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NVIDIA is going to spend $4 billion on photonics companies. He is preparing for what is coming

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NVIDIA does not provide stitches without thread. At the end of August 2025, the company led by Jensen Huang announced that in 2026 their platforms artificial intelligence next generation (AI) will use photonic interconnections to achieve higher transfer speeds between GPU clusters. This announcement came during the conference specializing in semiconductor engineering and high-performance computing ‘Hot Chips’, which was held in Palo Alto (California), and was just the prelude to what was to come. And this same week NVIDIA has revealed that is going to invest 2,000 million dollars in Lumentum, and the same amount in Coherent. These two companies have something very important in common: they are specialized in developing photonic technologies. Shortly after NVIDIA confirmed its interest in them, the shares of these two companies rose 5 and 9% respectively. And the company led by Jensen Huang has committed to purchasing products from Lumentum and Coherent for several billion dollars, and also to use their advanced laser solutions and optical networking technologies. Photonics is the support that cutting-edge semiconductors need Most IC designers and manufacturers are working on the development of silicon photonics. Douglas Yu, a TSMC executive with responsibility for systems integration, explained in September 2023 very clearly what disruptive capacity this technology has: “If we manage to implement a good integration system for silicon photonics, we will unleash a new paradigm. We will probably place ourselves at the beginning of a new era.” Silicon photonics is a discipline that in the field in question seeks to develop the technology of this chemical element to optimize the transformation of electrical signals into light pulses. The most obvious field of application of this innovation is implementing high performance links which, on paper, can be used both to resolve communications between several chips and to optimize the transfer of information between several machines. In AI clusters, thousands of GPUs must work in unison, so it is essential to connect them using high-performance links The advanced packaging technologies used by leading semiconductor manufacturers, such as TSMC, Intel or Samsung, can greatly benefit from a very high-performance inter-chip communication mechanism. And large data centers where it is necessary to connect a large number of machines, too. However, there is one discipline in particular that has an overwhelming future projection and that would benefit greatly from building on the advantages offered by silicon photonics: AI. This is precisely NVIDIA’s bet. In AI clusters, thousands of GPUs must work in unison, so it is essential to connect them using high-performance links. It is possible to solve this challenge using traditional copper cables or optical modules, but both of these solutions introduce into the infrastructure very important inefficiencies. The most problematic are energy loss and bottlenecks. Data transfer can consume up to 30 watts per port, which increases energy dissipation as heat and increases the likelihood of failure. Additionally, latency limits the scalability of clusters as the number of GPUs in data centers increases. To resolve these inefficiencies, NVIDIA will integrate the optical components required for photonic interconnections into the same switching chip package. This technology is known as CPO (Co-Packaged Optics) and manages to reduce power consumption to only 9 watts per port. Additionally, it minimizes signal loss and improves data integrity. Looks really good. NVIDIA has confirmed that it will integrate CPO technology into its Quantum-X InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet interconnect platforms during 2026. However, there is something important that is worth not overlooking: CPO is not going to be an extra. When it arrives, it will be established as a structural requirement of the next generation of AI data centers in a clear attempt to increase the competitiveness of NVIDIA’s AI hardware platforms. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Reuters In Xataka | Intel and TSMC lead the photonic chip revolution. Their problem is that China has just gotten fully involved in this war

Google wants you to spend more time in its app store. So he’s going to turn it into TikTok

