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The US has invested 16 years and 8 billion dollars in renewing the software of its GPS network. Result: a failure of epic proportions

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The Next-Generation Operational Control System project (OCX) was going to modernize the constellation of the United States’ more than 30 GPS satellites. The company RTX Corporation (previously known as Raytheon) managed to win the project in 2010 with a budget of 3.7 billion dollars. The project was supposed to be completed in 2016, but in reality the US has spent $8 billion and 16 years later has an absolute disaster on its hands. 16 years of broken promises. In 2010 the iPad had just appeared on the scene and cloud computing was a somewhat diffuse concept. The project of the US Government was reasonable, and proposed that the OCX system be operational by the time Lockheed Martin’s new GPS III satellites debuted. The development became a chaos of bugs and requirements changes, and to this day it is unclear when, if ever, it will be completed. In Xataka 90% of Iran’s oil industry depends on a tiny island. One that is already on the radar of the US and Israel A fortune invested. The financial management of the project is the first big disaster. The initial budget was estimated at 1.5 billion dollars, but since the award until today that figure has risen to reach almost 7.7 billion of current dollars, to which another 400 million are added to support an improved version of the satellites, the GPS IIIF. This increase is not due in large part to the project suddenly being much more ambitious or more capable, but rather to the costs of having been fixing everything that has gone wrong since they started working on it. Software costs more than satellites. Every time software fails an integration test, the bill runs into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That has made the OCX system one of the most expensive and least efficient software projects in recent US military history. In fact, it far exceeds the cost of the satellites themselves that it had to control: the 22 GPS III satellites of the contract signed in 2018 have a budget of 7.2 billion dollars. Satellites of the future controlled by a fairground shotgun. Currently the United States has a fleet of GPS III satellites in orbit capable of emitting much more powerful “M-code” signals and interference resistantsomething that among other things allocates them especially for military applications. The problem is that since the OCX software not workingthey are managing them with control systems inherited from the 90s. It is as if we had a VHS video connected to watch movies on an 8K Smart TV: the potential is there, but one of the components is an absolute bottleneck. {“videoId”:”x8wlh9q”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”United States vs. China: The CHIPS WAR”, “tag”:”webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1611″} The cybersecurity nightmare. One of the big problems of this project has been the cybersecurity requirements. OCX was designed to resist cyberattacks from powers such as Russia or China, but that requirement has become a spectacular technical burden. Pentagon standards have evolved so quickly that they have not been able to be adapted to an architecture that begins to become obsoleteand covering successive patches is locking the system in a complex vicious circle: the software is never finished because more and more vulnerabilities appear. Failed tests. The latest report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been the final straw. During the tests the system again showed once again instabilitywhich has forced the final delivery to be delayed to the end of 2026 or even 2027. Frank Calvelli, of the Air Force, has expressed his dissatisfaction with that unacceptable management of private industry: the strategic advantage that this project should offer at a time like this is inaccessible due to the disastrous progress of the project. It’s not that difficult. for a long time the excuse for justify the delays was that OCX was “the most complex software ever created for space,” but other players in the sector have shown that achieving these types of technical milestones is possible. SpaceX has demonstrated this with technical “miracles” like its reusable Falcon 9 or with the development of Starship, for example, so those arguments are falling on deaf ears now. Waiting for a better GPS. These problems also affect us end users, who will not be able to enjoy the L5 signals for now. This much more robust frequency will significantly improve accuracy in urban centers with many tall buildings. The irony is tragic: we cannot use extraordinary space infrastructure because the base stations cannot cope with it. While waiting for the problems to be resolved, the learning is clear: the software cannot be a monster that takes 16 years to build In Xataka The GPS in the Baltic has been experiencing interference for months and the culprit is becoming increasingly clear: Russia And while as always, China. While the US crashes against its project to renew the GPS constellation, China has once again managed to “become independent” from Western technology. Your satellite navigation system Beidouit does not replace GPS, true, but It already complements it in 140 countries. Once again China’s long-term view has its obvious result: it has taken 20 years in deploying its constellation, but they already surpass the GPS system in metrics such as signal availability or integrated messaging services. Europe, by the way, also has its own alternative. In Xataka |GPS “dead zones” are spreading around the world: jammers are to blame for confusing drones (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 The US has invested 16 years and 8 billion dollars in renewing the software of its GPS network. Result: a failure of epic proportions was originally published in Xataka by Javier Pastor .

