Staff Engineer @ https://xitter.gq/t.co/g2eFIPSCuZ
Cape Town, South Africa
Joined October 2009
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Danny Kopping retweeted
in the end, the people got a faster horse
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This is an AI-generated video.
It illustrates a real proposed product by Kawasaki, which is still under development.
newatlas.com/automotive/kaw…
Danny Kopping retweeted
> be me, Intel
> world domination status: achieved
> have a license to print money with x86
> life is good
> be 2007, some fruit company named Apple shows up
> "hey can you make a chip for our new phone?"
> my CFO brain activates
> look at their offer... pathetic
> my margins! my beautiful margins!
> "lmao no," I tell them, "get that low volume, low margin peasant shit out of my office"
> tell them to go bother some Korean foundry
> they call it the "iPhone"
> it only sells, like, a bazillion units
> oops.mp4
> should have listened to my gut, but my gut was too busy counting shareholder dividends
> speaking of shareholders
> CEO is now a finance bro
> innovation is for nerds, stock buybacks are for chads
> spend $36 billion to make line go up
> R&D? how about R&Buyback
> TSMC and Samsung are building fabs? cute.
> we're building value for our shareholders
> meanwhile, in the basement...
> be AMD, literally on life support
> selling their HQ to pay the rent
> "hey guys what if we made a good CPU for once?"
> entire Intel leadership room dies of laughter
> we're still milking 14nm++++ for the fifth year in a row
> what are they gonna do, beat us with... checks notes... core count and efficiency?
> HQ focused on PPT presentations and buybacks
> R&D team: "hey we have this 10nm design but it's kinda... impossible to manufacture?"
> me: "JUST MAKE IT WORK, I HAVE A DIVIDEND TO ANNOUNCE"
> requirement: quadruple the transistor density, tooling: from the stone age, yield: literally negative
> "10nm is fine, everything is fine" for five years
> entire company is stuck on 14nm++++++++
> watching AMD just call TSMC and get a shiny new 7nm node like it's nothing
> suddenly, AMD's "Zen" thing is actually good
> gamers and redditors are calling me a "dead company walking"
> my stock is in freefall
> panic.jpg
> hire back Based Pat Gelsinger to save us
> Pat comes in: "what in the goddamn..."
> find out we're now outsourcing our own chips to TSMC
> mfw we missed mobile, lost the process lead, got rekt by AMD, and our grand plan is to ask the government for money
> mfw we're now a fabless fab with an identity crisis
> mfw the once-proud "Intel Inside" is now "TSMC Inside"
> at least the shareholders had some good quarters
> company_cope.jpg
Danny Kopping retweeted
The most elegant solutions look inevitable in retrospect. They aren't some complex chain of tricks you've engineered out of nothing, but rather a simple abstraction that faithfully mirrors the shape of the problem.
Danny Kopping retweeted
An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/2…
ALT Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts compressed into them but that compression is lossy (see also Ted Chiang). The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters. This thought sparked by a comment on Hacker News asking why an LLM couldn't "Create a boilerplate Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico with st7789 spi display drivers configured". That's more of an lossless encyclopedia question! My answer: The way to solve this particular problem is to make a correct example available to it. Don't expect it to just know extremely specific facts like that - instead, treat it as a tool that can act on facts presented to it.
Our automated flake reporting now has issues being automatically created by blink.so/ based on CI logs, huge time-saver and pretty accurate too
Danny Kopping retweeted
"If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card."
Vibe code is legacy code
@karpathy coined vibe coding as a kind of AI-assisted coding where you "forget that the code even exists"
We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code
Legacy code is universally despised, and for good reason. But why? You have the code, right? Can't you figure it out from there?
Wrong. Code that nobody understands is tech debt. It takes a lot of time to understand code enough to debug it, let alone introduce new features without also introducing bugs
Programming is fundamentally theory building, not producing lines of code. This is why we make fun of business people who try to measure developer productivity in lines of code
When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it!
I vibe code happily all the time. Most often for small apps that I don't need to maintain. I'm a big fan, have at it!
Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing
Simply by being an engineer and asking for a web app with a persistent database, you are already vibing less than than a non-programmer who asks for an "app" without understanding the distinction between a web app and a native app, or how persistent data storage works
The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt
You'll end up spending a lot of money and getting a large, buggy, legacy code base. If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card
At Val Town, we built Townie, an AI assistant that agnatically reads & writes code, runs it, views the logs, and keeps iterating until it's done. It's is an awesome tool for vibe coding. I heartily recommend it to folks who understand these tradeoffs. I use it to vibe code sometimes. Other times I keep in on a tight leash as it makes surgical edits to a project I care about
If you know any non-programmers spending thousands of dollars vibe coding their billion dollar app idea today, warn them that vibe coding is not going to get them where they want to go. They're going to have to learn to use their human eyes to read the code 😱, and that sometimes it's easier to start over with building a well-written code base from scratch than to fix a legacy one that nobody understands
Danny Kopping retweeted
you've waited for it like a Kube waits for a Hotfix:
Interview with Cloud Architect FULL [2025]
