thought

Japan wanted its roads to be more than just a place of passage. And they thought of something: vending machines

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There are many, many things that catch your attention when you arrive in Japan. At first, it is difficult to understand how this country of ancient traditions and quiet Buddhist or Shinto temples that seem to be everywhere can mix with the most hilarious bustle of stores like the Don Quixote. As the days go by, little by little, one begins to assimilate what one sees and begins to focus on issues just as curious but not as striking. When you want to realize you are in the konbini in turn choosing which of the 12 types of cold coffee and the eight hot ones you want the most. Or if you dare with that lemon soda marked by some kanji as attractive as they are threatening. A few days later, you are picking up any of those soft drinks in the middle of a road, in a layby where there is nothing… Where there is nothing but a vending machine. And then you ask yourself: but what is this machine doing here? Vending machine culture And in Japan there is something as ubiquitous as shrines: vending machines. The Japanese have a passion for jidouhanbaiki either jihanki. Obviously, the most famous and used are those that sell something to drink, but there are all kinds of them and for all kinds of objects. My colleague Javier Pastor already pointed out in 2017 that there were an estimated five million vending machines distributed throughout the country. Some with objects as extravagant “like this one from used panties either it’s poop“. But in addition to selling products, these vending machines have found another function: that of promoting national and inland tourism by road. The country has been fighting rural depopulation for years and has found in vending machines a great support for travelers to opt for the car and motorcycle instead of the very crowded bullet train. The formula is as simple as it is Japanese: make the traveler comfortable. With that premise, many vending machines have been popping up on lay-bys and rest areas in the country. A tremendously simple formula for the traveler to stop and even deviates from its path. With a density of less than 40 inhabitants for each machine vending machine, this option has not only become a tool to assist the traveler, It is already a tourist attraction in itself. And that has encouraged an increase in the number of people who see here as another incentive to go out with their car or motorcycle for the weekend. When the Japanese have an obsession, it is very difficult for others to catch up to them. If we talk about motorcycling and motorsports, Japan is one of the most cultural countries. Hence, some roads have simply become a hobby. One where the customer simply pays to drive but to which some auxiliary services have been added to improve the experience. like the ubiquitous vending machines. It is not the only tool they have found to encourage this type of pure leisure travel. There are musical highways where the asphalt emits a melody as the car or motorcycle passes by, using the roughness to create scores that the traveler plays as they pass over it. Or the michi no eki, something like the latest evolution of the service area where the gas station has the obligation to have another business or to offer a local product. There are those that only sell local food but there are those that even have their own natural science museum. A perfect opportunity to collect your stamps or banknotes, other tourist attractions of these spaces. And Japan is an obsessed country for collecting and making everyone as comfortable as possible. And for that jidouhanbaiki They are perfect. Photos | Xataka In Xataka | Japan is searching for the person who built a road on the country’s largest lake. It leads nowhere

We thought that buying a yacht was a luxury. The real luxury that they don’t tell you is another: maintaining it

