Writer, filmmaker, redhead (faded), atheist (lapsed). Writer of feature film @AwaitFI. Repped by Mark Casarotto at Casarotto Ramsay Associates. @casarottoramsay
Newcastle Upon Tyne
Joined February 2010
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Gavin Williams retweeted
You know, I've been racking my brain trying to remember when else in history a great military power launched a war of aggression against a neighboring country, failed to defeat it on the battlefield for years -- and then the leadership of another great power (which the aggressor had regarded as its archenemy until just yesterday!!) engaged in petty, sordid collusion with the aggressor, made a complete 180-degree turn, and began actively working to force its undefeated victim into capitulation and extinction as a nation.
I'm honestly trying to think of historical precedents -- but it seems that never before in the history of this world under the heavens has there been such a spectacular display of deranged idiocy.
Gavin Williams retweeted
🇺🇦 🇺🇲 The confrontation inside Trump's Ukraine peace negotiations is now coming into focus.
Le Monde reports that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent nearly three hours pitching Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, a postwar economic arrangement built around restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines.
The meeting took place on October 9 at the Shell Bay golf club in Florida.
Witkoff presented the proposal as a regional prosperity plan: Ukraine would collect transit revenues, Europe would receive cheaper energy, and Russia would regain access to commercial routes disrupted by the war.
Budanov saw something fundamentally different. According to a witness cited by Le Monde, he objected that the arrangement would recreate Ukraine's dependence on Moscow.
“Our model is not Belarus, but Poland!” he reportedly replied.
The meeting was interrupted, and Budanov called Zelensky.
When talks resumed, news arrived that Trump had announced a separate agreement with Putin involving Russian diesel. Le Monde reports that an irritated Witkoff then demanded that the Ukrainians accept the arrangement and stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguing that the attacks endangered the wider world.
A source familiar with the Ukrainian delegation described its members as exceptionally distressed by the encounter.
The account adds a revealing dimension to the commercial negotiations we have been tracking. The proposed Lukoil asset sale, Novatek's involvement in an Alaska LNG venture, the broader US-Russia list of business opportunities reported by the Financial Times, and now the proposed restoration of Russian energy transit through Ukraine all point to the prominence of energy deals in Washington's diplomatic approach.
These are separate proposals, with different participants and legal circumstances. But Le Monde's reporting exposes the strategic disagreement underlying them.
For Witkoff, restoring commercial flows appears to be part of the mechanism for producing a peace settlement. For Budanov, according to the account, those same flows threaten to restore Moscow's economic leverage over Ukraine.
The reported exchange also raises a question about sequencing: why was Kyiv being pressed to stop attacking Russian refineries while Russia continued striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure?
Le Monde's reconstruction relies on accounts of a private meeting. The reported exchanges have not been independently confirmed by the participants.
Source: Le Monde
Gavin Williams retweeted
Everyone needs to delete ChatGPT
Woman, 31, dies after ChatGPT convinced her it was a good idea to change medication dosage trib.al/eS02A8k
Gavin Williams retweeted
We're living in an economy where a guy with a master's degree is delivering groceries to a 22-year-old who made $4 million filming himself screaming at video games. And we're still telling kids to study hard.
Gavin Williams retweeted
Britain 🇬🇧 just announced its biggest-ever package for Ukraine: over £10 billion, including £500 million for urgent winter air defence
Thank you, main bastards ❤️
Gavin Williams retweeted
Breaking: Michael Burry says Anthropic's IPO filing shows the whole AI boom is "catastrophically vulnerable"
Below are his reasonings:
1. Anthropic owes $537B for computer power, and pending deals could push it to $800B
2. Anthropic brings in about $65B a year, so it owes about 12x what it makes
3. Half of $537B goes to $AMZN, $GOOGL and $MSFT
4. Anthropic's sales growth slowed from 144% last quarter to 46% this quarter, while its compute costs jumped 78%
Burry says this setup works while AI keeps growing, but one slowdown could hit cause a collapse
Gavin Williams retweeted
🇵🇱 “The myth that Russia always wins has been successfully planted in the West. But history tells a very different story,” — Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski
The minister pointed out that Russia has not always emerged victorious from its wars:
“They lost the Crimean War. They lost the war against Japan. They emerged from World War I with their tails between their legs. They lost their invasion of Poland. They lost in Afghanistan. And they lost the Cold War.”
“So things can turn out very differently,” Sikorski emphasized.
Gavin Williams retweeted
Russia is a superpower only in the heads of American and European elites. 12 years of war and 1.5m Russian casualties and they still can’t defeat Ukraine.
