reason

the reason is the laws of physics

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Surely you already know (online advertising is reminding you day in and day out) that with a simple prompt you can generate a video game. The AI ​​does it for you, but what it can’t do is play it. The reason is not that games are difficult in the abstract: it is that the real world obeys the same physical laws everywhere, and video games do not. Do, not play. The paradox is striking: with tools like Cursor either Claudea prompt generates a clone of a functional classic game. ‘Asteroids’, for example. However, that same system would not even surpass the first level of its own creation. Julian Togelius, director of the Game Innovation Lab at New York University and co-founder of the testing company Modl.ai, has been investigating why for months, and has broken it down in an interview. Programming is not a game. Togelius defines programming from a structural point of view: a very well designed game. Each line of code comes with a clear statement, a verifiable success criterion and feedback on possible failures, and the program indicates exactly where and why it failed. LLMs (language models) have been trained with massive amounts of code and fine-tuned using reinforcement learning to solve exactly those types of problems. Programming is, in terms of task structure, an exceptionally “well-behaved” game, as Togelius defines it. That’s why so many people find programming fun. However, video games are another story: the action space is governed by more arbitrary rules, feedback can be immediate or take hours to arrive, spatial reasoning is essential and the margin of error is much smaller. When an AI model is asked to play something, the result documented in the paper that Togelius made is unequivocal: “absolute failure.” With a guide, please. Gemini 2.5 Pro completed ‘Pokémon Blue’ in May 2025, but it took considerably longer than any human player, made repetitive mistakes, and relied on auxiliary software to achieve it. The TIME magazine analyzed Why the best AI systems still struggle with ‘Pokémon’. And that is one of the few titles that manage to finish. They achieve this because these systems have specific APIs to consult strategic guides. That ‘Pokémon’ or ‘Minecraft’ (another title that AIs can navigate) are two of the most documented franchises in the history of video games, with millions of hours of walkthroughs available on the internet, is the key to making it easier for them. The key is in physics. But… why can a language model write an essay on quantum physics and at the same time fail in both ‘Halo’ and ‘Space Invaders’? Togelius’s response is that “those two games are more different from each other, in a sense, than two different academic essays.” Looked at another way: video games are very heterogeneous. Each one invents their own rules, their own space logic, their own reward system. The mechanics of a platform game are absolutely different from those of a ‘Tetris’. Spatial reasoning (where objects are, how they move, how they relate) does not appear in the pre-training data of the language models because it cannot be understood from one game to the next. However, let’s look at a task seemingly more difficult than playing ‘Super Mario’: driving a self-driving car. And AIs do that well. The difference with games is that the real world obeys the same physical laws anywhere on the planet. The asphalt behaves the same in San Francisco as in Shanghai, the traffic lights follow the same principles, the vehicle always responds the same. As Togelius points out, “driving is much more homogeneous than video games as a whole.” Learn to drive and you can do it anywhere on the planet. Learn how to play ‘Doom’ and you will have no idea how to play ‘Age of Empires’. The definitive criterion. That is why Togelius proposes video games as a criterion to determine the success of an AI: it is necessary to gauge whether an agent capable of learning can complete any game in the top 100 on Steam in approximately the same time as a skilled human player, without access to prior documentation or specific integration. To that scale (which does not require winning on the first try, but rather learning at a human pace) there is no system today that comes close. Header | Photo of Erik Mclean in Unsplash In Xataka | AI entered video games as an experiment. Today more than 80% of developers no longer know how to produce without it

