All posts tagged: architecture

Historic Seshadripuram police station to be razed; but is it a heritage building? 

Historic Seshadripuram police station to be razed; but is it a heritage building? 

Published by Parlour News

The 133-year-old Seshadripuram Police Station building on Subedar Chatram Road, in Bengaluru on Sunday. | Photo Credit: K. MURALI KUMAR The Seshadripuram Police Station building, which is 133 years old, is being demolished to make way for a new building, triggering a debate not only over conservation of heritage buildings in the city, but also the criteria for designating any building as a ‘heritage’ one. Constructed in 1892, the Seshadripuram police station in the central part of the city is also infamous for the first instance of a lock-up death in the State. The building, which was built during the British Era, however, does not have a heritage status unlike the Cubbon Park police station which was built much later in 1910. This has led many city residents to question why the former has not been considered a heritage site despite its age. ‘Age not sole factor’ Contrary to popular belief, historians and heritage conservators say that the age of a building is not the sole determinant of heritage.  “Although age is often one of …

Is Mumbai losing remnants of its Portuguese past? | Eye News

Is Mumbai losing remnants of its Portuguese past? | Eye News

Published by Parlour News

The Maximum City has many Bombays within it. One such is Khotachiwadi, a 19th-century heritage precinct in Girgaon, popular for its Portuguese architecture and its diversity, that shows both in its buildings and through its people. It is hard to miss Lynette Fernandez, 82, who spends her evenings on the porch of her century-old bungalow, chatting with passers-by. “We all grew up together. We would have these ‘pound parties’; no alcohol, just soft drinks. And each of us would bring something,” says Fernandez, as she points to the Girgaum Catholic Club that abuts her house. “There were many Catholic and Hindu families. We would exchange sweets on Diwali and Christmas,” she adds. But like many others in the area, she finds herself in an existential battle as everything around this urban village is changing rapidly. Story continues below this ad Khotachiwadi, once part of a vast coconut plantation, stands out for its cobbled, narrow lanes, colourful single-storey bungalows, with sloping tiled roofs and wood-frame porches. The sounds of the city are left far behind, its …

DeepSeek-V3 Open-Source AI Model With Mixture-of-Experts Architecture Released

DeepSeek-V3 Open-Source AI Model With Mixture-of-Experts Architecture Released

Published by Webster

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm, released the DeepSeek-V3 AI model on Thursday. The new open-source large language model (LLM) features a massive 671 billion parameters, surpassing the Meta Llama 3.1 model which has 405 billion parameters. Despite its size, the researchers claimed that the LLM is focused towards efficiency with its mixture-of-expert (MoE) architecture. Due to this, the AI model can only activate specific parameters relevant to the task provided and ensure efficiency and accuracy. Notably, it is a text-based model and does not have multimodal capabilities. DeepSeek-V3 AI Model Released The open-source DeepSeek-V3 AI model is currently being hosted on Hugging Face. According to the listing, the LLM is geared towards efficient inference and cost-effective training. For this, the researchers adopted Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures. Essentially, the AI model only activates the parameters which are relevant to the topic of the prompt, ensuring faster processing and higher accuracy compared to typical models of this size. Pre-trained on 14.8 trillion tokens, the DeepSeek-V3 uses techniques such as supervised fine-tuning and …

Brutalist architecture inspired this blocky wireless speaker

Brutalist architecture inspired this blocky wireless speaker

Published by Webster

The design of Transparent’s latest wireless speaker looks like the complete opposite of the glass-enclosed see-through speakers that helped originally launch the brand. The $4,000 Brutalist speaker is made from aluminum, and although it stands around 23-inches tall in person, without context it could be easily mistaken for a minimalist office tower designed by an architect still inspired by Britain’s post-war architectural style. Transparent’s speaker features a pair of three-inch tweeters positioned at 90-degree angles that work alongside a 6.5-inch subwoofer positioned on the opposite side of them. The company suggests its design is most effective at filling a room with sound when the speaker is positioned in a corner so sound can bounce off walls, but wherever you position it you’ll want to make sure an outlet is nearby because it doesn’t have a battery. At 26.5 lbs, it’s already heavy enough. The speaker features a pair of three-inch tweeters positioned at 90-degree angles, and a 6.5-inch woofer on the side.Image: Transparent The speaker can stream audio from devices over Bluetooth 5.2, but it …

