wanted

NASA wanted to keep a key antenna active. A culture of “personal heroism” ended up achieving the opposite

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There are infrastructures that seem made to escape the problems of the Earth. The Deep Space Network from NASA is one of them: a network of giant antennas designed to communicate with probes and ships that travel far beyond our immediate environment. But even a system designed to talk to deep space depends on something much closer: trained people, clear procedures and decisions made under pressure. What a space agency investigation has just pointed out is not only a costly breakdown, but a weakness that is difficult to ignore in a network that we take for granted. The Goldstone Incident. The episode occurred on the DSS-14 antenna, a 70 meter facility located in the Goldstone complexin California. NASA published a version with redacted parts of the final report on the incident recorded on September 16, 2025, which left the antenna out of service since then. The damage occurred when the structure rotated beyond its limits and stressed cables and hoses, including those for the fire suppression system. The consequence was a flooding of the base with more than 750,000 liters of water containing glycol and estimated damages between 4.1 and 4.6 million dollars. The incident chain. The report does not allow each step to be reconstructed with complete clarity, because the public version hides almost all the details of the six critical events identified by NASA. The failure did not appear suddenly. First there was a hydraulic limit system that stopped working at an unspecified time, then an anomaly on September 15 during a communication with Juno and then maintenance and diagnostic tasks. In this process, the antenna was taken several times to its rotation limits, until the safety margin ended up disappearing. The weak point. If this story is surprising, it is because it takes place in a place where we tend to imagine everything measured, written and reviewed down to the last detail. But the NASA investigation describes something much more earthly: insufficient training, procedures that were not up to par, and too much reliance on undocumented routines within the facility. In a network like the DSN, designed to maintain communications with very distant missions, this changes the reading of the incident. It was not just an antenna that turned too much, but an organization that, at that particular point, had left too much room for the informal. Misunderstood heroism. The report also points out a work culture based on what he calls “personal heroism,” an expression to describe teams willing to do what is necessary to keep the antenna going. On paper it sounds like a compromise, but research presents it as part of the problem. That drive led some people to take on tasks outside their qualifications, work long hours until they accumulated fatigue, and skip tests that could delay their return to operations. The conclusion is harsh: having agreed to leave the antenna in a failed state would probably have prevented the outcome. Specific duties. The report includes 20 recommendations, with one especially clear idea: NASA needs to encourage technical rigor over “personal heroism.” From there, internal correction measures come in, such as reinforcing training and reviewing procedures. Additionally, the agency is looking for similar scenarios beyond the Deep Space Network itself. Deep Space Network. DSS-14 is not just any antenna within the Deep Space Network. It is one of the three 70-meter antennas in the network, the largest category within a system made up of 14 antennas distributed between California, Australia and Spain. In early 2026, it looked like the antenna would return to service in May, before being taken out of operation in August for a major upgrade scheduled until October 2028. NASA, however, now maintains that it will remain out of service, although the DSN will remain operational thanks to the other antennas in the network. Images | POT In Xataka | Voyager 1 will reach a light-day distance in November, but this will be its last major record

Tesla wanted to have its autonomous driving system throughout Europe this summer. Sweden just made it very difficult for them