the result of decades of veto by the US and Japan

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China has just become the first country in the world to mass produce T1200 grade carbon fiber, the strongest synthetic material ever manufactured on an industrial scale. The milestone is led by the state group China National Building Material Group (CNBM), which presented it on March 11 at JEC World, the most important composite materials fair in the sector, held in Paris. We tell you all the details. What exactly is the T1200. In the world of advanced materials, the number that accompanies the T is a tensile strength rating. The higher the number, the stronger the fiber. T1200 has a resistance greater than 8 gigapascals (GPa), ten times more than conventional steel, and yet its diameter is ten times smaller than that of a human hair. Chinese media CCTV exposed the example that a rope less than two millimeters thick, made from 120,000 twisted T1200 filaments, is capable of towing a bus with 54 adults on board. And it weighs a quarter as much as steel. dhe laboratory to the factory. Zhou Yuxian, president of CNBM, counted that it has taken the country about 20 years to move from its research and development to mass production. The plant has a projected capacity of about 100 tons per year. Compared to that of Toray Industries, the Japanese company that leads the global market with 29,100 tons per year, it is laughable. But be careful, Toray announced in 2023 that it had developed its own T1200, also with 8 GPa resistance, but to date they have not offered details about a supposed mass production. China has beaten them to it. Mbeyond engineering. Industrial carbon fiber is a material that can be used for endless applications: from civil (aeronautics, electric vehicles, hydrogen storage, drones, medical devices, elite sports equipment) to military (fighter aircraft, missiles, satellites, fuselage structures). Precisely for this reason, Japan and the United States They have been strictly controlling their exports for decades through mechanisms such as the Wassenaar Agreement. China, which for years has depended on imports or has been forced to obtain the material through alternative means, just remove that dependency. The same has happened with semiconductors, since the foreign blockade has served to amplify their technological self-sufficiency. How China has accelerated in just a few years. Toray launched the T300 in 1971 and took 43 years to introduce the T1100. China didn’t have its own T300 until 2008. However, in just over a decade it has climbed from the T300 to the T1200, a cadence that the entire industry is watching closely. The key has been a model that China has already demonstrated with previous grades of this material: combining state capital, university research and industrial capacity in the same ecosystem, with continuous improvement cycles until reaching mass production. Who else competes in this race. The global carbon fiber market is an oligopoly with few relevant players. Mitsubishi Chemical (Japan) advertisement in December that it plans to double its production capacity in Japan and the United States between now and 2027 for sectors such as aeronautics and supercars. The South Korean Hyosung Advanced Materials aims to reach 24,000 tons per year in 2028. On the other side of the globe, Hexcel, an American composite materials company, defines itself as the world’s largest producer of aerospace carbon fiber and the main supplier for United States military programs. But the geographical trend has already changed. And according to the report Future Markets’ Global Carbon Fiber Market published in February, Asia-Pacific has surpassed North America and Europe as the world’s largest consuming region. Cover image | CCTV In Xataka | Japan has a rare earth megadeposit: 700 years of consumption to challenge China

Meta spent a fortune on AI talent and data centers. Nine months later the result is: zero models

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Mark Zuckerberg wanted to be the Florentino Pérez of AI. last summer began to sign galacticos in this segment and getting talent by letting go stacks of millions of dollars. He more popularOf course, it was the AI wunderkind Alexandr Wangwho became leader of its “Superintelligence” division. The funny thing is that the months go by and go by and in Meta they don’t seem to have absolutely anything to show. And that is very worrying. Delays. Despite having invested billions of dollars in that restructuring of the company to bet (practically) everything on AI, three internal sources confirm that Meta finds it very difficult to meet the planned deadlines. The race for generative AI waits for no one, and at the company headquarters nerves are on edge because the roadmap is not being met. Avocado, where are you? The new foundational AI model that Meta has been working on for months has been internally named Avocado, but at the moment it is not measuring up, something that reminds us what happened to Llama 4. Internal tests reveal that although it manages to surpass the aforementioned Llama 4 and the old Gemini 2.5, it falls short of Gemini 3.0 (and of course, the recent Gemini 3.1). Patience. Coming out with a model that is clearly worse than its rivals does not make sense, so Meta has decided to wait and delay the launch of its model. Avocado is expected to hit the market in May at the earliest. And meanwhile, Gemini. The situation is so critical that according to these sources, the leaders of the AI ​​division are considering something unthinkable: paying a license to Google to be able to use Gemini in their own products, something that for example will Apple do Siri. That would be a clear sign that for now this own model is not capable enough to power the AI ​​functions of WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads. Money does not equal speed. The company has spent billions of dollars on AI researchers, and has committed to invest 600,000 million dollars in building AI data centers. In January, Meta projected a capex of $135 billion dedicated almost entirely to these projectsalmost double the $72 billion it spent last year. Despite these investments, the company is currently missing from an area in which its competitors continue to advance. Internal tension. According to these sources, Meta is becoming a tinderbox. The “TBD Lab” (for “To Be Determined”), the unit led by Wang, is working under maximum pressure on models named after fruits (Avocado, Mango, Watermelon), but has clashed with old-school Meta managers like Chris Cox and Andrew Bossworth. The company is trying to integrate those models with Meta’s advertising business, which is what supports everything, but Wang doesn’t seem to handle that part of the business very well. Goodbye to open models. Meta stood out at the beginning of this AI race as the company whose open models —not Open Source— were above the rest. Llama became the norm in this area, but in this new stage that philosophy seems to change and China is the one that now leads that segment. Thus, there is talk that both Zuckerberg and Wang lean toward closed models, such as those of OpenAI (GPT) or Google (Gemini). This allows you to have full control over the code, a competitive advantage that Meta does not seem to want to give up. Few fruits of this tree. Despite the extraordinary deployment of resources, the current balance is poor. Meta’s only tangible product of those investments is Vibes, an application similar to Sora that has not managed to fully gel. Meanwhile, those initial talent signings have turned into abandonments: the trickle of AI researchers who leave the company to join others (or found their own projects) is increasing. In Xataka | Meta has been buying chips from NVIDIA and AMD for years. Now it also makes its own so as not to fall short

