dakkar

dice go spinny!

not a very good set of dice (it's quickly obvious that it prefers to stop at certain points more than others), but still fun

Any robotgirl looking for a new chassis? We have a Starflower Lily MK3!

I get some of my groceries from Sainsbury's, delivered. I have all the receipts since 2012. I have written a program to parse them and show me the prices of each item across time. Is stuff really more expensive? How much? Let's see!

INCREASES

"Birds Eye Southern Fried Chicken Grills x4 360g" went from £2.50 in 2022, to £5.25 in 2026

"Birds Eye Crispy Chicken Grills in Tempura Batter" went from £4.50 for 340g in 2024, to £3.00 for 170g in 2026 (so the same amount would be about £6 now)

"Cadbury Darkmilk Chocolate Giant Buttons Bag" went from £1.65 for 105g in 2024, to £1.95 for 100g in 2026

"Cathedral City Mini Mature Cheddar Cheeses" went from £1.50 in 2023 to £2.10 in 2026

"Country Life Unsalted Butter" went from £1.30 for 250g in 2016, to £2.50 for 250g in 2023, to £2.50 for 200g in 2026

"East End Pure Butter Ghee for Cooking 500g" went from £4.50 in 2022, to £7.50 in 2026

"Il Casolare Olive Oil 1L" went from £7.50 in 2014, to £8.60 in 2022, to £14.50 in 2026

"KTC Minced Ginger Paste 210g" went from £1.10 in 2020, to £1.50 in 2026 (the garlic paste did similar, 1.10 to 1.40)

"Knorr Stock Pot Chicken 4x28g" went from £1.45 in 2019 to £1.90 in 2026 (the vegetable one did the same)

A large bag of peanut M&Ms went from £2.50 for 268g in 2021 to £4.00 for 200g in 2026

"Maltesers 310g" went from £3.00 in 2021 to £6.90 in 2026

"Milkybar White Chocolate Giant Buttons Bag" went from £2.00 for 225g in 2021, to £3.25 for 176g in 2026

"Robinsons Squash Orange, No Added Sugar 1L" went from £1.00 in 2012, to £1.75 in 2022, to £2.00 in 2026

"Sainsbury's 100% Pure Squeezed Orange Juice with Bits, Not From Concentrate 1.75L" went from £2.36 in 2012, to £2.00 in 2022 (yes, down), to £3.25 in 2026 (peaked at £3.40 in 2025)

"Sainsbury's British Free Range Eggs Medium x6" went from £1.45 in 2023 to £1.80 in 2026

"Sainsbury's Duo Chocolate Swirl Spread 400g" went from £1.50 in 2016, to £1.65 in 2022, to £2.25 in 2026

"Sainsbury's Lemon Curd 411g" went from £0.65 in 2021, to £1.20 in 2026

"Warburtons White Bread, Medium Sliced 400g" oscillated between £0.80 in 2013 and £1.00 in 2025; it's currently at £0.95

STABLE

Colgate toothpaste, 75ml has been around £1.00 all this time

"Mini Babybel Original Cheese Snacks 12x20g" is £3.55 for the past three years

"Sainsbury's Plain Flour 500g" is stable between £0.40 and £0.45

"Sainsbury's Spring Onions Bunch 100g" is stable at £0.70

REDUCED

"Sainsbury's Garlic x4" went from £1.10 in 2015, to £0.95 in 2023, to £0.87 in 2026

"Sainsbury's Kitchen Caddy Liners" went from £3.80 for 25 in 2012, to £2.00 for 20 in 2022, to £1.75 for 20 in 2026

SUMMARY

Ten years ago, I had to be a bit creative to reach the £25 total order value that's the minimum for delivery; today, it's very easy to reach £40. I'm buying the same things!

uugh, clients…

at $work, one of the things we do involves sending HTTP requests to client-controlled servers (the details are really irrelevant)

some clients are… special

this one is getting on my nerves

some time ago, they renewed their TLS certificates, and for reasons nobody can understand, changed their DH key echange parameters; OpenSSL complained SSL connect attempt failed error:0A00018A:SSL routines::dh key too small

we exchanged some email, had a video conference, and they didn't understand the problem, and insisted we fix it on our side; did you know that OpenSSL from 2017 doesn't have a problem with too-small DH keys? and did you know that companies are still running that ancient version in production, and don't see a problem with it?

luckily, telling our code to not accept TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, makes the protocol negotiation pick a ECDHE suite, which works

and then we got a different error: a HTTP 403, with a plain text error code in the body

turns out, if our request doesn't have a user-agent header, their server refuses to talk to us; we fixed that without even telling them

a few days later, requests to one of their test servers started failing again

this time, the TLS layer is fine, but whatever I send to the server, it always replies with P

just one byte, P

no newline, not even proper TLS shutdown. P and then closes the socket.