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At the end of 2023, Google warned: at some point the discovery of applications through short videos in the Play Store would be enhanced. A pilot test began in the United States under the name “Play Report”, giving maximum prominence to certain selected applications through short videos in vertical format. What began as a pilot test appears to have worked successfully. The company just announced a package of news that will come to Android and, among them, is this type of videos. The fact that. Google is going to introduce Google Play Shorts. Their name does not deceive: they are short format videos in which we will be shown the content and operation of the applications. As soon as we open the application, we will see them playing, so the first question we ask ourselves is whether it will be possible to eliminate its autoplay to save data. Because. Google is not hiding, it wants us to be able to check how an application works without having to leave the Play Store. Until now, if we wanted to consult about any app we used to close the store, look for information in another source, and return to download it. The objective of the Play Shorts is that we have enough hook with the video, and we go on to download the application directly. As. The videos will be integrated into the apps section itself, they will not have an independent section. Or, in other words, a priori they seem inevitable. We will open the Play Store and at the beginning we will have these Play Shorts. They will be integrated into the app files themselves but, to boost downloads, there will be an installation button in the video itself. When. “Soon.” The key here is that the function has come out of pilot testing and will soon arrive on Android. Over the next few weeks, and through a server update, these new ads will progressively appear. TikTokizing Play Store. While the European Union puts infinite scroll in the spotlightGoogle has just added it to its most used application. Once we enter Play Shorts, we can slide down to see more and more applications, a format identical to that of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Image | Google In Xataka | The science of “doomscrolling”: how technology hacked psychology so we can’t let go of our phones

The US spent $600 billion building its highway network. It’s less than what big tech companies are going to spend on AI this year

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The irruption of ChatGPT in the technological panorama in 2022 marked the starting signal in the AI ​​race; a race in which, year after year, large technology companies continue to increase their spending without stopping. 2026 has just begun and, far from letting it go, the big tech They have put their foot even further on the accelerator. All but one. walk or bust. We already know the planned capex for 2026 of the main technology companies, that is, what they plan to invest in capital expenditures. amazon: 200,000 million Alphabet: 175-185 billion Goal: 115-135 billion Microsoft: 140,000 million Apple: 13,000 million If we add it up taking the highest figures they have given, it is 673,000 million dollars, if we take the lowest figures it would be 643,000 million. In any case it is outrageous. In 2025 the figures were already dizzying and we are talking about an increase of around 60%. There has come a point where we have to stop and ask ourselves: How many zeros does that have? (yes twelve). Context of this madness. Here are a few comparisons to put this figure in context. It is superior to Sweden GDP in 2025 (662,000 million), that of Israel (610,000 million) and that of Singapore (574,000 million). As pointed out this user in Xexceeds what it cost to build the entire US interstate highway system (about 634,000 million) and is a quarter of the entire global military spending in a whole year. It’s like spending $1.2 million per minute for an entire year. It doesn’t make any sense. The market response. The fear of a bubble was noted after the announcements of the different companies, causing sharp falls in the stock market despite the fact that all of them have made profits (some breaking records). amazon fell 12% after announcing a capex of 200,000 millionmuch higher than forecasts Alphabet (Google) achieved record revenues, but it was not enough to convince the markets and its shares fell 10% in the following days Goal also announced record revenue and they had a 10% increase. However, days later things changed and they fell 8%. Microsoft fit the strongest blow, with a drop of 18%. Additionally, they revealed that 45% of their cloud business contracts are for OpenAI and the market does not reward dependency. Apple was the winner, with an increase of more than 7% since they announced results. The declines have been corrected in recent days and all companies have seen their value stabilize, but the message was clear: investors fear that this level of capex is far ahead of the ability of AI to generate profits in the short term. Where are they going to get the money from? It’s the big question. As stated in Financial Timescompanies must choose between reducing shareholder returns, using their cash reserves, or borrowing more money. In the case of Amazon, estimates point to a cash flow of 180 billion, Alphabet 195 billion and Meta 130 billion. The threat of free cash flow falling into negative territory is there, so we can expect them to issue more debt and stop share buybacks. Think different. Then we have Apple, which announced revenues of 144 billion in the last quarter, boosted by sales of the iPhone 17 during the Christmas campaign. Its capex is a fraction of what other companies have spent because Apple doesn’t build data centers, it outsources them. He agreement with Google to use Gemini can be interpreted as They have lost the AI ​​racebut in the context of a possible bubble it is a masterstroke: Google is the one who assumes the brutal spending on infrastructure and who is exposed to the bubble, while they benefit from their technology and see how the market rewards them for spending less. In Xataka | What have Apple and Google agreed on for the new Siri? Nobody knows because Google doesn’t even want to mention it. Image | Photo of Adam Nir in Unsplashedited

