Venustum

BTW, eating the Beginning of Summer rice can prevent summer heat.Come on, do what the pandas are doing!

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ipandacom/status/1654637096727113728#m

I saw the photos first: tan, straggly piles along the banks of an otherwise fertile stream. My mind went to worms, and then gnats. I once wrote an article about fungus gnats, the larvae of which sometimes form circles to travel. Was I looking at something like that? A natural phenomenon that covered the stream in thousands of brown, straw-like creatures?

Nope. I was looking at pasta.

Residents of Old Bridge, New Jersey were presented with a mystery this week: Who dumped mounds of pasta in the forest, all along the stream?

The saga began earlier in the week when resident Nina Jochnowitz alerted town officials to the bountiful mess after receiving a complaint from a neighbor. Reportedly, it was loose spaghetti, alphabet noodles, and elbow macaroni.

“There was literally 25 feet of pasta that had been dumped,” she told The New York Times.

...

May 3 (UPI) -- Local officials in New South Wales, Australia, are asking residents to keep a respectful distance from a rare animal spotted in the area: an albino echidna.

The Bathurst Regional Council said in a Facebook post that a council employee snapped photos of the ghostly white echidna while out walking Tuesday.

The echidna, named Raffie by locals, is albino, meaning its entire body lacks pigment.

"If you see Raffie out, please feel free to take a couple of snaps but do not approach, touch, or try and contain him. It is important to leave wildlife alone, as you could risk them losing their scent trail or leaving young unattended in the burrow," the council wrote.

Resident Geoff Hadley said he helped Raffie cross a road recently.

"I've seen hundreds of echidnas but I've never, ever seen a white one -- it was just crazy," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

...

Thomas advertised her rally online hoping to draw in attendees from the public. She received virtual recruitment help from Known Heretic, or Amy E. Sousa, a TERF YouTuber, and the Gender Mapper, Alix Aharon, a hate monger who documents and makes public doxx lists of gender clinics. These lists are often utilized by the far-right. Thomas received on-the-ground help from a team of east coast TERFs.

Unfortunately for Thomas her propaganda push was unsuccessful and the only people who attended in support of the rally were her team of TERF’s slated to speak and their boyfriends and husbands.

Thomas and her group arrived at 11:45am at the capital building and began to set up around the erected police barriers and launched their live feed via Amy Sousa on YouTube. Almost immediately upon setting up and beginning their speeches the TERFs were drowned out by queer antifascists.

Queer antifascists and other collaborators led the initial disruption actions, preventing the TERFs from being able to broadcast their hate by using megaphones, music, and air horns.

The contingent of Rutgers union strikers, fresh off directing their own protest against the University, showed up on the scene en masse shortly after to offer their support. The large group of Rutgers Union strikers used their megaphones and numbers to completely stop the rally for a period of time causing confusion amongst the TERFs. Thomas and her goons couldn’t seem to process solidarity in action. She and several other TERFs, including an enraged Brittany Ortiz, then took turns yelling at the crowd about their transphobia.

...

The wave of new AI chatbots is not stopping anytime soon; another contender has jumped into the ring with ChatGPT.

Released recently, it's called 'HuggingChat.' The main focus of this chatbot is to provide a more transparent, inclusive, and accountable alternative to ChatGPT.

Don't get me wrong, HuggingChat is not the first open-source alternative to ChatGPT. We have covered open-source projects challenging ChatGPT.

However, HugginChat seems to be the first one available to access as a platform that appears similar to ChatGPT.

...

https://huggingface.co/chat/

https://huggingface.co/spaces

It signals the end of cold weather and the increasing amount of rainfall. Pandas recommend you enjoy the blooming peony and drink fresh tea with your family

Seems neat, I'm sure it reaps your data, but you could try it on a browser you just use for browsing, it's also on firefox

it claims to not sell your data though

https://jointoucan.com/privacy

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toucan-language-learning/

...

With Toucan installed for either Chrome, Edge, or Safari, the first time you visit a website or click on an article, you’ll notice something strange: Some of the words on the page will change, and translate to your chosen language. If you’re trying to learn Portuguese, you might see a sentence like esta, but one or two palavras will be translated.

Hover your cursor over the translated word, and a pop up will reveal what it means in English. (“Esta” is “this;’ “palavras” is “words.”) This pop up gives you additional interesting controls, such as a speaker icon you can click to hear how the word is pronounced, a mini quiz to see if you can spell the word, and a save button to highlight the word for later.

It starts out with one word at a time, but as you learn, Toucan ups the ante, adding more words in blocks, or “lexical chunks.” It makes sense, since languages don’t all share the same grammar structure. By building up to larger groups of words, you’ll more naturally learn word order, verb conjugation, and the general grammar of your chosen language.

The extension also offers “shortcuts,” which are a bit more like a traditional language-learning experience. These highlight key words and phrases you’ll use in common situations, such as greetings or going out to eat. Interestingly, shortcuts only work on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Google.

...

...

The first bits to acknowledge up front: Dril is a 35-year-old named Paul Dochney. He, in Rogers’ words, “has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman.” He also seems done with anonymity, saying that it was a useful tool for many years but that people might “need to grow up” and come to terms with him being a real guy.

“Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus,” he says. “I’m not a magic elf who posts.” Later in the piece, collaborator Derek Estevez-Olsen says that people “want [Dril] to be, like, an insane guy who lives in the woods or something” but that he’s just “a guy named Paul” who’s “fairly normal.”

More interesting than his real identity are the details Dril shares with Rogers about tweeting. Though he says he has “to get into, like, the writing mood,” Dril explains that he ”just [posts] whatever bullshit I’m thinking,” with ideas coming to him “usually when I’m driving or I’m in the shower.”

He also makes his less-than-favorable view of Twitter, which has only become more pronounced in the months since Elon Musk’s takeover, clear. Dril says he finds “a lot of aspects of Twitter very disgusting,” adding that “it would not be my first choice of websites to get popular on, but that’s just the way it goes. And I got to work with that.”

He says that “posting is not something you want to do forever” and tells Rogers that he wonders “whether Twitter’s demise could potentially force him to ‘grow in ways I never thought possible.’” Dril also added, in one of the best quotes from the profile, “You gotta commend Elon for doing everything in his power to wipe this nuisance website off the face of the earth.”

Naturally, then, his recent move to Los Angeles was motivated by a desire to, in his words, “get a job entertaining in some capacity.” Currently, that involves working on ideas for a new version of the show Truthpoint and figuring out how to leverage the enormous success of his Twitter account into something the entertainment industry can understand and actually pay him for creating.

In years past, Dril has expanded beyond Twitter with projects like TV shows, a video game, and books. The profile suggests that these non-Twitter media are where his interests really lie, which is both totally understandable and a bit melancholy, given that a potential end to Dril’s prolific posting would also mark the end of an entire era of internet history.