Kilowatto
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A Fondo con Kilowatto

  1. 2026-08-29 19:48:17 · 74 min

    The internet is "Too Big to Fail" - part two: who owns everything that makes the web work

    In January, I wrote that three cloud providers hold up the internet. This second part dives down to the ocean floor and into a Taiwanese factory, finding 15 layers where a single player has control: ASML with 100% of EUV machines, Taiwan with over 90% of cutting-edge manufacturing, three companies with 90% of memory, Cloudflare in front of 84.5% of reverse proxies, and a non-profit funded by donations holding certificates for two-thirds of the web. I also correct my own draft: the Department of Commerce stopped approving changes to the DNS root in 2016, there is a treaty on cables dating back to 1884, and several nuclear agreements I mentioned are just announcements without any connected megawatts.

    306 lecturas · Los dueños del cable que nadie ve En mi borrador escribí que el 95% del tráfico internacional viaja por 436 cables submarinos que suman 1.3…

  2. 2026-08-21 17:55:47 · 42 min

    What AI is already canceling at the university

    I investigated, country by country, if generative AI is already reconfiguring what can be studied at the university, measured in programs and enrollment, not in job projections. The answer is yes, but much more unequal than reported: in the US, Computer Science enrollment dropped for the first time in twenty years during three consecutive cycles, while in Germany, the same career continues to grow. The rumor that "universities are closing Law programs" is mostly false: enrollment rebounded in 2025, and Mexico's oversupply of lawyers is older than ChatGPT. China canceled 12,200 programs in five years but does not publish the actual enrollment behind that figure. Graphic Design is experiencing labor alarm without its enrollment dropping yet. I close with a projection: which careers a five-year-old child today will probably not be able to study, and which ones they will find everywhere.

    657 lecturas · En 1806, un joven de veintidós años sin fortuna cargó un bergantín en Boston con 130 toneladas de un producto que nadie en el Caribe había…

  3. 2026-08-21 05:28:00 · 19 min

    The pendulum got tired of swinging

    I've been stuck in discussions with two groups of engineers: one swears microservices were a collective mistake, the other that "going back to monoliths" is nostalgia disguised as pragmatism. The data from 2024-2026 says both are half right. A widely cited statistic — 42% of organizations "consolidating" microservices — turned out to be almost impossible to track down to its primary source, and that finding is revealing in itself. What I could verify: Amazon Prime Video, Shopify, SAP, Oracle, the Linux kernel, the European Union, and India build with different logic, and 2026's Artificial Intelligence — far from forcing more distribution — pushed its own creators (Anthropic, OpenAI) towards a pattern surprisingly similar to modular monoliths. Here's the complete map, with what's known, what's repeated without a source, and what just doesn't apply yet.

    870 lecturas · Dos bandos, un WhatsApp y ningún ganador claro No hace falta inventar una anécdota: cualquiera que dirija un equipo de ingeniería en 2026…

  4. 2026-08-21 03:11:56 · 28 min

    The VPN business: what they cost, what they promise, and what they actually do

    I dug deep into the consumer VPN industry — NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, Proton VPN, Mullvad, free options, and Opera's built-in "VPN" — to separate marketing from technical and legal reality. I found a pattern: several of the most sponsored VPNs belong to the same two or three corporate groups that also own sites that "independently" compare them. Audits for no-logging policies are more rigorous than they were five years ago, but the price you see the first month is almost never the price you'll pay when you renew, and NordVPN is facing lawsuits over this in the US. Free VPNs, with few audited exceptions, are still the inverse business: you're the product. And myths like "you become invisible" or "you have to use it at the airport" don't hold up to technical scrutiny.

    1,849 lecturas · Hace unas semanas revisé el estado de cuenta de mi tarjeta y encontré un cargo que no reconocí: $107 dólares de una VPN que hace dos años…