We believed Amazon was already spending too much on AI. Your answer to Wall Street: spend even more

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The honeymoon between AI and Wall Street is over. Amazon knows this very well, having just received that dreaded “we have to talk” message from investors with a drop of more than 10% in its shares yesterday. It seemed that the stock markets rewarded the fact that companies They invested absurd amounts of money in AI. It is just what Amazon announced yesterday, but that strategy has had a totally negative response in the markets. what has happened. Amazon presented yesterday financial results for the last quarter of 2025. Revenue grew by 14% and net profit by 6%, modest figures that were not very popular. But above all, I did not like that Amazon announced that it estimated a capex (capital expenditure) of $200 billion in 2026 in AI. Amazing. Wall Street used to reward, now it punishes. In 2025, that capex was $131 billion, and Amazon is determined to continue betting everything on AI. Before, investors rewarded that audacity. Now they are punishing her: the shares plummeted 11% “after hours“, and it will be today when those actions start with that reflected fall. We want return on investment. That market reaction is not an isolated event. Amazon’s fall comes just hours after Microsoft or Google suffered similar falls. The market before valued the potential of AIbut now he demands return on investment more than ever and has become impatient. Big Tech had operated with a blank check, but when revenue forecasts fall short of estimates, optimism evaporates. Income grows, yes, but not that much. The real problem is the imbalance between capex and revenue growth. AWS grew a spectacular 24% in revenue, but spending is growing at an even greater rate. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are trapped in a kind of infrastructure “arms race”: the first one to stop spending loses, and that is a big problem. He who does not risk, does not gain. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained that “this is an extraordinarily rare opportunity to forever change the size of AWS and Amazon as a whole. (…) We are going to invest aggressively to be the leaders.” It is a speech identical to that Mark Zuckerberg said a few months ago when he said he was willing to lose hundreds of billions on AI: not investing them would be worse for Meta. But Amazon is much more than AI. There is another disturbing element in this huge bet by Amazon. The reality is that the company has many expensive fronts. From the Kuiper satellite network to compete with Starlink to the robotization of its Whole Foods logistics and other areas. When adding AI to the equation, the math doesn’t seem to work out. Optimism ends. Historically, large technology companies have taken advantage of the optimism of the market and investors to justify spending forecasts completely unrelated to their income. In 2026, with the macroeconomic situation of “we no longer like risk” —tell it to bitcoin— and the pressure for profitability, “free optimism” has disappeared. If you are going to spend like crazy, you have to raise like crazy too. Amazon is doing well, AI is not. This total commitment to AI is preventing us from seeing that the rest of Amazon’s businesses are doing very well. Online sales grew by 10% and advertising grew by a notable 23%. E-commerce, the cornerstone on which Amazon was built and operates, is funding the AI ​​party, but it is turning into a bottomless pit. Like Qatar’s GDP. According to the world bankQatar’s GDP in 2024 was $219 billion. That Amazon invests almost the same in AI data centers alone is dizzying. It is the same thing that we said yesterday about Google, which also projected a capex of 135 billion dollars by 2026. The figures are no longer dizzying: they are crazy. Beware, obsolescence. And all that investment can end up wasted, especially because there is an implicit risk in the data centers that are built: in three or five years they could become obsolete if the architecture of AI chips changes radically. It is bread for today, and hunger for tomorrow… without counting the energy factor or the water consumption. Xataka | While Silicon Valley seeks electricity, China subsidizes it: this is how it wants to win the AI ​​war

Google has smelled blood with AI, so it has decided to spend more in 2026 than the GDP of 158 countries in the world

