Low-cost carrier Ryanair on Monday reported its best-ever annual profit, as passenger and revenue growth offset sharply higher operating costs, but flagged a weaker pricing environment in the current quarter.
Feijoa sellowiana[2][3] also known as Acca sellowiana (O.Berg) Burret,[4] is a species of flowering plant in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. It is native to the highlands of southern Brazil, eastern Paraguay, Uruguay, and northern Argentina.[5] Feijoa are also common in gardens of New Zealand.[6] It is widely cultivated as an ornamental tree and for its fruit. Common names include feijoa (/feɪˈʒoʊ.ə/,[7] /-ˈhoʊ.ə/,[8] or /ˈfiːdʒoʊ.ə/[9]), pineapple guava and guavasteen, although it is not a true guava.[10] It is an evergreen shrub or small tree, 1–7 metres (3.3–23.0 ft) in height.[11]
Ripe fruit is prone to bruising; difficulty maintaining the fruit in good condition for any length of time, along with the short period of optimum ripeness and full flavor, probably explains why feijoas are not exported frequently, and are typically sold close to where they are grown. However, intercontinental shipping of feijoa by sea or air has been successful.[10]
Because of the relatively short shelf life, storekeepers need to be careful to replace older fruit regularly to ensure high quality. In some countries, they also may be purchased at roadside stalls, often at a lower price.
Feijoas may be cool-stored for approximately a month and still have a few days of shelf life at optimum eating maturity.[10] They also may be frozen for up to one year without a loss in quality.
That said, heirlooms do have all kinds of crazy flavors and differences.
Yeah, I'd bet that some of them don't last as long as the standard red tomatoes that you get in the store, but looking through heirloom tomatoes is kind of a trip, from a visual standpoint. Grocery stores seem to have pretty much standardized on about three red ones -- and I'm not saying that they're bad, but it does kind of mean that people don't get to see a lot of variety. Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of just eating tomatoes plain, so never got super-interested in obtaining them, but they do look damned cool.
You can order blackcurrant drinks online, as well as getting extract.
googles
It sounds like the problem was that they could host a fungus that affected other plants, but it's been allowed on a state-by-state basis for some decades after they found a resistant variant.
By the end of the 19th century, farmers noticed that blackcurrants had introduced an invasive species called blister fungus that killed white pine trees, per Business Insider. The fungus solely spreads through blackcurrants rather than from pine tree to pine tree. That means the U.S. was faced with a choice at the time: blackcurrants or the white pine. With national forests highly valued for the timber industry sales used to develop the U.S. as we know it, they chose to protect the white pine.
In the early 20th century, the U.S. government made it illegal to farm blackcurrants and put forth resources to eradicate all Ribes plants from the environment, according to Business Insider. Interestingly, European agriculture met this fungus long ago when it was introduced in blackcurrant plants, but they didn't rely on white pine as fiercely as the U.S., and the "white pine was sacrificed to retain the Ribes," according to "History of White Pine Blister Rust Control: A Personal Account."
Blackcurrants come back
After more than half a century, scientists discovered a new variant of blackcurrant that was resistant to the fungal disease that threatened the white pine. Without the threat to the timber industry, the U.S. government "left it up to the states to lift the ban" blackcurrants in 1966 (via Cornell University). It wasn't until 2003 when New York, where blackcurrants were most heavily produced in the late 19th century, became the first state to uplift the blackcurrant ban in the continental U.S. Since then, some other states like Connecticut and Vermont have also rescinded their bans. But neighboring Massachusetts and Maine (or "The Pine Tree" state) are some of the many other states in which such bans remain (per AHS Gardening, Mass.gov).
First, note that there are a number of plants called the "huckleberry".
My guess is that @daltotron has good odds of talking about Vaccinium membranaceum. I've had that in Idaho, and consider it to be pretty good.
People pick it in the wild, but it hasn't been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they're a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.
I don't believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name "huckleberry" only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native "hurtleberry". You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don't see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.
We also have a plant called "huckleberry" around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.
DePape, according to prosecutors, was driven by conspiracy theories and had plans to tie the former speaker up and break her kneecaps if she lied to him.
How was an inflatable unicorn costume involved?
In prior testimony, DePape told the jury he planned to wear an inflatable unicorn costume and upload his interrogation of Speaker Pelosi online.
Well, that sounds kind of grotesque.
Kind of stands out to me more than the Canadian bit.
A Luther Burger, or doughnut burger (among several naming variations), is a hamburger or cheeseburger with one or more glazed doughnuts in place of the bun. These burgers have a disputed origin, and tend to run between approximately 800 and 1,500 calories (3,300 and 6,300 kJ).
