although the Chinese authorities they emphasized that the missile carried a training warhead and was not directed against any country, the context tell another story. Western analysts believe that the test was intended to demonstrate that Chinese submarines can now launch very long-range missiles. from nearby areas on its own coasts and continue hitting targets thousands of kilometers away. In other words, Beijing wanted to remind that its maritime deterrence capacity is entering a new phase of maturity. Type 094 Submarine A doctrine designed to reduce risks. Everything indicates that the launch took place from protected waters close to China, a strategy known as “bastion.” Instead of sending its submarines to the center of the Pacific, the idea is to keep them under the cover of national aviation, fleet and anti-missile systems while retaining the ability to attack very distant targets. If the new JL-2 or JL-3 missiles They fulfill the benefits attributed to them by analysts, these submarines no longer need to travel too far from home to reach US territory. Nuclear expansion continues. Because the test comes in full modernization process of Chinese strategic forces. Beijing is building new silos for intercontinental missiles, deploying more advanced generations of land-based missiles and increasing the number of ballistically capable nuclear submarines. Pentagon estimates suggest that the Chinese arsenal could exceed a thousand nuclear warheads before 2030a transformation that is changing the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. The Pacific responds worried. Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan reacted criticizing a pitch which they consider destabilizing for the region, despite having received prior notification. The criticism was not directed solely at the missile, but in the context of a rapid increase in Chinese military capabilities and an increasingly visible naval presence in the Pacific. For many governments, the test represents a new step in a show of force strategy that had already included tests of intercontinental missiles and naval maneuvers increasingly distant from Chinese coasts. The real novelty was not the missile. It is known that China has had ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons for years. What is really new is that he has decided show publicly how one of its strategic submarines can use them, something it had almost completely avoided until now. In fact, the demonstration increases the credibility of your ability of retaliation, forces its rivals to assume that these submarines are fully operational and confirms that Beijing is willing to use its military tests as another tool of political and strategic deterrence. Image | PLA In Xataka | Satellite images leave no doubt: China has launched an underwater creature into the sea that defies naval engineering In Xataka | From cultivating the field to sailing underwater: the Chinese farmer who makes homemade submarines in his free time

In 1993, no one could find the supposed red ninja from ‘Mortal Kombat’. There was a reason: it didn’t exist yet

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There was a time when the secrets of video games came in arcade machines, magazines, and conversations from someone who swore they had seen something impossible. Around the first ‘Mortal Kombat‘, that something impossible had the shape of a red ninja and a strange name: Ermac. The game had already shown that it could hide characters, so many players continued to look at the screen with the suspicion that there was another fighter waiting to be found. The clue that fueled that search was not born as a character, but as a technical entry within the game itself. Ed Boon, co-creator of ‘Mortal Kombat’, explained that During the development of the first game, the software had sections of code that, in theory, it was never supposed to reach. If that happened, the system incremented an error counter that the team could review on an internal audit screen. To shorten that record, Boon wrote an assembly macro called ERMAC, short for Error Macro. A rumor too good not to end up being true The detail that changed everything was where that counter appeared. Boon explained that the ERMACS number was listed right after the record of times the players had fought Reptile, who was a hidden character in the first ‘Mortal Kombat’. The association was almost inevitable: if Reptile existed and was counted there, Ermac could seem like another secret of the same type. For a player looking at that screen without knowing the code behind it, the name didn’t sound like an internal tool, but like someone. From there, the gap was filled by the collective imagination. Boon summed it up quite clearly long ago in X: rumors about Ermac became legend and some players insisted that they had actually faced him. The important precision is right after, because the co-creator of ‘Mortal Kombat’ cut the story with a short sentence: “They didn’t do it :)”. There was no hidden red ninja in the first game, but rather a misreading that had found the perfect ecosystem to grow. Ermac in ‘Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’ The most revealing part is not only in the code, but in the trace left by the conversation. Alleged clue linked to Electronic Gaming Monthly dates back to 1993and the rumor continued to appear in forums long after: Mortal Kombat Online discussed it in threads from 2003 and later years. Boon recalled that in ‘Mortal Kombat II’ Reptile stopped being just a hidden fighter and became part of the playable roster, while the game added three other secret characters: Smoke, Jade and Noob Saibot. It was a clear sign that ‘Mortal Kombat’ was still playing with the idea of ​​the hidden, even if Ermac wasn’t there yet. For some players, that was enough to keep the search open a little longer. Ermac in ‘Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’ The twist came in 1995, when ‘Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’ finally turned Ermac into a real fighter. Boon explained it as part of a broader decision: for ‘Mortal Kombat 3’ they began to transform some myths into elements of the game, starting with the Animalities, the animal endings of the saga, and in ‘Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’, the expanded version of 1995, they ended up adding Ermac to the roster. The character that many had searched for ahead of time now appeared as the red ninja that the community had already imagined, but with an important difference: this time he did exist. Ermac in ‘Mortal Kombat 1’ From there, Ermac stopped depending on rumor and began to have a life of his own within the saga. Boon recalled that, over the years, the character appeared in several ‘Mortal Kombat’ games and ended up accumulating history, background and a place within the lore. This evolution does not erase its origin, rather it makes it more peculiar: first it was an internal abbreviation, then an interpretation of the players and finally a fighter with an identity. Few characters summarize the relationship between error, community and canon so well. The last turn of the story came with ‘Mortal Kombat 1‘, the installment developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games in September 2023 as a reboot of the saga. Boon brought back Ermac’s origin at the time because the character was about to arrive in the game’s roster as downloadable content. It also served as the perfect context to present a fighter who had started as an error counter and continued to function, decades later, as a claimant. Images | YouTube Capture (Torne) | In Xataka | Independent analysts agree: “The Steam Machine is an expensive curiosity, not a gaming device for the masses”