for whatever reason, it resists nuclear explosions

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China has just landed a project that has been on the table for a decade: that of the first floating island of deep sea research of the world. It looks like an oil well, but it is actually a megastructure that is prepared for everything. And, when we say “everything,” we include the end of the world. Because it is a research center, but also a command center and a nuclear bunker. And it has already raised concerns about possible dual use by China. In short. A few months ago we echoed the China’s plan to formalize this project that has been in the oven for years, but that has not materialized. It was now when, according to the state channel CCTV Newsthe country will begin the final phase of design and construction of the platform. The name by which it has been known until now is the “Deep-Sea All-Wather Resident Floating Research Facility”, and it will basically be a facility that can do everything. The installation. Jio Tong University in Shanghai is in charge of the bulk of the project, a platform that will have a double twin hull of 78,000 tons and scandalous dimensions. We are talking about 138 meters long, 85 meters wide and a main deck located 45 meters from the waterline. He Fujianthe brand new new generation aircraft carrier from China, has a displacement of 80,000 tons. To contextualize. It is semi-submersible and, from the University, they have detailed that it will come to fill a gap that they have detected in the country’s arsenal: that of a research facility that can navigate quickly and remain in an area of ​​operations for prolonged periods. “And, if it reminds us of an oil well, it is because they have been inspired by those facilities, they have combined the design with that of the research vessels and what has come out is… well, what we see in the conceptual image. Investigation. The idea is that the facility can house almost 240 people for months thanks to the backup energy systems and the main objective set out by CCTV News and Jiao Tong University is to explore deep waters and serve as a research field. mining system testingoil and gas prospecting, as well as research into that unexplored ocean floor. Bombproof. But there is a twist. The structure is designed to be a fortress capable of withstanding nine-meter-high waves and category 17 typhoons, the highest for this type of cyclones. It is normal since it will be in areas where the hull can suffer, but what is no longer so normal is that the armor has been designed to resist nuclear explosions. Instead of conventional steel armor, the walls of the complex will be like a sandwich with several layers that will dissipate the shock wave from a nuclear explosion. For construction, it is proposed to use a metamaterial that, under pressure, compresses to create a denser structure than thicker steel panels. The simulations indicated that these walls will resist more pressure than that of a submarine. And that, together with the fact that it will have a command center, has raised some doubts about the possible dual use of the facility. Mapping the terrain. Because the ocean floor has become the new battlefield. We don’t even talk about space, since the United States claims that There has been a war with China and Russia for months for control of space, but the launch of this platform project comes shortly after the publication of some information that reveal how China has deployed dozens of research vessels to map the ocean floor. According to reports published in Reutersdozens of ships have been studying the terrain for years, mapping it and deploying sensors in a strategy to be able to monitor in real time data such as water temperature, salinity, the best prospecting areas and… also everything that moves in that territory. From the United States it has already been raised the voice pointing out that these civilian research vessels “can” collect military intelligence, which represents “a strategic concern.” This systematic mapping, for some military analysts, has a single objective and it is not to find oil wells: it is to erode the advantage that the United States had in the oceanic battlefield.” And a facility like the one they are now preparing with their sights set on 2030 can be a true marine fortress. Image | SJTU In Xataka | Japan has dozens of “forgotten” islands off the coast of China: it is now preparing for the worst scenario

There’s a reason Warren Buffett is known as the “Oracle of Omaha” and this chart is the best proof

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There are numbers that don’t need much explanation. Just take a quick look at them to understand why Warren Buffett has been considered the best investor in history. The difference between the cumulative performance that have generated the investments that Buffett has made throughout his career as an investor through Berkshire Hathaway, and what it would have meant to invest it in any security in the S&P 500 index during the same time is not a small advantage: it is an abyss. In its traditional letter to its shareholders The company collects on a single page the history of returns obtained since 1965. That page is, possibly, the most eloquent summary of what it means to invest well over a lifetime. The data portal VisualCapitalist.com has prepared a very illuminating graph with this data and a simple glance is enough to realize the enormous difference between the returns obtained by Buffett and those of the S&P 500. So much difference, that they even had to zoom in on the image so that the evolution of the S&P500 can appear. Six decades of financial returns He annual report of Berkshire Hathaway 2025 reflects the evolution of the company’s value per share compared to the performance of the S&P 500 since 1965. The accumulated result during that period is no less than 6,099,294% for Berkshire, compared to 46,061% for the most followed stock market index in the world. Translated into money, those figures indicate that if you had invested $100 in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, Buffett would have turned it into more than $6 million today, while that same amount put into the S&P 500 would have grown to just over $46,000. The compound annual gain that Berkshire has delivered between 1965 and 2025 was 19.7%, almost double the 10.5% achieved by the S&P 500 in that same period. It is not a difference of a few percentage points that accumulate; when we talk about decades, that gap becomes an abyss. He compound interest It has that multiplier effect, and Buffett understood it better than anyone. Good years and bad years (which are not so bad) Despite the good historical data for the entire period, not all years ended with green numbers. The table provided by the company each year also reveals that Berkshire Hathaway did not outperform the S&P 500 every year. In 2025, for example, Berkshire’s value per share rose 10.9% while the S&P 500 it did so by 17.9%. There were other exercises with similar results: in 1967, the S&P 500 index rose 30.9% compared to 13.3% for Berkshire; In 1999, Buffett’s company lost 19.9%, while the S&P gained 21.0%. In 2019, the S&P 500 soared to 31.5%, while Berkshire Hathaway only managed to post a not inconsiderable 11.0% return. Buffett wasn’t playing to win every battle, he was playing to win the war. But where the veteran investor’s strategy especially shined was when the bad times came. The S&P 500 closed negative 13 times between 1965 and 2025. However, Berkshire weathered the storm better than the S&P 500 in 11 of those 13 years. That is, it lost less during the worst years and even ended positively when everyone lost. The only two exceptions are found in the results of 1974, in which Berkshire closed the year with a fall of 48.7% compared to 26.4% for the S&P 500, and in 1990, when Buffett’s company fell 23.1% compared to 3.1% for the stock index. The secret of compound interest The key to this success in profitability is not in the individual years but in the consistency of the results over time. When an investment grows at a compound annual rate of 19.7% for 60 years, the cumulative effect is exponential: Each year’s profits are added to the previous capital and generate new profits on that growing total. It’s the difference between adding and multiplying, and Buffett made that principle the centerpiece of his entire investment philosophy. He new CEO of BerkshireGregory Abel, described in his last letter to investors This way of operating compares Buffett with the legendary baseball player Ted Williams, who divided the hitting zone into 77 segments and tried only in a much smaller area, achieving a historical average. “A similar discipline, patience and judgment define Warren’s approach to investing: determine preferred pitches, wait for them, and then strike decisively,” Abel said in the letter to shareholders included in the 2025 annual report. The Oracle’s investing nose Abel outlined in the 2025 shareholder letter the philosophy that has guided Berkshire’s investments over the decades, based on moat theory in which capital is concentrated in a small number of companies that understand their business, and defend lasting advantages. Along these lines, the report highlights Buffett’s historical investments in Apple, American Express or Coca-Cola as the best example of that approach. Businesses that, in Abel’s own words, Berkshire considers to be “companies that we understand well, have great respect for their leaders and have waited for them to grow for decades.” That investing nose, built with patience and without getting carried away by market fashionsis precisely what has made Buffett a investment legend. Coca-Cola has been in Berkshire’s portfolio since 1988 and American Express since 1991, investments that over time have generated returns that more than multiply the original purchase price. The Oracle of Omaha did not predict the future: he chose well, waited decades and let time do the rest. The same time that has proven him right. In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear Image | VisualCapitalist