I'm getting Ped off!

Captain, we're being hailed

Just realised that this server has better uptime than GitHub…

(I reboot it about once a week, after updating all the software, and it takes a few minutes to come back up; that's 99.9% uptime by my calculations)

$ llama-cli -hf mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-GGUF --temp 0.7 --system-prompt /tmp/sys.txt

Loading model...


▄▄ ▄▄
██ ██
██ ██  ▀▀█▄ ███▄███▄  ▀▀█▄    ▄████ ████▄ ████▄
██ ██ ▄█▀██ ██ ██ ██ ▄█▀██    ██    ██ ██ ██ ██
██ ██ ▀█▄██ ██ ██ ██ ▀█▄██ ██ ▀████ ████▀ ████▀
                                    ██    ██
                                    ▀▀    ▀▀

build      : b9103-838374375
model      : mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-GGUF
modalities : text, vision
using custom system prompt

available commands:
  /exit or Ctrl+C     stop or exit
  /regen              regenerate the last response
  /clear              clear the chat history
  /read         add a text file
  /glob      add text files using globbing pattern
  /image        add an image file


> what's the name of the captain of the nautilus?

The name of the captain of the *Nautilus* is **Captain Nemo**.

He is a fictional character from Jules Verne's 1870 novel *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea*. Nemo is a brilliant but enigmatic inventor and the commander of the advanced, self-sustaining submarine *Nautilus*, which he built to explore the ocean and conduct scientific research.

Would you like more details about the *Nautilus* or its captain?

[ Prompt: 4.0 t/s | Generation: 2.3 t/s ]

> what's the *birth* name of the captain of the nautilus?

Captain Nemo’s **birth name** is **Armand Nemo**, though this is only mentioned indirectly in Jules Verne’s novels.

- In *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea*, Nemo is revealed to be **Armand Nemo** (his full name) after a character (Professor Arronax) deduces it from a cipher and a French passport reference.
- Later works, like *Nemo and His Sons* (1923) by Jules Verne’s son, **Maurice**, also confirm this name.
- Some early translations and adaptations may simplify it to just "Nemo," but the full name is **Armand Nemo**.

Would you like more details on Nemo’s origins or the *Nautilus* itself?

[ Prompt: 3.5 t/s | Generation: 2.2 t/s ]

> 

Almost everything is garbage! That's very impressive!

@sushee@ohai.social we really missed a trick, when I was working for net-a-porter; we should have named the security group threat-a-porter @catsalad@infosec.exchange

@orangeacme@fosstodon.org what a mysterious coincidence!

https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/94/4/264/3383703/Higher-multipoles-of-the-cow

The spherical cow approximation is widely used in the literature but is rarely justified.
Here, I propose several schemes for extending the spherical cow approximation to a full multipole expansion, in which the spherical cow is simply the first term.
This allows for the computation of bovine potentials and interactions beyond spherical symmetry and also provides a scheme for defining the geometry of the cow itself at higher multipole moments.
This is especially important for the treatment of physical processes that are suppressed by spherical symmetry, such as the spindown of a rotating cow due to the emission of gravitational waves.
I demonstrate the computation of multipole coefficients for a benchmark cow and illustrate the applicability of the multipolar cow to several important problems

(via @badastro@mastodon.social on bsky)

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange there's also a closely-related compound that crystallises into heptahedra

@project1enigma@chaos.social oh, you're right (I hadn't noticed), bash has indeed true and false as builtins! @ChaosKitsune@woem.men @rebane2001@infosec.exchange @jcpandrade@mastodon.social

@jcpandrade@mastodon.social ha! I tend to do while true because it reads better to me (yes, I know that involves a fork+exec, but if we cared about speed we wouldn't be writing shell) @ChaosKitsune@woem.men @rebane2001@infosec.exchange

@ChaosKitsune@woem.men https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-_003a the colon is a shell command that does nothing it's often used to perform expansions with side-effects, like: : ${ARGUMENT:=default value} : ${MUST_BE_SET:?error message} @rebane2001@infosec.exchange

Question for the people that are basing their business on LLM&c: what happens when OpenAI/Anthropic/&c raise their prices? They're a cartel of half a dozen companies building black-box tools that thousand of other companies are (or will be) completetly dependent on. They can hold your business to ransom. What's your plan?