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New year, new budgets. Big tech companies are beginning to detail their roadmap for 2026 and the trend is clear: spend even more on AI. a few days ago, Goal announced that the planned capex (capital expenditure) rose to 135,000 million dollars and Microsoft too pointed to a similar figure. Alphabet (Google) just told everyone to “hold my hands.” May the rhythm not stop. The bomb was announced during the last results conference. Alphabet plans to spend between $175 and $185 billion, doubling 2025 capex, which was $91.4 billion, and almost quadrupling 2024 spending (52.5 billion). To put it in context, it is more than the GDP of Morocco, Kuwait, Bulgaria and up to 158 countries. At the same time, the company announced record results, surpassing 400 billion in revenue for the first time. The net profit stood at 132,000 million. Vertigo. That’s what investors seem to have felt. They count in Financial Times that, in the hours following the news, Alphabet shares fell 7% after the capex announcement, but then the fall was reduced to -1.5%. Microsoft experienced a similar response after its earnings call a few days ago, it is the response of investors to these exorbitant figures. However, as long as the results are good, it seems that the scare will not last long. Everything’s fine. They count in Fortune that Pichai assured that this year’s capital expenditure is “a look at the future” and justified his strategy by highlighting that the demand for his cloud services and DeepMind (Gemini) is extraordinary, so the investment must also be. He also announced that AI searches now surpass traditional searches and that Google Search’s business has grown 17% compared to last year. Additionally, the order book for its cloud has increased by 55% during the last quarter. It still won’t be enough. The CEO of Alphabet admitted that, despite the record results, there are insurmountable bottlenecks such as computing capacity, problems in the chip supply chain and energy limitations. These restrictions make it take a long time to get a data center up and running, or in other words, it was preparing investors not to expect an immediate return. Gemini, full out. The Google chatbot is in its sweet moment. The viral success of Nano Banana, Gemini 3 sweeping its competition in benchmarks and Apple choosing him as the new brain for the new Siri They have given a boost in popularity to Gemini, which already has more than 750 million users. OpenAI is still ahead with ChatGPT, but Google is closing the gap and Altman’s people have reacted going into panic mode. He moat of Gemini. Benchmarks are fine, but there is something much more important. During the conference, Pichai announced that they had reduced Gemini’s service costs by 78% “through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements.” It is no longer that its AI is surpassing its competition, it is that it is cheaper and there OpenAI does have a problem. With its advertising businesses, the cloud and more revenue, Google has plenty of room to skyrocket its capex. In Xataka | OpenAI’s entire financial strategy depended on achieving a monopoly with ChatGPT: the opposite is happening Image | Wikipedia

Mercadona and the rest of the supermarkets spend tons of paper on receipts that no one reads. Now they want to change it

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You go to the supermarket, you buy a couple of things (just enough for dinner), you go to the checkout, they give you the ticket, you put it in your pocket and you leave with the bag in the direction of the parking lot. Pure routine. Our daily bread. If the employer’s retail achieves its objective, there is one element of that scene, however, that will change radically. Which? That ticket that you will end up throwing away without even reading it. What has happened? Every year supermarkets print millions and millions of strips of paper in which in many cases only a handful of articles appear, so they end up in the garbage can without anyone having even looked at them. It is a waste, a waste of resources. For chains like Dia, Lidl or Mercadona, but also for the environment. So Asedas (Spanish Association of Distributors, Self-Service and Supermarkets) has had an idea: they want us to start printing receipts only when the customer requests it. What do they want? The news I advanced it on thursday theEconomist. Asedas has proposed to the Government that it slightly tweak the regulations that regulate tickets so that they are no longer printed systematically. That does not mean that they are no longer issued or that the customer no longer has a receipt that clarifies what they have purchased and how much they have been charged. The change would focus on support. The idea, clarifies Ignacio García, head of Asedas, is “that the ticket continues to be generated electronically for control purposes, but that it is printed on paper at the consumer’s request.” That is, the user can request the physical or digital ticket. Right now, remember theEconomistthe regulations provide that supers deliver the receipt in two ways: either in paper or digital format. What’s happening? Since not all clients are in favor of handing over their data (including email) to the chains, in the end they have no choice but to print it. Not only that. The employer’s data They show that many of the times we go to the supermarket we buy only a handful of items, so the receipts show small transactions, for low amounts that we do not even review. Result: those papers end up in the trash as they are printed. It is not even strange for the customer to reject them when the cashier offers them to them. Is it that serious? “Our companies have been confirming for years that, in about a third of operations, the ticket is abandoned at the checkout line,” confirm Garcia. It is not surprising if we take into account the data on the shopping basket managed by Asedas. According to their estimates, 30% of the operations registered in supermarkets respond to almost urgent visits, during which we take home at most four products and spend less than 10 euros. In 60% of cases, purchases involve between five and 25 products with average tickets of between 10 and 50 euros. Only the remaining 10% actually respond to large purchases. In practice, the fact that all operations end up reflected in a receipt means that the supers generate about 5 billion tickets that require the use of almost 4,500 tons of paper and a million-dollar expense. Is it important? Beyond the millions of receipts that are printed each year and the cost that this entails in tons of paper and euros, Asedas’ proposal is interesting for at least two reasons. To start with who throws it. Asedas presume to be “the first food distribution business organization in Spain” and cover 19,200 retail stores and 495 wholesalers. Between your partners Companies such as Mercadona, Lidl, Aldi or Dia appear. Another key is that its idea is in line with what is already done in other European countries. For example, in 2023 France said goodbye to the generation of tickets by default precisely because of the amount of paper it consumed. That doesn’t mean they no longer exist, but they must be requested. In the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden there have also been changes related to the generation of receipts. In Spain itself, some large chains they take time moving towards the digital ticket. Images | Xataka Mobile and Wikipedia In Xataka | There was a time not too long ago when the future of supermarkets seemed like Amazon Go. Now Amazon Go is dead