The reason has little to do with Noelia Castillo

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Today is Noelia Castillo’s last day. If everything goes according to plan and your story does not add a new script twist, this same afternoon The young woman will receive euthanasia in Catalonia. The normal thing would be that all this data, your name, surname, age and the details of your life and even those of his sedationwere preserved as part of their privacy. Noelia’s case, however, has long been different from those carried out by the more than a thousand people who have received help to die in Spain since the entry into force of the Euthanasia Law four years ago. The reason is very simple: Noelia will arrive at her sedation after having starred a judicial labyrinth that has stirred the debate around assisted dying. What has happened? If there is something complicated as of March 26, 2026, it is competing with Donald Trump and Netanyahu on the front pages of the newspapers. In Spain, it has been achieved by a 25-year-old Catalan whose surname (and face) was unknown to the general public until very recently: Noelia Castillo Ramos. The reason is very simple. Since he requested assisted suicide, his case has been the subject of a intricate judicial journey which took him from the courts of Barcelona to the Superior Court of Catalonia, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court and finally the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In between there have been sentences, opinions, steps in one direction and another and a rosary of tests that culminated a few days ago in Strasbourg, when the high court concluded that there were no reasons to hinder the young woman’s will. Why this journey? Because Noelia has been demanding her right to euthanasia for years, but her father does not share her decision. With the help of the ultra-conservative association ‘Abogados Cristianos’ he has used all the legal resources at his disposal to stop (or at least delay) the sedation. To understand it you have to go back to at least 2024, when the Guarantee and Evaluation Commission of Catalonia (CGAC), multidisciplinary body in charge of controlling requests, resolved that Noelia was in a position to request assisted death. As precise The Vanguardthe experts concluded that the young woman “presents a non-recoverable clinical situation” that causes “serious dependency, pain and chronic and disabling suffering.” So what’s the problem? His euthanasia was scheduled for August 2 of that same year, but her father requested to stop the process, a court accepted his request and a judicial process began that has had, above all, one consequence, beyond stirring up the debate around assisted suicide: Noelia will die, but 601 days later of that first scheduled euthanasia. The judicial chronicle of the case has continued to be written until the end. In the last hours, Christian Lawyers appealed for “very precautionary measures” to postpone the death, but without success. It has also had other protagonists, in addition to the young woman. The judicial focus has also been put in the role of the experts (doctor and jurist) who once had to evaluate Noelia. Why is it news? If the judicial fight had not been enough to give her notoriety, Noelia’s case has been attracting media attention for some time due to its details. 75.9% of the euthanasia processes that were completed in Spain in 2024 (latest data available) were carried out by people over 60 years of age. In fact, around a third (27.8%) were over 80. The most common thing is that those who request assisted death are also patients with neurological diseases (32.5%) and oncological diseases (29.7%). Noelia breaks that statistic. Is your case so different? The Catalan is 25 years old, which, explains The Newspaperwill make her the youngest person in the country to receive euthanasia. Beyond his age, his profile is not ‘orthodox’ either. The same media specifies that Noelia will be one of the six Catalan psychiatric patients who have agreed to a dignified death, which gives an idea that this condition is not common either. of the young woman has transcended who suffers from borderline personality disorder (BPD) and who for years tried to commit suicide jumping from the fifth floor, which explains his current paraplegia. It is an important detail. And not only because it explains the physical pain that Noelia suffers. One of the arguments put forward by her father throughout the lawsuit is that the young woman is not in a position to decide on her sedation and that her problems are of a psychiatric nature. Is there more? Yes. If in the last few hours you have probably seen images of Noelia on the networks and news about her case, it is because, after more than 600 days of judicial journey, she herself has wanted to take a step forward and explain her case. He did so in an exclusive interview granted to the program ‘And now Sonsoles’ in which he talks about his past, his present, what he feels, what his life is like and how he has lived during these last years. His story is interesting for several reasons. To begin with, because it completes a chronicle in which until today the voice of the other party had been heard above all, including Christian Lawyers. The other reason is that Noelia has not hesitated to expose the stark rawness of her story, further amplifying the interest in her figure. We know about her that her parents separated when she was 13 years old, that she was in foster care for a time and that she has suffered episodes of sexual abuse and assault. The last one, multiple, was followed by a suicide attempt that severely limited her mobility. Is this just about Noelia Castillo? No. According to the calculations shared by the Right to Die with Dignity last year, since the Euthanasia Law came into force in June 2021, more than 1,000 people have obtained assistance to end their lives in Spain. Only in 2024 did Health … Read more

