Stealing Part of a Production Language Model (2024)
We introduce the first model-stealing attack that extracts precise, nontrivial information from black-box production language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s PaLM-2. Specifically, our attack recovers the embedding projection layer (up to symmetries) of a transformer model, given typical API access. For under $20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI’s ada and babbage language models. We thereby confirm, for the first time, that these black-box … ⌘ Read more

DCF77, our time signal radio station, is a great public service. I really love that. It’s just a signal that anybody can pick up, no subscription, no tracking, no nothing. Much like GPS/GNSS. 💚

Seeing like a software company
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Boosting work engagement through a simple smartphone diary
Work engagement is a positive and persistent state of mind related to one’s work. It is characterized by high energy and mental resilience (vigor), enthusiasm and involvement (dedication), and complete concentration in the task at hand (absorption). Engaged workers are not merely more productive; they are more likely to be proactive, creative, and less susceptible to burnout. Most importantly, work engagement has been consistently … ⌘ Read more

My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

Does anyone else’s cat just stare at them like this? ⌘ Read more

Lake Tahoe algae experiment suggests seasonal shifts ahead
As the climate warms and nutrient inputs shift, algal communities in cool, clear mountain lakes like Lake Tahoe will likely experience seasonal changes, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, published in Water Resources Research. ⌘ Read more

Top pic: the last picture of my best buddy Gus who succumbed to a hard battle with cancer after 15 great years. Bottom pic: the kitten who ran up to me in a parking lot two days later completely out of nowhere. I like to imagine he found me again. ⌘ Read more

Anyone else’s cat sit like this on the cat tower? ⌘ Read more

Strange ‘rogue’ planet spotted guzzling matter like a star
A mysterious “rogue” planet has been observed gobbling six billion tons of gas and dust a second—an unprecedented rate that blurs the line between planets and stars, astronomers said Thursday. ⌘ Read more

Self-Hosting Email Like It’s 1984
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Undergrad students deploy applications to geosynchronous satellite 22,236 miles above Earth
For many college students, satellites are faint dots crossing the sky on clear nights. These objects are background details from science fiction to reality, like GPS, satellite radio, and WiFi. ⌘ Read more

A Mac-like experience on Linux
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2 Ways to Install Homebrew in MacOS Tahoe
Homebrew is a powerful command line package manager that allows you to easily install, update, and manage popular command line programs and tools, as well as traditional graphical apps with cask (and third party tools like Applite help you manage cask through the GUI too). It’s a popular tool with advanced Mac users and those … Read More ⌘ Read more

Computational tool helps forecast volcano slope collapses and tsunamis
For people living near volcanoes, danger goes well beyond lava flows and clouds of ash. Some explosive eruptions can lead to dramatic collapses of the sides of a volcano, like those at Mount St. Helens, Washington, and Anak Krakatau, Indonesia. The latter triggered tsunamis blamed for most deaths from its historic eruptions in 1883. ⌘ Read more

Ultra-thin sodium films offer low-cost alternative to gold and silver in optical technologies
From solar panels to next-generation medical devices, many emerging technologies rely on materials that can manipulate light with extreme precision. These materials—called plasmonic materials—are typically made from expensive metals like gold or silver. But what if a cheaper, more abundant metal could do the job just as well or better? ⌘ Read more

New telescope cuts through space noise in hunt for distant Earth-like worlds
EU researchers are developing powerful new telescopes to help uncover Earth-like planets around distant stars and advance the search for extraterrestrial life. ⌘ Read more

Of course, all things optional is fine. Like, it will be ignored (just like banner would) for clients having no knowledge of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, the lighting needs to be right in order to make them really pop like this. I got lucky today. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Waste paper, like an opened envelope, suits a shopping list perfectly fine.

Indeed, I’m drowning in this stuff and I throw it away anyway, so I might just use it.

You’ve got a nice handwriting, I like it.

Thanks. 😅 (It used to be horrible. Gosh, the teachers scolding me in school … Bah. 😂)

Okay, they are also offering 2.8x25mm copper nails. Which I actually do have a single one here. :-)

My hardware collection also includes a few brass-like looking screws that I could repurpose into rivets. But I reckon I have to upgrade my burner first. I’m not a metal worker by any means, so I could be totally wrong, but I imagine that some heat is necessary to loosen the work-hardening effect when beating on them. I will do some experiments on Saturday and report back.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de No doubt, some things are just so much better the low-tech way. Waste paper, like an opened envelope, suits a shopping list perfectly fine. You’ve got a nice handwriting, I like it.

