Lifeboat Foundation

Illinois houses, apartments and condos being built from 2024 onward must equip EV charging points.

As part of our own recent AI hackathon, the NFX content team spent 48 hours going from house to house, office to office, talking with top founders about their work — what’s hard, what’s exciting, and what will never be the same again. What’s really happening day in and day out at hacker houses and AI social clubs is electric and an entirely new way of thinking and building. This is the rise of the AI underground.

NFX has not invested in any of the highlighted companies in this documentary. See more content from us at — www.nfx.com

French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh has created a brick workshop in Louviers, France, for luxury brand Hermès that is the first industrial building to achieve France’s highest environmental labelling.

The wood-framed Maroquinerie de Louviers workshop, located in Hermès’ hub in Normandy, was built from over 500,000 bricks produced by local brick-makers located 70 kilometres from the site.

Large, swooping arches open the 6,200-square-metre building up to an internal courtyard around which the workshops are placed, with arched windows designed to let in natural light.

Airbnb investors are flocking to South Texas, where they see a chance to capitalize on relatively cheap homes and proximity to Musk’s SpaceX.

So I commented on an IKEA story about them using employees to assist in interior design. I commented, “Can they use AI”, of course knowing people can. AI can augment a regular homeowner into an interior designer.

Here is a list of some helpful AI interior design tools for homeowners who would like to avoid interior designers and decorate their homes on their own.

Home owners, nowadays, spend a sizeable amount of their savings on decorating their homes. Nevertheless, many of them remain averse to hiring interior decorators, as they believe it to be a costly affair. Hence, they take things into their own hands, when it comes to deciding the design of their dream abodes. Today, there are many Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered interior design apps and software that can help the home owners with the interior designing job. Moreover, home owners do not need to be tech-savvy to use these tools.

One month into living under Russian occupation in northern Ukraine, Marina cycled cautiously through her village. She was five doors from her elderly parents’ blue garden gate when three soldiers ordered her to stop. Grabbing her hair, they dragged Marina into a neighbour’s empty house.

“They forced me to strip naked,” the 47-year-old said, picking at the skin around her fingernails. “I asked them not to touch me, but they said: ‘Your Ukrainian soldiers are killing us’.”

Continue reading “Gang-rape and genital electrocution: How Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine could go un-prosecuted” »

The explicit modeling of the input modality is typically required for deep learning inference. For instance, by encoding picture patches into vectors, Vision Transformers (ViTs) directly model the 2D spatial organization of images. Similarly, calculating spectral characteristics (like MFCCs) to transmit into a network is frequently involved in audio inference. A user must first decode a file into a modality-specific representation (such as an RGB tensor or MFCCs) before making an inference on a file that is saved on a disc (such as a JPEG image file or an MP3 audio file), as shown in Figure 1a. There are two real downsides to decoding inputs into a modality-specific representation.

It first involves manually creating an input representation and a model stem for each input modality. Recent projects like PerceiverIO and UnifiedIO have demonstrated the versatility of Transformer backbones. These techniques still need modality-specific input preprocessing, though. For instance, before sending picture files into the network, PerceiverIO decodes them into tensors. Other input modalities are transformed into various forms by PerceiverIO. They postulate that executing inference directly on file bytes makes it feasible to eliminate all modality-specific input preprocessing. The exposure of the material being analyzed is the second disadvantage of decoding inputs into a modality-specific representation.

Think of a smart home gadget that uses RGB photos to conduct inference. The user’s privacy may be jeopardized if an enemy gains access to this model input. They contend that deduction can instead be carried out on inputs that protect privacy. They make notice that numerous input modalities share the ability to be saved as file bytes to solve these shortcomings. As a result, they feed file bytes into their model at inference time (Figure 1b) without doing any decoding. Given their capability to handle a range of modalities and variable-length inputs, they adopt a modified Transformer architecture for their model.

The Los Angeles Affordable Housing Challenge, the 16th installment of Buildner’s affordable housing competition series, welcomes architects and design enthusiasts from around the globe to submit inventive solutions to tackle Los Angeles’ housing crisis. As the city grapples with skyrocketing rents, gentrification, and expensive starter homes, affordable housing for lower-income households has become increasingly scarce.

This competition seeks to generate imaginative and pragmatic solutions to address the diverse housing needs of Los Angeles residents, including families, single professionals, and couples. Participants are encouraged to think beyond conventional housing models and explore innovative designs that offer flexibility, affordability, sustainability, and a sense of community.

Architect Samira Rathod built a house in Gujarat that stays naturally cool even in peak summer. Here is how: