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Day 4: 📷 foliage (@pratik)

Although we are only at something like 60% bloom for the whole region, some varietals bloomed last week. Now the leaves 🍃 are poking through the blossoms 🌸

There is still time for 花見 hanami flower-viewing. Then comes 葉っぱ見 happami leaf-viewing 🍻

Tight shot of a cherry blossom tree showing the mix of pink blossoms and fresh green leaves. Looks like the leaves are winning
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Finished Northern Ireland: The Fragile Peace by Feargal Cochrane 📚

A very readable, yet comprehensive, history of Northern Island over the past 100 years. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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Day 3: card 📷 (@val)

Some sakura 🌸 themed greeting cards at a backstreet stationery shop. Unfortunately they didn’t stock any of those fancy 3D constructable ones where you get a whole tree, or the music light show ones. Still, the Japan levels are turned up to 11 on these 🎚️🇯🇵

3 greeting cards: One depicts Mt Fuji with cherry blossom trees in the foreground. Another is cherry blossoms with Himeji Castle in the background. The third is a kokeshi like doll-girl reaching up to catch falling sakura petals
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People not looking up so much today ☔️

People walk under a canopy of cherry blossoms with umbrellas since it is raining

(See yesterday’s pic micro.chadkohalyk.com/2024/04/0…)

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A little night walk down by the riverside in my neighbourhood which is called “Palace of Cherry Blossoms” 🌸🏯 Finally the blooming has started.

See all my sakura shots for the day here: www.flickr.com/photos/sa…

closeup of some cherry blossoms in the dark, lit up by a nearby takoyaki stalla cover over a street light with sakura motifclose up of lit up cherry blossoms. In the distance is the lit up arch of a bridge out of focustwo young women sit on the grass under a blooming cherry blossom tree at night

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Day 2: Flowers 📷 (@davegullett)

A photographer enjoys the blooming cherry blossoms

Long shot from a high angle through cherry blossom trees of a photographer on the ground shooting cherry blossoms above their head
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📷 Day01 : toy (@pcora)

Cherry blossoms will be blooming over the next couple of weeks, so I am going to see if I can somehow maintain a parallel theme as this photo challenge progresses. Today I popped down to the Lego store to capture some toy cherry blossoms 🌸🧱

Closeup of Lego cherry blossoms
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Gorgeous day at Osaka Station 🌞 😎 🧸⛲️

The green Teddy Bear fountain called Ted Hyber, a sculpture by Fabrice Hybert. In background is the Osaka Station Building
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What are you into? What would you like to GET into? My newsletter this month is on “making” and hobbies. Consider the possibility: maybe you aren’t looking for something to DO, but looking for a community to do something with? Read it here 👇

buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…

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Kyoto is CRAZY with tourists right now. We went to visit the family grave since we missed out last weekend. Cloudy, but got a couple of nice photos of cherry blossoms 🌸 📸

#EverydayKyoto #Kyoto #Japan #sakura

浄土 (pure land) spelled out in FlowersGate to the burial site of Shinran, which is a common burial ground where my parent-in-law areThe old cherry blossom tree in Maruyama park. It is something like 170 years old, although it was recently trimmed and is much smaller than previous yearsSome cherry blossoms blooming by the east gate of Yasaka Shrine

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Spent all day in the Wakayama mountains at a very eclectic Buddhist temple that will open soon. More photos but here are a few random shots. The main statue of 1000 Hands Kannon-sama is being shipped from China, and there is an opening ceremony by a Malaysian Zen master in the coming weeks.

Small Tibetan Buddhist statue with three vajra sitting in front of the statuecloseup of a Buddha statue rising from a gold lotus leafa wooden Amida relief against a cloud pattern cloth. The Amida is holding two strings that hang down over a third part of the artwork showing Kannon and Seishi-bosatsuCloseup of Tibetan writing in gold ink that rises from the black paper

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This was another great ep following the one with Simon Willison about finding the boundaries of LLMs oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/…

#podcast #machineLearning #LLM #adversarialML

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Bluesky, blue building 📸

No edits. Taken from the north side of Osaka Castle park.

Photo of a cloudless blue sky. To the bottom right is a building with a dark glass blue colour
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Gorgeous spring day. Hung around Umeda enjoying the warm. There are still no cherry blossoms outside yet due to the cold, but the Hilton has a bunch of trees growing on display in the lobby that are fully bloomed! 📸🌸

Photo of street in front of JR Osaka building from the 15th floorWindows of the 15th floor looking down on the center of UmedaFlowering trees inside of a hotel lobby. A low shot showing the high cieling of the hotelclose up of a cherry blossom

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Today I found out about Rev. Joanne Yuasa who this year started working as a chaplain at Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Base Kingston, where I went to graduate school. She is the first Buddhist chaplain in the Canadian Forces! Wow!

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Finished Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr@social.coop) 📚 A positive read with a bunch of interesting branches to explore next. You can see some short chapter overviews: www.goodreads.com/review/sh…

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Appreciated this discussion about operations research and the “universal science” of advertising. Surviving adtech like I have, I was really nodding my head along with the discussion about how ad agencies play both sides of the transaction

www.patreon.com/posts/328…

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Really itching to go out on a photowalk. I’ve been on the backstreets at night but need to capture more. This rando snap I took since I liked the mix of stopping and going in one moment. 📸

Anywho, next week the sakura 🌸 will bloom so I will definitely be taking lotsa shots

Late night photo. Train passes by. Below is a short tunnel under the tracks, with someone about to walk through. The foreground shows an empty crosswalk scramble.
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This is fun to play with

jnolan.shinyapps.io/Populatio…

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RIP Vernor Vinge

file770.com/vernor-vi…