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Owning a yacht is synonymous with luxury and opulence. It is not for less. Superyachts like the koru by Jeff Bezos or the Leviathan by Gabe Newell, they had a purchase price of 500 million dollars; he launchpad by Mark Zuckerberg about 300 million dollars. However, although buying a yacht seems the most difficultwho has been in the sector for some time knows that this initial disbursement will not be the only one, it is only the first. The true luxury (and what is really expensive) is what comes after and is repeated every year: the maintenance of that yacht. There is an unwritten rule that has been circulating around moorings and ports for decades to prepare future buyers for what awaits them. It is called the “10% rule“, and refers to the annual maintenance cost that a yacht requires: 10% of its price, each year. The inhabitants of the Caribbean island of Antigua they learned it the hard way. The price of a yacht does not come on the label When someone is going to buy a boat, it is usual to take into account whether they can afford its purchase price. That’s the easy part. You look at the price and compare it to your checking account. If it fits the budget, honey on flakes. However, there is a cost that not always taken into account in which the owner of a yacht (or any boat in general) should reserve approximately the 10% of the purchase price to cover all expenses annual operation and maintenance. Yes, 10% of the price each year. A 500,000 euro yacht will generate annual costs of around 50,000 euros; If the value amounts to one million euros, the figure rises to 100,000 euros per year. That 10% includes practically everything necessary to keep the boat sailing and in perfect condition: routine maintenance, regular repairs, average fuelannual insurance, mooring fees and, in the case of larger superyachts, crew salaries. Boat insurance alone already represents between 1.5% and 2% of the value of the yacht per year, which in a 500,000 euro boat translates into between 7,500 and 10,000 euros per year in premiums alone. At this point, it should be noted that these premiums are also calculated based on the location of the mooring. A yacht moored in the Mediterranean does not pay the same insurance as in areas like Florida where hurricane warnings and tropical storms are the order of the day. As the ship ages, the numbers change The 10% rule is stated as a reference guide for the entire life of the yacht. That is, it is an average in which some years the maintenance cost will be well below that 10%, while in other years it will far exceed it. However, above or below, the cost always remains close to that 10%: As and as they point out from WS Yatch Brokersone of the decisive factors, for example, is that this 10% varies as the age of the boat advances. When the yacht is new, the manufacturer’s warranties are in force, the mechanical systems are working well and maintenance costs can remain around 2% of the purchase price for the first few years. That 2% corresponds to fixed expenses such as insurance, mooring, or basic deck maintenance. As the years go by, parts wear out, warranties expire, and breakdowns become more and more frequent. For boats between 5 and 15 years old, the recommended percentage rises to 10%, with bad years that can reach (and exceed) 15% of the purchase value. The reason is that, as the market value of the boat goes down, its maintenance costs go up, so any calculation based on a fixed percentage loses reliability. That is to say, a 15-year-old yacht that has cost 100,000 euros second-hand will not (or at least not always) have expenses of 10% since its engine and hull begin to need major repairs due to years of use. That is, what the buyer has saved on the purchase price must then be invested in repairs anyway. Hence the 10% rule is a reference average applied to the entire life of the yacht (with its ups and downs), not a rule written in stone. The size, the crew and the place where you moor Size also determines the maintenance budget proportionally. From 25 meters in length, the yacht can now require professional crewand that 10% falls short to cover the cost of maintenance. A captain’s salary alone starts at around $50,000 per year, and a full crew for a large yacht easily exceeds $200,000 per year. On megayachts, managers usually plan 10% for operating expenses (which are included in the 10% rule), plus an additional 10% for onboard personnel, their maintenance, etc., which places the real maintenance cost closer to 20% of the acquisition price. This percentage does not apply to those yachts that, due to size, only require the services of a captain during the high season, thus reducing their annual cost. He port where it is moored It also has a decisive influence on the calculation of annual fixed expenses. It does not cost the same to moor in a small fishing town on the Catalan coast as in Puerto Banús or in the port of Monaco. In Spain, the monthly mooring fee for a boat between 12 and 14 meters ranges between 450 and 575 euros per month (about 6,900 euros per year), but it skyrockets in large tourist ports. to put a practical examplemooring in Marina Ibiza, the main recreational port on the island, for a yacht of about 15 meters in length costs between 25,000 and 30,000 euros per year, while if you opt for other secondary ports on the island, the price is reduced by half to between 10,000 and 15,000 euros per year. According to estimates of Ocean Independencea company specializing in superyacht management, the annual routine maintenance of a superyacht, which includes hull cleaning, fuel, engine inspection and electronic systems, ranges between … Read more

We thought AI was laying off engineers. In reality, it has pilloried another profile: middle management.

