Book Review: Stuff Matters

January 28, 2026

The Meta Irony

So the subtle irony behind the first meta post has been quite simple — all engineers seemingly write blogs.

Since I seem to be obsessed with meta and meta-meta type of things, in the best traditions of engineering blogs — this post will be about a book that has impressed me most lately.

Stuff Matters

And it will be surprisingly Mark Miodownik’s “Stuff Matters” — on the subtle physics, logic and “soul” behind the materials we see in our everyday life. Metal, Plastic, Porcelain, Paper, Chocolate — all of the seemingly mundane things described by Mark in such a way that you start treating them like proper sci-fi materials of the future, like a friend you have known for a long time but only now noticed how brilliant they are.

This book was randomly picked for a 14h flight because of geniuene interest in 3D printing at the time, and fella ChatGPT recommended it as a good reference point for the logic behind thermoplastics — with proper obsessed-engineer rigor behind.

And as a result — this book not only brought me vivid imagery on almost poetic stories about steel, plastic and bone china, but also showed me an interesting meta-pattern on how books could be written. Especially when they are written by engineers. And there is a third layer I will address right now before moving to much meatier things.

UK Mandem

When you live long enough in UK — you grow an appreciation towards well (and sometimes tricky) crafted sentences and paragraphs that scream with every layer of them: “written by a proper UK mind”. The book definitely hits that sweet spot of nostalgia with constructions that require proper mind wrestling to process. Once learning how to reliably render slightly fancy wording into vivid scenes in your mind — you notice that reading Mark is like observing a wine collection of a dedicated artisan. One who values well-crafted “word scenes”: ideas, phrases and sentences that have spent proper time in the cellars of an engineer’s mind — reaching optimal “ripe” conditions before they were put into paper or keystrokes.

Let me just show you several things I brought to my notes with some excited commentary of mine:

The man is writing about paper in such an artistic way this makes me smile with an insight, with appreciation of beauty. Just look at it:

“The world of travel is dominated by stiff, hard machines, and card reflects that back to us. Funnily enough, as cars and airplanes have gotten lighter and more efficient, so tickets have mirrored this, becoming thinner and thinner. Soon they will probably disappear altogether, becoming part of our digital lives.”

It’s very beautifully composed. Simple things gain life and soul. And it all starts to make very much sense.

And:

THE GUY literally breathes life into everything he writes about: “Paper money is an endangered species”

He has been cooking some ideas and shapes in his head for a while. And this is felt immediately for some chapters. You immediately notice that the idea is well forged, by artisans, in a proper Japanese furnace. You got me. The ideas are sharp, crisp and alive. They have well spent time in one’s head before they are extruded.

And:

“The biggest diamond yet discovered is located in the Milky Way in the constellation of Serpens Cauda, where it is orbiting a pulsar star called PSR J1719–1438. It is an entire planet five times the size of Earth.”

“Diamonds on Earth are minuscule by comparison. The biggest yet found is the size of a football.”

What a perspective this gives… beautifully twisted mind…

And:

“Money is at its most seductive in its paper form”

“Books on shelves and on tables are a kind of internal marketing exercise, reminding us who we are and who we want to be”

“The act of writing being one fundamentally of touch, of flow, of flourish, of sweet asides and little sketches, an individuality that is free from the mechanics of a keyboard. The ink becomes a kind of blood that demands honesty and expression, it pours on to the page, allowing thoughts to flow.”

I hope this brings you a slight understanding of what I am talking about.

Aged Thoughts

Same happened with this post — the commentary on this book and the idea to write about it has been aging inside cellars of my mind for a while before it reached its final form here in words.

His book is a proper collection of well-aged thoughts and concepts connected with somewhat fresher bridges, resulting in beautiful and coherent stories of seemingly mundane things around us.

There is something almost sacred in reading about how one could be truly obsessed with the things they are doing. And when it is a remote domain — you also learn the subject and get a glimpse into the mental models of a fellow engineer from distant fields.