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The famous supervised autonomous driving system of Tesla (FSD) has crossed the Atlantic and is already preparing to circulate on European roads. However, the strategy does not seem to be going as well as the company would have liked, since it has run into regulators again. In this case, Sweden and its speed limits. Below these lines we tell you all the details. Arrival in Europe. It all started last April, when the Dutch traffic authority (RDW) approved the use of FSD in the Netherlandsbecoming the first European country to give the green light to the system. Since then, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania and Estonia have followed suit with national approvals of their own. Tesla needed to gain traction in this way in its first European countries and that is what it has done. Now the next step is to obtain approval valid for the entire European bloc. And that’s more complicated than it seems. For FSD to circulate legally throughout the EU, the Technical Committee for Motor Vehicles (TCMV) you should vote for it with a qualified majority, with at least 15 of the 27 member states representing 65% of the community population. The committee is scheduled to meet June 30 to discuss the matter before a formal vote. Speed ​​limit. FSD includes a function called “Speed ​​Offset” that allows the driver to set a margin above the legal speed limit, so that the system itself drives exceeding that limit. In the United States, Tesla offered this under names like ‘Sloth’ or ‘Mad Max’. In Europe, those profiles have disappearedbut the possibility of exceeding the limit is still there under another name. Who says no, and why. The Swedish Transport Administration (TRV) sent a letter to the TCMV in April recommending voting against the FSD expansion if Tesla does not remove that feature. According to the document, obtained by Reuters“allowing automated systems to systematically exceed legal speed limits poses risks that undermine both the legal framework and the expected benefits of vehicle automation.” Finland and Norway have also been skeptical of the introduction of the system in their countries, although they have not yet formalized their position before the committee. What Tesla answers. The company has not commented publicly on the matter, but its user manual points out that drivers should not rely solely on the system to comply with speed limits and that they should drive “at a safe speed based on traffic and road conditions.” Their implicit argument is that FSD is a supervised system, as the driver remains responsible and can take control at any time. For Estonia, this reasoning has been sufficient to approve the system at the national levelalthough the country has not yet defined its vote in the TCMV. There is more at stake than speed. Various regulators have questioned also the performance of the system in extreme conditions with heavy snow (something common in Nordic countries) and the name “Full Self-Driving” itself, which could be misleading about the real level of autonomy of the vehicle. In fact, the European version already shows “FSD (Supervised)” on the screen instead of the full name, precisely to reduce that ambiguity. Additionally, Reuters public A few days ago, Tesla reportedly presented questionable safety data to European regulators, including the claim that FSD could have “saved 32,000 lives,” something that has not caught on, at least according to share Electrek. What is at stake Tesla. Tesla sales in Europe have plummeted significantly since 2025partly due to the impact of Elon Musk’s fleeting political activity, and the flood of new Chinese brands that have disrupted the sector. In fact, BYD has been outperforming him in registrations for several consecutive months. Tesla needs new arguments to regain ground, and FSD was one of them. Musk even publicly predicted that It would be available throughout the EU this summer. At the moment it seems difficult to achieve. In Xataka | Ferrari wants your car to charge itself in the sun while parked. One of his patents explains how

Haiti wanted an epic jersey for their return to the World Cup. He has managed to piss off FIFA and make everyone talk about Poland

