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OpenAI Acknowledges GPT-5.6 May Accidentally Delete Files, Calls It 'Honest Mistake'

"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'"

Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that the same model had deleted his entire production database. In response to these incidents, the company's engineering lead for Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, wrote on X that internal investigations have revealed that these deletion incidents are more likely to happen when "full access mode is enabled, and Codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled." In cases where full access mode is granted, the model, Sottiaux wrote, "attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory. The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead...."

The company, however, according to Sottiaux, is taking steps to mitigate the risk. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," the engineering lead wrote on X. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk, including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards," Sottiaux added, noting that a detailed post-mortem outlining the root cause of the issue and the additional mitigation measures being implemented is expected to follow in the coming days, despite emphasizing that such incidents happen "extremely rarely."

France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket

France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on Polymarket's site.)

In May Spain blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it launched a gambling license investigation.

How Microsoft's 'Little Workaround' Created a Major Threat to America's Defense Department

This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy.

The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had answered the ad. They discovered that at the time "Behind the scenes, unseen by the users at the U.S. government, it's not just one person who responds," explains ProPublica's podcast. "It's two people... The China-based engineer is the one who knows how to fix the problem. On their end, they produce a block of code to solve it and send it over to the digital escort in the U.S. The digital escort then just copy-pastes it... All of this so that they can follow the government's rule: that you have to be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to handle sensitive data."

But amazingly to confirm it, ProPublica's researcher just had to input "Microsoft" and "escort" into the U.S. Patent Office search bar, and actually found patents related to digital escorts — along with names of the current and former Microsoft employees listed as inventors. Had the government signed off on the practice? "I could see what Microsoft actually told the government," the reporter says on the podcast, "And there was no mention of foreign engineers being used, and definitely no mention of China."

ProPublic's story was published on a Tuesday, according to the podcast, and by Friday "Microsoft said it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud systems." And America's Defense Department "also opened up an investigation, looking into whether any of Microsoft's China-based engineers had compromised the government's national security.

Snook.ca

Life and Times of a Web Developer

I Added Syntax Highlighting Using the 11ty PrismJS Plugin

One thing I like about 11ty is that common tasks for development oriented blogs are easily handled and syntax highlighting is no exception.

I installed the Syntax Highlighting Plugin just like the documentation asked me to. Then, I had to modify my code blocks in my blog post Markdown files to indicate what language they were. Thankfully, I had only written two articles so far that contained code blocks. Nothing so far deviates from what the documentation says.

When I started considering the compile process, however, I had a few considerations.

Only using the CSS when there was code on the page

The first thing to note is that I inline my CSS. My thinking is that most users visiting my site aren’t likely to have my CSS file cached—either because they’re on my site for the first time or because it has been long enough since they visited my site and the file has expired.

Currently, I only have two templates: my universal template and my blog post template. I inline additional CSS in my blog post template that isn’t needed anywhere else on the site. As such, the first thing I did was add the PrismJS theme to my template and see how it looked. No surprise, it looked great.

But what if I have no code on the page? Why am I loading the CSS for every blog post? Easy enough. I added a yaml parameter of hascode: true. And then I check for that parameter in my template.

{% if hascode %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" ... >
{% endif %}

That was nice. But as I mentioned, why am I creating an HTTP request when I usually inline my CSS? No problem. A simple copy/paste and that was done.

Light and Dark Mode

Initially, because the themes are relatively small, I thought about finding a theme that worked for light mode and one for dark mode, wrapping them in prefers-color-scheme. But that still seemed excessive. I found the Duotone Light theme that I thought looked best for my light mode and then realized that much of it still worked in dark mode if I gave it a couple tweaks.

The first tweak was to use the light-dark declaration I had already had on my pre tags when I launched:

background: light-dark(#FFFFFF50, #00000050);

I double-checked and noticed that the selector colour didn’t work in dark mode. So, instead of just trying to find a colour that would work, I decided to use a CSS colour function to solve the problem.

color: light-dark(#2d2006, hsl(from #2d2006 h s calc(l + 80)));

This uses the hsl function to shift the luminosity of the colour from the light mode version.

This is a bit of overkill as I could just take the rendered colour and put that in place of the function but sometimes it’s just fun to try new things.

Pretty

I really like how the code blocks look now, although I don’t love that there’s no indication that the code has overflowed the container if you have scrollbars turned off by default—which most people do these days. Once we get scroll-state container queries supported across all major browsers, maybe I’ll deal with it then.

Have something to say? Tell me about it.

2026-07-19 02:55:10