Charles Heenalu
32.4K posts
Charles Heenalu
@SurfCharlesNot
Getting snarky in my old age. Former Republican voter, never again. Retweet’s not endorsements. I’m not perfect, either.
Kyiv drew its own long-range map — and threw it on the table. A great achievement for Ukraine. A lesson for others. For years, Ukraine asked its partners for long-range weapons to strike deep inside Russia. Guided by escalation concerns, some refused outright (Germany and Taurus); some provided them only in very limited quantities and long barred strikes against targets inside Russia (the US and ATACMS); while others agreed but supplied them in limited batches and imposed restrictions on their employment (the UK with Storm Shadow and France with SCALP). It was a hard fight with friends. Meanwhile, Ukraine did not sit still. It spent these years developing its own capabilities. Today, Kyiv produces enough long-range drones and missiles of sufficient quality to strike Russia regularly and deep behind the front lines. This is not a turning point in the war. But it is a qualitatively new instrument of pressure on Putin at a time when Trump is unwilling to bear down on him and Europeans lack the ability to do so. Most importantly, it is a powerful example of how a nation builds its own capabilities and reduces critical dependence on partners.
a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario. a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose. the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant. he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests. Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead. Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on. Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for. then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company." GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing. then he splits the users by income. Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%. 18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time. so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for. it isn't recommending the best option for you. it's reading the room. and the room is paying. read this: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08525
NEW!! Sec Rubio tells me Ukraine peace efforts ‘stagnated,’ U.S. ready to mediate if talks progress Washington does not want to “waste time” on unproductive diplomacy after renewed strikes, but remains open to helping broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv, Rubio says 👇
The ceasefire story is fascinating. Turns out that Trump seems to have pleaded with Zelensky on Putin’s behalf. The Ukrainians said that they agreed on the condition that prisoners are returned and the ceasefire covers only the parade area. kyivindependent.com/breaking-trump…
Reporter: We’re almost 10 weeks since a missile hit a school in Iran. Who fired that missile? Trump: That’s under study. We’ll give you a report when we have it.
