GoKawiilI just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Still, 2026 does feel singular: every conversation that I had with my fellow '96ers seemingly circled back to the effects that LLMs are having on knowledge work — and the anxiety felt for the future.
Beyond LLMs, there was another topic that came up quite a few times (albeit among an admittedly small and self-selecting demographic). This was a very specific kind of nostalgia for the three-decades-old past, and explaining it necessitates a bit of backstory…
In my first year of college in 1992, my friends and I loved to play the terrific Wesleyan Tetris by Randall Cook, the so-called "asshole tetris" that would make your game difficult (by inserting squares or taking them away or similar mischief) — and then make fun of you for it.
I thought it would be neat to make a two-player Tetris with similar inspiration — but instead of the computer making your life difficult, it would be your networked opponent. In the summer of 1993, I resolved to write a version of what I had in mind: two players duel in Tetris, accumulating money (by getting dice in cleared lines), and then using that money to buy weapons to screw up the opponent’s game (flipping their board upside down, making the pieces spin out of control, giving them oddly shaped pieces, etc). Local area networking was not found much outside of commercial and university settings, so I instead connected two PCs with a null-modem cable. Over that summer, I also had the blessing of a willing play tester in my younger sister (thank you, Libby!): she and I spent much of that summer in our mom’s basement in Colorado, listening to U2’s Zooropa, and playing early versions of what I had dubbed BattleTris.
When I returned to Providence in the fall, I showed the game to my suitemates. The game was an immediate hit (if a hyperlocal one!), and we resolved to build a proper version from scratch for the group final project for our software engineering class in the spring.
We started the course early in 1994, knowing exactly what we wanted to do (and having already built it once and having an idea where some of the design challenges were), we got to work, working on the final project long before it was formally assigned.
By the time the course’s famous demo day arrived at the end of the semester, the re-imagined BattleTris was pretty polished — and it brought the house down: after our demo, it seemed as if everyone was playing the game that we had created. (This long pre-dates digital photography, but an image that is seared into my mind’s eye is walking into the back of the Sunlab that night — and seeing every computer playing BattleTris.) That was the good news; the bad news was that it may have been relatively polished, but it was by no means bulletproof — and the three of us scrambled to fix bugs.
Over the next two years, we continued to work on BattleTris as our time allowed (and played plenty of it). BattleTris saw some of my own undergraduate milestones: when my 21st birthday rolled around, my housemates and I snuck a case of beers into one of the systems labs and turned BattleTris into a drinking game (one that I was designed to lose — and very much did).
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