years

“It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to be silent”

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Whether or not you are part of their legion of userssomething must be recognized about X, the old Twitter: it has become a gigantic social laboratory. Also definitive proof that it is often less difficult for people to open their mouths (or type) than to think beforehand about what we are going to use them for. It doesn’t matter that it’s the last game of the League, the war in Iran, a video of kittens or issues as sensitive as euthanasia: There will always be someone willing to take out their phone and share their opinion, even if that opinion has just been formed. Hence in this world verbose Ernest Hemingway resonates strongly: “It takes two years to learn to speak and 60 to learn to be silent.” Speak and be silent. The history of Philosophy (thus, with capital letters) is full of good ideas… and suggestive phrases of uncertain origin and dubious attribution. We have told it more times. A quick Google search arrives to find alleged statements by Marcus Aurelius, Da Vinci or Marie Curie (among a very long list of thinkers) whose authorship is impossible to confirm. Something similar happens with the sentence that concerns us today. We have been putting the phrase “It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to be silent” on Hemingway’s lips for decades when in reality it is impossible to know if he ever uttered it. In 2019 Quote Researcher tried to confirm it and came to three conclusions. First, it dates back to at least 1909, when Hemingway was still a boy from Illinois. Second, that it has been associated (with variants) with other intellectuals, including Mark Twain either Lydia Allen DeVilbiss. Third, it is very difficult to go beyond the two previous conclusions. The value of each word. In view of all the above, we might ask ourselves why pay attention to a proverb of diffuse authorship. The answer is simple. Perhaps we cannot confirm if it came from Hemmingway’s lips (or pen), but it certainly connects with the style of a novelist who was characterized by concise sentences and maximum economy of language. In the works of Hemingway every word counts. And that is also a valuable lesson if we think about the fact that humanity (or at least a large part of it) has never had it so easy when it comes to expressing its opinions and participating in public debate. The torrent of public opinion is so powerful that it has even overflowed and has been carried forward the 140 characters of Twitter. In defense of silence. If Hemingway’s supposed phrase has been captivating us for more than a century, it is not only because of its ironic point. To a large extent it also connects with an idea that has permeated philosophy since the time of Pythagoras, to whom another similar phrase is attributed: “Listen, you will be wise”. People express themselves naturally. It is part of our elemental baggage, which we develop during the first years of life along with other skills such as walking. The complicated thing, in fact, is to do the opposite: embrace silence. In silence you think, reflect and listen, tasks that often require active effort. “It takes sixty years to learn to be silent,” reminds us Hemingway sarcastically, implying that silence is a complex virtue that we must work on and takes a lifetime to master. Is it that important? Yes. Educated in a world in which from a very young age we are instilled that ‘he who remains silent grants’ it is easy to forget it, but silence is sometimes an art. To begin with, it requires self-control. It is not always easy to remain silent. As they comment our colleagues TrendsIt also requires discipline, tolerance and a certain dose of humility and generosity. Against polarization. In exchange, silence offers us other things. It leaves us more room for reflection, to form more informed opinions and, above all, to measure our words and avoid regrets. In the age of networks, the debate held from anonymity and with society increasingly polarizedalso helps to ask certain questions: Can I contribute something to the conversation? Am I sure of what I’m going to say or will I just contribute to generating noise? What repercussions might what I say have on others? The virtues of silence and contemplation have been defended by many thinkers throughout history, from Pythagoras to the Stoics (including Epictetus either Marcus Aurelius) to the great humanists of the Renaissance. Even neuroscience has endorsed the advantages of giving yourself some time before opening your mouth. I already said it Aristotle himself in another equally ingenious phrase: “The Wise Man never says everything he thinks, but he always thinks everything he says.” Images | Wikipedia 1 and 2 Via | Trends In Xataka | “A place of joy with pain”: the phrase that summarizes the Aztec philosophy to be happier in this life

Cinema has been accusing Netflix and Amazon of suffocating it for years. Now it has new saviors: Netflix and Amazon

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In Las Vegas, before thousands of theater owners, the head of Amazon MGM Studios promised that at least 15 of its films a year would reach theaters. He did so days after Netflix, which has been avoiding cinemas for years, announced that it will respect traditional exhibition windows for Warner Bros. films, thus building new bridges of understanding with its former enemies, traditional cinemas. Coincidence or highly studied public relations move? 15 a year doesn’t hurt. Mike Hopkins, director of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, He was very direct with the exhibitors: “While some competitors have entered and exited the theatrical waters, for us this is neither a test nor an experiment. Our commitment to release at least 15 films each year in your theaters is underway.” The theater owners responded with a standing ovation. Amazon backs this promise with figures: they have been announcing for some time an investment of $1 billion annually in movies for theaters. The ‘Hail Mary’ gift. Immediately afterwards, Ryan Gosling spoke. The actor and producer of ‘Salvation Project’the science fiction film that has been dominating the global box office for weeks, thanked the exhibitors for their decisive role in the film’s success. He later said that the production, which has accumulated more than $525 million at the global box office, was going to extend its exhibition window, delaying its arrival on digital platforms. A true gift of good will for a sector that appreciates any oxygen cylinder. In the other corner. On the other hand we have Netflix. In April 2025, his co-CEO Ted Sarandos described going to the movies as “an outdated concept”. Obviously, given the platform’s trend-setting power, the statement did not sit particularly well with exhibitors. Months later, when Netflix announced its intention to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for around 80,000 million dollars, the alarm became something more concrete: the main studio committed to the exhibition passed into the hands of the platform most hostile to traditional cinema. Collect cable. Sarandos partially retreated in January 2026 in an interview: “When this deal closes, we will have a phenomenal theatrical distribution engine that generates billions of dollars of theatrical revenue that we do not want to put at risk. We will manage that business as it is today, with 45-day windows.” He clarified his comment about “outdated” cinema: he was referring to locations without access to theaters, not to the experience itself. Internally, suspicions did not subside: according to the CEO of the Cinemark chainNetflix intended to approach a window of only 17 days. Cinemas are improving. The point is that a slight improvement is detected in the situation of cinemas. According to Comscorethe US box office accumulated from the beginning of this year until April 12 reached $2.26 billion, 23% above the same period of the previous year and the best figure since 2019. Ticket sales grew by 16%, reaching 154 million viewers. This improvement has been echoed among production companies: Universal, which during the pandemic reduced its windows to 17 days, has already announced that will extend its guaranteed minimum to 45 days since January 2027. In this context, MGM’s congratulations and Netflix’s change in philosophy make sense. Reasons for suspicion. The rooms, however, have reasons to be reticent. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner, promised three years ago 20 films a year from Warner Bros. for rooms. He never kept his promise. But we may be seeing the winds of change blowing. The box office in slight but clear improvement, the expansion of windows and the regulatory pressure They are creating a panorama in which it is more profitable for platforms to be allies of cinemas than enemies. Although the rooms know that they have to make sure before burying the hatchet. In Xataka | Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

Apple is two years behind its competitors. So he’s sending 200 engineers to an “AI camp.”

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When we talk about AI Big Tech, there is one name missing: Apple. There are many “the wolf is coming” in this matter of artificial intelligencewith companies that are creating ‘hype’ with models that they consider very dangerous and, above all, with artificial general intelligence. However, the “the wolf is coming” par excellence in AI is the new Siri and Apple Intelligence. Apple is tired of being the last and has made the most radical decision two months before WWDC. Sending almost all Siri engineers to early summer camp. Issues. Apple has two approaches with AI. On the one hand, a more transparent one for the user that interconnects applications of your systems or that allows us to have advanced information about photos from our gallery. On the other hand, the avalanche of promises they made two years ago about Apple Intelligence. For a start, they were already late to the advertise your system a year and a half after the arrival of ChatGPT. To continue, there were functions that did not reach the devices, others that were delayed and even had to delete promotional videos that showed something totally false. This translated into an Apple that allied itself with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and, in January of this year, they teamed up with Google to put a huge band-aid: Apple’s next basic models will basically be Gemini. The user will not notice it – it would be a blow to the pride of those from Cupertino – but Google accounts will. The camp. If two years ago they were late, now they are running out of reaction time. This year we are seeing AI advancing day after day with both American and European and, above all, Chinese models. Apple must get in tune and, as they point out in The Informationhave made the decision to send 200 of Siri and Apple Intelligence engineers to a several-week “camp” focused on programming tools for AI. It is something that reflects the uncomfortable reality that Apple is experiencing right now. On devices they are doing well (even with a MacBook), are establishing themselves as one of the technological pillars of the United States and They have returned to work in Chinabut in the most important race in recent years, they are still behind. Therefore, it is urgent that the Siri team, which is earning such a bad reputation, gets its act together ahead of what could be one of Apple’s most momentous launches in years. And it’s not just sending developers to camp: it’s reformulating the company. The departure of John Giannandrea – one of the leaders of Apple’s AI strategy team – left a gap that has been filled by Craig Federighi, the company’s director of software engineering. Mike Rockwell, team leader of the VisionPronow leads the new Siri team. They are two Apple heavyweights who are very much on top of the AI ​​team, which makes clear the importance that Apple is giving to this issue. 60 stay at home. Obviously, the Apple Intelligence ‘laboratories’ are not going to be deserted these weeks. As The Information points out, about 60 members of the Siri development team will remain in their positions to continue shaping the new assistant and another 60 will be in charge of evaluating performance, ensuring that it meets the standards that Apple wants to implement. Because we are no longer talking only about the quality or functionality of the assistant and Apple Intelligence, but about the ambitious privacy goal. At the presentation of the softwareApple commented that it had built a cloud infrastructure specifically for AI with end-to-end encrypted data sending and that, when that was not possible, the data would be encrypted to obscure the user’s identity. According to the company, none of them would be visible even to its own workers. The new Siri, now it is. It is evident that Apple seeks to close the gap between its assistant and what the competition has – Google integrated Gemini into Assistant months ago – but they must also close that space between their reality and the ambition they showed when presenting Apple Intelligence. Either way, this year is expected to be the year of the new Siri. According to rumors, we will see during the first half of this yearbut we have been there for four and a half months and there is no trace. Now, everything indicates that Siri will be the star of Apple’s keynote at WWDC, the great software – and hardware, sometimes – event that will be held from June 8 to 12. Meanwhile, the world of AI continues to spin, and the most curious thing about all of this is what we mentioned at the beginning: Apple has no say. We’ll see if that new Siri manages to get them into the conversation. 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

‘GTA Online’ has been making more revenue than many new games for 13 years

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A game released in 2013 for previous generation consoles is earning more than a million dollars a day in 2026. It is the online mode of ‘Grand Theft Auto V’, which has just a few months left before its own creators try to replace it with the most anticipated sequel in video game history, ‘GTA VI‘. The dilemma this poses for Rockstar is unprecedented (and the figures that show it came in a not exactly official way). The hacking. On April 11, the ShinyHunters group (responsible for previous security breaches in Ticketmaster or Santander bank, among others) accessed the Rockstar Games servers through an exploit in cloud management software. The company confirmed the attack, although it described it as having limited impact on its operations. What hackers posted after Rockstar refused to pay a ransom for the information it was not code from the long-awaited ‘GTA VI0, but business metrics extracted from the internal analytics platform Anodot. And what they leaked was not bad news, quite the opposite. To the point that Take-Two’s shares rose as soon as it went public. A million a day. According to leaked information (which Rockstar has neither confirmed nor denied), ‘GTA Online’ earned an average of $9.59 million per week between September 2025 and April 2026, with a weekly maximum of almost 28 million and a minimum of 4.7 million. The annual figure is around 500 million dollars. More than a million a day, not bad for a game that debuted in 2013. How they do it. The backbone of the model is Shark Cards, packs of virtual currency that players purchase to acquire cars, properties or weapons within the game. The Shark Cards generated more than 5 billion dollars between 2014 and 2024but the thing is that only 4% of the active player base has spent real money on the game. They are the so-called “whales”, users who concentrate practically all of the spending, and who generate these exorbitant incomes. ‘GTA Online’ is, in that sense, a business model like the most aggressive free-to-play games. The cherry on top of GTA+. Added to all this is GTA+, a paid monthly subscription that Rockstar launched in 2022 and which, according to the same leaked data, reached its peak of 1.3 million subscribers in December 2025, coinciding with the launch of the update.A Safehouse In The Hills‘. It added luxury mansions to the game and resumed the narrative of ‘GTA V’ with the reappearance of one of its protagonists, Michael. The death of ‘Red Dead Online’. These figures also explain why Rockstar stopped updating ‘Red Dead Online’ regularly. The online mode of ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ generated an average of $507,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, compared to 9.59 million weekly for ‘GTA Online’. Take-Two was immediately clear where resources needed to be concentrated. Coexistence. Although Rockstar has not officially detailed what its online component will look like, leaked court documents They suggest that ‘GTA VI’ will include a multiplayer mode (something that, now that the colossal income of ‘GTA Online’ is known, no one doubts). But at the same time, that’s the problem: in a message to shareholders in FebruaryTake-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that “I have every reason to believe that we will continue to support ‘GTA Online’. There is a large community that enjoys it and remains engaged.” Does that imply two live-services simultaneous, with the consequent investment in resources, updates and player service? There is a precedent. When ‘GTA Online’ arrived on PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, Rockstar did not close the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Both generations coexisted for more than a year receiving the same content, and in 2015 the ‘Ill-Gotten Gains Part 2’ update was the last significant one for the old platforms. Even so, those servers were not permanently turned off until December 2021, six years later. The history problem. If they were two different services, the online mode of ‘GTA VI’ would arrive without twelve years of updates, without thousands of accumulated missions, without the ecosystem of properties, vehicles and businesses that ‘GTA Online’ players have built for more than a decade. The examples of sequels that failed to attract the players of the previous game are numerous, but ‘Payday 3’ stands out among them all (the number of players for ‘Payday 2’ is still five times higher). Big losses. Players who have spent years accumulating virtual money, garages, businesses and personalized clothing in ‘GTA Online’ will hardly dare to start from scratch. And at the moment no one has dared to talk about a transfer of assets between both games: the practical and design implications of such an exchange make it practically unfeasible. (And so not to mention FiveMthe community role-playing mod based on ‘GTA V’ that Rockstar bought in 2023 and is still an active source of income). Most likely. As Kotaku predictswe’ll most likely see a multi-year period of coexistence, with Rockstar gradually trying to move the user base from one game to another while keeping both running. Controlled closure of ‘GTA Online’, indefinite maintenance with minimal updates or something in between? It all depends on how fast ‘GTA VI Online’ grows into a game that, let’s not forget, will attract thousands of new players. At the moment, the bar he has to reach is very high. In Xataka | In a time when almost no one develops their own graphics engine, ‘GTA VI’ arrives to punch the table

