posted at the request of Lumicon

fruits featured:

• Inga densiflora
• Pouteria caimito
• Theobroma bicolor

I turn on the kitchen light in the middle of the night and a cockroach is already there and that fucker just stares at me, isn't even afraid. Being a landlord is a thankless struggle.

THE ESCALATING COST of living keeps making headlines and inspiring furious Reddit threads. Food prices remain a flashpoint, especially when it comes to coffee. But behind every grocery store gripe lies a deeper unease about whether wages are keeping up and the tariffs that continue to dominate economic news.

But the fixation on tariffs and inflation obscures a different shift revolutionizing pricing: algorithms. The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project warns automated tools are reshaping what Canadians are charged for essential goods and services, including groceries and fuel. Companies can now use software to tailor prices based on everything from our browsing patterns, location, loyalty history, device type, and operating system. The same item can appear at one amount for you and another for someone else, depending on who you are, when you see it online, and what the algorithm believes you are willing to pay.

Here’s how it works. Companies gather data from many routine digital touchpoints: web and app tracking (cookies, pixels, and device fingerprinting), geolocation from phones and browsers, and in-store sensors. Also involved are data brokers who sell detailed consumer profiles combining demographics, purchase histories, and online behaviour. After the initial lure with attractive benefits and promises of discounts, (“the hook”), you’re handed over to a surveillance infrastructure that mines data about your behaviour and willingness to pay (“the hack”) and then raises fees, cuts rewards, and traps you in the program by making cancellation difficult (“the hike”).

Hegseth is reportedly set to tour Bath Iron Works on Monday and give a speech on the recently announced “Trump” class battleship, according to the Bangor Daily News.

When the bosses reached out to workers for volunteers to attend the speech, however, few hands went up, according to one worker, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The speech is slated for Monday afternoon, shortly before a shift change, which means that workers who attend would need to stay past their normal work hours — and anyone who shows up would be required to stay until the event is over.

“They issued a polling sheet this morning to see who would attend and, at least from my crew, there were no takers,” said the worker, “and not even a mention of overtime.”

After the initial lack of enthusiasm on Friday morning, a later survey went out around noon that explicitly said workers would receive overtime if they stayed past the end of their shift, according to the worker.

Iran has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to several more years in prison, her lawyer said on Sunday.

News of the extended years of imprisonment comes after Mohammadi embarked on a hunger strike.

On Monday, Mohammadi had to be taken to a medical facility due to her poor physical condition and was then returned to custody, the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said.

It described the process that extended her time in prison as a "sham trial."

...

"She has been sentenced to six years in prison for 'gathering and collusion' and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban," her lawyer Mostafa Nili said.

...

"Ms Mohammadi stated that she was hospitalized three days ago due to her poor physical condition and was subsequently returned to the detention center," Nili said in quotes published by the Narges Mohammadi Foundation.

"Furthermore, as she began to explain the details of recent events and the manner of her arrest, the phone call was disconnected," Nili was quoted as saying.

The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said that with the new charges, she has now been sentenced to over 44 years in prison throughout her life.

...

The Washington Post told staffers today that it was moving forward with a sweeping round of layoffs that was part of a “broad strategic reset” of the storied newspaper, which will include eliminating the sports desk, severely cutting back on its international coverage, dismantling its books section, and restructuring its local news team.

Though it was not immediately known exactly how many employees would be impacted by the cuts, it had previously been reported that about 100 staffers from the newsroom could be laid off, and as many as 300 employees from the broader company would face terminations.

However, after emails were sent to staffers on Wednesday morning, it is expected that roughly one-third of staff — about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom — will be laid off, with some staffers saying that this was a “bloodbath”.

Murray revealed that the paper would be “shrinking” its foreign news bureaus and drastically altering its local metro coverage.

For the past few years I've been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It's mostly about programming, and more specifically it's ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I've been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I've got a little stack of M910Q's running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

Since I've been spending all - and I do mean all - of my time futzing about with this self-hosted stuff, I thought I'd try to add some content to my website to help people doing the same thing. My idea was to make it more "bloggish", talking about the tricky things I've had to master along the way as I implement various services.

But I feel like there also needs to be some foundational content. Articles that explain concepts that a lot of people, especially people without professional networking experience, find difficult to grasp. So I've started working on those.