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Toward more than half a century that Haiti was not participating in the World Cup and yet, ironies of history, in the country (and the sports press of the rest of the planet) they are not talking about their players or their chances of success today in their debut match against Scotland. What is being talked about is his t-shirt. About its meaning, its colors, what exactly its designers wanted to capture in it and whether FIFA has acted well by demanding Haiti to change it. To understand it you have to go back to the 19th century. What has happened? We don’t know how Haiti will fare its world premiere today against Scotland (the match is played at 9:00 p.m. ET in Boston), what we do know is that, no matter what happens, their participation in the FIFA Cup is already football history. First because it did 52 years that the Caribbean nation did not qualify for the tournament. In fact, he had only achieved it once. in 1974when he participated (with little success) in the World Cup in West Germany. The second reason is that, even before the ball began to bounce on Thursday at the Azteca stadium, Haiti was already one of the teams with the most headlines in the World Cup. And the reason is surprising: his uniform. Or rather, a detail in the lower right corner of his shirt that FIFA did not like. What is the shirt like? We could see the shirt of the Haitian team a few days agoduring the friendly match that played on Friday the 5th against Peru. The design has also been shown in the profiles of the Haitian Football Federation (FHF) or even in the official website of FIFA. Also in publications of Saeta, the clothing brand Colombian sports that took on the challenge to shape the uniform and that at the end of 2025 he was already thinking about the design and its details. On March 28, the company finally published a post on his Instagram account in which the three Haitian team shirts could be seen: one blue (home), another white (visitor) and a third red. A nod to the colors of the country’s flag and two concepts: the sea and passion. Otherwise, the design was very simple: red collar and sleeve ends with a white stripe, the FHF shield at chest level, the Saeta brand… and a kind of very faint illustration, made up of shadowed silhouettes, at the level of the right hip. What does that flag mean? The image in question shows a group of men with a clearly highlighted silhouette in the foreground holding a flag. The key is… What colors does that banner look like? If we look at the t-shirts with a white or red background, it seems that the flag shows a blue stripe on a red stripe, the colors of Haiti. If we look at the shirt with a blue background, the bluish part of the flag however fades so much that it appears white. That last was the option the team used in your game on friday 5 against Peru and automatically led some to see a nod from the Caribbean nation to Poland. Is it really like that? A tweet from the 9th that ended up going viral points in that direction and many other international media (generalists and sports) have jumped on the bandwagon by publishing that, indeed, the Haitian shirt includes a deliberate tribute to Poland. Others believe that if the flag appears white and red (an effect that occurs in the home kit, but not in the others) it is the result of a factory error. In recent days they have circulated on networks voices who insisted on one and another version: intended tribute either optical illusion. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Poland, for the sake of what? If the doubts had been pointed towards the flag of the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, the United States, Japan or any other nation on the planet, they would probably have been cleared up soon, but not with Poland. The reason is very simple: with history books in hand, Haiti has reason to be grateful to the Poles. To understand it we have to go back to the beginning of the 19th century, more specifically to the Battle of Vertieres (1803), in which the Haitian revolutionaries defeated Napoleon’s troops, ended colonial rule and cleared the way for Haiti to achieve its independence. In that episode the Poles played an unexpected role. What role? Its role was explained in 2003 by Dr. Zdzislaw Wesolowski in a speech pronounced in the USA: in 1802 5,000 Poles from a legion attached to the French army were transferred to the Caribbean to quell the uprising in the colony of Saint-Dominguethe current Haiti and Dominican Republic. It is assumed that many fought on the side of France for Napoleon’s promise to restore freedom to his Poland. Shortly after arriving in the Caribbean, however, the Poles began to disobey the command and joined the rebels. At the end of 1803, in Verières, allies were already fighting with Jean-Jacques Dessalineswho proclaimed the independence of Haiti shortly after, in January 1804. What do we know about the happy shirt? When he started thinking about the design, in December 2025, Saeta explained that he was “collecting ideas, cultural references and identity elements” to “create an authentic and representative garment.” He wanted to “reflect the history, energy and resilience of the town.” With that starting point, it is supposed that the silhouettes located on the right hip refer to the Ballata de Viertières and the Haitian Revolution. One of his iconic moments actually came when Dessalines tore the white stripe off a French tricolor flag to create the banner of the first republic free black, an episode that was celebrated every May 18. What has FIFA said? Whether it represents one thing or another, whether its effect is more or less intended, … Read more

The Trump Mobile T1 wanted to be the quintessential American mobile. It has turned out to be an absolutely Chinese mobile

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Donald Trump was determined that Apple will build the iPhone in the United States and he managed to get them to take steps in that direction, but it soon became clear that the 100% American iPhone was a utopia. Things didn’t go as planned, so he did something very Trump: announce its own smartphone made in the USA. After almost a year since its announcement, the Trump Mobile T1 is already has reached the hands of several analysts and the conclusion is that nothing American. The mobile phone is an old acquaintance and It is mostly made in China. An HTC U24 Pro with a coat of paint It is the summary of what they have discovered after analyzing it in detail in iFixit. The mobile phone that promised to be 100% manufactured in the United States is an almost carbon copy of the HTC U24 Prowith the main difference that its back cover is gold and has the American flag engraved with the text ‘Trump Mobile’. The differences come down to color, the camera module and little else There are other cosmetic changes, such as the speaker grill having a different pattern and the camera module having a different design, with an oval piece encompassing the three lenses (which by the way is completely misaligned in the photos on the official website). At the specifications level, the only change is that the battery is a little larger than in the original HTC, but it loses the 60W fast charge and is left with only 30W. At the internal design level, iFixit says that matches point by point with the original HTC model: same component layout, same motherboard and same screen. In terms of specifications, the HTC U24 Pro was launched in summer 2024, so it does not have the most cutting-edge features. We are talking about a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of capacity and a 6.78-inch screen (although the Trump Mobile website says it is 6.8 inches). Made in China, assembled in the USA (or almost) First of all, it should be noted that the mobile was announced as “designed and built in the United States”, but In January of this year they lowered the promise by others like “designed with American values ​​in mind” or “proudly assembled in the USA.” This already gave clues of what was to come and the iFixit breakdown confirms it: it is very little American. In 2017, HTC sold a large part of its smartphone division to Googleabandoning frontline manufacturing. Since then, HTC has turned to Chinese ODMs to be able to manufacture and assemble its phones. Although they have not confirmed it directly, according to The Verge investigation Everything indicates that the HTC U24 Pro is manufactured in Guangdong Yuanchang Electronics, located in (surprise) Guangdong, China. According to Trump Mobile, the device is assembled in Miami, Florida. Specifically, they say the phone is assembled from “about ten pieces,” which is just enough for the FTC to allow them to use the label. ‘assembled in the USA’. To achieve ‘made in USA’ status that Trump so desired, the FCT is much stricter and requires that “all significant processing” and “all or substantially all” components be manufactured in the United States. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | In its quest to manufacture the iPhone at home, the US has achieved something historic: that the majority of its smartphones come from India

Greece wanted to put AI to monitor traffic. The problem came when the fines had to be reviewed

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Putting cameras with artificial intelligence to monitor traffic sounds, on paper, like an almost inevitable solution: less paperwork, more speed and an administration capable of detecting violations without depending on an agent being in the right place. The problem appears when that promise comes down to the asphalt and what we have seen in Greece forces us to ask a much more difficult question for any automated system: what happens when the machine flags a possible infraction, but then someone has to check if it really existed. The problem. Ta Nea published a figure which forces us to look at the system from the inside, not only in terms of the fines that reach the driver. According to the Greek media, during the pilot phase the percentage of failures or incorrect registrations would have reached between 90% and 95%. The scale helps to understand the problem: of 5,500 records generated by the system, only 400 were validated as correct after review by the Greek Police. The remaining cases included 1,300 cases attributed to cell phone use and 3,800 due to speeding that were eventually discarded. The key. The Greek system provides for a long chain: cameras record a possible infringement, this information goes through validation by the competent authority and only then can it be broadcast and digitally notified to the citizen. That is why Ta Nea’s data is so relevant. It does not simply point to drivers who resort after receiving a sanction, but to a previous bottleneck: a huge amount of records that the system generates and that the Police have to review before considering them good. New violation management model. Greece has a pilot phase since the end of March the Digital Traffic Violations Certification System, designed to gradually replace handwritten fines with a digital registration and processing process. In this first stage, two main sources intervene: the cameras of the public transport company OSY in the bus lanes, aimed at traffic and parking violations, and the network of “smart” cameras linked to the Ministry of Digital Governance. Then comes another plane. Until May 30, 2026, according to Euronewsthe new mechanism had generated 2,453 digital fines, for which 420 allegations were presented, 17.12% of the total. Of those claims, 52 were accepted, equivalent to 2.11% of all fines issued. Most of the accepted cases were related to technical or procedural issues, such as time differences, difficult-to-read data or exceptions linked to seat belt use. The distinction. One thing is the records that the camera generates and that must then go through police review before becoming a valid sanction. Another thing is the fines that have already passed that filter, have been issued, have been notified to the citizen and can then be the subject of allegations. In other words: the system has a human review before the fine arrives, but that does not prevent some drivers from continuing to appeal sanctions that had already gone through that circuit. Conflict point. As explained by a transportation expert cited by Ta Nea, the failure would not be so much in external violations as in those that occur inside the vehicle. Running a red light or driving over the speed limit can be recorded more faithfully, while detecting whether someone is wearing a seatbelt or using a cell phone depends on much more variable factors. Shadows, colors, camera angles or objects such as a cigarette can alter the reading and turn a questionable image into an alleged infringement. Images | Greek Ministry of Digital Governance In Xataka | A German driver set out to discover how much he could stretch the tank of his old diesel car. And he has done 2,400 kilometers