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We’ve been hearing for several years that AI was going to change work as we know it. What perhaps no one anticipated is that the first mass casualty They would not be factory operators or data analysts, but the layer of professionals that holds together the structure of any company: middle management. The phenomenon is already leaving a trail of layoffs with the successive restructurings that the big technology companies have been applying for the last year. Departments are reduced by the implementation of AI and become increasingly autonomous in decision-making, so the intermediate step that united everything becomes unnecessary. The profile that worries the most. Middle managers have been acting as a transmission belt between the management that dictates strategies and the teams that execute them for decades. The function of these positions was to collect data, synthesize it, transfer decisions and coordinate day-to-day operations. That intermediary job is exactly the role that AI is automating most easily, making middle managers the most important link. likely to be fired in that chain because it is not related to either decision-making or their execution. The pressure on this intermediate profile has been building for some time and the data confirms it. By the end of 2025, job offers for middle managers in the US were 42% lower to the maximum recorded three years earlier, according to Revelio Labs. The consulting firm Gartner calculated that by 2026 one in five companies will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions. Companies are applying it. Just a few weeks ago, Block, the payments company founded by Jack Dorsey, announced the dismissal of 40% of its staff and presented a new organizational model in which AI assumes the role of a link between teams. In one later blog postDorsey and councilor Roelof Botha explained this move: “There is no need for a permanent layer of middle management.” Brian Armstrong picked up Dorsey’s baton in your ad of dismissal for 14% of the Coinbase workforce, specifying that the intermediate positions were going to disappear as such and that they were now going to contribute by “getting their hands dirty with their teams.” What is lost when a link disappears. In statements to GuardianFreeland Abbott, former CTO of Square, warned that “AI cannot provide team motivation, human connection, and support the way a person can,” removing the human component from middle management in companies. Furthermore, the elimination of this role could mean another obstacle in promotion options for junior employees, who usually find those opportunities by starting to manage the work of other junior employees as they gain experience. According to the study By Anastassia Fedyk, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, as AI tools allow more work to be shifted from managers to their subordinates, these structural changes could become permanent. Rehire middle management. Matthew Bidwell, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, assured on his podcast on the labor market that there are precedents of companies that tried eliminate intermediate hierarchies and they ended up turning back. According to their analysis, middle managers are in an especially vulnerable position in restructurings because it is more difficult for them to demonstrate their value to management. Far from putting an end to the “productive” positions held by engineers and administrators, AI seems to have opened the door and the piece that is being most affected to the point of placing it as a species at risk of extinction are middle managers. Above all, after his post-pandemic proliferation. In Xataka | Generation Z is avoiding promotions to mid-level positions: too much stress and too little reward Image | Unsplash (Austin Distel)

We thought platypuses were strange animals. We just discovered that they are even rarer

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The platypus has been a box of surprises since we formally “discovered” it almost 230 years ago, when the first stuffed specimen arrived in Europe and the naturalist George Shaw thought which was a hoax sewn up by some Chinese taxidermist. And let’s see, the platypus is truly unique in its species: it is a mammal that lays eggs, detects electric fields with its beak and glows under ultraviolet light. As if the above were not enough, a research team just found a surprising explanation for the color of his coat. What’s new about the platypus. The research, led by biologist Jessica Leigh Dobson from Ghent University, has identified that the platypus has melanosomes holes in their fur. What is this exactly? The organelles responsible for giving us color in our skin, hair or eyes. Until now, science assumed that hollow melanosomes existed only in birds and that those of mammals were always solid. Curiously, in birds those melanosomes are the ones that produce iridescent colors, but the platypus is dark brown, without flashes or shine. Furthermore, their melanosomes are mostly spherical, a morphology that in other animals is associated with red or orange tones, but not brown. The reason is a mystery. Why it is important. Melamine is the standard for vertebrates to provide color and protect from the sun, but what is truly key is its packaging. For decades the shape of melanosomes has served as an evolutionary fingerprint to differentiate the branches of birds and mammals. The platypus just killed it, but of course, it is so disconcerting from the beginning that it took researchers 80 years to agree on what it was, as its scientific name summarizes. The most reasonable hypothesis What this research team proposes is that the hollow melanosomes could have been an adaptation to the aquatic lifestyle of the platypus, a kind of thermal insulation mechanism in the fur for life in cold waters. But of course, if this is the case, why doesn’t the same happen with other semi-aquatic mammals? If confirmed, it would imply that this condition of hollow melanosomes evolved independently in birds and only in this mammal. The platypus continues to go on its own. Context. The platypus deserves a separate chapter in biology books: it is one of only five species of mammals that lay eggs, the monotremes. And what can we say about its appearance: it has the beak of a duck and the tail of a beaver. Although it seems harmless, it is not: it has venom like snakes and the males also have poisonous spurs on their hind legs capable of causing intense pain in humans. The icing on the cake is that the animal is capable of detecting the electric fields generated by the muscles of its prey underwater. But the platypus is different outside and inside: He is a genetic rebel. While humans have only two sex chromosomes (XX or XY), he has ten. This complexity makes their system for determining sex totally different from that of other mammals. It is, literally, one of the few animals that forces science to consider pre-established laws. How they discovered it. The discovery was almost a coincidence: Jessica Dobson was building a database of melanosomes from different mammal species when her thesis supervisor detected this platypus anomaly. The scientist passed the samples through a high-resolution microscope to examine the melanosomes inside the hairs of 12 platypus specimens taken from different parts of the body. He then extended the comparison to echidnas, marsupials such as wombats and opossums, and a hundred more mammals. No trace of hollow melanosomes, and for example their cousins, the echidnas, also lay eggs. In Xataka | The “Spanish platypus” exists and is on the verge of extinction: the very rare animal that only lives on the peninsula In Xataka | A 24-year-old platypus challenges what we knew about the longevity of the strangest mammals Cover | Dr Philip Bethge

