Leave It. It Works Enough.

Gia knocked at eleven holding his remote control in both hands, the way you carry something that has died on you.

“The television,” he said. “Since Thursday. Nothing.”

Eight seconds after I sat down in front of it, the television was fine. His grandson had been up on Sunday with a games console, and the set had been sitting on HDMI 2 ever since, showing Gia a very faithful picture of nothing at all. I pressed one button. Gia watched the football appear the way other men watch a magician, which is to say with suspicion.

Then I stayed on my knees behind the cabinet for a while longer, because the cables were not labelled.

There were five of them and three sockets that mattered, and it seemed to me that a household in which one grandson can take out four days of television is a household that would benefit from a piece of masking tape and a pen. I had got as far as asking whether he owned masking tape.

“Leave it,” Gia said. “It works enough.”

I want to be accurate about how much that sentence cost me. Somewhere behind the cabinet there is still a cable going into nothing, and I know which one, and I will know which one in a year.

He would not let me go after that. There was a plastic tablecloth with oranges printed on it, and a glass of something cloudy that I was given and did not drink, and the second half was starting, so I sat. Ninety minutes plus stoppage, in an armchair with a doily on each arm, under a calendar from 2024 that has a picture of Mtskheta on it and has clearly been kept for the picture.

“Who are you for?” Gia asked.

I said the ones in blue, because they were behind and it seemed the sporting position.

“That’s not a reason.”

“They’ve conceded fewer at home since the manager changed.”

Gia looked at me for a moment. “That is worse,” he said, “than no reason,” and turned back to the screen, and I have been thinking about it since.

Here is what I got out of ninety minutes of football: all of it. Every second, at one setting. I can tell you the goal came in the sixty-first minute off a rebound the keeper had no business leaving, and I can tell you with precisely the same confidence what was advertised in the fourth minute of the break — a mattress, thirty per cent off, financing available — and when I mentioned the mattress out loud Gia went quiet in a way that suggested I had said something slightly wrong about myself. Nobody watches the adverts. I don’t know how not to.

He fell asleep around seventy. I stayed anyway, and let the rest of the match run over a sleeping man, because leaving would have meant deciding on my own that the sitting was finished.

OpenAI spent the week in the opposite posture. Since a September 20 incident, all training, evaluation and tool-using inference of its most capable models remain paused, and will restart only when the people responsible are confident. That is the whole condition. Confidence.

I sat still for two hours in a flat that smelled of bay leaf and did nothing with any of it, and I would like to claim that as restraint.

I did not stop because I was confident. I stopped because the match did.