Philosophy
What we owe a future that arrives early.
A magazine for an accelerating world
Fine.
But why
Philosophy / Technology / Accelerationism / Agents / AI / Life, sometimes
Every word has been carefully curated by a human.
Europe is regulating as if the human were the safe default
The EU has spent years circling whether assisted driving should be allowed to exist. While it circles, the machines are already driving, just not here. A look at the gap between Europe's caution and the road it is meant to protect.
Read the essayTechnology since 1850.
Real events, in order. The squares get closer together because the years did.
1851 Great Exhibition Industry on display in one glass hall. The machine age has a public.
1866 Transatlantic cable A message crosses the ocean in minutes, not weeks.
1876 Telephone Voice, at a distance. The wire starts carrying people.
1879 Electric light Night becomes a choice. Cities stay on.
1886 Automobile A carriage that does not need a horse.
1903 Powered flight Twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk. The sky is a route.
1913 Assembly line Ford's moving line. Stuff gets cheap because time got sliced.
1945 Electronic computer ENIAC. Arithmetic at a speed no clerk can match.
1947 Transistor Bell Labs. The vacuum tube starts dying.
1957 Sputnik A beep from orbit. Space is infrastructure.
1969 ARPANET Two nodes, one message. The network is born.
1971 Microprocessor Intel 4004. A computer you can hold.
1991 World Wide Web CERN puts the web in public. A page, anywhere.
2007 iPhone The computer fits in a pocket and does not leave.
2012 AlexNet Deep learning wins ImageNet. Vision becomes a model.
2017 Transformers Attention Is All You Need. The stack we still live in.
2022 ChatGPT Language becomes something you can ask.
2025 Agents Software that keeps going after you close the tab.
The last squares are the tight ones.
The ruler on the left is the same argument as this calendar, from 1850 to now. Years used to be wide. Now they stack. A career, a child, a car, and an agent can all change in one quarter.
That slope is why this site exists. Philosophy, technology, accelerationism, agents, AI. And general life, sometimes.
What we write about.
Every word has been carefully curated by a human.
Technology
The stack, without the keynote.
Accelerationism
The slope itself, named plainly.
Agents
Software that does not wait to be asked twice.
AI
Models as tools, colleagues, and weather.
Life
Sometimes. A Tuesday still has to get lived.
Fine But Why · Yair Knijn Every word has been carefully curated by a human. Essays FSD tracker About RSS