Snapchat invented the format that dominates the Internet. 15 years later it is still unable to make it profitable

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Evan Spiegel this week sent a memo to your employees announcing that Snap is going to lay off about 1,000 people16% of the entire workforce, in addition to canceling 300 vacant positions that had yet to be filled. Snap thus hopes to save more than $500 million in annualized costs starting in the second half of this year, although the cut is expensive in the short term, since it will have to pay between $95 and $130 million in compensation. Nevertheless, the stock rose 7% in response to the layoffs. The markets have been asking for them for a long time. Why is it important. Snap’s is not a “normal” failure story. It’s much more interesting than that. It’s the story of a company that forever changed how we communicate online and yet has failed to build a profitable business on it. In 2025 it lost 460 million dollars, although it is true that in 2024 it lost more and in 2023 even more. He has spent his 15 years of life in that dynamic. It still hasn’t closed a single complete year on a positive note. The context. His paradox begins in 2013, when he launched Stories: photos and videos that lasted 24 hours, published before disappearing. A format that is common today but at that time groundbreaking. A format that freed people from the pressure of permanence, of the trail. In August 2016, Instagram launched exactly the same thing, with the same name, and with much bigger muscle behind it. Within two months, Instagram had 100 million Stories users. It had taken Snapchat four years to reach that number. A year later it had already surpassed Snapchat. Yes, but. The problem was not that they were copied. The problem was that Meta, TikTok and YouTube adopted the format with an advantage that Snap never had: data. Meta and Google know who we are, what we buy, what interests us. Snap knows much less. That’s why their advertising converts worse, and advertisers pay less for it. A vicious circle. The coup de grace was Transparency Tracking AppApple’s privacy policy released in 2021, which sank tracking-based advertising models. Meta also sufferedbut Meta had the scale and ecosystem to absorb the impact. Not Snap, so its stock went from touching $83 to trading today around $6. A drop of more than 90% from its highs, in less than five years. However, Snap has 946 million active monthly users, grows 12% in year-over-year revenue and has one of the youngest audiences on all platforms. The most coveted demographic for fashion and entertainment brands. It has cutting-edge augmented reality technology and also has Snapchat+, your paid subscription, which is growing well. That is the contradiction that a thousand layoffs do not resolve: Cutting costs improves margins, but alone does not truly monetize a platform with almost a billion users when its audience is young and difficult to convert, and its competitors have ten times more resources. There is also an activist fund in the capital, Irenic Capital Management with 2.5%, which has been pushing for months exactly in this direction: cuts. And now what. Spiegel speaks at memo to concentrate investments where monetization already works. That is, give up on markets that are difficult to grow and profitable (Spain has every chance to be one of them) and focus on more powerful ones, presumably in the style of the United States or the United Kingdom. Give up growth in search of sustainability. Snap has been trying to solve an equation that others have solved at their expense for 15 years. These layoffs are bought time to keep trying. Featured image | Shutter Speed In Xataka | Snapchat introduced its own version of ChatGPT in its app. Nothing has gone, nothing good

