SWL Week in Review - Lowbrow LLM culture

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

10/26/2025, 9:10 PM

More or Less Highbrow vs. Lowbrow Cultural Responses to AI

We play with ideas around the cultural reverberations of LLMs…. Watching some humans / people literally start to talk like machines / mimmic the bots - while the more culturally sophisticated approach is people working harder / adapting patterns of language and interaction to clearly distinguish themselves from machines. Also, should we all be long google?… seems like a wild variance question given search susceptibility (really tho? Aren’t those the least monetizable queries?) vs. the STILL under-appreciated TPU story (is google google + Nvidia? + Waymo and what else)

Hot Takes

Lowbrow LLM use - politics follow culture, culture follows tech. In this moment the culture following tech is either parroting LLMs or rejecting sounding like a computer.

Naval’s Wisdom… I don’t usually like random fandoms… but Toly resurfaced this Naval tweet and it really is quite good — hard to not appreciate what amounts to the good parts of very good book in 20 tweets.

Nuclear War a Scenario — … hilariously jess and I watched ‘House of Dynamite’ last night… and the whole time I was like, ‘this is just a rip-off of the book Nuclear War a Scenario — … turns out on googling it, yes. That is exactly what it is — movie was OK, book is great.

Making Fun of Europe — The Cheapest / Easiest Way to get Twitter Engagement… works every time. It is the lay-up of tweets because everyone either wants to (a) fight you or (b) agree with you— which is exactly what the algorithm wants

Random Reward Credit Card, an old favorite idea.. — funny to see the launch if https://www.coverd.us/ — I think the design they have is a bit too complicated, but right theme / idea and follows one of my old favorite themes of design for an era without as much fundamental opportuinity/ growth... from tiktok on down everything becomes a lottery (and it isn't even irrational for it to work that way)

Famous Last Words — earlier this week I was having a great conversation about the future of libraries — what do we need them for really? In an era where leaders don’t write things down, and frictionless world means everyone just talks their books / no expectation of recorded authenticity? Maybe libraries should become trusted ‘timeout’ where leaders go to record in private secured archives what is REALLY going on to be unsealed long in the future (the library as nexus of trust) — you go in the ‘stack’ as a clean room to hear the real story when you can’t trust any source — I was mentioning this and someone said, ‘oh like famous last words’ on Netflix — apparently this is already a pop thing.

Pascal’s AI Wager — this resonated last week and the conversation continued… the big question is what do you do when the ‘wager’ really isn’t costless either in practical dollars or to society… and what if you bet on the ‘wrong’ religion.

Pro-Institution & Pro-Western Party — It seems like Kamala wants to run again? For the love of g-d please no…. Again, pro-institution & pro-western is the way to go.

AI Uno EvalI will be more worried when AIs can at least figure out how to play Uno. This was a pretty disappointing experience where these AIs don’t even know what this card does (neither do I to be clear, but this should be a layup)

AI music is getting good, but it is all about remixes not originals — Spotify discover weekly served me a banger of a remix of Eminem … loved it not even knowing it was AI … but it is. And it is great. IN more and more domains I am VERY SHORT purely AI created content BUT the idea that in all sorts of places with AI we actually listen to / watch, etc. a concentrated set of great human driven culture and AI just infinitely samples and remixes it… that is the way / that is the future. Like most things — the middle drops, the head becomes even more dominant.

What is Quantum Actually Useful For? really smart people keep telling me … nothing / that quantum computers can’t solve the traveling salesman problem we were told in high school they could… if the market is just for recovering old encrypted hard-drives where I lost the password it is non-zero, but probably not worth all that much. PS, I do have a few hard drives I would love to use a few billion dollars of someone else’s money to recover if you got something for me.

Harvard Grade Inflation — 1636 has gone really deep on this — worth a read. When Princeton tried to curb grade inflation in the 2000s, it did so without graduate programs in core fields like law, business, or medicine. Harvard, by contrast, can coordinate across the College and its Law, Business, Medical, and other schools to help its admissions offices interpret new grading distributions consistently.

Peanut Gallery

David asked for a ping on his talk in Privacy, Crypto, AI and Control

Anarchist’s Cookbook — Farm Memberships going but not gone for those who want to join the movement to drop out of the awful factory farmed American food system and build our own private versions.

Best,
Sam

P.S. remember in 2011 when I thought it was ‘too late’ to invest in bitcoin? Came up in recent conversation… and it is always a good reminder to be willing to re-evaluate things, but also a key explanation of how you get mega bubbles when everyone follows the same logic.

SWL

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