“you should spend all your time practicing vibe coding”

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Alexandr Wang is only in his twenties, but under his responsibility he has the greatest minds in AI in his position as head of the Meta AI Lab. In one of his last interventions during the coverage of the Meta Connect event in the TBPN podcastissued a very direct recommendation to adolescents and young people concerned about their future work: “you should spend all your time practicing vibe coding“. The idea behind his statements is that the sooner you begin to familiarize yourself with the new ways of programmingthe more options you will have when AI is involved in almost everything we use. ​Everything will be “vibe coding”. Wang assured in his speech that the work of software engineers had changed a lot in recent years and that, even for someone who had been in the job market for as few years as he had, it’s going to change a lot more in the next five years. The Goal Manager and founder of Scale AI assures that it is no longer so much about being good at programming in Python, C++ or JavaScript, but about learn to converse with the AI ​​models that are already programming in those languages ​​and explain to them precisely and with natural language what you want to achieve, and monitor its results until the result works. According to Wang, the future of programming inevitably involves he Vibe Coding. The best thing is to start now. Wang’s strongest message is aimed directly at teenagers. “If you’re 13, you should spend all your time coding with Vibe Coding. That’s what you should do,” said the young Meta manager. Wang compared the current technological moment with the computer technology boom of the late 70s and early 80s with the flourishing of the computer industry. “When personal computers emerged, those who spent more time with them and grew up with them had a huge advantage in the economy of the future, like the Bill Gates and even the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. I think that moment is happening right now,” stressed the founder of Scale AI. Practice new skills. Wang takes that idea even further when he talks about the dedication necessary for today’s young people to acquire those programming skills for their future work. “If you spend 10,000 hours playing with those tools and discovering how to use them better than others, that will be a big advantage,” encouraged the Meta executive. His criteria are based on his own experience, since at just 19 years old, Wang fundó Scale AI, a company dedicated to labeling content for training AI models and only 25 years old, entered the list of millionaires of Forbes with a fortune valued at more than $1.1 billion. The future of programming. According to Wang in his speech, it is clear to him that AI will not only help with programming, but will also write by itself practically all the code that a person like him has produced in his entire career. However, Wang does not believe that the role of the human engineer will disappear, but rather that it will shift to another point in the process. Your job will be to know what to ask for, how to combine different tools, how to review what the AI ​​produces and how to turn it into real products. That is why he insists so much that children and adolescents get used to this as soon as possible. new way of workingso that the youngest learn to use the Vibe Coding and integrate it naturally into their way of working as we already do today with computers and programming languages. In Xataka | “In a year or two, code editors will not exist”: four programmers explain the vibe coding revolution to us Image | Scale AI