there is a clear reason behind

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The PlayStation 3 is already a console vintagewell, or almost. For an object to be considered vintage, it must have at least 20 yearswhich are what the PS3 is going to celebrate next November (insert meme about feeling old here). Well, despite its age, the PS3 has just received an update. Just don’t expect new features. 4.93. It is the version of the update that Sony has just released and for which you will need at least 200MB of free space. On the update pageSony simply says that “this software update improves system performance” – the same description as in the last three versions released. However, there is a warning that points to the real reason for the update: Please note that to play Blu-ray discs, your PS3 console requires a renewed Blu-ray player encryption key. Please update the PS3 system software to the latest version to renew the Blu-ray player encryption key. New key for the Blu-ray player. Although they do not say it explicitly, everything indicates that it is a renewal of the Blu-ray player’s encryption key. This is what Sony has been doing with the latest software updates. These encryption keys They are renewed every year or year and a half and you need to update if you want to play recently released Blu-ray movies. AACS. It stands for Advanced Access Content System, the anti-copy system that protects the content of Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs using a multi-layer encryption scheme. This scheme links the disk to the player and a set of cryptographic keys. As for the players, they are assigned a set of internal keys, but if any of them are leaked, the system can make them obsolete so that it cannot play new discs. Like any anti-copy system, it has been the subject of numerous attempts to violate it. In 2007, the decryption key leaked on the internet and the AACSLA organization tried to erase all traces, which caused a Streisand effect and caused thousands of users to republish it en masse. Later AACS 2.0 releasedan improved system that is much more complex to breach (but not impossible). Other updates. In addition to the PS3 update, Sony has also released updates for the PS4 and PS5. In the case of the PS4, version 13.50 promises improvements to the messaging system and the usability of some screens. More new features arrive for the PS5 with version 26.02-13.00.00, such as improvements in PSSR for the PS5 Pro, new emojis and more functions for the Welcome Center. In Xataka | The most viral retro console, removed from AliExpress. It is as toxic as it is illegal, according to the EU

Sony closes its games to PC and Capcom confirms that half of its sales come from there. A contradiction with a reason: Playstation 6