The unusual flavour and odour of the fruit have prompted many people to express diverse and passionate views ranging from deep appreciation to intense disgust. Writing in 1856, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace provided a much-quoted description of the flavour of the durian:
The five cells are silky-white within, and are filled with a mass of firm, cream-coloured pulp, containing about three seeds each. This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acidic nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience. ... as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed.[a]
Wallace described himself as being at first reluctant to try it because of the aroma, "but in Borneo I found a ripe fruit on the ground, and, eating it out of doors, I at once became a confirmed Durian eater". He cited one traveller from 1599:[b] "it is of such an excellent taste that it surpasses in flavour all other fruits of the world, according to those who have tasted it." He cites another writer: "To those not used to it, it seems at first to smell like rotten onions, but immediately after they have tasted it they prefer it to all other food. The natives give it honourable titles, exalt it, and make verses on it."
While Wallace cautions that "the smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable", later descriptions by Westerners are more graphic in detail. Novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory". Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says:
its odor is best described as pig-excrement, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.
Other comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs.
You can buy it online from Amazon wherever you're located. I got a bunch when I was going through a period experimenting with East Asian spices and condiments.
I couldn't name most rappers, even popular ones. Just not an interest for me. If you'd given me his name without context, I wouldn't have known what he does.
I mean, it's not age. I just don't follow celebrity news or listen to rap. I could name maybe three rappers. Don't listen to country music, could name maybe one performer there. Couldn't name any Indian music performers, to pick a random genre. Or K-pop. Or folk music.
I might have a better shot at some rock or electronica musicians, at least band names, but I couldn't tell you anything about their personal lives.
EDIT: Well, I guess...let's see now. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, guess I could rattle off that they had untimely deaths that drug use contributed to. Elvis gained a lot of weight, Jackson had serious issues from plastic surgery. Picked that up from retrospectives or obituaries at or after their deaths, though. Beethoven was deaf.
I couldn't tell you anything about the lives of celebrity professional sports figures either, though I know that there were many dramas that made the sports news over the years and I'm sure that there were no shortage of people who did follow them.
Might also depend on where you are. I understand that in Finland, it's extremely common to drink milk all the time, whereas in East Asia, where adult lactose intolerance is the norm, adult milk consumption isn't really a thing at all.
there's some stuff image generating AI just can't do yet
There's a lot.
Some of it doesn't matter for certain things. And some of it you can work around. But try creating something like a graphic novel with Stable Diffusion, and you're going to quickly run into difficulties. You probably want to display a consistent character from different angles -- that's pretty important. That's not something that a fundamentally 2D-based generative AI can do well.
On the other hand, there's also stuff that Stable Diffusion can do better than a human -- it can very quickly and effectively emulate a lot of styles, if given a sufficient corpus to look at. I spent a while reading research papers on simulating watercolors, years back. Specialized software could do a kind of so-so job. Stable Diffusion wasn't even built for that, and with a general-purpose model, also not specialized for that, it already can turn out stuff that looks rather more-impressive than those dedicated software packages.
I think creating a lora for your character would help in that case.
A LORA is good for replicating a style, where there's existing stuff, helps add training data for a particular subject. There are problems that existing generative AIs smack into that that's good at fixing. But it's not a cure-all for all limitations of such systems. The problem I'm referring to is kinda fundamental to how the system works today -- it's not a lack of training data, but simply how the system deals with the world.
The problem is that the LLM-based systems today think of the world as a series of largely-decoupled 2D images, linked only by keywords. A human artist thinks of the world as 3D, can visualize something -- maybe using a model to help with perspective -- and then render it.
So, okay. If you want to create a facial portrait of a kinda novel character, that's something that you can do pretty well with AI-based generators.
But now try and render that character you just created from ten different angles, in unique scenes. That's something that a human is pretty good at. Here's a page from a Spiderman comic:
Like, try reproducing that page in Stable Diffusion, with the same views. Even if you can eventually get something even remotely approximating that, a human, traditional comic artist is going to be a lot faster at it than someone sitting in front of a Stable Diffusion box.