We thought Ozempic was only for weight loss. Science is seeing that it can end alcoholism

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The famous Ozempic has been revolutionizing the treatment of type 2 diabetes for years and also has an important effect on obesity when it comes to helping patients lose weight by causing a greater satiety. However, the scientific community had long suspected that its effects went far beyond weight control and now, science has an idea that it may have an effect on alcohol. New advances. A new study published earlier this month in The Lancet ha proven that these drugs are capable of significantly reducing the days of excessive alcohol consumption in patients who have an alcoholism problem. Something that is a great milestone, since until now the evidence on the use of these drugs to treat addictions was based on small studies, but now a big change has been made by designing a trial with the maximum guarantees to find a clear relationship between taking Ozempic and the control of addiction. How it was done. For 26 weeks, researchers followed 108 adult patients who had both obesity and an alcohol use disorder. From this sample, the group treated with semaglutide once a week experienced a 41% reduction in days of heavy drinking, compared to 26% in the placebo group not taking the treatment. In addition, patients on medication consumed an average of 1,026 grams of alcohol per month, which is a significantly lower figure considering that the control group drank 1,550 grams of alcohol. And they both thought they were taking the same treatment, although that was not the case. It’s not magic. To understand why this happens, we have to go to 2023, where a study showed that semaglutide, which is the active ingredient in Ozempic, binds directly to the nucleus accumbens of mice. By doing so, it suppresses the release of dopamine induced by alcohol consumption, suppressing the reward circuit that generates satisfaction when you drink a little alcohol and that is the effect that addicts seek. In this way, if alcohol does not generate that chemical “high”, the desire to consume it disappears. The limitations. Despite the enthusiasm that this may generate for having a new treatment against alcoholism, which is an addiction that has great negative effects, we must put the brakes on a little. At a technical level, we must keep in mind that 108 people is still a relatively small group to extrapolate the results to the entire population. Furthermore, all patients who participated in the study were obese and white, which limits the generalizability of the results to patients of normal weight or other ethnicities. And as if those were not enough limitations, it should be noted that the trial was funded by the drug manufacturers and does not have follow-up data beyond week 26. Images | freepik freepic.diller on Magnific In Xataka | We thought that quenching hunger with Ozempic was the definitive remedy against obesity. Until we look at the muscle

Two men thought it was a good idea to lend their houses to a North Korean laptop farm. It went wrong