Sony has told you why it stops selling games in physical format. The real reason, of course, is the same as always: money

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Sony has announced that in January 2028 will stop manufacturing physical discs for PlayStation. Among the brief reasons given for making this decision is adapting to the player’s preferences, and following the trends that rule the industry: digital games sell more than physical ones, therefore, this is the choice of the players, which must be adhered to. However, what you have to look at there to find Sony’s true motives is “best sellers.” And specifically, we have to ask ourselves what economic benefit Sony extracts from these sales. The clear accounts. You just have to take note of the profit percentages that Sony makes with each game sold to understand the operation. According to the analysis of consultant Serkan Toto, Kantan GamesSony receives around 54% more for each digital copy of its own game than for the same physical copy. At a price of 70 dollars, a digital game leaves you the full 70 dollars, because there is no external store that takes commission (of course, from there you have to extract development, marketing and corporate costs, if the game is from an external studio). The same title on disc, after deducting the distributor’s margin (about 30%) and the manufacturing cost (about 5%), is left with a profit of about $45.50. Although the calculation is approximate and countless external actors must be taken into account (especially third parties), the comparison makes clear the maxim that is guiding these decisions: the fewer intermediaries, the greater the profit margin per unit. Less physical. Added to this is that the physical aspect already weighs little in the company’s overall income statement. According to a corporate report of the company itselfphysical software represented only 3% of its revenue in 2024. All these decisions must also be contextualized: at a time when Your Playstation 6 can cost a thousand euros sales price and that the current component crisis promises not only to continue, but directly double next yearcutting that 3% can save millions. Kill the second hand. There is another figure that should be taken into account: resale. Every second-hand record that changes ownership is a sale from which Sony does not see a euro. An Alinea Analytics analyst said that “what this is all about is profitability and control for PlayStation”, two very juicy terms in this new situation because a digital code, apart from all the savings in intermediaries that we said above, is linked to a personal account that cannot be resold or lent. Every second-hand product that Sony was unable to sell now becomes a new purchase at full price, or is not produced at all. This second-hand market is not exactly marginal, and is now being seen to disappear. GameStop saw a 14% drop in its quarterly revenue last March, and explicitly attributed to the shift towards digital. The analysis firm Circana estimates that spending on new physical games in the United States has fallen to 1.6 billion dollars in the last year, compared to a maximum of 11.5 billion in 2009. In other words, we have had an almost uninterrupted decline for seventeen years. It’s the market, friend. Sony has taken the most aggressive step, but the direction had already been set from different parts of the sector for some time. A week before Sony’s announcement, Rockstar confirmed that The physical edition of ‘GTA VI’ will not have a disc version. Both Xbox and Playstation have sold versions of their latest consoles without a disc reader. It is an inescapable trend, which began on PC and in stores that have ended up becoming massive options, such as Steam, and which reveals that a corporation will always prefer, rather than a one-time sale, that we are subscribed (literally or figuratively) to a constant purchase, to a service that never ends. Therefore, saying that the player has chosen digital for convenience is, at the very least, a liquid truth. As he told newsletter ‘Friday in Kiribati’we must not get carried away by that discourse: we have not chosen the preeminence of the digital, it has been imposed on us: “it seems that during the last decade no one has designed consoles without a reader, exclusive discounts for digital versions, subscription catalogs, stores integrated (and hyperpresent) in the designs of the systems, games that, despite having the disc, need to connect to the internet (…) nor have they invested obscene amounts of money in convincing us that getting up from the couch to change a disc was a thing. of the past.” Image | Photo of Alexey Savchenko in Unsplash

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