Friday: Three Morning Takes
pick your button / release the goblins / cannons too big to fail
PW Daily
May 1, 2026
Pick your button
The internet has been divided for a week over Tim Urban’s thought experiment: “Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?” Blues argue reds are selfish, sociopathic monsters, while reds argue blues are genuinely just dumb (blues could simply not press the suicide button, after all). The conversation has since shifted. Are babies included? How, if they can’t make a “choice”? Comatose patients? Ultimately, the reds “lost,” according to blues, as most people voted blue in an online poll with no stakes. But was the goal to win a poll, or make the best choice? In any case — a week with no discussion of Israel? Let’s be real, we all won.
Release the goblins
This week, internet dwellers discovered that OpenAI gave a new model the following instruction: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant.” Apparently, per a Wednesday blog from OpenAI, recent models were accidentally rewarded for goblin-laden outputs and therefore developed a taste for “creature language.” But as Kat Dee wrote for us yesterday, that doesn’t explain why the models specifically started yapping about “the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects” (aka goblins) in the first place. Just possibly, AIs are revealing “ultraterrestrials” of yore by tapping into strange, liminal spaces. At any rate, OpenAI shared instructions for disabling the goblin-suppression, and I recommend employing them. If the ultraterrestrials of yore are trying to reveal ancient cosmic mysteries through your silly little ChatGPT messages, who are you to suppress their truth, man?
Cannons too big to fail
Life as a junior employee at J.P. Morgan is tough: long hours… stressful projects… your boss forcibly performing oral sex on you and calling you her “little Arab boy toy” before withholding promotional opportunities unless you satisfy her ravenous desires after the company happy hour. Such were the allegations recently leveled against J.P. Morgan executive Lorna Hajdini, whose accuser claims subjected him to “humiliating” office sexual assault. In one instance, Hajdini allegedly courted her accuser with the text “Birthday BJ for the brown boy?” while another saw the exec expose her breasts and muse “bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons.” For their part, J.P. Morgan claims there’s “no merit” to the allegations, which comes as welcome news to one Mike Solana, whose writer will henceforth withdraw his J.P. Morgan job application and hope Hajdini didn’t see his LinkedIn message saying “nice cannons, it’s my birthday btw 👀”