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Teleworking has accustomed us to a very comfortable idea: if someone delivers work, attends meetings and responds to messages, perhaps it doesn’t matter too much where they do it from. The problem appears when that distance becomes an advantage to hide identities, move money and enter companies that believe they are hiring a legitimate professional. North Korea has been exploiting precisely that rift. And the case of two men convicted of hosting laptops in their homes shows the extent to which the plot could rely on domestic infrastructure. Two men condemned. Matthew Isaac Knoot, of Nashville, Tennessee, and Erick Ntekereze Prince, of New York, have been sentenced in the US to 18 months each in prison for their role in fraudulent schemes involving remote IT workers linked to North Korea. according to the Department of Justice. The house as a piece of the plot. The mechanism was more domestic than one might imagine. Companies shipped corporate laptops to American addresses because they believed the contracted workers were there. Once received, the computers were housed in those homes and configured with remote desktop applications installed without authorization. This allowed the fake workers to operate from abroad while, to the companies, the connection appeared to come from an address within the United States. What did each one do?. Prince, according to official information, facilitated at least three North Korean IT workers to obtain remote employment in US companies between June 2020 and August 2024, and used his company Taggcar Inc. to fraudulently supply “certified” workers, despite knowing that they were outside the US and using false or stolen identities. Knoot, for his part, operated a laptop farm from his Nashville residences between July 2022 and August 2023. Money, companies and damages. The Justice Department maintains that the two schemes together generated more than $1.2 million for North Korea and affected nearly 70 U.S. companies. In the Prince case, the companies paid more than $943,069 in salaries to IT workers linked to the file. In Knoot’s case, the payments exceeded $250,000. More than labor fraud. The US justice system presents the sentences as part of a specific line of action against facilitators located in the US. The note itself highlights that these are the seventh and eighth convictions of “laptop farmers” obtained in the last five months within their efforts to interrupt North Korea’s illicit generation of income. It is an important nuance: the focus is not only on those who connect from abroad, but also on the local network that makes the operation viable. Expansion into Europe. As we have seen in the pastthese cases are also present outside the United States. The Record discovered in April 2025 an investigation by Google Threat Intelligence Group according to which North Korean operatives had increased their activity in Europe following US police actions against laptop farms and financial networks. At the center were job searches linked to the United Kingdom, Germany and Portugal, in addition to the use of local facilitators to support the alibi of a work presence in the corresponding country. AI and fake identities. One of the most current layers of this story is not only in the laptops, but in the ease of building increasingly credible profiles. BISI points out that North Korean operations combine stolen identities, manipulated professional profiles and AI tools capable of writing localized CVs and cover letters. In the Old Continent, platforms such as Upwork and Freelancer are usually used, in addition to Telegram. The consequence is obvious: detecting the fake candidate can become much more difficult before the company even ships the equipment. What started with laptops housed in private homes ends up having something much bigger than a criminal conviction. The companies were not attacked from outside in the classic sense, but ended up opening the door to workers they believed to be legitimate. So everything seems to indicate that in these times it is no longer enough to protect servers, credentials or repositories, but rather to review the processes that we consider normal, such as the hiring of personnel. Images | Xataka with Grok In Xataka | The ‘vibe coding’ promised to democratize software. Your first gift is 5,000 apps with open sensitive data

I always thought that a Stream Deck was only for streamers. It turns out to be a gadget that saves you a lot of time every day

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It is not easy to work in front of a computer for many hours a day (whether at home or in the office). You spend the entire day browsing between documents, spreadsheets, files or writing emails and, just moving from one task to another, you already waste a lot of time. I really like the concept of ‘optimize workflow‘so that this does not happen (or happens little), but it is not easy at all. There are many ways to try to do this, although few are as visual as using a Stream Deck. Yes, that little device that many streamers have on their table and that seems to only serve to change scenes or cameras, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is a device that helps improve productivity in many waysand although there are a lot of models, my favorite is this Stream Deck Neo: right now it costs 84.99 euros. Elgato Stream Deck Neo – 8 customizable keys, 2 Touch Points, fly through your tasks and processes – Control Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Zoom, Spotify, etc. Easy setup – For Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Integrates with almost any software you use on a daily basis The idea of ​​the Stream Deck (of this specific model or any of the others that Elgato has) is the same: to have a panel that, with just the press of a button, simplifies tasks of all kinds. Let’s start with something simple: you can place buttons on a key to open the apps that you use most when working, such as an email manager, the browser or a Slack-type program. Or directly program a single button to open everything at once when you sit in front of the PC. In addition, it is a device that is very easy to install (it is basically plug and play) and configure. The software is also intuitive and allows us to customize the keys to the millimeter. Being compatible with software of all types, we can assign very specific keys to Photoshop, Excel or PowerPoint tools, for example. All, furthermore, with a very high degree of customization. I like this particular model for two things. The first of them is that it is compact and not as big as other models that Elgato has (which have more keys or even other types of buttons). The other is that it has two small touch panels that allow us to switch between the different “pages” of actions that we have configured. All of this means that we have a tool that will help us (a lot) to give a boost to our ‘workflow’. You also have other different Stream Deck models As I said above, there are different models of this gadget. In fact, this same year it released a keyboard in collaboration with Corsair that, directly, integrates a Stream Deck where the numeric keypad usually goes. Next, we leave you said keyboard and some different models of this Elgato gadget. Corsair Galleon 100 SD RGB Wired Mechanical Gaming Keyboard – Spanish QWERTY, Stream Deck Integration, Pre-Lubricated and Interchangeable MLX Pulse Key Switches, SOCD FlashTap, 8000Hz The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Elgato Stream Deck Mini – Control Zoom, Teams, PowerPoint, MS Office etc., increase your productivity with perfect integration with the most used apps, easily create shortcuts, compatible with Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Elgato Stream Deck +, Audio Mixer, Live and Studio Controller for Content Creation, Streaming, Gaming, with Touch Strip, Customizable LCD Dials and Keys, Works with Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Elgato Stream Deck XL – Advanced Studio Controller, 32 Macro Keys, Activates actions in apps and Software such as OBS, Twitch, Youtube and Others, Works on Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Elgato In Xataka | Best iPhones. Which one to buy in 2026 and recommended models based on budget, tastes and quality-price In Xataka | This is the gaming tower that I would buy. The computers with the best quality-price ratio for gaming recommended by Xataka