There’s a reason you spend hours watching reels on Instagram until 3:00 AM: the science of doomscrolling

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It’s one in the morning. We should be sleeping but the finger is still sliding across the screen, scrolling through videos on TikTokreels on Instagram or posts on X. A viral meme, a new fire in the area or a new political crisis has us hooked on the screen. And although we may be exhausted, it cannot be stopped. If this scene sounds familiar to you, then welcome to the club. doomscrolling. A term that became massively popular during the pandemic and which can be defined as the habit of consuming prolonged form negative news or distressing, mainly through social networks. But behind this process, which may be very common in society right now, there are numerous chemical processes in the brain that science has not hesitated to investigate. The trap mechanism. To understand why we do doomscrollingwe must first understand that our brain did not evolve to have X or TikTok, but rather it evolved to survive. And it is not so long ago that humans were hunting for food or fleeing from a threat in nature, and it is something that our brain is still very much aware of. According to the most recent scientific literaturethe fact of sliding our screen down activates our reward brain circuits such as the dopaminergic system in each interaction. This drives us at all times to continue searching for information and evolutionarily knowing “where the danger is” was vital. The problem is that in this case the algorithm has no purpose, and we can spend 24 hours watching this type of news. But the reward system, which gives us ‘pleasure’ when knowing where the danger is, is not alone. It is accompanied by the amygdala which is the fear center in our brain. When seeing all this information, such as a war nearby in our territory, the brain interprets it as a potential threat that results in a large release of cortisol. This hormone is precisely known as the ‘stress hormone’, because it keeps the body in a state of hypervigilance. The result of these two circuits is quite clear as point out publications in Frontiers in Psychiatry and Brain Behavior: The brain seeks relief from information, but only finds more threats. This results in a toxic cycle being generated in which one seeks to calm down, becomes more scared, and searches again. The rotten brain. On social networks there is already a lot of talk of the term brain rot which translates to ‘brain rot’ like a real meme. but science has a very different opinionsince recent research suggests that repeated exposure to these fragmented stimuli with high emotional impact, with 15-second videos and alarmist headlines, have a high physical cost. The impact is located above all in executive functions (planning, organization, decision making…). And the constant alternation of these catastrophic contexts forces the brain to jump from one idea to another in milliseconds, and it is not something free. The cost we have to pay can be summarized in three points: Mental fatigue due to the high consumption of glucose that the brain has to make by having to constantly change focus. Deterioration of the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with a reduction in the efficiency of the area responsible for planning and impulse control. Processing blockage when the brain is on hyperalert. This makes it difficult to transfer information to long-term memory. Do we no longer know how to concentrate? This is the question we can all ask ourselves due to this phenomenon. The short answer from science is: we know, but it is much harder for us to “get started.” Studies on digital multitasking indicate that it is not that we have lost ability physiological of sustained attention, but we have trained our brain to expect interruptions. Deep attention (what you need to read a book for example) requires a “warm-up” time. He doomscrolling and the constant stream of notifications resets that counter constantly. Research collected in BMC Public Health they point out that attention remains “anchored” waiting for the next update. Even when you are not looking at your phone, a part of your cognitive resources is focused on it, reducing your performance on the task in front of you. It is not an irreversible decline, it is an atrophy due to lack of use of deep concentration circuits. There is hope. Despite the apocalyptic tone of the studies themselves on the subject, the scientific conclusion It’s not that we’re doomed. to be distracted automatons glued to a phone. The great advantage that humans have is neuroplasticity. With this term we mean that just as the brain learns to scroll compulsively, it can “unlearn.” Experts agree that the damage is not permanent unless the behavior becomes chronic for years without intervention. Evidence-supported strategies for breaking the cortisol-dopamine loop include: Set strict times to inform yourself and never before bed. Do exercises mindfulness as a tool to restore the default neural network. Allowing the brain to rest and ‘get bored’ without stimuli to help cleanse itself and regain the ability to focus. Images | Yazid N In Xataka | Young people have decided to stop posting (so much) on Facebook and Instagram. “AI-generated garbage” has free rein