A streamer shared out-of-print movies. Now Enrique Cerezo wants him to go to prison for two years and pay 870,000 euros

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In October 2021, five riot police equipped with shields, tactical shotguns and a battering ram burst into the home of a YouTuber from Burgos known as “El Feo”. They were not looking for weapons, drugs or criminals who had committed blood crimes, but hard drives with movies. Films out of circulation, that no one offered almost anywhere on the Internet and whose exploitation rights remained in legal limbo until that moment. David against Goliath. With that assault, the judicial process begins, which culminated on April 9 with the trial in Burgos against El Feo, the nickname of the person responsible for the YouTube channel. The Cursed and the now closed Zoowoman website. The private prosecution, headed by EGEDA (the entity for managing the rights of audiovisual producers that Enrique Cerezo has chaired since 1998), requests two and a half years in prison and compensation that the parties estimate between 850,000 and 870,000 euros. No profit motive. Zoowoman was a platform without advertising, subscription or any type of business model. Its purpose was to rescue and make available to the public out-of-print audiovisual works, films whose production companies had disappeared or that had erratic or zero commercial distribution. Zoowoman functioned as a collective repository of links: the community’s own users shared access to films hosted on external servers such as MEGA or archive.org, without the files residing on the web. Sister website. La Filmoteca Maldita, the associated YouTube channel that is currently still active, functions as an archive of essays that provide historical context and cultural readings of genre and cult cinema. It includes nearly 4,000 film analyzes (according to data provided by El Feo’s defense), which is pertinent when approaching its intentions as a cultural disseminator, rather than as a mere exploiter. Several of these videos, as well as the often unfindable films that resided in Zoowoman, have been used as teaching material in universities such as UNAM, the University of Buenos Aires or the University of Medellín, as Feo himself states in a video where he explains his case. The legal argument. The prosecution cannot claim direct profit from El Feo because Zoowoman did not generate income, so it relies on the reform of the Penal Code of 2015which expanded the definition of piracy to include “indirect economic benefit.” Under this interpretation, offering free movies can be considered a “hook” to attract followers to the main channel and reinforce the reputation of the creator and generate income through other means, which would constitute criminally relevant profit even if there is no money involved. The police investigation estimated the alleged indirect profit obtained in this way at around 12,000 euros. The defendant defended himself by explaining that this amount is equivalent to his total income as streamer during its first four years of activity, and that the messages that the agents interpreted as codes from a piracy network were donations from its community (“for your birthday”, “so that you can have a drink”), consistent with the crowdfunding model of any independent creator. In January 2025, before the trial was to take place, the prosecution tried to reach an agreement: if he pleaded guilty and paid 100,000 euros, the sentence would be reduced to one year in prison. El Feo rejected him. Who sues? Enrique Cerezo, apart from presiding over the plaintiff entity, is the owner of Video Mercury Films, the distributor that controls between 70 and 80% of all Spanish cinema, with a catalog of more than 7,000 titles. He is also the president of Atlético de Madrid and the promoter of FlixOléthe platform streaming launched in 2020 with the intention of disseminating Spanish cinema from all eras, much of it out of print or not seen for decades. The complaint that ended the 2021 raid occurred shortly after the launch of FlixOlé, whose catalog largely coincided with that distributed by Zoowoman. The logic, described by the accused himself, is that Zoowoman offered for free what the new platform charged in a subscription. Cerezo has not made public statements about the case. EGEDA acts as a private prosecutor on behalf of the producers whose rights it manages, which includes films in the Video Mercury catalogue. This is not the first time that EGEDA has embarked on complaints of this type: in 2017 it denounced WebTV device distributors and in 2022, to 17 websites that they spread content without permissionamong which was Zoowoman. Beyond the trial. If the thesis of indirect profit prospers, any free cultural dissemination channel that builds an audience could potentially be prosecuted under the same legal umbrella. There are international precedents that point in the same direction. In the United States, the case of Hachette against Internet Archive, resolved in 2024 with a defeat of the digital archive, demonstrated that courts tend to prioritize the rights of the owner over arguments of cultural access, even when the model is non-profit. The legal question. Spain has a regime for orphan works (transposed from a European directive in 2014 and developed by Royal Decree in 2016) but its use is reserved exclusively for public cultural institutions such as museums, libraries or film libraries. An individual or an independent digital creator cannot rely on it, which leaves precisely the type of initiative that Zoowoman represents without legal coverage and which is called into question from the very moment Cerezo creates FlixOlé so that these films are no longer inaccessible. Image | House of America In Xataka | AI has been built by plundering the content of the Internet. Now there are people who want to charge for allowing it

