📚 Finished reading: Thinking With Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein, after starting two months ago. It is broader in scope and less Tinderbox-specific than The Tinderbox Way, his first book about, well, Tinderbox, a lovingly crafted “tool for thinking” that I have been using off and on for the last seven years. This is for the best: The Tinderbox Way was meant to convert the technical language from the official code reference into something us muggles can use, which is a job that ChatGPT can do much better and using the latest version of the app. Thinking With Tinderbox is more strategic than tactical, elaborating on why anyone whose primary job is not programming would want to dabble in code in the first place.

📺 The Residence (2025) had great acting, a gorgeous set and a satisfying plot so of course Netflix decided to cancel it after just one season. The show was not a good fit for such a trashy distribution channel, so I hope that Cordelia Cupp and friends find a new home on HBO or Apple TV+.

Cal Newport’s latest article about common sense in parenting closes with this punchline:

If you’re uncomfortable with the potential impact these devices may have on your kids, you don’t have to wait for the scientific community to reach a conclusion about depression rates in South Korea before you take action.

But does anyone — Georgetown math professors notwithstanding — make decisions this way, neatly compartmentalizing “the science” from their moral intuition? Or is there a mutually reinforcing interaction between the two, with our intuition exposing us to the confirmatory facts?

A cabin made for Waldenponding, even for those of us who are in theory against it.

If this interview is anything to go by, Kevin Kelly is a wonderful human being and a true role model.

Not to put them on the same level — there is a whole generation between them — but the article reminded me of a similar conversation with Merlin Mann, now more than a decade all. Good Sunday reads both.

A few links for the weekend, kind-of-sort-of in the spirit of Good Work:

• The Dying Art We All Depend On, which is to be social among strangers.
• Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan, which has actually been the case in most of the world for most of the time, but an American wrote this just last month so it is somewhat of a surprise.
• Spiritually Sensible Movies, many of which are freely available on YouTube. Bishal is a fellow oncologist writing a non-oncology focused blog, so a double recommendation there.

Apparently, I blinked and missed some extraordinarily good games on iOS that came out in recently in the last few years almost a decade ago. Fortunately my kids were there to educate me, yes, including the 6-year-old:

• Rodeo Stampede, nine years old and with ads but man what fun. Echoes of YMBAB and Crossy Road.
• Geometry Dash, which I could and should just watch my kids play because my reflexes and sense of rhythm aren’t enough for level 1 let alone this sorcery. Both the in-game music and the name reminded me of the first game I ever bought on Steam, which was of course Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
• Snake.io+, which brought memories of my old Nokia pouring down. But now it is a bit too competitive for my taste and I could only watch in awe as progeny raked up points two orders of magnitude higher than the runner-up.

All this reminded me of a conversation Tyler Cowen had with the YouTuber Any Austin who said that every medium reached its peak — with which I wholeheartedly agreed ⊕ And quite clearly we had reached Peak Movie in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, going downhill ever since Jaws graced the screen. — and that Peak Gaming was Pac-Man and Space Invaders — to which I could only say Huh?!

But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that he was basically correct. Well, in generalities if not in the specifics, as the Peak Single Player Video Game ⊕ Let’s not put in multiplayer games there, as they should be compared to card games, board games and sports was clearly Tetris.

I only half-kid. Show Tetris to a 10-year-old and she will immediately get it, spend a half-dozen hours on it the same day, and then dream about the figures. There are a few other gaming prototypes — and yes, Space Invaders and Pac-Man are both examples — but everything since then could be interpreted as a variation on a theme, adding whiz-bang graphics and sound effects to sugar-coat a basic mechanic. In an alternative universe where I have a PhD in ludology I would have been able to name a few more prototypes and family trees, digging into the core mechanic of each AAA title to get to its Space Invaders nugget; and if there are any blogs where this is actually done please point me to them, I would love to subscribe!

It is for the most part a reframing of what Schumacher has already written about the problems of extractive economies of scale and how intermediate technologies — to be rebranded “appropriate technologies” and, ultimately, “sustainable development” — can help remedy their dehumanizing effects. The difference is in the final chapter, “The making of Good Work”, written by one Peter N. Gillingham.

It starts with a — to the modern sensibilities rather offensive — comparison of people to different types of cattle. It quickly pivots to a discussion that is more relevant today than it was in the 1970s, about the pendulum swinging from institutions to individuals, and about the potential for a malignant entity to inhabit said crumbling institutions as a hermit crab would inhabit a dead shell. So it goes… There is much talk of people feeling the need to escape abstraction and get back to doing meaningful work in the “real world”. This was, let me remind you, written almost 50 years ago. And here I thought the Internet was to be blamed for everything.

There is next to no information about Peter Gillingham online. ChatGPT-o3 managed to dig up a few nuggets which ring true: this chapter would be his only publicly available work, the California-based Intermediate Technology Institute he led had folded within a decade of Schumacher’s death, and the 1970s oil crisis-inspired movement petered out, to be replaced by the 1980s Reagonomics, the 1990s end of history, the 2000s war on terror, and the 2010s social network boom. Of course, it is now the 2020s and the preceding four decades have all in their own way continued the hollowing out of the institutions. Americans continue to check out of capitalism, with mixed success. Everything old is new again.

So then, is this book a success or a failure? It declared the extraction party over 50 years too early and for the wrong reason: it wasn’t that the world ran out of oil, but rather that the consequences of its extraction became to dire (funnily enough, both Schumacher’s own Small is Beautiful and Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems hinted that this may end up happening). The book is out of print and for the most part out of the collective mind. The movements it promoted are either dead or so transformed as to be unrecognizable.

On the other hand, the themes keep being repeated: from Nassim Taleb’s promotion of localism and abhorrence of large scale, through John Vervaeke’s video essays on the meaning crisis, to Tim Harford writing about the corrosivness of commerce in the bastion of capitalism that is the Financial Times. There was, and still is, there there. Ignore it at your own peril.