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Sony has decided that titles like ‘Ghost of Yotei’ will not come to PC, ending six years of multiplatform strategy. The twist is striking for the moment: Capcom has just confirmed that 50% of its sales already come from the PCand expects that number to continue growing. Two giants of the industry from Japan, two radically opposite bets on where the future of the business lies. The breakup. After weeks of rumors in that direction, Bloomberg confirmed that Sony has canceled plans to bring its big single-player exclusives to PC. TO ‘Ghost of Yotei‘, one of the most celebrated PlayStation releases in 2025, are joined by ‘Saro’, the next Housemarque game. The multiplatform experiment that Sony started in 2020 with ‘Horizon Zero Dawn‘It has lasted six years. The withdrawal is not total. According to sources consulted by Bloomberg, games as a service (the imminent ‘Marathon’, ‘Marvel Tokon’ or ‘Horizon: Hunter’s Gathering’) will maintain a multi-platform launch, because their business model depends on building player bases as wide as possible. ‘Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’ and ‘Kena: Scars of Kosmora’ will continue to be ported to PC this year, as they are titles from third-party developers published under the PlayStation umbrella. Calm rhythm. Sony’s release rate on Steam was never that of a furious competitor: the titles arrived between one and three years after their console debut, which meant that the ports had to compete against previous versions that had already suffered price discounts, to which was added the incessant pace of new releases for PC. These are some of the reasons why Sony may the bills didn’t work out: ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ reached a peak of 77,000 simultaneous players, but ‘Horizon Forbidden West’ and ‘The Last of Us Part II Remastered’ did not exceed 40,000 and 30,000 respectively. To retreat. This leaves some decisions made by Sony recently up in the air: in 2021 acquired Nixxes Softwarea Dutch studio specialized in porting games to PC (‘Tomb Raider’ trilogy, ‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’), and it is not clear what its future will be with this new strategy. Furthermore, on the 19th Bluepoint Games closedthe studio responsible for the remakes of ‘Demon’s Souls’ and ‘Shadow of the Colossus’, with around 70 employees affected. Sony think tank CEO Hermen Hulst spoke internally of an “increasingly challenging industry environment”, with rising development costs and slowing growth. Bluepoint had been working on a ‘God of War’ project in the form of a game as a service. Print money. In February 2025, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of PlayStation Studios, described the strategy of bringing games to Steam as something which is similar to “printing money” because the cost of a port is only a fraction of that of developing an original game. Why the change in strategy? PC numbers weren’t bad in absolute terms: Sony’s five best-selling titles on Steam together they surpassed 43 million copies and generated more than $1.2 billion in gross revenue for the company. The problem may well be the value they subtract from the hardware: they generate income but not a loyalty to the ecosystembecause a PC gamer does not need to buy a Playstation console. In the end, as Bloomberg pointed out, PC ports represent less than 2% of Sony’s total annual revenue. And there is something else: apparentlythere is a real concern about the design of the next xboxwhose architecture is closer to a Windows PC than to a conventional console, with the possibility of supporting multiple stores, including Steam. The PlayStation exclusives available on Steam could run perfectly on an Xbox, which would make Sony investing money to literally benefit its most direct competitor. Capcom prefers the PC. A day before Bloomberg published Sony’s new policy, Capcom released the Q&A transcript of its fiscal third-quarter results. An investor asked about the PC strategy regarding ‘Resident Evil Requiem‘ and its technical commitment to that platform. The company’s response was that the PC already represents approximately 50% of the total units sold for Capcom, and the internal expectation is that that figure will continue to grow. Already in October 2021, the company’s COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto stated in an interview that the company’s goal was that the PC became its main platform and that the proportion of sales between console and PC will reach 50-50 in 2022 or 2023. The prediction has been fulfilled with only a couple of years of delay. Revenue generated via Steam grew by 61.1% between April 2024 and March 2025 and in that same period PlayStation’s share of Capcom’s total revenue fell below 10%. The differences. Of course, there are differences to take into account between Capcom and Sony. Capcom has no hardware to sell, and its only incentive is to maximize the distribution of its software catalog across all platforms. Sony, on the other hand, manages a complete ecosystem that includes a console, digital store, subscription and accessories, and each decision has to be measured not only in direct sales of that title but in the impact on the value of the hardware and loyalty to the ecosystem. They are different business structures. Things that happen. All this happens the same year that Valve announces its new Steam Machine, in which the ROG Ally with branding from xbox It corroborates after the Steam Deck that the power of PC hardware can reach the living room, and that Microsoft officially embraces the idea that its games do not need an Xbox to be played. What justifies buying a dedicated console in 2026? Sony clearly focuses its sights on the most successful name in the industry at the moment: Nintendo. If you have to sell hardware, the key is exclusivity and making your object essential. It only remains to be seen if Playstation 6 will be so essential. In Xataka | Playstation 6: all the information we know (or think we know) so far

Employment among those over 65 triples and reaches the maximum in the historical series. There is a good reason: retirement