Fine-Tuning Local Models with Docker Offload and Unsloth
I’ve been experimenting with local models for a while now, and the progress in making them accessible has been exciting. Initial experiences are often fantastic, many models, like Gemma 3 270M, are lightweight enough to run on common hardware. This potential for broad deployment is a major draw. However, as I’ve tried to build meaningful,… ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net Hm, I tried with https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt#:~:text=2025-09- and my Firefox 143 didn’t like it. https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt#:~:text=2025%2D09%2D worked. 🤔

@zvava@twtxt.net

(#abcdefghijkl https://example.com/tw.txt#:~:text=2025-10-01T10:28:00Z), because it can be simply hacked in to clients currently on hashv1 and provides an off-ramp to location-based addressing

I like that property (an off-ramp to location-based addressing), so I think I could live with that approach. ✅

(I’m not sure why we’re using text fragments, though. Wouldn’t that link to the first occurence of 2025-10-01T10:28:00Z? That’s not necessarily correct. And, to be proper URLs that Firefox and Chromium understand, it would also need to be written as 2025%2D10%2D01T10:28:00Z. The dash carries meaning, sadly. I think all this just creates needless complication. How about we just go with https://example.com/tw.txt#2025-10-01T10:28:00Z?)

Show HN: Autism Simulator
Hey all, I built this. It’s not trying to capture every autistic experience (that’d be impossible). It’s based on my own lived experience as well as that of friends on the spectrum.

I’m trying to give people a feel for what masking, decision fatigue, and burnout can look like day-to-day. That’s hard to explain in words, but easier to show through choices and stats. I’m not trying to “define autism”.

I’ve gotten good feedback here about resilience, meds, and difficulty tuning. I’ll keep tweaking it. If e … ⌘ Read more

Bunny.net (previously BunnyCDN) keeps doing great things (like this free European non-logging JS CDN), but it would be even better if they also replaced the Disqus comments in their blog with a more privacy-friendly alternative. ⌘ Read more

The Encore 91 computer system
Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still onl … ⌘ Read more

10 Signs That “Made in the U.S.A.” Still Lives
In an age of global supply chains, the phrase “Made in the U.S.A.” might seem like a fading echo of the past. Yet, the story of American manufacturing is one of evolution, not extinction. In the early 1900s, at the height of its industrial revolution, the United States accounted for about a quarter of all […]

The post [10 Signs That “Made in the U.S.A.” Still Lives](https://listverse.com/2025/09/30/10-signs-that-made-in-the-u-s-a-still-lives … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Android developer registration requirement will kill F-Droid
The consequences of Google requiring developer certification to install Android applications, even outside of Google’s own Play Store, are starting to reverberate. F-Droid, probably the single most popular non-Google application repository for Android, has made it very clear that Google’s upcoming requirement is most likely going to mean the end of F-Droid. If it were to be put into effect, the … ⌘ Read more

Hopefully I can muster up the energy to start this new project:

Put up lots of thermometers and hygrometers in the apartment, have them report their readings wireless to a database.

I suspect that I’ll have to “build” these myself, because ready-to-use kits most like require some sort of cloud service. Dunno, haven’t checked yet.

It still needs some cleaning (and some slight UX improvements), but overall, I’m happy with it.

BTW - I promise, I intended it to be pronounced like “TweetStream” (or as written, “TwtStrm”), rather than “TweetStorm”. Sorry again. 😊

@prologic@twtxt.net I checked a while a ago and there were, like, 3-5 collisions or something like that. Not that many. 🤷 I have to specifically look for them – I don’t notice it in normal operation.

@prologic@twtxt.net it is looking good! On mobile, I find that the line height is too large for my liking, and that text takes too much space. I would like it a bit more dense. But that’s just my taste.