Boeing has surpassed Airbus after years behind. That doesn’t mean I’ve regained control.

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The rivalry between Boeing and Airbus has been marking the pulse of commercial aviation for decades, but it cannot always be summarized in a simple classification. Sometimes, a piece of information seems to announce a change of era and, when we look closer, what appears is something much less resounding. That’s just what happens with the first quarter of 2026: Boeing has managed to overcome to Airbus in deliveries, yes, but it is worth looking at what is behind that advantage before reading it as proof that the American manufacturer has left its problems behind. The photography. The start of 2026 is based on a clear difference in deliveries: Boeing placed 143 commercial aircraft in the hands of its customers between January and March, compared to 114 for Airbus. The data has weight in itself because it puts an end to a long period in which Airbus had remained ahead of Boeing in deliveries. In practice, the American giant supported this result especially in the 737, with 114 units delivered, while Airbus once again concentrated the bulk of its activity in the A320 family, with 81 aircraft. The Airbus bottleneck. If we want to understand why Airbus has been left behind at the start of 2026, the focus is not so much on a drop in demand as on a supply problem. According to Reutersthe European manufacturer has a traffic jam linked to Pratt & Whitney, one of its engine suppliers, immersed in the correction of around 1,200 units affected by a manufacturing defect. While that process is still underway, the production of new engines slows down and Airbus can advance the manufacturing of those planes, but not always complete delivery at the expected pace until those systems arrive. Reality, in context.. That Boeing has closed this quarter ahead, in any case, does not mean that it has resolved the core of its problems. Let us remember that the manufacturer comes from years marked by the 737 MAX crisis, triggered by the accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302in which 346 people died, and for the subsequent stoppage of that program. Added to this are more recent difficulties: Boeing already warned last month that 737 production will slow while it addresses certain wiring issues. Before this long cycle change, Boeing’s position on deliveries was very different. In January 2018, Boeing reported that it had closed 2017 with 763 commercial aircraft delivered, a record for the industry at the time and its sixth consecutive year leading this field. That year also left 912 net orders valued at $134.8 billion at list prices and a portfolio of 5,864 aircraft. Seen from today, that starting point helps to better measure to what extent the balance between both manufacturers changed in very few years. The context is not so far away: It is worth remembering that this rivalry left another very significant milestone in October 2025, when the Airbus A320 became the most delivered aircraft in history by surpassing the Boeing 737. That was not just a symbolic matter: it reflected the extent to which the problems of the 737 MAX had altered Boeing’s trajectory and the extent to which Airbus had managed to keep up with the A320neo family. The next industrial duel: If we project our gaze a little, the board also begins to move at another very specific point: the future entry on the scene of the 777X. Boeing plans to deliver it in 2027 as a late competitor to the A350, after accumulating delays that are already part of the program’s recent history. For Boeing, this arrival could be important because it would open a new opportunity to rebalance forces in the long haul. But Airbus also continues to move forward. Images | Tienko Dima | Jan Rosolino In Xataka | Commercial aviation is based on very old aircraft. The Iran war is going to make it even worse

Unless you are 170,000 years old, in the next few days you will be able to see a comet that you have never seen before