In 1995 a program came out that promised to double your PC’s RAM. In the best of cases what I did was not spend more

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The 90s were wonderful in the world of software and hardware. Epic trolling like that of the 299 dollars of the first PlayStationthe legendary key of Windows 95 or the PlayStation emulator presented by Steve Jobs himself. In the middle of the decade a program came out that promised the impossible: double the amount of RAM on your PC. Its name was SoftRAM 95 and, although it makes us raise an eyebrow today, in its day it sold hundreds of thousands of copies for $80 each. And spoiler: it was of absolutely no use. SoftRAM 95, the miracle solution for your PC’s RAM The launch of a program like this is a product of its time, one in which users they could have been less ‘smart’ Now for more than logical reasons and in an industry in which everything was learned and developed as we went. There were times when the smartest were the ones who got results, but a company called Suncronys Softcorp learned its lesson the hard way. The year was 1995 and Windows 95 was beginning to revolutionize homes. Although the Microsoft system made control a PC was more accessible than ever (unfortunately for Steve Jobs), the hardware still had a brutal barrier to entry: the price. They were still expensive devices, very expensive, so saving on components saved a few dollars. RAM It was one of those components for which you paid gold per KB, but… what if there was a program that, for a few dollars, doubled the amount of memory on our PC? What if he did all this without having to touch any piece of our equipment? That is where the Californian Syncronys Softcorp saw a vein and – now we can say that in bad faith – launched its program: SoftRAM 95. It went on sale in August 1995 and it is estimated that they sold a whopping 600,000 copies until December of that same year. In those days, it was truly outrageous. And the logical question is how he achieved what he promised. The long answer is that it compressed the memory, so when the operating system needed to save data from RAM to the hard drive, SoftRAM 95 compressed it before writing it, reducing the amount of space needed on the disk and allowing the RAM to have more space available. The concept, roughly speaking, is correct, and the program interface told us that yes, congratulations, you had double the amount of RAM. The long answer is that it didn’t do what it promised. Although technically they were on the right track, this process at the time was tremendously ambitious for one reason: the speed of both the RAM and the primitive hard drives It was so absurdly slow that, effectively, the objective could not be met. They knew this from the top of Syncronys, but they didn’t care: the money was pouring in because each license cost about 30 dollars. Under the magnifying glass of the press… and Microsoft However, things quickly went wrong. A magazine of the time called PC Magazine submitted the software to a analysis How these analyzes should be done: testing whether the program really did what it promised. Using blocks of data to evaluate whether compression was effective, they found that processing times were exactly the same with compressible data and with random data that could not be compressed. They came to the conclusion that the only thing SoftRAM did was show an animated screen which gave the user the perception that they were working when, in reality, they were doing absolutely nothing. But beyond the press, those who got their hands on the software were Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich, two Microsoft engineers who dissected the program at the code level. Basically, confirmed the well-founded suspicion of PC Magazine and pointed out that the program never actually worked. That is, the paging controller device – that compression of the RAM to transfer it to the hard drive – it closed just when loadingso it never did anything at all other than display false numbers while the operating system worked exactly as it should, whether the program was installed or not. When I said before that the management of Syncronys knew it, it was not because we saw history with the eyes of the present. When everything was revealed, they reported that RAM compression was not being carried out and, in addition, it was learned that they sold the software even though its developers had warned that the product was not ready. And it wasn’t aI’ll launch it and I’ll fix itlike many current games”, because in 1995 Internet updates were not the norm. Just when the company thought it was over, the US Federal Trade Commission arrived. Following its investigation, Syncronys finally acknowledged that it had misrepresented the performance of its product and banned it from selling any more copies of both SoftRAM and Windows 3.1 as SoftRAM 95. In total, both versions placed 700,000 copies on the market and Syncronys declared bankruptcy in July 98, owing 4.5 million dollars. The idea did not die with SoftRAM In the end, what SoftRAM did The best case scenario was not to eat up your PC’s resources.and it was one of those attempts to sell whatever in a still somewhat naive market. For PC Worldnext to AOL and RealPlayerSoftRAM is the worst technology product of all time. But of course, with the eyes of 2025, you may be wondering… what happens with solutions like Windows Vista ReadyBoost and the mobile memory expansion? It’s a different matter and, although both promise to improve performance by using “extra memory”, it is something very different from what SoftRAM did. ReadyBoost, for example, allowed you to use the memory of a pen drive as a cache to speed up access to frequent data. It acted as an extension of the system’s virtual memory and the theory is correct, but again we ran into the speed limitation of USBs … Read more