While I think of myself as mostly a programmer, my career (now, thankfully over) had me as an "IT Guy" more often than not. I spent 24 years at the same mid-sized company with a tiny IT department and simply had to get involved with infrastructure stuff because there was nobody else to do it. It was very hands-on at first, but as we grew I was able be limit my involvement to planning and technical strategy.

Since the mid 90's, we went from self-hosted physical servers, to colocated servers, to colocated virtual servers to cloud servers and services. So I feel like I have the insight to provide help.

Anyways, this is the first article in this new section. I've seen a lot of people posting questions about how VLAN's work and I know that it's mystifying to many. So I wanted to push it out before I have the supporting framework put together on the website, and it's just sitting there as the first post that's not about programming.

My goal is to provide practical, pragmatic advice. I'm not particularly worried if some particular facet of an article isn't 100% totally correct on some obscure technical level...as long as the article gives solid practical advice that readers can act on.

Anyways, take a look and let me know if you think this kind of article might me of use to yourself or other people getting started on self-hosting.

The Japanese leader's election gambit, fueled by the power of her personality and some unlikely help from young voters consumed by “Sanamania,” appears to have paid off.

Japan’s conservative prime minister Sanae Takaichi has won a landslide victory after she gambled on a high-stakes snap election.

Takaichi, who took office in October after being elected leader of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), surpassed the 310 seats needed for a supermajority in the 465-seat lower house, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported from the official election count on Sunday evening. The supermajority allows her ruling coalition to override the upper house, where it lacks a majority.

An NHK exit poll as voting ended earlier on Sunday projected the LDP would win between 274 and 326 seats. The party and its coalition partner Ishin were projected to win a combined 302-366 seats, as voters turned out amid freezing temperatures in a rare winter election.

The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.

During a coffee break at this year's CentOS Connect conference, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won't name them – we're sure that they'd prefer to keep their job rather than enjoy a moment of fame – but we much enjoyed their pithy summary of how IT has faced repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale financial collapse bursting the AI bubble.

This vulture has been working in the tech field for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the business nearly as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly following the 2008 credit crunch, we've had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.

Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.

Software developer Leonardo Russo has released llama3pure, which incorporates three standalone inference engines. There's a pure C implementation for desktops, a pure JavaScript implementation for Node.js, and a pure JavaScript version for web browsers that don't require WebAssembly.

"All versions are compatible with the Llama and Gemma architectures," Russo explained to The Register in an email. "The goal is to provide a dependency-free, isolated alternative in both C and JavaScript capable of reading GGUF files and processing prompts."

GGUF stands for GPT-Generated Unified Format; it is a common format for distributing machine learning models.

Llama3pure is not intended as a replacement for llama.cpp, a widely used inference engine for running local models that's significantly faster at responding to prompts. Llama3pure is an educational tool.

• New communications systems will give commanders faster battlefield information and speed up decision-making.
• Ministry of Defence(MOD) awards contract worth up to £86 million to British-based SME for advanced tactical communication systems, such as radios and tablets.
• Contract creates 12 UK defence industry jobs and builds on successful deployment in Estonia.

He's going to make TRANS and ANTIFA come into the world and be mean to Mr. President Donald J. Trump on TRUTHSOCIAL.

I need you all to pray to JESUS right now and will away this wicked devil worshiping Spaniard.

Thank you and GOD BLESS

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42875178

from +972’s Sunday Recap
972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Feb. 7, 2026

Ibtisam Mahdi wrote about how with or without a ceasefire, Israel is still targeting #Gaza’s journalists: the killing of Muhammad Qishta, Abdel Raouf Sha’at, and Anas Ghneim on Jan. 21 shatters any illusion of “post-war” safety. But for Mahdi, who knew and regularly collaborated with Qishta and Sha’at, the honor of their work and the memory of their laughter cannot be erased.

Also:

• Why a Palestinian protest in Tel Aviv exposed the limits of Israeli solidarity
• U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians to West Bank in coordination with Israel
• In Hebron’s hyper-militarized Old City, a Palestinian cinema opens its doors
• The legal fight to open Gaza to foreign press has failed. It’s time to change course

FBI documents published on the US Department of Justice website show that billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein funded the group Friends of Israel Defence Forces (FIDF) and settlement-building organisation the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Analysis of income and transfers to non-charitable exempt organisations, released by the FBI, shows that the convicted sex offender financed the FIDF, which "raises funds for active duty Israel Defence Forces soldiers and veterans".