AI chips have always wanted to become more and more powerful. TSMC has just pointed out the true limit: efficiency

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More performance? It is the first thing we usually ask of a new chip, almost without thinking about it. We have done it for years with the processors in our devices and we do it now with the chips that support much of the deployment of AI. More computing power, more speed, more scope to do things that previously seemed out of reach. But this logic begins to encounter a very specific limit: energy. What is making its way now is a less flashy idea, but increasingly difficult to ignore: progress will not only be measured by how much a chip calculates, but also by how much energy it needs to do it. The clearest clue comes from TSMC. We are talking about the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world, a company that does not sell processors under its own brand, but rather produces semiconductors designed by other players in the industry. According to ReutersKevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development, explained at a conference in Amsterdam that his customers are paying more and more attention to performance improvements that do not increase consumption. The pressure comes from very different profiles, from smartphone manufacturers to AI data center operators, all with a concern that we have seen growing in recent times: electricity cost and energy availability. The key is in the manufacturing. TSMC has not simply described a change in priorities. He has also placed it on his technological calendar with A14a future manufacturing technology planned around 2028. The firm expects that this process offers more than a 20% improvement in performance and, at the same time, reduces consumption by up to 30% compared to N2, the process that the company takes as a reference in that comparison. The key is that we are not talking about a specific processor, but rather the method with which subsequent chips can be manufactured. Not everything is about miniaturizing. For decades, reducing the size of transistors has been one of the great ways to gain performance and efficiency in chips. That logic doesn’t go away: transistor density remains within TSMC’s roadmap. What Zhang points out is that in the face of energy pressure from AI, other solutions, such as advanced packaging, chip stacking, and photonics, are also gaining weight. In parallel, as we pointed out a few weeks agoTSMC has decided not to use High-NA EUV, the lithography associated with ASML’s most advanced and ambitious equipment, in its A13 and A12 processes planned for 2029. The battle is also in the data. Huawei enters this conversation with Tau Scaling Lawa proposal that seeks to improve performance by accelerating the movement of data within the chips. The idea shifts part of the focus from the transistor to architecture and integration, two areas that gain weight when manufacturing smaller components is not enough. Along the same lines appears LogicFolding, which Huawei presents as a possible step beyond traditional 3D stacking, but which will depend on new design tools for folded architectures and better dissipation solutions for devices ranging from smartphones to AI data centers. Where are we going? TSMC does not speak for the entire industry, but its position makes the message carry. The firm suggests that, at least in its roadmap and in conversations with its clients, energy efficiency is gaining prominence that was previously more hidden behind performance. And it’s not a concern limited to AI data centers. Huawei, for its part, shows that the problem is also being addressed from architecture and integration, not just from the manufacturing process. The common point is not a closed conclusion, but an increasingly visible tension: chips will have to continue to be more capable, but each leap will be more difficult to justify if it increases consumption, heat or costs. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | Samsung has just achieved a milestone that has not been recorded for eight years. The problem is that it is a mirage

Mexico wanted to end telephone anonymity. SIMs are already being sold with someone else’s identity on the black market

