Alba Cabañas

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

El debat nuclear apareix per la visió de tenir un sistema dissuasori nuclear a Europa. França és qui porta el tema, esperant cobrar dels altres països per tenir el paraigua. Però si mirem la producció elèctrica, l'augment de tecnologia nuclear no té sentit per una qüestió de preu. La tecnologia nuclear ha hagut de resoldre els casos de Txernòbil i de Fukushima, i això ha encarit sobremanera els seus costos per sobre 120 €/MWh o molt més. De fet la xifra no la volen dir mai, però els projectes nous posats en marxa a França, Finlàndia i Regne Unit són un fracàs econòmic. Però el problema és que hi ha una solució renovable. A Espanya el 2025 hi va haver una demanda elèctrica de 255,8 TWh. Si apliquem els factors d'utilització, més els factors estacionals per a cada tecnologia, es veu que per la generació hidráulica li caldria 4,7 TWh en bateries per resoldre la intermitència, a la eòlica 8,55 TWh, a la fotovoltaica 7,91 TWh, necessitant un total de 21,38 TWh en bateries, que suposa una potència de 4,28 GW en bateries. Avui a Espanya hi ha 0,124 GW instal·lats, en construcció 0,5 GW, en tramitació 5,3 GW i en projecte entre 9 i 24 GW. O sigui, a la tecnologia nuclear li queden 3 dies de funcionament. El debat és inútil, només per anumèrics

Adding more GPUs will never make a machine conscious. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose just dismantled the entire AI race’s core assumption. Right now, the industry operates on one belief. Build massive data centers. Scale the models. AGI will just “wake up.” Penrose destroys this completely. Penrose: “There is this sort of view that once you make a computer complicated enough or something, it suddenly becomes aware. I just don’t believe that. There’s no reason to believe that.” A machine can compute better than any human alive. But computation is not awareness. Penrose: “There is something quite different involved in understanding things, in being aware of things, of feeling things, which is not part of computations.” We’re confusing rule-following with actual intelligence. Penrose: “The keyword is the word ‘understanding.’ You can follow rules alright, but we don’t understand what we’re doing. The understanding is the key point.” Models today are exceptional at processing data. At mimicking logic. But true understanding requires consciousness. Penrose: “It doesn’t make sense to say of a device that it understands something if it’s not even aware of it. There is something much more profound in being conscious of something.” And here’s what should terrify every AI lab on earth. Penrose: “I believe that the brain is following the laws of physics, sure. We don’t have a good picture of the laws of physics.” Penrose: “Quantum mechanics is not an answer to the way the universe operates. It’s a partial answer. It’s incomplete.” We’re trying to engineer synthetic consciousness using classical computation. While biological consciousness likely operates on physics we haven’t even discovered yet. The race to AGI isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s a frontier science problem. The labs are hiring engineers. The problem might require physicists who don’t exist yet.

Un any i dos mesos després de la presentació de l'informe Draghi, com a pime industrial d'un sector en perill (20%+ d'empreses del CNAE han fet fallida els darrers 2 anys) hem rebut aquesta setmana una auditoria de contaminació lumínica. Un senyor absurd que, de nit...