We thought that domestication shrank dogs’ brains forever. Now we know we were wrong

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When the first wolves began to approach human settlementsthey signed an evolutionary contract that would change their species forever. They gained easy food, warmth and protection, but in exchange they had to give up their brains, which have been reduced in size since we began to domesticate them, as science has pointed out. But this is changing now. From more to less. that the animals domestic have smaller brains than their wild ancestors is something already well known, but the “when”, the “how” and above all the “why” of this phenomenon were between two questions. But now a new study published HAL Open Science has managed to put a key date on this transformation, revealing that the brain “shrinkage” of dogs was already fully established in the late Neolithic. How it has been seen. To understand what happened inside the head of man’s best friend, the team of researchers did not limit itself to measuring the skulls with a tape measure, but used CT to analyze 22 prehistoric skulls dating from the Mesolithic to the late Neolithic in Western Europe, comparing them with 185 modern dog skulls, and using as a reference a 3D model of a wolf skull from the 19th century. The results. Here they were quite forceful when they saw that the Neolithic dogs already had an amazing 46% reduction in volume endoraneal compared to wolves. According to the data, these prehistoric French dogs had what we could call “miniature brains”, as a consequence of undergoing an evolutionary adaptation to new roles in agricultural settlements. And, by not having to hunt in nature, defend vast territories or be on constant alert against predators, the parts of the brain dedicated to extreme survival, which consume a lot of energy, simply ceased to be necessary. There are more culprits. Although this story sounds perfect, biology is more complex and that is why domestication is not the only factor highlighted here. Here, at do phylogenetic analyzes Comparing dogs to other wild canids, scientists found that older dog breeds fall within the “normal” brain size ranges expected for their body size. In fact, they suggest that there are ecological factors that can cause brain reductions even greater than domestication. The best example here is the raccoon dog, whose brain experiences drastic reductions linked to its hibernation periods to ‘save energy’. The script twist. If the story ended in the Neolithic, we would have an animal with an increasingly smaller brain without any type of limit. But here a recent study suggests that the modern dogs bred in the last 150 years They have relatively larger brains than their ancestors. That is, the downward trend has reversed. To understand this, we must keep in mind that humans have stopped using dogs solely as basic guardians or shepherds, and have begun to require them to perform more complex cognitive tasks, such as obeying orders, assisting humans with disabilities, drug detection, and other functions in our society. And it already shows. This has not only changed the size, but also the internal architecture of the brain, as seen in the MRIs performed on 85 dogs of different breeds that revealed abysmal differences between “primitive” and modern breeds. For example, dogs that are trainable have a much larger cut, and it makes sense because this is the area responsible for learning and decision-making. On the contrary, the most primitive and ancient races retain an expanded amygdala, which is the region linked to the processing of fear, instinct, and rapid survival responses. Some qualities that are essential to be able to hunt and respond to any type of threat. Images | Pauline Loroy In Xataka | We have been using our pets to relieve our anxiety. And now the stress is on them