China surrounded an enclave with robots. Now they have been given a rifle to shoot at 100 meters, and the result points to an island

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China has been leaving increasingly explicit clues about how it imagines future conflicts. In 2025, PLA maneuvers included island assault exercises minors using ground robots and unmanned systems, a sign that Beijing is no longer testing only classic amphibious crossings, but scenarios where machines make way before soldiers. Those practices marked a clear direction: Combat automation was no longer a distant theory, but something China was beginning to test on the ground. Now he has amplified it. Drones with rifle. China has made a qualitative leap in the use of combat drones by demonstrating that a UAV armed with a standard assault rifle can be 100% right of his shots against a human target at 100 meters while remaining in hover. The system, developed by a Chinese company together with the PLA special operations academy, fired 20 times and placed half of the hits in a comparable radius. a shot to the heada result that makes it clear that these are no longer experimental platforms but rather precision weapons ready for real environments. Extra ball. It does not seem like a specific experiment or a laboratory demonstration: the team itself has explained that the only “imperfect” shot was due defective ammunitionnot the system, making this test an unmistakable sign of where Chinese combat power is headed. Taiwan and a problem. This progress cannot be understood without the Taiwan backdropone of the most urbanized territories on the planet, where any military operation would require fighting in dense megacities, full of civilians, underground infrastructure and narrow streets that neutralize many traditional advantages. For the PLA, the challenge is not just cross the seabut to dominate neighborhoods, subway stations and residential complexes where human infantry suffer enormous political and military costs. The Chinese response to this dilemma is neither doctrinal nor moral, but technical: dealing with urban warfare as an engineering problem which can be solved by delegating violence to machines capable of moving, identifying targets and shooting without fatigue or fear. A bet. In fact, recalled in The Diplomat that the essay of the armed drone fits into the third major phase of Chinese military modernization, the so-called “intelligentization,” which seeks to replace human decisions with distributed artificial intelligence systems. Having mechanized and digitized its forces, the PLA now aims to delegate key functions (detection, prioritization and attack) to algorithms that operate faster than any human chain of command. In this framework, a drone with a rifle is not a curiosity, but rather an elemental piece of an ecosystem where sensors, weapons and software act in a coordinated manner, reducing the role of the soldier. to a mere initial authorizer or, in the extreme, eliminating him from decision-making altogether. Swarms in alleys. There is much more, because the medium stood out documents and studies linked to Chinese military universities that reveal that the target is not individual drones, but autonomous swarms specifically designed for urban warfare. These systems are designed to operate at low altitudes, inside buildings, indoors and underground, even when communications are degraded or non-existent. Through simple rules and self-organization, swarms They could patrol areastrack people and execute attacks without receiving orders in real time, a solution that the PLA consider ideal to neutralize defenses in cities such as Taipei or Kaohsiung and to eliminate key objectives before external forces can intervene. The gray area of ​​legality. The technological bet is accompanied by a legal position deliberately ambiguous by Beijing on lethal autonomous weapons. As? Defining as unacceptable Only those systems that simultaneously meet a series of very strict criteria, China leaves itself a wide margin to develop weapons capable of killing without direct human supervision, as long as they can be stopped in theory or follow pre-programmed rules. This ambiguity, they say, contrasts with documented risks of AI in combat (identification errors, inability to interpret human intentions, data biases) and makes it easier for research to advance without clear regulatory brakes. The future that is being tested today. In short, the drone that shoot with surgical precision at 100 meters is not an anecdote, but tangible proof of where the Beijing strategy: move the war to the heart of the city and delegate it to machines. There is no doubt that if this model is applied in a conflict such as Taiwan, the combination of autonomous swarms, integrated light weapons and decisions without human intervention could multiply the risk for civilians and reduce the political thresholds for the use of force. From that prism, what is presented today as a technical experiment is, in reality, a most disturbing preview: that of an urban war where the alleys are no longer patrolled by soldiers, but by armed robots that will never ask questions. Image | Heeheemalu In Xataka | The biggest geopolitical risk on the planet is not Greenland. It’s a smaller island with a disturbing neighbor: Taiwan In Xataka | 200 drones in the hands of a single soldier: China is advancing very quickly in a type of war that seemed like science fiction