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The labor market in Spain has recorded several notable milestones in recent months: record contributions, lowest unemployment rate in decades and recovery of youth employment. However, the last annualized EPA data They hide a story that goes beyond global figures. According to Annual average data for 2025 published this week by the INE, the employment rate among those over 65 has reached its historical maximum, and the reason is not that older Spaniards have discovered a sudden love for work. There is something structural behind it that deserves a closer look. An aging workforce. The aging of the population in Spain, and the changes in the pension system that were approved in the 2011 reform, are quietly but very significantly redrawing the Spanish labor map. What a decade ago seemed like a statistical anomaly has today become a consolidated trend with direct consequences on the future and viability of public pensions. The EPA data of the fourth quarter of 2025 indicate that at the end of the year there were 4,926,300 employed people over 55 years of age in Spain. This represents a growth of 23.3% in this age range since the 2022 labor reform, compared to the 11.3% average increase recorded by the rest of the ages. But the most striking thing is that the employment rate among those over 65 years of age has tripled compared to the levels of a decade ago, with 14.25% for men between 65 and 69 years old and 12.29% for women in the same age group, compared to the 5% that was registered in 2015. The employment rate for men between 60 and 64 years old is around 58% in 2025. highest since the early 1980s. All this used to be retirement. What largely explains this rebound in employment among the population over 65 years of age is not a greater demand for experienced workers, but rather the progressive delay in the legal retirement age. In 2026, the legal age for access ordinary retirement For those who have less than 38 years and 3 months of contributions it is 66 years and 10 months. This displacement forces many people to remain active beyond the age of 65 at which they could previously retire. Howeverthe report ‘Quarterly Labor Market Observatory‘ prepared by Fedea and BBVA Research confirms that the increase in senior membership is mainly due to the aging of the population and the delay of retirement agewhich often responds to the need to continue working due to financial difficulties. Staying in the job market at that age is not easy. However, although the data points to record percentages compared to historical figures, the reality is that their employment situation is not a bed of roses. a study of the BBVA and Ivie Foundation has revealed that those over 55 years of age register for the first time an unemployment rate of 9.8%, exceeding the unemployment rate of the group of people between 25 and 54 years of age. Furthermore, six out of ten unemployed of that age group They are long-term unemployed, a percentage that triples that of young people between 16 and 24 years old. The data depict a labor market in which workers over 55 years of age they lose their jobs a decade before their retirement age, and must survive throughout that time either with temporary employment, or in a situation of chronic unemployment due to lack of opportunities. At the other extreme, the employment rate of 14.2% shows those who have managed to stay afloat or get out of that hole. The pension system, the backdrop. Behind all these figures there is a reality that economists have been pointing out for years: the pension system needs people to work longer. to be sustainable. The reforms have been moving incentives in that direction, tightening the requirements for early retirement with greater pension reduction coefficientsand with a progressive increase in the necessary years of contributions. The result is what the data is already showing: there are more and more people who cannot retire at age 65 and must extend their working life until age 67 (effective in 2027) to access their retirement pension. In Xataka | What is the regulatory base: how it is calculated in 2026 with examples Image | Unsplash (Matt Bennett)

The first great Atlantic submarine cable that connected us to the internet says goodbye for a simple reason: it was too expensive to repair it