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In April, astronomy lovers have an annual meeting with the lyrid star shower. However, this year the observation of C/2025 R3 is also added, a comet that last visited the inner solar system 170,000 years ago. Prepare to observe. Although the comet has been visible in our skies for several days, it can currently only be seen with binoculars or small telescopes. However, it is expected that after its perihelion (closest point to the Sun), which will take place on April 19, it can be seen with the naked eye. Between April 20 and 24, if all goes well, could reach magnitude 3. This is a measurement that indicates greater brightness as it descends. That is, a comet of magnitude 3 will be brighter than one of magnitude 5. Better in the morning (in the northern hemisphere). If you are in the northern hemisphere, the best time to see this comet will be very late at night. Or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it. Your best visibility will be achieved around 2 hours before the sun rises. In fact, the sun is the main problem, since its best observation time could be April 25, but the Sun will already be too close to allow its visibility properly. in the southern hemisphere. In the other half of the planet, the comet will be seen in the evening, in the late afternoon. While in the north optimal visibility ends on April 25, in the south it is just when it will start to look better. It will continue like this until almost the entire month of May. Of course, it doesn’t matter which hemisphere you are in. It is essential to stay away from light pollution and look for the darkest skies possible. Where to look. The point in the sky on which to rest your eyes (or binoculars) It depends on the day you choose to try to see the comet. For example, on April 19 it will cross from the constellation of Pegasus to that of Pisces. Later, on April 24, it will walk alongside Aries, and then move on to Cetus on April 25. From here, there will no longer be visibility in the northern hemisphere, but in the south you will be able to see the comet on April 29 leaving Cetus towards Taurus, on May 1 through Eridanus, from May 7 to 8 through the Witch’s Head Nebula and on May 8 through the constellation of Orion. The Orion Nebula will also meet it, between May 10 and 12. The comet will then pass between the border of Orion and the Unicorn on May 16. Finally, between May 23 and 25 it will be in the Red Rectangle Nebula, but already with a magnitude of 9, which indicates an extremely weak brightness. A special shine. In reality, the brightness of a comet cannot be predicted exactly. In fact, depending on which source we turn to, we may read different magnitude values ​​for the one we will see these days. When we talk about magnitude 3, we are referring to the calculation in the best scenario. It could be somewhat weaker, although the truth is that C/2025 R3 has a peculiarity that makes it very special: forward dispersion. This is a phenomenon where sunlight passes through the comet’s dust at the perfect angle so that most of that light is directed towards Earth. Therefore, it is a fairly bright comet, although that desired 3 may not be reached. Red-handed for Pan-STARRS. This comet was discovered on September 8, 2025 through observations with the Pan-STARRS telescope, located in Haleakala, Hawaii. At that moment he was passing Andromeda. Its status as a comet was confirmed with another observation on September 17. Since then, it has attracted the attention of many astronomers, both professional and amateur. Without a doubt, it is worth going out and looking for it. We cannot wait 170,000 more years. Images | Dimitrios Katevainis (Wikimedia Commons) In Xataka | China has created the largest kite in the world with a very clear objective: to make its energy extremely cheaper.

If anyone thinks that gambling is a modern vice, we just found a game of chance that is more than 12,000 years old

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We are so used to locating the origins of gambling in the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean (in the Babylonian temples, on the Roman gaming tables) that it is difficult to imagine another scenario. But a study published this month in the magazine ‘American Antiquity‘ changes everything: the oldest known dice do not come from the Old World, but from the western plains of North America, and are at least 12,000 years old. They date back to nothing less than the Pleistocene. Old dice. With his study, archaeologist Robert J. Madden has shown that Native Americans made and used dice at least 12,000 years ago, during the last centuries of the Ice Age. That makes them the oldest known games of chance, more than 6,000 years ahead of the earliest documented dice in Europe. What was believed? Mainstream history placed the origin of dice in the complex societies of the Near East and Eastern Europe, approximately 5,500 years ago. Madden’s findings they relocate that starting point to another continent and to another completely different type of society: groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers of the western Great Plains of North America. Neither palaces, nor cities, nor written culture: games of chance in Pleistocene camps. What are these dice like? Prehistoric Native American dice do not look like the cubes we know. They are known as binary lots: flat, two-sided pieces, made of bone or wood, designed to be thrown on a surface. The result depended on how many marked faces were left face up; Players counted points with small rods and whoever reached an agreed upon number first won. More like a coin toss than the six possible outcomes on a die, but just as useful for generating random outcomes. Why was there confusion? The problem was classification. When archaeologists found pieces of this type, they simply labeled them as “game pieces.” There was no systematic criterion to identify them as given. madden corrected that way of seeing it developing a morphological test based on a catalog that the ethnographer Stewart Culin published in 1907, ‘Games of the North American Indians’, where he documented 293 historical sets of indigenous dice from more than 130 towns. With that framework applied to the published archaeological record from across the continent, he identified more than 600 additional dice. Where were they? The oldest dice come from three sites in the Folsom culture: Agate Basin (Wyoming), Lindenmeier (Colorado) and Blackwater Draw (New Mexico). It is believed that these pieces They are between 12,800 and 12,200 years old. Lindenmeier, north of Fort Collins, has 14 different artifacts that meet the criteria, leading some archaeologists to speculate that it was a large seasonal congregation site for dispersed groups. The density of material found there points to something more than a temporary camp. What is most striking is the continuity. These objects appear in deposits from all major periods of North American prehistory, without detectable interruption from the late Pleistocene until after European contact. A 12,000-year-old tradition that still works: Madden himself found tutorials on YouTube where native groups explain how to play versions of the same games from two millennia ago. How to play. Possibly, these dice were used in games that we can connect with what we tell about the patollithe Mesoamerican board game of the Mayans and Aztecs: that was also a game of chance with a deep ritual dimension, found in the archaeological works of the Mayan Train. The social and religious function of the game seems to have been constant in very different pre-Columbian cultures. Madden describes these games as “social technologies of integration”: neutral spaces, governed by shared rules, where groups with little or no prior contact could interact, exchange goods and information, and build alliances. The religious dimension is equally documented. Numerous native oral traditions describe dice as a sacred activity: the gods themselves participate, and in some cosmologies the creation of human beings is the result of a cosmic game. Image | Robert J. Madden