China has done everything to stop its population bleeding. The result is the lowest birth rate since 1949

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China has encountered an even more complex challenge than the real estate crisis, the trade war with the US or the future of Taiwan: the babies. As your birth rate deflates (leaving the number of newborns below the number of deaths) the Asian giant is becoming less and less “giant”, a trend that threatens to punish the nation’s economy. Beijing knows it and that is why it takes time deploying measures that seek to boost their demographics. The problem is that, despite his many efforts, he can’t hit the nail on the head. Your latest official data birth rates show a new setback. What has happened? That despite all its efforts, China has not been able to stop its demographic hemorrhage. This is how it reveals the last balance from the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS), which shows a scenario similar to that suffered by other nations (inside and outside Asia) shaken by demographic winter: fewer babies, more deaths and general population decline. In short: a country that continues to lose weight little by little and risks complying UN predictionswhich estimates that by 2100 China will have lost more than half of its population, remaining at the size it had in the late 1950s. What does the data say? That in 2025 the authorities counted 7.92 million of births, 17% less than the previous year. The data leaves two other negative readings: the first is that it suggests that the birth rate increase registered in 2024 was punctual and has not been consolidated over time. After that brief rebound (which some associate to the cultural influence of ‘Year of the Dragon’) the Chinese birth rate has resumed the negative curve that it has been drawing for years. The second negative reading is that the decrease in the number of births has in turn reduced the country’s birth rate, leaving it in 5.63 births per 1,000 people. This is a historic low. A fact that has not been seen since (at least) 1949, year of foundation of the People’s Republic of China. It is about the steepest drop birth rate for the last five years. As AP News recallsChinese authorities do not regularly publish their fertility rate, but their last estimate, from 2020, was 1.3 children per woman. Now that indicator would have dropped to 1. The data is far from the “replacement rate” (2.1), essential to keep a country’s population stable. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Are there more figures? Yes. And they are just as bad. Deaths increased, going from 10.93 million registered in 2024 to 11.31 in 2025. The result of this drop in birth rates and increase in deaths was a natural loss of population (the data does not allude to the migratory effect) that brings China even closer to the projections of the United Nations by the end of the century. The NBS balance sheet reflects the loss of some 3.39 million of Chinese, leaving the country’s total population at around 1,405 million. It is the fourth consecutive year in which the country sees its population reduced, which has caused China to no longer be the most populous nation on the planet: from 2023 that honor India boasts itwhich comfortably exceeds the 1.4 billion of people. Why is it important? Birth rate and census are more than just demographic variables. They also influence the future of the country. The size of the population is directly related, for example, to domestic consumption (key piece in the country’s economy) or the health of its workforce. The demographic winter threatens to subject China to the same social pressures as other countries in Asia and the West, only on a much larger scale. Right now the population over 60 years old represents 23%. If nothing changes, in 2035 that strip will add 400 million of people, just like the entire population of the US and Italy combined. The big question is how that will affect their pension system. At the moment the country already has increased the retirement age. How to change it? That is the other reason why the NBS data is so important and has probably fallen like a bucket of cold water on Beijing. It’s not just about fewer babies being born and population being lost, it’s that the Government has been looking for a way to avoid it for some time… without success, at least until now. As far as birth rates are concerned, it seems to have hit the same rock as other neighboring nations that face a similar challenge, like japan either South Korea. What have you tried? Of everything. And without much success. Despite the billions of dollars invested in child care programs, the facilities offered to those considering becoming parents (from subsidies to medical attention) and efforts to form new couplesthe birth rate continues without increasing. And the Chinese authorities have gone to the extreme of go door to door encouraging women to be mothers. The reason? Beyond the influence of ‘one child’ policy (abandoned a decade ago) there are those who point to cultural changes and the high cost that (despite everything) parenthood entails in China. A 2024 report from the YuWan Population Research Institute in fact concluded that China is one of the most expensive places to raise children (especially if we talk about cities), even more than in Japan or the United States in relative terms. The study addressed both direct and opportunity costs. Image | Peijia Li (Unsplash) In Xataka | China knows that its population is going to collapse but it already has a long-term plan to solve it. Of course, thanks to AI