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It has been at the bottom of the sea for more than two decades, forgotten. But now, finally, the TAT-8, the first fiber optic cable that crossed the Atlantic and connected us to the Internet, is being removed from its place. And to understand the importance of this, it is worth telling its story, since perhaps the Internet would not be as we know it without this cable. The cable that started it all. On December 14, 1988, AT&T, British Telecom and France Telecom developed TAT-8, the acronym for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8. It was the eighth transoceanic cable system between Europe and the United States, but the first to use optical fiber. Before him, transatlantic cables ran on copper, with very limited capacity. With the TAT-8, voices and data traveled converted into pulses of light through glass threads thinner than a hair. Just like account Wired in its report, at the inaugural event, writer Isaac Asimov connected by video call from New York with audiences in Paris and London to celebrate, in his own words, “this inaugural voyage across the sea on a ray of light.” Why was it so important? When it came into operation, the Internet was still too technical a concept for the general public. But the TAT-8 literally built the highway on which everything later circulated. The curious thing is that in just 18 months it already reached its maximum capacity, so this forced new cables to be laid as soon as possible, especially after the outbreak of the world Wide Webelectronic commerce and in a context in which the Internet became increasingly relevant. By 2001 the TAT series had already reached 14. Disconnection. Just like account In the middle, in 2002, the TAT-8 suffered a breakdown, and repairing it was not worth it, it was that simple. With more modern and higher capacity cables already operational, it made no sense to invest in their recovery. It went offline and was abandoned at the bottom of the Atlantic, where it has remained for more than two decades. Now they are taking it out of the sea. According to collect Wired, a specialist company called Subsea Environmental Services is physically recovering the cable with its vessel MV Maasvliet. It is one of the few companies in the world whose entire business consists of recovering and recycling retired submarine cables. The operation involves dragging a flat hook across the seabed, waiting hours until tension is felt in the cable, and then hoisting it aboard meter by meter. The workers they explain As the ocean floor is an increasingly crowded space, and recovering old cables frees up routes for new ones. What is done with the remains. The TAT-8 is not thrown away. Fiber optic cables contain high purity copper, steel and polyethylene, all recyclable materials with market value. Copper, especially, is a valuable resource and may become scarce in a few years. And according to the International Energy Agency, in less than a decade could be scarce if the industry does not find new sources. On the other hand, the steel of the cable will end up being converted into fences, and the plastic, processed in the Netherlands, will be transformed into pellets to manufacture non-food packaging. In fact, just as they count At Wired, you may soon be using shampoo in a bottle made from remains of the first fiber optic cable to cross the Atlantic. Sharks. Curiously, the TAT-8 is at the epicenter of one of the legends that has lasted the longest in this sector: that sharks bite internet cables. Just like share In the middle, it all started with a test prior to the TAT-8, the Optican-1, which ended up failing due to problems in its insulation. A Bell Labs engineer appeared at a conference with shark teeth that had supposedly been removed from the damaged cable. The story spread instantly. As well as point At the time, AT&T even included four pages on protection against shark bites in its press kit for TAT-8. Actually, there has never been consensus about whether the sharks really caused that damage. Subsequent tests in aquariums, where they were starved to see if they would bite into wires with electric fields, did not yield any clear patterns. At least the outcome of all that testing and debate was positive, as engineers added a layer of steel between the insulation and the fibers, which improved the cable’s overall resistance to abrasions and damage of all kinds. Cover image | What’s Inside? In Xataka | In 1901, a Spanish man had one of the ideas of the century: invent the remote control before television

An economic science fiction text has sunk Visa and Mastercard in the stock market. The reason is more disturbing than the story itself

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Citrini Research, a hedge fund American published this week a text written as if it were a macroeconomic memorandum from June 2028. It is not a prediction, its authors warn. It is a speculative exercise. A feasible scenario. It has achieved 24 million impressions, and counting. It is not an anecdotal tweet. The markets they have responded by sinking. Visa has fallen 4.4%. Mastercard, 6.3%. American Express, almost 8%. And Capital One, 8%. This deserves an explanation. And it’s not what it seems. Between the lines. The market reaction is not explained by the specific content of the Citrini Research report, which includes arguments as debatable as that AI agents will abandon cards to pay with stablecoins in Solana. Antonio Ortiz, technology analysts, has pointed it out precisely: part of the argument “it is from the first of Twitter AI-hype“. The idea that an agent will compare twenty food delivery apps vibecodeadas to find the cheapest one smells like a caricature of the future. But the panic is not irrational. It is precisely the panic of not knowing where the limit is. Why is it importantand. What has moved the market has not been so much the thesis about payments but the thesis about the destruction of value. And that is solid: many billions of dollars of market capitalization have been built on a single foundation: that humans are slow, impatient, forgetful and loyal out of inertia. That we do not compare prices. That we renew subscriptions that we do not use. And that we pay commissions that we do not negotiate. An AI agent has none of those weaknesses. And that changes everything. The backdrop. Citrini’s report comes at a time when the so-called “saaspocalypse“is no longer a metaphor. WSJ states that investors are terrified by the possibility that AI ends up doing the work that large software companies bill for today. ServiceNow, Salesforce, business management platforms… all built on the premise that companies need software for their employees to do their jobs. But… what happens when employees disappear? What if the software itself can be replicated in weeks with agentic coding tools? Citrini’s fiction begins exactly there, in early 2026, when a competent developer can reproduce the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS in a few weeks, and constructs a scenario of systemic collapse. The big question. The report’s most disturbing argument is that in every previous technological cycle, job destruction created new jobs that only humans could do. This time, AI is already occupying those new positions as well. If that’s true—if AI improves faster than workers can reorient themselves—the self-correcting mechanism that has always kept creative destruction from turning into outright destruction wouldn’t work. That is the scenario that the markets have discounted this week, even if only partially and speculatively thanks to a creepypasta financial. Yes, but. The scenario requires assuming a speed of adoption that is not guaranteed, a completely absent political response and a total absence of new economic sectors. None of the three conditions are set in stone. Furthermore, as Antonio points out, there is some collective hysteria in the reaction: each announcement or “scary story catches attention and moves investors.” Markets are trading in panic over the unknown. But there’s an important difference between saying “this scenario won’t happen” and saying “this scenario is impossible.” And that difference is exactly what has the market nervous. The alarm signal. The most striking thing this week is that a speculative text, written in economic science fiction format, has been enough to move billions in market capitalization. That says a lot about the state of certainty in the markets regarding AI: it is practically non-existent. Nobody really knows how much a company whose moat It is human friction in a world where that friction is disappearing. The canary is still alive. But investors have stopped trusting the canary. In Xataka | AI promised to revolutionize all sectors. It has only revolutionized programming while the rest is still waiting Featured image | Avery Evans