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He Mexican government made the decision to end the anonymity of cell lines and thus put an end to telephone extortion. The goal is for each number to be linked to a person by June 30; after that date, all unregistered lines will be disconnected. The problem is that on the black market there is already a way to circumvent this rule. What is happening. They tell it in Xataka Mexico following a newspaper investigation Millennium. In the historic center of CDMX anyone can buy a SIM card already activated under the identity of another person, without having to leave their personal data. It costs 200 pesos and can be done in minutes. He modus operandi. The official process To register a mobile line, you must provide your identification document or passport and perform biometric identification using a selfie video. The sellers of these SIMs take a photo of the barcode on the card and send it via WhatsApp. In a few moments, the fraudulent registration is done and they even offer a guarantee if there is a problem. All for 200 pesos: 100 pesos for the SIM and 100 pesos for the procedure. A striking detail is that the majority of SIMs sold with this method are from Movistar. Deepfakes. Although it is not clear how registration is carried out, it has already been confirmed that the identification system is not infallible. As reported in The Countrythe system cannot distinguish between a real person or a deepfake made with AI, so registration can be done on behalf of anyone simply by having their data and a photo. False lines have even been registered using the senator’s data Gerardo Fernández Norona. Fear of identity theft. There is another problem with line logging related to trust. Many citizens flee from the registry for fear that their personal data will end up on the black market. It is not an unfounded fear, it is something that already happened in a previous attempt to create a database with mobile phones in 2008. The initiative was called Renaut and ended up being eliminated in 2011 after complete databases were leaked and sold on the black market. Later, in 2022, the Supreme Court invalidated another attempt because it considered it violated the right to privacy. Massive line losses. This distrust has had an impact on telephone companies’ numbers. Many prepaid users have preferred to let their lines die rather than comply with this obligation. Taking into account that in Mexico more than 80% of the market is prepaid, this translates into massive line losses. In the first quarter of the year, AT&T Mexico lost a whopping 577,000 lines, while Telcel lost 483,000. With contract users there is not so much resistance since when signing with the operator the personal data has already been delivered. An unreal goal. The government is putting pressure with advertising campaigns to get registration done before the deadline, but it does not seem realistic that they will achieve it. As of May 19, there were registered 49.5 million lineswhich represents 30.7% of the total, which is about 160 million lines. As we said, if the plan continues as planned, all lines that have not been registered before June 30 will be disconnected. Image | PublicDomainPicturesedited In Xataka | Not content with flooding your email, spam and scams are now arriving in your mailbox.

In 1972 Italy wanted to put an entire city in a one kilometer building. Half a century later he is still paying the consequences

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The same year that construction of the Corviale complex began, US authorities began demolition by Pruitt–Igoea gigantic public housing complex that had been presented just two decades earlier as the future of the modern city. The coincidence was almost symbolic: while one country demolished one of its great urban utopias, another began to build a new one. A city within a building. During the 1970s, Italy believed it could solve several urban problems at once. Rome was growing rapidly, peripheral neighborhoods were multiplying and public housing was facing increasing demand. The answer It was the Corvialea gigantic residential structure almost a kilometer long designed to house around 8,500 people. Its architect, Mario Fiorentino, did not simply imagine a block of flats, but a authentic linear city where streets would be corridors, squares would emerge from common spaces and daily services would coexist with homes. That vision was intended to demonstrate that architecture could reorganize urban life from its foundations. A utopia that was never completed. The problem appeared before the project was even finished being built. The company in charge of the works went bankrupt in 1982 and many of the essential elements of the original design never came to fruition. The famous middle floor used for shops, offices, services and community spaces was left empty and ended up being occupied by families looking for a place to live. What was to become the social heart of the complex ended up becoming a housing labyrinth improvised. Many of the planned facilities were also never built, leaving the infrastructure that was to turn the building into a self-sufficient city incomplete. When architecture conditions everyday life. Over the years, Corviale began to demonstrate that buildings are not simple containers where people live. Its long corridors, its few entrances, the complex interior circulation and the enormous scale of the complex began to influence the way in which the residents they were related to each other. The elevators are They broke down constantlyforcing thousands of people to travel long distances to enter or leave their homes. The centralized heating system caused conflicts between residentsirregular occupants and administrations on who should bear the costs. Some researchers even described the building as a small town whose governance problems were directly linked to its physical characteristics. From the symbol of the future to the symbol of failure. As the deterioration progressed, Corviale began to accumulate a reputation increasingly negative. For many he became the perfect example of the excesses of urbanism postwar monumental. Its critics described it as a concrete monster, a residential prison or an example of how certain urban planning ideologies had ignored people’s real needs. Illegal occupations, maintenance problems, the presence of criminal activities and institutional abandonment reinforced this perception. for years proposals arose to tear it down completely and replace it with smaller-scale traditional neighborhoods, connected by streets, squares and buildings closer to human dimensions. Giuditto Miele at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Corviale complex The battle to decide your destiny. However, Corviale was never demolished. Unlike many other large post-war European housing estates, managed to survive to demolition attempts. Part of the explanation lies in its increasing symbolic value. What for some was an urban failure, for others represented an unrepeatable piece of Italian architectural history. The building ended up getting heritage protection and became part of the national debate about what to do with the great utopias of the 20th century. The discussion stopped focusing solely on whether the project had worked or not and became a more complex question: how to transform such a gigantic structure without destroying it. Half a century of reforms to correct an idea. The last decades have been marked by an almost constant succession of regeneration projects. International competitions, neighborhood associations, architects and public administrations have tried adapt the complex to current needs. Some interventions have regularized occupied spaces, others have rehabilitated common areas and several seek to recover the pedestrian scale through new public spaces and green areas. No other residential complex in Rome has received public investment so intense and prolonged. The paradox in this case is more than evident: the building that was born to simplify urban life has become one of the most complex regeneration operations in the city. Consequences of a big bet. The story del Corviale It continues to fascinate because it transcends architecture. It is the story of a time that believed that social problems could be solved through great physical solutions and a city that continues to deal with the consequences of that bet. The building, by the way, still standinginhabited by thousands of people and subjected to continuous transformations. For some it demonstrates the limits of grand urban visions, for others, the ability of a community to adapt to an unfinished project. The truth is that half a century later, Rome continues to dedicate resources, time and energy to managing a structure designed to function as a complete city. And perhaps that is the clearest proof that Corviale never stopped being exactly that: a city enclosed within a building. Image | Wikimedia, Umberto RotundoAlessandro Pace In Xataka | In 1970 Japan built homes of the future where each capsule would be replaceable. Half a century later he discovered that no one knew how to repair them In Xataka | The incredible story of the tallest building on the planet that ended up becoming the largest swimming pool in the Soviet Union