Fed up with paying almost 8 euros for a Guinness, someone thought of setting up an index to find cheap beer

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How delicious is that little beer that you drink right after leaving work or after a paddle tennis game and how angry it is when you find out that they have raised the price. Matt Cortland He paid €7.80 for a pint of Guinness in Dublin in March 2026 and didn’t like it one bit (the price, not the beer). So instead of criticizing the waiter or posting a review on Google complaining like some people do, he adopted another strategy that was slightly more laborious but much more effective (judging by its results): a very complete price index where he would know where to drink the best and at what price. Because revenge, like beer, is served cold. The project. Is called Guinndex and is independent of the very famous Irish beer brand. You go to the website, enter a pub, a city, a county or a postcode in the box and it returns pubs and the cost of a pint, as well as useful information such as its location or its score. Or you zoom in on the map to see with a traffic light map which taverns look cheaper than others. A good way to save if you travel to Ireland and fancy a pint of Guinness. In fact, it has very diverse rankings ranging from how long it takes to earn a pint (depending on salary) to pubs named after animals or the best pub names (praise be the “Hairy Lemon”). Today it has almost 6,500 registered pubs in the 32 counties of the country and almost 1,300 prices verified and rising thanks to anonymous contributions from users. The price index for Dublin. Guinndex Why is it important. Because the Irish Central Statistics Office stopped tracking the price of a pint since 2011, leaving a data gap of more than a decade in a country where Guinness is much more than a beer. And although Guinness is almost a religion in Ireland, it is the same everywhere: no one knows for sure if they are overcharging you compared to the standard price or how much extra. The Guinndex fills that gap with real, verified data, not estimates. Furthermore, it does so publicly and for free, so that it allows obtaining an objective reference so that consumers have information and can put pressure on prices. It’s the market, friend. On the other hand, and leaving aside the anecdote of finding where to drink cheaper, what it shows is relevant: that the cost of carrying out a complex idea has plummeted and streamlined so much that a single dev is capable of setting up a project of this magnitude in just 48 hours when before it took weeks of work, a certain budget and a team. Context. Matt Cortland likes AI, data and Guinness, as he himself admits on the project website. He is an American engineer based in London with strong ties to Ireland: his partner is irishlived and trained there with the George Mitchell scholarship and course the Creative Digital Media master’s degree from TU Dublin. He is not just a tourist they are trying to scam. The project came at a critical time: Diageo, the company that owns Guinness, had applied several price rises in a row and some pubs had taken the opportunity to inflate margins. If you’re not careful, you can pay up to €11 for a pint, although the average price in Dublin is €6.94 and €6.06 nationwide. How has he done it. With an AI agent named Rachel who looked human, understood Irish humor, and had a Northern Irish accent (after several tests, she concluded that this worked best), as its author tells. The task was simple and quick: call, ask the price of a pint of Guinness, say thank you and hang up. Few people discovered that it was a chatbot and there were all kinds of responses, even waiters who offered to buy him a round. During the St. Patrick’s weekend he called 3,000 pubs, answered more than 2,000 calls and more than a thousand pubs provided a price: he already had the Guinndex base. The technical stack was jack, knight and king: the Google Maps API, ElevenLabs for the voice and agent logic, Twilio for making the phone calls, and Claude for extracting Guinness prices from the transcripts. Cortland explains What cost him the most was time, since he only invested about 200 euros. The consequences. The most immediate impact is behavioral: Cortland account that the owner of a pub lowered the price of his Guinness by 0.40 euros and then updated the information in the Guinndex himself. When there is price transparency and it is available to everyone, it is capable of changing behaviors. However, the biggest consequence is the technological moment in which we live: three APIs, 200 euros and a weekend are enough to build a project from scratch, with real utility and that is already changing prices. The bottleneck is no longer money or infrastructure: it is knowing what problem is worth solving. In Xataka | Spain can tell itself as many times as it wants that it hates Cruzcampo. The figures say a very different thing In Xataka | We humans like beer. The big question is whether we like it enough to have invented agriculture Cover | Guinndex and Christopher Zapf