Almost everything is more expensive than ever, but televisions are at rock bottom. It is the result of a “suicide pact”

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Technology is in an economic shaker. If we consumers have become accustomed to something, it is that, as the years go by, a product drops in price, even if it is updated with better features. It is clear in the console segment: as each generation progressed, the hardware improved and the price fell. That’s over. Buy a PS5 or an Xbox Series in 2026 It is more expensive than when they came out in 2020. But the consoles They are not the only thing that rises: There is more competition than ever in streaming services and they have all agreed to raise prices from time to time. It’s not just technology: dwellingmedical expenses, cars, meal… However, There is something that has collapsed: televisions. Because although there are very expensive models, the price of televisions has fallen more than almost any other consumer product in the last quarter of a century. And we owe it all to something that one of the industry’s leading glass manufacturers named in a curious way. A 25-year suicide pact. Although there is something else in the equation, something much more important. The “suicide pact” and the mother glass You can say in the comments if you have been walking around a large area this Christmas and have been tempted to buy a new 65-inch TV. Not because you need it, but because you saw it at a ridiculous price. For 400 eurosyou can buy one right now. Inch/price, they are much more attractive than the 24 inches that you can put in the kitchen. These prices on huge televisions do not seem to have been affected by the multiple crises we have experienced in recent years. What if that of the chips, then transportation, that of the Ukrainian warthe current RAM… The price of televisions has followed suit and, although the most cutting-edge OLEDs or risky technologies They have very high pricesan LCD TV is very affordable. In Construction Physics They mention a very interesting fact. In a advertisement On Black Friday 2003, a barely 20-inch LCD television in 4:3 format with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels (laughing) cost $800. In the same ad, 32-inch CRT TVs for $380 or 27-inch TVs for $150. Today, those TVs are gold for playing retro games, by the way. In Xataka already we started having to talk about different technologies of liquid crystal panels. 21 years ago we were already talking about OLEDs when I was content with a small 15-inch TFT screen to play ‘Age of Empires 2’ and ‘Half Life 2’. In the end. But well, I’m going around the bush. In 2022, Mark J. Perry published in AEI the following graph: He shows us in a crude way what he was saying: the price of LCD technology had been plummeting rapidly while other goods and services increased dramatically. It’s funny to me that I don’t see the computer hardware on the list, we’ll see when I update the graph in a few years… He estimated that, since 2000, the price of televisions had fallen 97%. There are others informationbut the conclusion is the same: prices through the floor in a short time. That crash occurred a decade earlier. In a document of Corningone of the largest glass manufacturing companies, noted the following: “LCD technology continues to grow and there are abundant opportunities to expand both the functionality and performance of displays. So the expansion of LCD technology must be a great success story, right?” “FAKE” In the document, it is clarified that for consumers it is great news because they can access better and bigger televisions at a fraction of the price. Even other technologies such as plasma had to be adapted. In the same Black Friday ad from 2003 we see a Daewoo of 42 inches with 480p resolution for $2,300. I remember that a 50-inch Samsung 1,080p arrived at my house for 700 euros in 2007. However, for the manufacturers, it was not as happy a story as it was for the consumer. “The LCD platform looks like a 25-year suicide pact for display manufacturers,” Corning noted in its report. It is a segment “characterized by hypercompetition, excess investment and periodic lack of profitability, but which at the same time requires sustained investment to differentiate a product that has a low return.” They pointed out that, within that chain, glass manufacturers were still able to make considerable profits, although there was increasing pressure. But that price drop is not limited to extreme competition between a few companies. There is something else behind it, and that “something” is the “mother glass.”. Known as “mother glass” in English, it is a main element in the manufacture of LCD panels. It’s a process which is made up of several stages. On the one hand, there is that mother glass, which is a sheet of glass substrate on which other layers are deposited. Broadly speaking: We have the glass plate on which layers of semiconductors are deposited. Using a photolithography process, TFT transistors and pixel electrodes are marked across the entire sheet. It is something that is repeated several times until the active matrix on the mother glass is completed. The next step is to use another mother glass to which RGB color filters and electrodes are applied. Both glasses are well cleaned, aligned and sealed with perimeter glue. It’s like a sandwich. There we would have a mother glass with many screens, and the next step is to cut them to obtain individual modules. The fourth step is to combine those modules or cells with backlight units, the control PCB and the metal casing to have the complete LCD module. It is tested and, when it is ready, it is delivered to the assemblers, who are the ones who already create monitors, televisions, mobile phones or anything with a screen. Here you can see the process: What is the key? That those large sheets of glass have been increasing in size little by … Read more