Marie Curie died 92 years ago. Your personal notebooks are still buried under layers of lead for a good reason

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If you visit the basements of the National Library of France (BnF) and you want to look at some of the bibliographic gems that are kept there, you will most likely be forced to respect a series of measures, such as wearing gloves or handling the books in perfectly controlled conditions. The objective is obvious: protect the volumes. From you, from excessive exposure to light, from degradation. Things change if what you want to read is one of the notebooks that Marie Curie scribbled in her laboratory. In that case it is you who they must protect. Literally. The fact that there are dangerous publications may be a controversial statement that may or may not be shared, but in the case of the folios handwritten by the famous Franco-Polish scientist, it leaves little room for debate. Despite Madame Curie He died in 1934, almost 89 years ago, his notebooks continue to cause concern among archivists. and it is quite normal so be it. When Marie Salomea and her husband, Peterinvestigated in their laboratory with uranium, little was known about the potential damage of radiation, so they did not apply the basic safety measures that govern any radiological task today. So things—supports the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)— “no wonder his workspace and notebooks became contaminated.” Pierre and Marie Curie, in the laboratory, around 1904. To avoid possible risks, the handwritten notebooks are kept in the basements of the National Library of France inside special boxes, made up of several layers of lead. Not only that. As detailed in 2021 by the BBC networkthe French institution requires researchers who want to handle the notebooks in person to first put on some protective suits specials and, of course, that they sign a document in which they exempt them from any responsibility. Is such misgivings justified? When reading requires a special suit For their research, which led to the discovery of polonium and radium, the Curies accumulated, crushed and manipulated enormous quantities of minerals containing uranium in their laboratory. He knowledge about natural radioactivity It was very recent at the time and the couple, who contributed to their research, were unwittingly exposed to its harmful effects. Themselves and, of course, all the material they used. Including notebooks of notes. To understand the conditions under which they worked, it is good review the notes by Marie, collected by Philipp Blom in ‘The years of vertigo: Europe, 1900-1914’: “One of our joys was entering the workshop at night; everywhere we saw the faintly luminous silhouettes of the capsule bottles containing our products. It was a beautiful sight and always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like dim fairy lights.” It was not strange, they say, that the pair of scientists carried flasks with polonium and radium in their coat pockets or kept them in their desk. Marie herself ended up dying in 1934 from a aplastic anemia which was probably caused by his frequent exposure to radium samples and polonium. “Taking into account the half-life of 1,600 years of the radius and the sensitivity of current radiation detectors, it is also not surprising that this contamination is still detectable today,” comments the ACSH in an article dedicated to the topic. The experts, BBC specifiescalculate that given that on average radium atoms take about 15 centuries to disintegrate, it is not unreasonable to think that the notebooks should remain in their lead box during that period. The National Library of France is in any case not the only one to preserve Curie’s notebooks. The Wellcome Collection It also has a volume, digitizedwith notes on experiments and radioactive substances and sketches. The volume dates from between 1899 and 1902 and was written in Paris. To avoid scares in 2014 The Aurora firm examined the material and concluded that it was contaminated with radius-226. The ACSH states in any case that the volume “does not represent an appreciable risk.” Fortunately, the notebook can consult now from homeonline, or even downloaded in PDF. The theme of “the contaminated notebooks” of Curie generate so much interest that it even has your own entrance on the website Marie-curie.eu, focused on the figure of the two-time Nobel Prize winner, and numerous articles have been written on the subject. Notebooks are not the only ones in a similar situation. The BBC explains that the house south of Paris where Marie Curie worked until 1934 is also affected by the radiation levels generated during her experiments. The block has even earned the ironic nickname of “Chernobyl on the Seine”. When he was buried in Paris Pantheoneven Marie Curie herself ended up in a lead sarcophagus almost an inch thick. Image | Aurora In Xataka | In 1968 a man had the idea to create the first tablet in history. The problem is that he was decades ahead of his time. In Xataka | The first hard drives in history were gigantic. Then a miracle happened: miniaturization

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