Amazon wanted its employees to continue using AI. They have just cut their losses by asking that “you do not use AI just for the sake of using it”

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Amazon wanted to force its employees They will use AI as if there were no tomorrow. It implemented a tool that measured that usage, but after a few weeks the company realized something: people were using AI for absurd and worthless tasks. That has made Amazon make a decision forceful: abandon this initiative completely. what has happened. Amazon has had to cancel an experiment that measured the performance of its employees based on their use of corporate AI tools. The reason is simple: the engineers had begun to cheat and took the opportunity to automate completely useless and redundant tasks with the sole objective of climbing positions in the ranking. The labor scam has also absurdly increased the computing and infrastructure costs of the company itself, so the experiment has failed. The controversial Kirorank. The service in question was a scoreboard internally named Kirorank. It measured the activity of Amazon developers within Kiro, the “Claude Code of Amazon.” Amazon management wanted 80% of its programmers to use AI every week, an ambitious goal. What the developers ended up doing to score points with their bosses was deploying autonomous agents based on MeshClaw —the version of OpenClaw from Amazon—so that they would run processes in a loop and devour tokens for almost no purpose. The era of tokenmaxxing. Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell had to intervene this week before the staff to announce that developers no longer had to use this tool. Although he admitted that the experiment had originally been designed with “good intentions,” the practical result ended up being an economic hole due to the tokenmaxxingthat newly coined term that defines the action of artificially inflating the consumption of tokens to simulate productivity. “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” the executive demanded of his engineers, urging them to focus on creating better products instead of burning server resources. Cost through the roof. Treadwell’s announcement is no small matter, because this shows that companies have realized that cost control is necessary with AI. Companies like Anthropic—of which Amazon is the largest investor and whose Claude model they use intensively—have recently migrated from flat monthly fees to a per-use pricing model based strictly on token consumption. With this new billing scheme, the fact that the engineers dedicated themselves to “playing” with the bots to rise in the ranking significantly multiplied the bill that Amazon had to pay. Meta suffered the same problem. The Amazon case is not an isolated event. In the Meta and Microsoft offices identical situations have been experiencedwith employees sabotaging internal AI usage rankings through massive token consumption. The irony for Amazon is tremendous: the company has been executing waves of massive layoffs to cut costs and be able to finance its gigantic investment plan in data center infrastructure and AI. Your theoretical capex for 2026 It is estimated at 200,000 million dollars. Lesson learned: AI must be used well. The failure of this “gamification” of work has ended with Amazon abandoning this experiment. To prevent developers from cheating again, a company team is going to change metrics. Instead of measuring raw token consumption, they will analyze so-called “normalized deployments.” From now on, the goal will be to measure how many times the interaction with AI results in useful lines of code that are truly integrated into the company’s products. In Xataka | Customers demand that a human solve their problem. The surprising thing is that if humans serve them they think they are an AI

