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White House Authorizes Private Companies to Conduct Offensive Cyber Operations

White House Authorizes Private Companies to Conduct Offensive Cyber Operations

The White House is creating a program that will allow vetted U.S. companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign cybercrime groups under federal direction. The presidential memorandum creates a formal path for private companies to perform work usually associated with government cyber operators. Participating firms could covertly access criminal systems, collect intelligence, disrupt networks, manipulate infrastructure, or destroy data after receiving approval from the…

Socket
PHP Ambassadors: Six Weeks In

PHP Ambassadors: Six Weeks In

When we launched the PHP Ambassador Program on June 19, 2026, we honestly didn’t know what to expect. We knew the need for something like this was definitely there, and it seemed like something the community would be interested in being a part of. But as they say, “you never know how a thing is going to go, until it goes.” I mentioned in my strategy document that I was hoping to enlist 10 people to attend a regular cadence of meetings. (Honestly, 10 people seemed like a reasonable number.) Not…

The PHP Foundation
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights, but given the weights are available for both April's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro and July's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 it seems likely. Interestingly I got very different looking pelicans for the three different…

Simon Willison's Weblog
alchemy-utils 0.1a0

alchemy-utils 0.1a0

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a research spike to see what it would take to build a library with the same core API as SQLite-utils - in particular the insert and upsert and insert_all and upsert_all and create and update methods, and the table introspection stuff - but…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Florian Herrengt

Quoting Florian Herrengt

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature. "So where does the data come from?" "Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude." You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very…

Simon Willison's Weblog
The Two Pillars of Post-training: Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning

The Two Pillars of Post-training: Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning

This is the second article in Sharon Zhou’s post-training series. Read part 1 here. In the first post of this series, you learned how post-training closed the fundamental gap in usability of LLMs by making them behave in a certain way. In this post, you’ll explore specific techniques you can use to change a model’s […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you…

Simon Willison's Weblog
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you…

Simon Willison's Weblog
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