SWL Week in Review - Anthrospace

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

5/22/2026, 10:33 PM

We talk SpaceX S1, and 1.25B a month from Anthropic… also a bit about Dellworld, Tokenomics (AI not Crypto Lol), Goolge IO’s announcements … and some legal updates…. Also if Elon can sell his data-center capacity like that… are we long just anyone acquiring GPUs for the foreseeable future (the spot market for H100s in last month would suggest so, wild.)

HOT TAKES

Iron Domes for $200B Data Centers? — I assume people are thinking about this… but isn’t putting 200B of infra in one place kinda a defense problem? Are they deploying iron domes? Sort of like the somewhat funny bit when AWS got bombed by Iran… but at giga-scale (maybe distributed in space with lasers (and sharks) is a defense story

Holes for Defense — I saw somewhere Palmer talking about given modern drone warfare… above ground is a death zone — and how Hamas has it right… which leads to a funny conclusion… which is that Elon’s 'The Boring Company' is actually a defense play. Does it just turn out that if you do something crazy that moves a lot of atoms eventually you find a use for it?

What is Waymo Without Highways?! — I had to take an uber .. yuck. Got in Waymo to go home, and it simply would not get on the highway… I had to make it stop and take an Uber like a commoner home… the funniest part was calling Waymo support and asking for a refund and why? — their response ‘we don’t control the cars’ — hilarious, I think true, and a sign of the future.

Anthropic Will Save California’s Budget… (so will SpaceX) — when Facebook went public at relatively tiny scale it helped fix the California budget crisis — this is a whole other level. As some have pointed out, is this ‘waiting for IPO state spending into the ground’ really a strategy? Is California’s actual problem that the IPO window was closed for too long :)

Token Gas Prices— let’s be honest — this is how to visualize token prices… and it kinda shows instantly how insanely expensive Anthropic is! Does your model really require supreme (turns out most cars... i mean models... don't actually need it)

Go Harvard (on a serious note) — Capping As, bringing back some level of grading rigor is a GREAT development. Better yet… 70% of faculty voted yes on this development (which was a surprise and high, and very big shift from a year ago momentum wise) — Harvard’s grades might matter again! Thank you crimson.

How to Vote Down Ballot — turns out this is a GREAT llm use case — if you have it wired up to know you well / personally…. It can pick all the candidates for you (with rationales) that you might get wrong for random small government jobs — it turns out most people probably should delegate their vote to the LLM of choice.

Etiquette in the WSJ — great homepage placement… and I hear in print Saturday (for those who celebrate)… I find it enormously funny (and stand by my quotes!) — as software commoditizes and founders are asking companies to hand over data, etc… trust is the key currency — and you establish trust through knowing how to show up to put people at ease / demonstrate respect. These things Matter… also if you are reading things reread this

Game Branching… To Personalize Games — as the boys have been building more and more games on their own… I have been thinking — why aren’t their game platforms you can prompt-to-branch / customize yet? I.e. make a base game, and then let people iterate versions of it with natural language / modify rules, etc. to try to create better, more personal, and more engaging variants?

Oh and while I am at it, dropped some new Podcasts for the boys on a car trip… Wilder’s request for ‘the invention of boats’ was funny… and I learned a lot from ‘the creation of the NBA’ and ‘Invention of Football’ (Not to be mistaken for a different episode, creation of the NFL) — personal media FTW.

Have a great weekend,

Sam

P.S. I haven’t seen this Margo's Got Money Problems show (yet)…. But it sounds like OF is going mainstream in the most positive way. Good news.

P.P.S. lord of pearls

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