I have Lost narrative here

There is a weird silver lining present through a significant part of my notes spanning over last 10 years — the meta-thinking on writing. For some absolutely obscure reasons I always had a feeling that I would be a writer. But it was rather met with careful planning and retrospective than just sitting there and writing. Countless ChatGPT chats where it evaluated my vocabulary and told me to use words like “quixotic” and “pernicious” more. Studying Hemingway’s works in the same places he’d been in Kenya in order to understand how exactly the world was seen by his eyes. And random pieces of writings from here and there.

I have almost forgotten where I have been leading this to.

But yeah, meta-thinking on writing. It has always puzzled me: “So I read things, whether sci-fi or prose — do other people around me understand it the same way?” And: “Whether I decide to write — how much meta-thinking is needed in order to produce wordings that will do the correct activations around the people that will read it?”

While the second type of meta-thinking is useful for writing stakeholder memos, briefs, commercial offerings and yada yada — Mark has shown me that raw thoughts properly aged in the cellars of mind will actually do the job. That no extra seasoning is needed. And that no other way to become a writer exists than to write.

This was planned to have a bigger bridge to the main narrative, but maybe next time

Hard and Soft

And here comes another stream of the same thinking: “Why engineers love to read books.”

As of December 2025 we can observe that part of engineering procedures and workflows have converged to “I use pure English to write code” @ Karpathy. In the case of now-retiring raw-dog code writing, the reference archives have been codebases and StackOverflow. For a speculatively extrapolated future — books might become the source of references.

As per vibe coding, there are two streams to make things work: hard and soft (like sci-fi). The hard stream is terms, precise instructions, actions, tasks, you get me. The soft stream is rather the meta-thinking framework that we want to impose over an LLM-”ghost” in order to achieve the result we want.

The skill created as per the Karpathy twitter post is a perfect illustration to the soft stream here.

So as I write about the meta-thinking principles we can take from books — a swarm of Opus subagents are chewing through several experiments I told them to run with Karpathy’s principles. I have just given them meta-thinking guidelines as a prompt in order to see where it will converge. Anthropic API being down is actually the best catalyst to just sit down and write stuff; waiting for agents to come back to life. You know, in order to not lose your prompting capability because of a sudden hiccup. UPD: My Elon Musk “first principles thinking” guidelines worked better than that skill.

I am bad at conclusions: Trying to converge

So I assume that it is about a time to converge several streams of thinking and meta-thinking here into one beautiful conclusion; but oh man I am bad at consluisons.

The speculative idea behind this post has been to

start with the meta irony regarding “I identify as engineer now, hence I have to write about the book I have read”
and then lead it gently towards the fact that “actually engineering becoming more and more plain english now, where an important part of daily job now is to impose certain meta thinking frameworks over models”
with a nudge to “that is why engineering & books reading have been so close for a long time, but now we can finally somewhat explain it”.
And maybe final “Let us all read more books and pay a closer attention towards the meta mechanics there - because actually they might come useful for my next prompt to claude”

Claude tried to process this list and produced:

  ┌─────────────────┐    ┌─────────────────────┐
  │ "I am engineer" │    │ Vibe coding = prose │
  │  → write blogs  │    │  → meta frameworks  │
  └────────┬────────┘    └──────────┬──────────┘
           │                        │
           └──────────┬─────────────┘
                      ▼
        ┌─────────────────────────┐
        │  Books = aged thoughts  │
        │  that transfer to LLMs  │
        └────────────┬────────────┘
                     ▼
          Read books → better prompts

P.S. I have absolutely forgotten to link up the sci-fi books here. But maybe next time I will write about my favorite author — Clifford Donald Simak. Not wildly popular, but I hope the internet will do its magic and connect me with like-minded engineers.

P.P.S. In the best practices of my first writeup — I absolutely hope that this one will also be buried in the darks of internet, so I would not feel bizarre about my own words. But it is rather now a self-imposed meta-framework in order to steer myself towards just writing stuff and then doing something fun with it once the critical mass of content is reached.