I believe that the best ideas emerge from a state of calm, as well as the freedom to explore without the external pressures of grant hunting and its risks. Enjoy!

Thanks for the invitation — a very interesting synthesis.

One angle for a commentary could be tinkering under ecological and network constraints, especially in software and technological systems. I’d be happy to contribute from a complex-systems perspective if useful.

cc: @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

Thanks @replicatedtypo.bsky.social for pointing this out.

For a more informal overview of the intuition — including the ecological implications — I also wrote a short Bluesky thread here:

bsky.app/profile/sval...

You can freely read a preprint of the chapter here:
arxiv.org/abs/2512.02953

This appears in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System: Part IV (2026), Santa Fe Institute Press.

cc: @mh-christiansen.bsky.social

Thank you, James.

As a side point: the term "tinkering" is not even new in the context of cultural evolution -- Francois Jacob had a paper on this in 1977 called "Evolution and tinkering" and @svalver.bsky.social + colleagues directly refer to tinkering in their papers on tech evolution

Interesting! Is there any connection between "Top Speed" and "Special Criminal Investigation" (both from Taito)?

youtu.be/3Eal0mjjepE?...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

arxiv.org/abs/2512.02953

Much of this work was developed during stays at the Santa Fe Institute. It provided a perfect environment to think about technology as an evolving system. It’s an honor to bring these ideas into this classic book series.

Thank you.

This research began years ago when I worked at Ubisoft Barcelona @ubisoft.com. Building Pro Rally 2002 for PlayStation 2/GameCube, I kept wondering whether complexity science could help us understand the challenges of large software projects.

youtu.be/ZymLjhhccW0