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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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LLM text written for humans can be very useful. For quick research, short of having a team of experts on retainer who are obliged to answer you within a minute or two if you text them, the bots are obviously the answer. If I am debugging a specific Linux problem, I am not going to care that Scott could have presented the answer in a better writing style.

Here is a CW analogy for you. Guns are undeniably useful. Cheap. Scale well. Incapacitate physically stronger opponents without ever getting into close combat. Kill your enemies without needing to deal with the vagueness of poisons or henchmen.

Yet inexplicably, many places and societies restrict the use and sometimes even the bearing of guns. There are whole sports built around the fiction that you can't just shoot your opponent. How does this fit together?

Clearly, this is just societies avoiding a tragedy of the commons, an inadequate equilibrium. Your life might be slightly improved by you carrying, but it will be massively impacted if everyone around you (including kids and schizophrenics) is likewise packing. The gun CW is merely about the specifics of the tradeoffs, but very few people support just arming everyone.

As I have outlined above, permitting LLM-generated texts would transform this website in pretty much the same way as airdropping a few crates of Kalashnikovs would transform schoolyard violence.

I'm not sure I agree with the point it makes, but that's a really cool analogy.