Is it possible to make some form of art generator that can do that? Yeah, maybe. But it's going to have to have a much more-sophisticated "mental" model of the world, a 3D one, and have solid 3D computer vision to be able to reduce scenes in its training corpus to 3D. And while people are working on it, that has its own extensive set of problems. Look at your training set. The human artist slightly stylized stuff or made errors that human viewers can ignore pretty easily, but a computer vision model that doesn't work exactly like human vision and the computer vision system might go into conniptions over. For example, look at the fifth panel there. The artist screwed up -- the ship slightly overlaps the dock, right above the "THWIP". A human viewer probably wouldn't notice or care. But if you have some kind of computer vision system that looks for line intersections to determine relative 3d positioning -- something that we do ourselves, and is common in computer vision -- it can very easily look at that image and have no idea what the hell is going on there. Or to give another example, the ship's hull isn't the same shape from panel to panel. In panel 4, the curvature goes one way; in panel 5, the other way. Say I'm a computer vision system trying to deal with that. Is what's going on there that there ship is a sort of amorphous thing that is changing shape from frame to frame? Is it important for the shape to change, to create a stylized effect, or is it just the artist doing a good job of identifying what the matters to a human viewer and half-assing what doesn't matter? Does this show two Spidermen in different dimensions, alternating views? Are the views from different characters, who have intentional vision distortions? I mean, understanding what's going on there entails identifying that something is a ship, knowing that ships don't change shape, having some idea of what is important to a human viewer in the image, knowing from context that there's one Spiderman, in one dimension, etc. The viewer and the artist can do it, because the viewer and the artist know about ships in the real world -- the artist can effectively communicate an idea to the viewer because they not only have hardware that processes the thing similarly, but also have a lot of real-world context in common that the LLM-based AI doesn't have.
The proportions aren't exactly consistent from frame to frame, don't perfectly reflect reality, and might be more effective at conveying movement or whatever than an actual rendering of a 3d model would be. That works for human viewers. And existing 2D systems can kind of dodge the problem (as long as they're willing to live with the limitations that intrinsically come with a 2D model) because they're looking at a bunch of already-stylized images, so can make similar-looking images stylized in the same way. But now imagine that they're trying to take stylized images, then reduce them into a coherent 3D world, then learn to re-apply stylization. That may involve creating not just a 3D model, but enough understanding of the objects in that world to understand what stylization is reasonable to create a given emotional effect and be reasonable to a human, and when. People may not care that that ship is doing some impossible geometry, but might care a whole lot about the numbers of limbs that Spiderman has. Is it technically possible to make such a system? Probably. But is it a minor effort to get there from here? No, probably not. You're going to have to make a system that works wildly differently from the way that the existing systems do. That's even though what you're trying to do might seem small from the standpoint of a human observer -- just being able to get arbitrary camera angles of the image being rendered.
The existing generative AIs don't work all that much the way a human does. If you think of them as a "human" in a box, that means that there are some things that they're gonna be pretty impressively good at that a human isn't, but also some things that a human is pretty good at that they're staggeringly godawful at. Some of those things that look minor (or even major) to a human viewer can be worked around with relatively-few changes, or straightforward, mechanical changes. But some of those things that look simple to a human viewer to fix -- because they would be for a human artist, like "just draw the same thing from another angle" -- are really, really hard to improve on.
On the other hand, there are things that a human artist is utterly awful at, that LLM-based generative AIs are amazing at. I mentioned that LLMs are great at producing works in a given style, can switch up virtually effortlessly. I'm gonna do a couple Spiderman renditions in different styles, takes about ten seconds a pop on my system:
And yes, I know, fingers, but I'm not generating a huge batch to try to get an ideal image, just doing a quick run to illustrate the point.
Note that none of the above were actually Spiderman artists, other than Adams, and that briefly.
That's something that's really hard for a human to do, given how a human works, because for a human, the style is a function of the workflow and a whole collection of techniques used to arrive at the final image. Stable Diffusion doesn't care about techniques, how the image got the way it is -- it only looks at the output of those workflows in its training corpus. So for Stable Diffusion, creating an image in a variety of styles or mediums -- even ones that are normally very time-consuming to work in -- is easy as pie, whereas for a single human artist, it'd be very difficult.
I think that that particular aspect is what gets a lot of artists concerned. Because it's (relatively) difficult for humans to replicate artistic styles, artists have treated their "style" as something of their stock-in-trade, where they can sell someone the ability to have a work in their particular style resulting from their particular workflow and techniques that they've developed. Something for which switching up styles is little-to-no barrier, like LLM-based generative AIs, upends that business model.
Both of those are things that a human viewer might want. I might want to say "take that image, but do it in watercolor" or "make that image look more like style X, blend those two styles". LLMs are great at that. But I equally might want to say "show this scene from another angle with the characters doing something else", and that's something that human artists are great at.
Stuff could be anything, digital or physical, but the idea is of discussing and doing it as a hobby without any pressure or push to make it a business or side-gig. Nothing against that, simply that communities/groups with that atmosphere are easy enough to find as-is.
SYDNEY/PARIS, May 17 (Reuters) - French police reinforcements have started arriving in New Caledonia as part of a massive operation to regain control of the capital Noumea, the top French official in the Pacific island territory said on Friday....
I have always called a light top with a full zipper to be a jacket, however the people I'm surrounded by insist on calling it a sweatshirt. I'm prepared to be wrong, just wondering if I'm the only one.