We thought that AI was going to collapse the electrical grid. The solution is to “unplug” it 18 days a year

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Daily headlines bombard us with the insatiable hunger for Artificial Intelligence, painting a future where data centers will devour our infrastructure. However, reality hides a fascinating irony: the same technology that clutters cables today could be our greatest ally. According to estimates of DeloitteAI will optimize global systems saving more than 3,700 TWh by 2030, almost four times the energy consumed by all data centers on the planet combined. But to get to that stage, you first have to turn on the machines today. And the solution is surprisingly analog. Paweł Czyżak, from the Ember analysis center and one of the most authoritative voices in the European energy transition, sums it up with a simple idea: A data center does not need to operate at full power every hour of the year. In the face of system collapse, the industry’s new survival dogma is clear: “Connect now and operate flexibly.” The heart attack of the network. We have been victims of what we once defined as “tyranny of 24/7”. Algorithms do not sleep and demand uninterrupted supply. This voracity has caused a heart attack in the traditional data epicenters in Europe (the “FLAP-D” markets: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin), almost completely paralyzing new deployments. The bottleneck is no longer the latest generation microchips; transformers and free electrons are missing. Added to this physical collapse is the bureaucratic one. The European University Institute (EUI) warns that connection queues are a critical funnel: in countries such as the United Kingdom or Italy, the requested capacity exceeds the peak of national maximum demand by more than 10 times. All of this is aggravated by speculative “zombie” projects that block entry to legitimate developers. The obstacles are, as detailed in the recent study by Camus, encoord and Princeton ZERO Laba double wall: there is a lack of cables for day-to-day operations and a lack of clean capacity built to provide backup. Flexibility as a lifesaver. Is it possible to “turn off” part of the AI ​​brain without the system crashing? Yes. A recent trial led by Nebius, Emerald AI and National Grid showed that an AI cluster was able to cut its consumption by 30% in just 40 seconds to relieve the network, keeping critical tasks intact. Even Google already boasts of having reached 1 GW of “demand response” by combining batteries and the ability to move loads between regions. As Czyżak explainsmoving just 5% of the load (the equivalent of a few critical hours per year) unblocks the grid massively. In fact, this strategy would save more natural gas than a country like Denmark consumes in electricity generation, by preventing electricity companies from having to turn on expensive and polluting combined cycle plants to cover demand peaks. For its part, the Camus and Princeton report proposes to scale this with two mechanisms: Flexible connections: The center operates normally 99% of the time, but in the scarce 40 or 70 hours a year of extreme network saturation, it reduces its computing or draws on its own batteries. BYOC agreements (Bring Your Own Capacity): Big tech finances its own clean energy capacity instead of waiting for the state to modernize infrastructure. The combination is magical: it reduces the wait to connect to the network from 7 to just 2 years. For a technology company, this means starting to bill three years earlier, generating net returns of between 1,000 and 4,000 million dollars per site. The citizen will not pay the bill. On a social level, the transition towards this flexible model brings excellent news for the average citizen. The detailed modeling of Princeton’s ZERO Lab confirms that a flexible data center (under BYOC schemes) assumes practically all of the incremental costs it generates to the electrical system. In other words, the billions needed to host the cloud will not be transferred to household electricity bills. On the contrary, by making the most of the existing network instead of building massive new lines, the fixed costs are distributed among more actors. In Spain, organizations such as the CNMC are already applying “flexible access permissions”forcing by law to accept controlled cuts in emergencies to protect the stability of the country. The plug that will rule the world. In the frenetic geopolitical and business race to dominate the future of Artificial Intelligence, the narrative has changed. It is no longer enough to design the fastest microchip or have the most brilliant engineers. Today absolute victory belongs to whoever has a free plug. But rather than desperately burning gas or waiting a decade for governments to bury thousands of kilometers of copper, the industry has found a pragmatic way out. Demand flexibility from Big Tech Not only does it allow them to turn on their servers years earlier; It protects citizens’ bills, squeezes the infrastructure of the 20th century and banishes the dangerous ghost of a Europe forced to relapse into its old addiction to fossil fuels. Image | Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash Xataka | There is no energy for so many data centers and the consequence is clear: half of those planned for 2026 in the US are in danger

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