Samsung has made a lot of money from the memory crisis and its employees wanted their cut. Result: bonus of $340,000

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Employees at Samsung’s chip division were in high gear. And it is logical: your company is becoming gold thanks to the rise of data centers for AI. The demand for memory chips is extraordinary and that has caused Samsung’s market capitalization to skyrocket over a billion dollars. The company, yes, was being very selfish, but the threat of a strike He has made her see reason. The bonus of the crisis. Samsung Electronics workers have ratified a multimillion-dollar compensation agreement. One that will see employees of the semiconductor division receive an average bonus estimated at 513 million won (about $340,000). Agreement in extremis. The vote was approved by 74% of members of the majority union, and was closed in extremisbecause there were 90 minutes left before an indefinite strike began that threatened to paralyze this giant’s supply chains. The risk was too high. This agreement avoids a scenario that would have been catastrophic for the AI ​​industry. Samsung is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the worldand its modules power everything from mobile phones and electric vehicles to the GPUs used in AI data centers. Considering that the market is already stressed by the memory crisis and demand that far exceeds supply, adding this bottleneck would have had unforeseeable consequences. Only Saudi Aramco surpasses Samsung in estimated operating profits for 2026. Source: Bloomberg. Memory chips are pure gold. Samsung is on its way to close one of the most profitable years in its history, and its semiconductor division already indicated that its profits had multiplied by 48 in the first quarter of the year, an absolutely extraordinary figure. She is not the only one taking advantage of this phenomenon: SK Hynix and Micron They have broken the trillion-dollar market capitalization barrier for the first time. Some so much and others so little. Although the agreement has avoided a logistical disaster, it has also caused a very uncomfortable situation internally. The bonuses are linked to the financial performance of each business unit, which means that the 28,000 members of the chip division have benefited significantly, but the rest of the company has not. The differences are clear: Engineers in that division will receive bonuses of up to 600 million won ($400,000). They will share 40% of the total allocated as bonuses. Personnel in divisions such as home appliances or telephony will receive a testimonial bonus of just 6 million won ($4,000). They share 60% of the bonus, but there are many more in number, about 260,000 in total. The average salary of Samsung employees in 2025 was 158 million won (about $105,000) according to internal company information published in March. Unions divided. This asymmetry of 100 to 1 has caused great tensions to appear between departments, and this has also been noted in the negotiation and conversations in the union. While the majority bloc (which included the majority of workers in the semiconductor division) supported the agreement with more than 80% of the votes, the secondary union, which brings together employees from other divisions, rejected the document with only 21% of votes in favor. TM Roh takes action. The situation is so worrying that TM Roh, head of the device division, has sent an internal statement to try to calm things down. He has admitted that the results of the negotiation have left thousands of employees feeling “alienated, dispossessed and hurt by the company.” Top management has promised to monitor the conditions of each unit, but while Samsung has managed to control the chaos in its factories, it could have an even more disturbing problem on its hands. Image | Wikimedia Commons (Choi Kwang-mo), IntelUnsplash (Liam Briese) In Xataka | Samsung has just achieved a milestone that has not been recorded for eight years. The problem is that it is a mirage

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