A hoodie (in some cases spelled hoody[1] and alternatively known as a hooded garment)[2] is a type of sweatshirt[1] with a hood that partially or fully covers the wearer's head or face.
Wikipedia says that the zipper can be a defining characteristic:
On Tuesday at Google I/O 2024, Google announced Veo, a new AI video-synthesis model that can create HD videos from text, image, or video prompts, similar to OpenAI's Sora. It can generate 1080p videos lasting over a minute and edit videos from written instructions, but it has not yet been released for broad use.
Jughead is apparently still around too, and the source is up on Savannah, just been renamed to "jugtail" to avoid potential trademark issues. Dunno if anyone's actually running any instances, though.
Although the song is normally performed with electric guitars, vocalist/guitarist Dave Grohl's solo acoustic variation gained popularity after an impromptu rendition on Howard Stern's radio show in 1998.[19] The band has performed it acoustically since then and an acoustic performance concludes their 2006 live CD and DVD Skin and Bones. Additionally, an acoustic version was released on Foo Fighters' 2009 Greatest Hits album.
The very first hit I get on YouTube is for the Greatest Hits version. Is that it?
$400 for one pineapple: The rise of luxury fruit ( www.cnn.com )
Britain expands AI Safety Institute to San Francisco amid scrutiny over regulatory shortcomings ( www.cnbc.com )
Budget airline Ryanair posts record annual profit as passenger numbers soar above pre-Covid level ( www.cnbc.com )
Low-cost carrier Ryanair on Monday reported its best-ever annual profit, as passenger and revenue growth offset sharply higher operating costs, but flagged a weaker pricing environment in the current quarter.
Red Lobster files for bankruptcy, restaurants will stay open ( www.nbcnews.com )
Who is Mohammad Mokhber, the man set to become Iran's interim president? ( www.reuters.com )
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, known for brutal crackdowns against political opposition, dies at 63 ( www.nbcnews.com )
The Mac vs. PC war is back on? ( www.theverge.com )
I find it hard to believe that, outside of work computers, many people would be choosing Windows over Mac or Linux, especially is AI is their goal....
What vegetables and fruits do you wish were commonly available in the US?
Paul Pelosi attacker sentenced to 30 years in prison ( www.bbc.com )
The man who attacked the husband of former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been sentenced to 30 years in prison....
Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training ( arstechnica.com )
China-Russia relations: Putin and Xi no longer have a partnership of equals ( www.bbc.com )
TLDR:...
What is the weirdest flavoured thing you've had?
Was it good?
Not Dead Yet: WD Releases New 6TB 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives - First Upgrade in Seven Years ( www.extremetech.com )
Slack has been scanning your messages to train its AI models ( www.engadget.com )
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs seen physically assaulting Cassie Ventura in 2016 surveillance video obtained by CNN ( www.cnn.com )
Lots of times the restaurants won't even have milk ( lemmy.world )
DeviantArt’s Downfall Is Devastating, Depressing, and Dumb ( slate.com )
Where to find online communities of people making stuff mainly as a hobby?
Stuff could be anything, digital or physical, but the idea is of discussing and doing it as a hobby without any pressure or push to make it a business or side-gig. Nothing against that, simply that communities/groups with that atmosphere are easy enough to find as-is.
'Massive' French police deployment arrives to secure New Caledonia ( www.reuters.com )
SYDNEY/PARIS, May 17 (Reuters) - French police reinforcements have started arriving in New Caledonia as part of a massive operation to regain control of the capital Noumea, the top French official in the Pacific island territory said on Friday....
Arizona woman accused of helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at 300 companies ( arstechnica.com )
Is it a sweatshirt or a jacket? ( lemmy.world )
I have always called a light top with a full zipper to be a jacket, however the people I'm surrounded by insist on calling it a sweatshirt. I'm prepared to be wrong, just wondering if I'm the only one.
U.S. Navy Completes Gaza Aid Pier, Deliveries Imminent (Updated) ( www.twz.com )
Video games are now a generation-spanning hobby for 190 million Americans, survey finds ( www.scrippsnews.com )
The average video gamer is now 36 years old — but Gen Alpha and Gen Z are most likely to play games.
Google unveils Veo, a high-definition AI video generator that may rival Sora ( arstechnica.com )
On Tuesday at Google I/O 2024, Google announced Veo, a new AI video-synthesis model that can create HD videos from text, image, or video prompts, similar to OpenAI's Sora. It can generate 1080p videos lasting over a minute and edit videos from written instructions, but it has not yet been released for broad use.
Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running ( arstechnica.com )
What is a song you wanted to find again for a long time, but it gave you no clear clue about how to search for it?
I would also be curious to hear how you eventually found it again!...