Ten years ago, Bnext was the great hope of fintech. They ended up crashing

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Founded in 2016 by Guillermo Vicandi, Bnext It was born as a fintech alternative to traditional banking. In fact, their visible heads assured that it was not a bank, despite offering an account and card. The growth was as fast as the fall. After the collapse of its cryptocurrency, The app announced its closure on April 13. What was Bnext. It was not a bank, that’s what its creators constantly said. It was an electronic money entity (EDE) alternative to traditional banking. In practice, it offered what a bank offers: account, card, loans, insurance, currency purchases, investment plans. The difference was the model: Bnext always acted as an intermediary, connecting the user with the best products on the market through a single app. No offices, no paper, no queues. The golden age. In 2019, Bnext was one of the most visible projects on the Spanish fintech scene. became the fintech that grew the most in Spainwith more than 156,000 registered users and more than 100,000 active clients holding a Bnext VISA. Your second round of financing It closed with 22 million eurosthe highest figure seen in Spain (in 2019) since the Valencian Hawkers raised 55 million euros. That same year, they partnered with giants like MyInvestor to offer financial products. The stumble. Bnext’s first setback comes a year later, in 2021, after its landing in Latin America. Its partner, Cacao Paycard, did not obtain authorization to operate from the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV), which translated into a fine of 2.6 million Mexican pesos (about 150,000 euros at the current exchange rate) to Bnext for misleading communication. There was no plan B. Bnext had to cease operations in Mexico, close all its accounts and lose more than 230,000 clients who had trusted the company prior to the sanctions. Meanwhile. In Spain, alternatives like Revolut were growing like wildfire, and Bnext was beginning to run out of oxygen. In 2021, they decided to ally with Algorand, a blockchain firm that became one of the company’s main shareholders. After the alliance they announced their own token: B3X. The play didn’t go well. On March 1, 2022, it was launched to the public with a starting price of two euro cents. Today it cannot even operate from the app, since the service has been dismantled. Its price before the debacle: 0.00006 US cents. What happens to Bnext users. Bnext accounts and cards have already been canceled and the product is no longer marketed. No payments, transfers or receipts can be uploaded. Payroll cannot be received The balance of the account may be requested during a repayment period of 20 years Cryptocurrency management is referred to Onyze… via email User data will be deleted in accordance with the GDPR You will no longer have access to the marketplace services Bnext was once the great hope of Spanish fintech. Now rest in peace. What will become of the company. The company gives the finishing touch to its app, but does not completely cease its operations. “The fintech business and market has changed considerably, and with this, we have had to pivot our value proposition. After several years offering products to the end consumer and in an increasingly competitive environment and with more complex regulation, we have decided to take a step towards the future, focusing on helping companies launch their own payment products.” Guillermo Vicandi, CEO of Bnext. Bnext closes as a neobank, but pivots towards financial infrastructure services. In Xataka | Europe had been asking for a big hit on the table for some time. Revolut just gave it a huge valuation

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