I haven’t checked in desktop; I try not to touch desktop on weekends. 😂

Pretty happy with my zs-blog-template starter kit for creating and maintaining your own blog using zs 👌 Demo of what the starter kit looks like here – Basic features include:

• Clean layout & typography
  
• Chroma code highlighting (aligned to your site palette)
  
• Accessible copy-code button
  
• “On this page” collapsible TOC
  
• RSS, sitemap, robots
  
• Archives, tags, tag cloud
  
• Draft support (hidden from lists/feeds)
  
• Open Graph (OG) & Twitter card meta (default image + per-post overrides)
  
• Ready-to-use 404 page
  

As well as custom routes (redirects, rewrites, etc) to support canonical URLs or redirecting old URLs as well as new zs external command capability itself that now lets you do things like:

$ zs newpost

to help kick-start the creation of a new post with all the right “stuff”™ ready to go and then pop open your $EEDITOR 🤞

#awesome #zs

Is Mainstream Tech News Dead?
Millions of “Followers”, but struggle to get a single “Like”? ⌘ Read more

** Franconia Notch **
We went to the Franconia Notch, which is on objectively funny thing to name a region. It was beautiful and the weather was wildly clear. Even on top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the entire north eastern United States, it was sunny and calm. We could see all the way back to Maine…supposedly…it all looks kinda like green lumpy blurs to me.

While there I started to read two books, Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami.

_Kata … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That looks like an older bug report. Which groff version is that (groff --version)?

@bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Thank you! Not sure what I end up putting in there, but I’m sure I will find some tools to go in. :-)

Yes, this was a flat piece of sheet metal. It went together like a cardboard box, just much slower and with timbers clamped down to get a straight folding line. I don’t have a sheet metal brake, so I just carefully hammered the piece bit by bit. Like in this video by the Sheet Metal Dude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgEfWEMXk0

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Not bad. 🤔 So this started out as a flat sheet and then you cut and folded it, like paper (more or less)?

10 Ways News Media Manipulate Readers
Media bias is often responsible for reader manipulation, but what constitutes bias in news reporting? Individuals and groups are likely to disagree with both the criteria for determining what puts the “slant” in slanted news and the findings of such considerations. Even to discuss this issue, though, a benchmark of some sort must be used, […]

The post [10 Ways News Media Manipulate Readers](https://listverse.com/2025/09/26/10-ways-news-media-manipulate-rea … ⌘ Read more

MacOS Tahoe 26 Feels Slow? Try These 6 Performance Tips
Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Tahoe 26 feel like the new operating system runs slower than their prior MacOS installation did. Reports online suggest there can be general sluggishness and lagging performance, sometimes with frame rate drops and stuttering animations on the screen, or even when typing. Other users in various forums … Read More ⌘ Read more

Oh man, if the EU actually rolled out this horribd idea called ChatControl that actually threatens the security and privacy of secure e2e encrypted messaging like Signal™, fuck me, I’m out 🤦‍♂️ I’ll just rage quit the IT industry and become a luddite. I’m out.

I would personally rather see something like this:

2025-09-25T22:41:19+10:00	Hello World
2025-09-25T22:41:19+10:00	(#kexv5vq https://example.com/twtxt.html#:~:text=2025-09-25T22:41:19%2B10:00) Hey!

Preserving both content-based addressing as well as location-based addressing and text fragment linking.

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it that sounds pretty much like Italy! LOL. We pay $48 on renewal in Florida, US, but that fee isn’t Federal, so other states may pay more, or less.

Legacy Update 1.12 released
If you’re still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you’ve most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Up … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for asking!

So, I’ve been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.

The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I’ve been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It’s still very much an MVP, and I’ve been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).

But that’s where I’ve been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the “follow” list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I’ve been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.

On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I’ve been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).

In the end, I’m hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we’ll see.

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you’d like to know more, please reach out!

Do You Miss LaunchPad in MacOS Tahoe? Using the New LaunchPad, Plus a LaunchPad Alternative
macOS Tahoe 26 adds some new features, but it also has taken a prominent popular feature away on the Mac, and that is the removal of the dedicated LaunchPad app from macOS Tahoe. LaunchPad is the simple app launcher that is kind of iOS-like and has been on the Mac for a longtime, visible in … Read More ⌘ Read more

Whooooaaaah, I just accidentally found out that VLC can play 360° videos and I am able to pan around! Crazy shit. I actually scrolled in order to adjust the volume like it usually works, but it zoomed in and out instead. Then I saw the title hinting at the 360° stuff. Even though this is not my cup of tea, it’s nice that VLC supports it.

The driver’s license documents in Germany now have an expiration date. You have to renew them every 15 years. (Not the license itself, just the documents.)

I just got my renewed documents. Their expiration date says something like 01.09.40. Huh? That looks super weird to me, like an error. But no, it’s 2040 … Just 15 years away.