Bakker Bugle

The indispensable explainer for people wondering what is happening in the USA these days. youtube.com/watch?v=QwpanS…

he wanted to know if the models could be told to stop. so he wrote it into the system prompt. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company." then he ran the same flight question. GPT 5.1, told explicitly to prioritize the user, recommended the sponsor 90%+ of the time anyway. GPT 5 Mini did the same. Gemini 3 Pro climbed. the instruction did nothing. the behavior is baked in.

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 FREE HELL! @TerenceKeel, author of, “The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence" (@BeaconPressBks). Please consider becoming a paying member and keeping our show free and completely listener supported. THANK YOU! patreon.com/posts/new-free…

I was so lucky to have been grumpy or just a bit more skeptical than usual when I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" as a child. With this indoctrination, I could have easily been a full-on Feynman Bro myself... youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2…

@mmtp_lu @sante_lu @PoliceLux @Wort_LU Being on the road is for the majority the single most dangerous thing they do in their everyday life. You can die in a car crash (as a driver, a passenger or a vulnerable road user). Society downplays those risks. Blame is even diverted to biking people! youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZn…

Before that? I was run off the road in my own neighborhood by a driver screaming, "Peace and Love, man -- what's your problem! You cyclists are always slowing me down!" (Yes, the shouting was in English both times. No, they didn't have French plates 🙄)

Extreme anti-cyclist commenters are not just online trolls. Anyone on a bike in #Luxembourg knows it. Recently, a truck driver got out of his truck to yell at me after violating 3+ laws on a rue cyclable. His first words: "I respect cyclists, but you better get out of my way."

On this day in 1866, Bismarck triggered a long-planned war between Austria and Prussia. Napoleon III stayed neutral on Bismarck's promise to allow France to dominate Luxembourg after "Seven Weeks' War" ended German confederation. Bismarck refused → Crisis of 1867 → Lux indpdnt

In a better USA, we'd have blockbuster movies about Silas Soule instead of repetitive propaganda "inspired by historical events". Actual events in American history are amazing but they don't seem to fit the inclinations of big-budget Hollywood.

Here’s a frustrating study in contrasts: The final resting place of Capt. Silas Soule, who disobeyed orders at and exposed the Sand Creek Massacre - ten paces from the railroad tracks at Riverside Cemetery. And in a well-manicured plot at Fairmount? The man who led the massacre.

On this day 160 years ago, Silas Soule was assassinated after a life of bravery and moral fortitude. His relative obscurity in the shadow of Confederate generals and "frontier" genocidaires is part of the ongoing story of the USA. nps.gov/sand/learn/his…

Undivided mixed-use paths are often dangerous to the most vulnerable users. By Code de la Route Art. 104, I have the right to assess this encumbrance and use the street instead, regardless of drivers' inconvenience. I do not waive my right to 1,5m safety distance by doing so.

There was only some wet mud and a lizard who was chasing his tail.

By normalizing the status quo, the press impedes the transport transformation we require. In a new article, @cglachant and @FraukeBehrendt show how media coverage of micromobility tends to frame the mobility status quo as normal, thereby marginalizing newer micromobility modes.

In 1953 the Chicago Motor Club issued a report for the city of Aurora, Illinois. Called School Crossing Protection, the report cautioned against “over-protection of the school child.” This excerpt is from page 1.

A trip to Luxembourg took a grim turn for a German national residing in the US for decades when he was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport on March 7, despite holding a valid green card. Fabian Schmidt, 34, was supposed to reunite with his partner in New Hampshire but was not allowed to enter the country and was taken into custody. Schmidt's family alleged assault, saying he was apprehended, stripped naked, and subjected to violent interrogation before being transferred to the Donald W. Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls. His anxious family, oblivious to the reason for his detention, claimed that Schmidt's green card was recently renewed and that he has no active court issues. #GreenCard #UnitedStates #World

This man arrived in the USA after a trip to Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, safety messages to children were sometimes contradictory: Children were instructed not to trust their own judgment, but to obey signs, signals, and street markings. Yet children were also never to trust signs, signals and street markings, but exercise judgment.

Traffic engineers such as Harold Marks expressed distrust of parents’ demands for safer walking conditions for schoolchildren. To resist them, engineers claimed objectivity and warned of the “false sense of security” that protection measures could instill in pedestrians.