74% of employees have felt more productive when using AI. Almost half have ended up correcting the result

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Artificial intelligence is already part of the daily life of the employees of many Spanish companies and helps them complete tasks faster. At least that is what emerges from a recent study by the AI ​​consultancy Workday, in which it is estimated that three out of four workers feel more productive thanks to AI. Behind that data there is a growing adoption of AI tools and a change in perception among professionals. However, this reality also implies a less visible one: part of that time gained you are missing out on reviewingcorrect and fine-tune what AI systems generate. Everyday use of AI in Spain. According to the data collected in the report “Beyond productivity: measuring the real value of AI” prepared by Workday, 74% of workers in Spain indicate they feel more productive thanks to AI, with 28% using it daily or 58% claiming to use it very often during their work week. That frequency of use of AIHowever, it is well below the global average which reflects a daily use of 46%. In any case, the increase in the use of AI translates into an average of time savings of between one and three hours per week for repetitive and administrative tasks, such as writing reports, analyzing or searching for data. ​These data coincide with the photo that the study of Indicators of use of Artificial Intelligence in Spain of 2024 prepared by ONTSI (National Observatory of Technology and Society), although in that case the perception is positive, only 11.4% of Spanish companies with 10 or more employees used AI technologies, which is revealed by a very limited business implementation. In any case, 85% of the users consulted report savings of between 1 and 7 hours per week. ​The problem of constant revisions. Satisfaction with the use of AI has the counterpart that 42% of Spanish workers dedicate up to one hour per week to review, correct or reformulate the result produced by AI, known as what has been called a “hidden tax“which stops part of the benefits. Adolfo Pellicer, Country Manager at Workday confirms that the use of these tools requires review and supervision of the results. “There is a hidden impact of AI at work. The report shows us that almost 40% of the time saved with the use of AI it ends up being lost in correctingreview and redo what the information that AI gives us,” said Pellicer. in statements to Computer World. AI digital natives. The youngest employees, between 25 and 34 years old, account for 46% of the cases with the highest review burden, since they use AI more frequently. 77% of these users verify AI results more rigorously than human-generated work. This generates additional exhaustion in these profiles. In departments such as human resources, 38% of employees need to review AI results due to the high number of errors reported. For its part, in the technical and IT departments, with a 32% increase in the use of AI, the tool has been better integrated, generating better results and content that requires fewer and fewer modifications. ​Training in companies: the pending signature. Although 66% of global leaders cite skills training as a top priority for leveraging AI, only 37% of employees who regularly use it admit to having access to these training programs. According to the report data From ONTSI, in Spain, this disconnection is worsened because 78% of workers demand more digital tools and training to use them, but adoption remains low: only 11.4% of companies with 10 or more employees used AI in 2024. In Xataka | Firing a worker because an AI “does its job” sounds very tempting. China wants to make it inappropriate Image | Unsplash (ThisisEngineering)

Samsung has been gradually shaping its super high-end range for years. And the result is the triumph of the S25 Ultra for another year

