Today, we remember a legend.
On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline.
Tomorrow marks 10 years since we lost him. Ten years since the moment the world stopped scrolling and collectively mourned something bigger than a meme.
He became a symbol of loyalty, strength, chaos, unity, and the strange beauty of the internet bringing millions of people together for one cause: never forgetting Harambe.
Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. And somehow, a decade later, his legacy still lives on.
Gone, but never forgotten.
Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸
May 27, 1999 — May 28, 2016
Forever in our hearts.
As evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human. It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological, and it is my hope that the Encyclical Letter to be published within a few days will contribute to answering this challenge.
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: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
The only thing epic here is the aesthetic catastrophe.
Nolan is a cerebral director of the global anglo world, all his intelligence put to industrial ends. Grey matter for a grey world. Nothing in this trailer is Greek. Nothing is Mediterranean. No olive groves and no white stone burning under the sun and no salt and no pine and no sea-glare. A deracinated Odyssey, made for imaginary nobodies from nowhere.
The script feels like it's going to be the work of a diligent student who took down the events of the Odyssey one by one, forgetting that this is not a novel but an archaic poem, from a time when men and women lived each word as a heartbeat, who sang the soul and flesh of a people and of a world at once real and supernatural. A poem in which Telemachus does not say "my dad is coming home."
The Odyssey deserved a Parajanov or a Fellini or a Welles, someone larger than life, a Dionysian ogre, someone hungry, someone who could make a film that smells of figs and raw wool and roasting meat and tar and blood. Monsters that are actually monstrous and seductive witches with real venom and golden shields catching real light and banquets going on for days.
And the women of the poem, who are everywhere in Homer and seem so cold and dull here. Circe in her smoke and Calypso in her cave and Penelope at her loom, the sensuality of witches and the rigid loyalty of wives, all replaced by a fashion-armor Athena and a Penelope played as a strong American woman.
And then there is what the Odysseus of the trailer says: "No one can stand between me and home, not even the gods". The cunning sufferer who knew how to bow to divine forces turned into a defiant individualist who bows to no one. Greek cunning replaced by American autonomy. The poem's central lesson reversed in a single line of dialogue.
I usually don't mind Hollywood slop, but this has made me weirdly angry, and the film isn't even out yet. I feel as if a red line has been crossed, some hubris that has gone too far. The gods have been angered. How could they not be, with the decapitation of that statue at the end of the trailer? An iconoclastic gesture absent from Homer, usual with the monotheistic traditions that have spent centuries smashing pagan images.
Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. Apollo without Dionysus produces exactly this: cerebral, cold, unambiguous. I cannot trust a filmmaker who is not hungry enough to banquet with the gods.
The names of kings have been worn away by the sands of time. Gods once feared are forgotten. Monuments to the immortality of civilizations now shattered into the cobblestones of another. But one man shall survive forever because he was a really, really shitty copper merchant.
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.