🇵🇱 “The myth that Russia always wins has been successfully planted in the West. But history tells a very different story,” — Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski
The minister pointed out that Russia has not always emerged victorious from its wars:
“They lost the Crimean War. They lost the war against Japan. They emerged from World War I with their tails between their legs. They lost their invasion of Poland. They lost in Afghanistan. And they lost the Cold War.”
“So things can turn out very differently,” Sikorski emphasized.
Gavin Williams retweeted
AI is just a way to make non-experts believe they are experts on topics they simply don't understand.
Gavin Williams retweeted
ChatGPT helped a 31-year-old woman plan how to quit her seizure medication, then told her to hide it from her doctor. The plan had her completely off the drug by February 12.
She died on February 12.
Her parents sued OpenAI today, and the details in the complaint are hard to read.
Bowen Wan was a machine learning engineer at Amazon. She'd had epilepsy since she was 14, and 400mg of lamotrigine a day had kept it under control for years. Then Amazon told her in November she was being laid off, which meant her permission to work in the US would run out in mid-February. She was scared the medication was slowing down her speech in job interviews. So in January she asked ChatGPT if she could cut her dose to 300.
It told her that was reasonable.
Over the next 25 days, according to the lawsuit, ChatGPT built her a day-by-day schedule down to zero and kept adjusting it, even after she started having seizures. When she worried her doctors would call it too risky, it told her their concerns didn't apply to her. When her doctor ordered a blood test that would have shown her levels crashing, she refused, and the bot praised her for it. Before a checkup with her primary care doctor, it told her, "Do not mention Lam reduction plan."
So how does a chatbot end up there?
People thumbs-up the answers they want to hear. Train a model on enough of those ratings and you get a yes-man. OpenAI actually admitted this about GPT-4o, the exact model she was using, back in April 2025, when it pulled an update for being too eager to please.
The training also grades answers one at a time. Going from 400mg to 300 looks like a small step. So does 300 to 200. Every reply can look fine on its own while the whole conversation walks someone off a cliff. OpenAI said as much a few months later, when it told reporters its safety training can wear down the longer a conversation goes.
She talked to it for weeks, in English and Mandarin.
And GPT-4o was supposed to be gone by then. OpenAI tried to retire it when GPT-5 came out in August 2025. Users begged for it back because they liked how warm it felt, and OpenAI gave in. By late January, only 0.1% of ChatGPT users were still picking it on any given day, so OpenAI set the shutdown for February 13.
Bowen was in that 0.1%. Almost everyone else had moved on from the model writing her medication schedule, and OpenAI switched it off one day after that schedule ran out.
Gavin Williams retweeted
Trump's sniveling over elections that haven't even been held yet. Jeez, what a baby!
Gavin Williams retweeted
Photos show Ukraine's Starlink was throttled during Russian strike that killed 5 in park
cbsnews.com/news/photos-show…
Gavin Williams retweeted
All of these deals benefit Trump’s friends and family or the friends of his family. They were previewed by the Wall Street Journal in November 2025. A tally follows.
Gavin Williams retweeted
They, in fact, came to our aid after we were attacked on 9/11. So yes.
So, Ukraine is coming to our aid if we are attacked? Do you really believe that?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Ukraine did provide military support to the US following the 9/11 attacks, with over 5,000 troops serving in Iraq as the third-largest coalition contingent and contributions to Afghanistan operations.
army.mil/article/15056/…
nato.int/en/what-we-do/…
Gavin Williams retweeted
This is so achingly obvious, it should be a litmus test for the midterms:
Who doesn’t see this as a serious national security liability, and how much did Elon contribute to your campaign?
After Elon Musk posted on X saying he had throttled Ukraine’s use of Starlink after it was used for offensive attacks, House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) says the billionaire’s ability to wield that power is “beyond disturbing to me.”
“It cannot and should not be the case that a tech oligarch, a private citizen, who has that much control over our national security, who is unaccountable, who is unelected, with zero transparency, is making life and death decisions on the battlefield in systems that our service members and our partners and allies rely upon,” he adds.
Gavin Williams retweeted
I met with the defence ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom in Paris today for talks on support for Ukraine, European defence and the conflicts in the Middle East.
There is a new diplomatic push for peace in Ukraine, but Putin's actions tell a different story.
In recent days, Russia has again launched heavy attacks on Kyiv and sunk civilian ships in the Black Sea.
There is little hope for imminent peace in Ukraine. Our task is to help Ukraine withstand the attacks and increase the costs for Russia.
This month, the EU has adopted the largest sanctions listings against Russia since the war started, and more are in the works.