Category: Tech

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs

This capability comes for free…

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs

ArXiv has an interesting paper on mechanising online deanonymization attacks on large datasets. Even if you’re not interested in LLMs it’s still worth understanding what they’re capable of and how they may be deployed against you in the future.

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…explore infinitely diverse worlds

This Project Genie stuff is really rather impressive – I’m less interested in the gaming aspects (60 seconds? Pah!), but it’s going to be interesting to watch how it’s adopted for cheap stock shots and special effects.

The thing is, though, there are a couple of articles kicking around and no-one seems to have done the next logical thing – create 60 seconds of footage, grab the last frame, and then try and create more footage based on that last frame. It’s likely to degrade across generations, but how it degrades will be interesting in itself.

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a lovely online compendium of Henry T. Brown’s classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements. The classic illustrations (taken from a 1906 edition of the text) are just wonderful – as are the modern animated sequences that show the motions in question. My current favourite is No. 92 – better known to most as the mechanism used to drive a steam locomotive!

Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size for MacOS Tahoe

Well, it’s been a little while since I last looked at sizing Time Machine backups on MacOS and, with MacOS 26 (‘Tahoe’), the magic incantation needed to pull that information out has changed.

Open up a terminal and enter the following…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "will be in backup of all sources"

…and this will print out a number of records from previous Time Machine sessions thus…

2025-11-17 08:59:01.989807+0000 0xdd79ec   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3112764 files (13.52 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 09:54:37.554473+0000 0xde7d23   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3113582 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 10:54:38.754477+0000 0xdfb366   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3119251 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 11:54:25.417194+0000 0xe0dd3f   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3123208 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources

New Old Stock IBM OS/2 Warp 3.0

Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0.

Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached.

And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not. I should really get an instance of this up and running just so I can really feel – rather than just see – the differences between how I expect it to work and how it does work…

Anyway, I strongly suggest going and having a read of the article and a look at the pretty pictures.