Fine But Why
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A blog by Yair Knijn

Fine.
But why

Philosophy/Technology/Accelerationism/Agents/AI

Essays, written by hand, about technology that moves faster than the words for it and what that does to an ordinary week. Coding tips and model tests in between.

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Essays

Written by hand

All essays
Autonomy · Oct 10, 2026 · 3 min

Sludge

Tesla asked the RDW to approve FSD (Supervised) 24 months ago. Since April only 8 of 27 EU countries have approved it.

 Autonomy · Sep 2, 2026

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

 Autonomy · Jun 2, 2026

Europe is regulating as if the human were the safe default

Coding tips

How I run Claude Code

All coding tips
  1. Coding tip · 1 min Auto-compact your Claude at 250k Claude Code can hold a million tokens and every reply drags all of them along. Compact at 250k and let subagents do the reading.
  2. Coding tip · 2 min Claude Code tips I actually use A free 17-page PDF: 24 habits, shortcuts and settings that changed how I work with Claude Code, each with the lines to copy. My own mods and tools are in the back.
  3. Coding tip · 1 min One planet at a time Grok 4.7 low, 362 seconds. Opus 5 high, 468. The browser was open the whole time. The sun landed first.
Tracker Tesla FSD, country by country Where it is allowed, where it is rolling out, and the source for each market. Benchmarks One prompt, checked by hand I open the file or the render and write down what is actually there. About Who writes this Yair Knijn, a principal engineer in the Netherlands. Talking about Tesla since 2014.

1850 to now

Technology since 1850.

Eighteen times a thing left the lab and started working in public. Read down the years and watch the gaps between them shrink.

  1. 1851

    Great Exhibition

    The Crystal Palace in London. Steam, iron, and glass under one roof, for anyone with a ticket.

    Glass exhibition hall filled with machines and iron arches.

  2. 1866

    Transatlantic cable

    Ireland to Newfoundland. A message in minutes.

    15 years after the last one

    Thick telegraph cable laid across a dark ocean floor.

  3. 1876

    Telephone

    Bell's instrument. You hear a voice on a wire.

    10 years after the last one

    Early wooden wall telephone with a speaking cone and a wire.

  4. 1879

    Electric light

    Edison's filament. The room stays lit.

    3 years after the last one

    A single incandescent bulb lighting a dark room.

  5. 1886

    Automobile

    Benz's Patent-Motorwagen. Three wheels and an engine.

    7 years after the last one

    Early three-wheeled motor carriage on a dirt street.

  6. 1903

    Powered flight

    The Wright Flyer leaves the sand at Kitty Hawk for twelve seconds.

    17 years after the last one

    Early biplane just lifting off a sandy strip.

  7. 1913

    Moving assembly line

    At Highland Park the chassis rolled past a standing worker.

    10 years after the last one

    Factory line of car chassis moving past workers.

  8. 1945

    Electronic computer

    ENIAC at Penn. A room of racks doing arithmetic.

    32 years after the last one

    Room-sized 1940s computer of racks, cables, and glowing tubes.

  9. 1947

    Transistor

    Bell Labs, December. A solid switch.

    2 years after the last one

    Close view of an early point-contact transistor on a workbench.

  10. 1957

    Sputnik

    A metal sphere in orbit, beeping.

    10 years after the last one

    Polished spherical satellite with antennas against black sky.

  11. 1969

    ARPANET

    UCLA sent a message to the Stanford Research Institute.

    12 years after the last one

    Two 1960s computer rooms linked by a thin line.

  12. 1971

    Microprocessor

    Intel 4004. A processor on one chip.

    2 years after the last one

    A small silicon chip on a fingertip next to a circuit board.

  13. 1991

    World Wide Web

    CERN puts the web in public.

    20 years after the last one

    Early computer screen showing a simple hypertext page.

  14. 2007

    iPhone

    A computer in your pocket.

    16 years after the last one

    2007-era black smartphone with a home button, no brand marks.

  15. 2012

    AlexNet

    A convnet wins ImageNet by a wide margin.

    5 years after the last one

    Layers of a vision network looking at a photograph.

  16. 2017

    Transformers

    Attention Is All You Need.

    5 years after the last one

    Abstract blocks connected by attention arcs, no readable paper text.

  17. 2022

    ChatGPT

    A chat box that writes back.

    5 years after the last one

    Simple chat window with empty bubbles, no product logo.

  18. 2025

    Agents

    Software that keeps a job going after you close the tab.

    3 years after the last one

    Small helper figures working at a laptop after the person has left.

Now

2024 and 2026.

The calendar did not grow more squares. The recent ones just folded.

A stick figure on top of a calendar whose last pages, 2010 to 2026, fold into a thin wedge.

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