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The verdict of the jury of the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 has been clear. In a year where competition has been fierce in the premium segment, with Apple renewing its commitment to iPhone 17 and Chinese brands like Alive or Oppo pushing the limits of photography, there has been a traditional winner: The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has won gold in the most coveted category. Prima facie, may seem like a conservative decision. And the Galaxy S25 Ultra is not a disruptive mobile; It doesn’t make a huge leap in performance or photography. However, his victory responds to a reality that we verified during our analysis: a perfect balance. It is not a victory resulting from chance or a specific success, but the culmination of a strategy that the Korean firm began five years ago. While other manufacturers lurched in search of wow effect every twelve months (and even less), Samsung decided that its ‘Ultra’ surname already had a defined identity: the super high-end customer is not looking for experiments—faster charges, sensors with better numbers, higher capacity batteries—but rather certainties. The Galaxy S25 Ultra has not reinvented the wheel, but has made it roll better than anyone else: these are the technical and experience reasons that make it the king of 2025. Something with which I can’t agree more. When the screen matters (and a lot) If you have used a Galaxy S24 Ultrayou know the pain. Those rectangular corners that dug into the palm of the hand were the price to pay for having the largest and most spectacular screen. With the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Samsung has smoothed over that roughness. It’s not just that the corners have been softened: it’s that the phone has lost a few grams. It may seem like a smaller figure on paper, but in the hand, the difference between one and the other is very noticeable. Maintaining the 6.9-inch screen and 5,000 mAh battery while reducing weight (and a little thickness) is the kind of change that justifies the award. Of course, perhaps after saying goodbye to those corners he has lost one of his identifying marks at first glance: now he looks like the rest of his younger brothers. That does not mean that it is at this point that the maturity of the concept is appreciated: it took Samsung years to correct the course from those curved screens, beautiful, but not entirely comfortable. The S25 Ultra is the recognition that usability must come before pretty aesthetics, even in the premium segment. And if that means sacrificing the visual identity of the extinct ‘Note’ in favor of ergonomics, then too. On the other hand, the anti-reflective treatment of its predecessor already seemed like a game changer. This year, it is maintained, and its screen is also improved with more mature brightness management. They are one of those small details that matter: I don’t need 6,000 nits if I have a panel that eliminates reflections and it offers me very pure blacks in broad daylight. This panel does not seek to win on the technical sheet, but on experience. And there is a technical detail that we often overlook but that makes a difference in everyday life: visual fatigue. Although Samsung remains conservative with PWM Dimming (492 Hz vs. 2,000+ Hz for the Chinese competition), the panel calibration and automatic brightness management in One UI have reached an exquisite point. Let’s not forget that we still have a real Quad HD+ resolutionsomething that many rivals they have sacrificed dropping to 1.5K to save battery or increase the refresh rate. Samsung has not made that sacrifice, and it is appreciated. Power without anxiety and mature chambers It was easy for Samsung to deliver high-end performance: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has given way to a Snapdragon 8 Elite who plays in another league. Although in synthetic stress tests the mobile can suffer considerable throttling, in real use – editing video or playing demanding titles like ‘Genshin Impact’ – this drop in theoretical performance is imperceptible. Samsung has prioritized system stability over raw benchmark numbers: I confirm that it is the right decision for a productivity device. My biggest fear was that the power of the new chip would eat up the battery, the reality has been the opposite. Getting to the end of the day with half the battery is possible: Samsung has shown that optimization can improve autonomy. Now, it goes without saying that to continue winning our super high-end award, the South Korean will have to join the new trend in batteries: those of silicon-carbon. This year it has not been, but next 2026 forces Samsung to take the leap that other manufacturers are experiencing. And what if it becomes notable: mobile phones with 7,000 mAh batteries and more are flooding the Android market. In the photographic field, this is where the philosophy of refinement is most noticeable. Do you miss a radical change in camera hardware? Sometimes, although if you value consistency more, not so much. The Galaxy S25 Ultra solved the Achilles heel of its predecessor: the ultra wide angle. By raising the resolution to 50 MP with a new sensor, this camera finally does not clash with the rest. Furthermore, the recording in LOG and AI noise removal are quite useful tools for content creators. An aspect in which it approaches the high level of the iPhone in video recording. No, it is not the most exciting camera of the year, but it is one of the few that does not leave you lying around: whatever photo you want to take, it offers very consistent results. Samsung has got the point of its photography. A software to match Finally, part of the prize is also for the Android software: Gone are the days of Touchwiz as well as the first versions of One UI that did not achieve the promised user experience. One UI 7 has turned AI from a curiosity into a complete tool suite; and in … Read more

Years ago someone dreamed of a floating megacity. The result is a 550-meter “terayate” for 60,000 people

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The ocean is full of infrastructures that once sounded crazy. With his almost 400 meters in length the ship Ever Given would surely sound like science fiction to any 19th century engineer, as would the ability of the Blue Marlin to transport infrastructure the size of an aircraft carrier or the gigantic dimensions of the ship’s engine Emma Maerskwhich at 13.5 meters high and 27 meters long looks more like a mansion than a machine. In naval engineering the limit is your imagination. Or, if the technique still does not allow you to translate the idea into reality, wait long enough. The Italian designer must have thought something similar Pierpaolo Lazzarinifrom the Lazzarini studio, who in 2009 began to think about a crazy idea: building a floating megacitya gigantic structure capable of hosting tens of thousands of people, hotels, commercial spaces, parks and even facilities for aircraft and other smaller vessels in the middle of the ocean. Breaking the mold Not only that. Already starting to dream – Lazzarini must have thought – why not give it the appearance of a terayate, a boat format so large that it surpasses the super, mega or even “gigayacht” categories. And curling the curl a little more: Why not design that mass to look like a sea turtle? It seems crazy, but that’s what came out of the workbench of Lazzarini, a studio that has already made headlines for its designs. dream vehicles, luxury boats, flying devices either architectural proposals floating. Of course, without the caliber of his latest idea. His proposal is called Pangeos and was presented as nothing more nor less than an immense “itinerant floating city”a chelonian-shaped vessel of 550 meters in length and a beam of 610 m at its widest point, measurements that would make it a true titan of the seas, much larger than the Ever Giventhe transatlantic Wonder of the Seas or even the Seawise Giant. “At the moment it’s just a concept, but it’s starting to become more than just computer animation,” Lazzarini recognizedwhich launched an online dossier with images and videos. In an attempt to go further, in 2023 its promoters promoted an NFT crowdfunding to sell “virtual spaces”. All in all, it does not seem that Pangeos will become a reality in the short term. The studio estimates that shaping its project would cost around 8 billion dollars and the work that would last about eight years. Once finished it would become “the largest floating structure ever built”, with 60,000 accommodations. Its hull will be divided into 30,000 floating cells. Its wings are designed to get energy of the resistance and the waves that break against the hull and along its roof there would be solar panels that would supply it with energy. The vessel, with a draft of approximately 30 meters, would be capable of moving at a speed of five knots. Building a record structure requires record resources. Not only because of the enormous amount of funds and work that Pangeos would need. Giving it shape will require a huge shipyard—”tera shipyard,” he points out—in which they have also thought. The idea is to have a facility with a dock that can be flooded to allow it to float once the yacht is finished. The structure designed by the studio would 650 meters wide by 600 long and would have its own access to the sea. As for where, those responsible have opted for Saudi Arabia, a location located about two kilometers from the King Abdullah Harbor. Although Pangeos is fascinating and its structure seems straight out of a science fiction movie, it is not the first floating community project. Long before Lazzari, other studios embarked on the adventure of designing their own traveling cities. One of the most recent is the MV Narrativean exclusive residential ship of 229 meters in length and 547 “residences-cabins”. The crown of the projects, however, goes to another structure worthy of the most fertile imaginations: the enormous Freedom Shipa boat designed for 100,000 passengers. Norman Nixon launched the proposal in the 90s, but so far he has not managed to put his impressive infographics into practice. They all share the same basic ingredient: ambition and imagination. Images | Lazzarini Design Studio In Xataka | This is Freedom Ship, the megaship designed to become a floating city with 100,000 passengers *An earlier version of this article was published in November 2022

A university used an AI to hunt down students who used AI. The result was a predictable disaster

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What has happened? They count in Futurism that in 2024, the Australian Catholic University accused about 6,000 students of academic misconduct. At least 90% of cases were related to the use of AI for cheating. What is striking is that the university itself used an AI to issue these accusations, many of which were erroneous. Why it is important. It is one more example that AI is not yet reliable. We see it constantly with wrong results and hallucinations. The Australian university is not the only one that has relied on AI to accuse its students, it is a practice quite common and there have been others similar cases. The reality is that AI text detectors are also AI and, at least for now, They are imperfect. Turnitin. It is a plagiarism detection software whose first version was released in 1997 and is widely used in universities and educational centers. In 2023 he added a tool to detect texts created with AI and it is the one they used at the Australian Catholic University. The company itself says in its usage guide that the AI ​​detector is not always accurate and should not be used as the sole source when accusing a student. However, according to ABC Australiathe university used it as the only evidence when issuing his records for misconduct. The university version. Allegations regarding AI use included AI-generated works, fabricated references (hallucinations), and the use of AI tools to cite and translate content. The university says at least a quarter of all allegations were dropped after an investigation. They also rejected those in which the only proof was the AI ​​itself and in March of this year they stopped using that software. The dilemma. The emergence of AI tools poses challenges in the educational sector. Hay voices that advocate its banwhile others They defend integration and encourage good practices. UNESCO published a guide to the use of generative AI in education in which they establish rules and obligations, such as privacy protection, age limits and an approach that guarantees ethical and safe use of these tools. Image | Turnitin In Xataka | A teacher corrected a final exam done with ChatGPT, but another AI evaluated it differently and exposed the dilemma

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