If you spend more than 25,000 euros a year with your card, the PIN will not be the only information they ask for

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He cash is increasingly anecdotal for consumers, not only because of the lack of concern that comes with not having to be looking for a cashier to withdraw cash from time to time, but for the convenience that the mobile payments. However, from January 1, 2026, the Treasury will have stricter control over payments made with bank cards. If a card accumulates more than 25,000 euros in annual expenses, financial institutions will be obliged to “submit an annual informative return” on these movements to the Treasury. Payments of more than 25,000 euros must be declared. The new measure is included in the regulatory modification introduced by the Royal Decree 253/2025allowing the State to detect possible fraud and ensure that capital movements of a certain size are transparent and justified. This control comes at a time when most payments are made digitally and cash is increasingly used less. Therefore, the regulations that already required financial institutions to notify cash movements have been reinforced. The scope is expanded. Until now, the regulations required notification of payments with cards and Bizum of more than 3,000 euros per year to companies and professionals. However, the scope of the measure is now extended to all charges made by card in any payment method, both in physical establishments and online, as well as through platforms linked to telephone numbers. That is, it not only affects credit or debit card payments, but also extends the measure to Bizum or other mobile payment systems. “Banking or credit entities and other entities that, in accordance with current regulations, provide the collection management service through cards, with physical or virtual support, that offer cash, debit, deferred debit, credit and electronic money functions, in any currency, as well as through payments associated with a mobile phone number, to businessmen and professionals established in Spain,” the regulations specify. Differentiation between companies and individuals. The new regulations establish differences between business and private use, but in both cases entities must notify movements of more than 25,000 euros annually. For self-employed workers and companies, the new regulations eliminate the minimum limits to communicate card operationswhich implies that any payment, regardless of its amount, must be reported to the Tax Agency. This significantly increases the monitoring and traceability of all commercial operations carried out with card or mobile payment. On the other hand, for individual consumers, only those who have a high annual spending with cards will be subject to this more exhaustive tax control. What information is reported? In accordance with the provisions of article 38ter that modifies the new Royal Decree, financial entities must notify the Treasury of the following data about the holders and linked payment products of those who spend more than 25,000 euros per year in card spending: Contract number formalized by the entity for the issuance of cards. Identification data of the contract holders (or their authorized persons or beneficiaries), which will include name and surname or company name, tax identification number, country of residence, and date of birth for natural persons. In the absence of a tax identification number, the passport number or identity number valid in your country of origin and the country issuing the identification documentation will be provided. Card number (PAN) associated with the contract and type of card. Number of subscriptions and their total amount, registered on the card in the year, with indication of the number of cash recharges and their total amount, made on the card in the year (movements and total amount of the expense) Number of charges and their total amount, recorded on the card in the year, with an indication of the number of spending operations carried out with the card and their total amount, derived from payments made in establishments in the year and the number of cash withdrawals and their total amount, made with the card in the year. Identification of the account, if applicable, to which the card operation is linked, through its International Bank Account Code (IBAN) or, failing that, through the corresponding customer account code. In Xataka | In 2030 we will no longer have to enter card numbers in purchases. Mastercard already has a substitute Image | Unsplash (Nathana Rebouças)

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