Mathematicians Uncover Soft Cells, a New Class of Shapes in Nature

Published by Webster

Recent mathematical research has unveiled a fascinating new class of shapes known as “soft cells.” These shapes, characterised by their rounded corners and pointed tips, have been identified as prevalent throughout nature, from the intricate chambers of nautilus shells to the way seeds arrange themselves within plants. This groundbreaking work delves into the principles of tiling, which explores how various shapes can tessellate on a flat surface. Innovative Tiling with Rounded Corners Mathematicians, including Gábor Domokos from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, have examined how rounding the corners of polygonal tiles can lead to innovative forms that can fill space without gaps. Traditionally, it has been understood that only specific polygonal shapes, like squares and hexagons, can tessellate perfectly. However, the introduction of “cusp shapes,” which have tangential edges that meet at points, opens up new possibilities for creating space-filling tilings, highlights a new report by Nature.  Transforming Shapes into Soft Cells The research team developed an algorithm that transforms conventional geometric shapes into soft cells, exploring both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. In …

Step inside Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s stunning blue and white bungalow that he designed himself. Watch | Bollywood

Published by Webster

Nawazuddin Siddiqui has given a sneak peek inside his luxurious home. In an interview with Film Companion, the actor opened the doors to his beautiful bungalow, which believe it or not, Nawazuddin has designed himself. The actor, who said that he has studied architecture, revealed that he even made the sketches for the home himself. Also read: Nawazuddin Siddiqui shares sweet video of daughter Shora Siddiqui’s at-home ramp walk Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s sprawling house is an epitome of serenity, style and comfort. (Pics courtesy: Film Companion) His home can only be described as casual luxury The house, with blue and white exteriors, is named Nawab. While, the outside has a cool vibe with lots of plants and trees, the living room is decorated with handsome art, comfortable furniture and lots of books. In fact, the actor spoke about why he chose to fill this luxury abode with paintings of famous men, and movie posters, and not his own photos. “I will never want to see my face plastered across my home,” he said in Hindi. A …

Blackwell Architecture Will Accelerate AI Products in Late 2024

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NVIDIA’s newest GPU platform is the Blackwell (Figure A), which companies including AWS, Microsoft and Google plan to adopt for generative AI and other modern computing tasks, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced during the keynote at the NVIDIA GTC conference on March 18 in San Jose, California. Figure A The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. Image: NVIDIA Blackwell-based products will enter the market from NVIDIA partners worldwide in late 2024. Huang announced a long lineup of additional technologies and services from NVIDIA and its partners, speaking of generative AI as just one facet of accelerated computing. “When you become accelerated, your infrastructure is CUDA GPUs,” Huang said, referring to CUDA, NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform and programming model. “And when that happens, it’s the same infrastructure as for generative AI.” Blackwell enables large language model training and inference The Blackwell GPU platform contains two dies connected by a 10 terabytes per second chip-to-chip interconnect, meaning each side can work essentially as if “the two dies think it’s one chip,” Huang said. It has 208 billion transistors and is …

Abhishek Manu Singhvi writes: Why the legal architecture of defection must be reimagined

Published by Parlour News

Nowhere is the saying “the law is an ass” more validated than in the shenanigans of defectors and amidst the legal acrobatics surrounding the 10th Schedule. Nowhere is the gap between preaching and practice more pronounced and nowhere in constitutional law is human venality more self evident. Poor Gaya Lal, who twice changed parties on the same day in 1967, would blush if he saw the sophisticated present-day devices used to circumvent the 1984 anti-defection law. Constitutional law is no match for Indian jugaad. The ill-repute of this subject does not arise from lack of legal principles or absence of clarity. After endless delays by the Speaker, the Supreme Court’s (SC’s) Manipur judgment declared that three months is the ideal time limit for Speakers to decide disqualification petitions. The Constitution was amended to eliminate the concept of a split, and despite the common misconception, even a two-third breakaway group is liable to be disqualified unless it merges with another political party. The Speaker’s order is subject to judicial review and the 10th Schedule is not …

Twitter Gets Significant Backend Server Architecture Changes, Should Feel Faster, Says Elon Musk

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk has planned yet another set of upgrades to the platform. Taking to the microblogging site, the Tesla CEO wrote, “Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out”. “Twitter should feel faster,” Musk added. Numerous Twitter users took to the comments with baffled reactions to the sudden announcement. “Do we need to restart the app?,” one user wrote along with a meme featuring Musk holding a telephone captioned “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” “Faster exactly how? It’s always felt the same,” another user wrote. Yet another user wrote, “Yes I needed that ! Thank you Elon for all you do”. The update followed an outage of the microblogging platform in the early hours of Thursday. According to a report by Al Jazeera, the web version of the platform suffered a major outage. It was difficult for many users who were greeted with an error message when they tried signing in. More than 8,700 users reported problems with the site as of 7:30am EST (6pm IST), Al Jazeera reported citing …