Pictured above: A dining room in Dallas, Texas, designed by Studio Thomas James.As you designa room at home, you may have specific ideas about the paint color, furniture placement, and even the lighting scheme your space requires to truly sing. But, if you're not also considering what type of rug will ground the entire look, this essential room-finishing touch may end up feeling like an afterthought. After all, one of the best ways to ensure your space looks expertly planned from top to bottom is to opt for a rug that can anchor the whole space—and, in many cases, that means a maximalist rug.A maximalist-style rug, or one that has a bold color, an abstract or asymmetrical pattern, an organic shape, distinctive pile texture, or unconventional application, offers a fresh answer to the perpetual design question, "What is this room missing?" Instead of defaulting to a neutral-colored, low-pile rug that goes largely unnoticed, a compelling case can be made for choosing a design that functions more as a tactile piece of art. Asha Chaudhary, the CEO of Jaipur, India-based rug brand Jaipur Living, has noticed many consumers moving away from "safe" interiors and embracing designs that pop with personality. "There’s a growing desire to design with individuality and soul. A vibrant or highly detailed rug can instantly transform a space by adding movement, contrast, and character, all in one single piece," she says.Ahead, we spoke to Chaudhary to get her essential tips for choosing the right maximalist rug for your design style, how to evaluate the construction of a piece, and even why you should think outside the box when it comes to the standard area rug shape. Turns out, this foundational mainstay can be a deeply personal expression of identity.Related StoriesWhen a Maximalist Rug Makes SenseJohn MerklAn outdoor lounge in Healdsburg, California, designed by Sheldon Harte.As you might imagine, integrating a maximalist rug into an existing aesthetic isn't about making a one-to-one swap. You'll want to refine your overall approach and potentially tweak elements of the room already in place, too."I like to think about rugs this way: Sometimes they play a supporting role, and other times, they’re the hero of the room," Chaudhary says. "Statement rugs are designed to stand out. They tell stories, stir emotion, and ground a space the way a bold piece of art would."In Chaudhary's work with interior designers who are selecting rugs for clients' high-end homes, she's noticed that tastes have recently swung toward a more maximalist ethos."Designers are leaning into expression and individuality," she says. "There’s growing interest in bold patterns, asymmetry, and designs that reflect the hand of the maker. Color-wise, we’re seeing more adventurous palettes: think jades, bordeauxes, and terracottas. And there’s a strong desire for rugs that feel personal, like they carry a story or a memory." Jaipur LivingJaipur Living’s Manchaha rugs are one-of-a-kind, hand-knotted pieces woven from upcycled hand-spun yarn that follow a freeform design of the artisan’s choosing.Jaipur LivingJaipur Living is uniquely positioned to fulfill the need for one-of-a-kind rugs that are not just visually striking within a space, but deeply meaningful as well. The brand's Manchaha collectioncomprises rugs made of upcycled yarn, each hand-knotted by rural Indian artisans in freeform shapes that capture the imagination."Each piece is designed from the heart of the artisan, with no predetermined pattern, just emotion, inspiration, and memory woven together by hand. What excites me most is this shift away from perfection and toward beauty that feels lived-in, layered, and real," she adds.There’s a strong desire for rugs that feel personal, like they carry a story or a memory.Related StoryHow to Choose the Right Maximalist RugBrittany AmbridgeDesign firm Drake/Anderson reimagined this Greenwich, Connecticut, living room. Good news for those who are taking a slow-decorating approach with their home: Finding the right maximalist rug for your space means looking at the big picture first."Most shoppers start with size and color, but the first question should really be, 'How will this space be used?' That answer guides everything—material, construction, and investment," says Chaudhary.Are you styling an off-limits living room or a lively family den where guests may occasionally wander in with shoes on? In considering your materials, you may want to opt for a performance-fabric rug for areas subject to frequent wear and tear, but Chaudhary has a clear favorite for nearly all other spaces. "Wool is the gold standard. It’s naturally resilient, stain-resistant, and has excellent bounce-back, meaning it recovers well from foot traffic and furniture impressions," she says. "It’s also moisture-wicking and insulating, making it an ideal choice for both comfort and durability."As far as construction goes, Chaudhary breaks down the most widely available options on the market: A hand-knotted rug, crafted by tying individual knots, is the most durable construction and can last decades, even with daily use.Hand-tufted rugs offer a beautiful look at a more accessible price point, but typically won’t have the same lifespan. Power-loomed rugs can be a great solution for high-traffic areas when made with quality materials. Though they fall at the higher end of the price spectrum, hand-knotted rugs aren't meant to be untouchable—after all, their quality construction helps ensure that they can stand up to minor mishaps in day-to-day living. This can shift your appreciation of a rug from a humble underfoot accent to a long-lasting art piece worthy of care and intentional restoration when the time comes. "Understanding these distinctions helps consumers make smarter, more lasting investments for their homes," Chaudhary says. Related StoryOpting for Unconventional Applications Lesley UnruhSarah Vaile designed this vibrant vestibule in Chicago, Illinois.Maximalist rugs encompass an impressively broad category, and even if you already have an area rug rolled out that you're happy with, there are alternative shapes you can choose, or ways in which they can imbue creative expression far beyond the floor."I’ve seen some incredibly beautiful applications of rugs as wall art. Especially when it comes to smaller or one-of-a-kind pieces, hanging them allows people to appreciate the detail, texture, and artistry at eye level," says Chaudhary. "Some designers have also used narrow runners as table coverings or layered over larger textiles for added dimension."Another interesting facet of maximalist rugs is that you can think outside the rectangle in terms of silhouette."We’re seeing more interest in irregular rug shapes, think soft ovals, curves, even asymmetrical outlines," says Chaudhary. "Clients are designing with more fluidity and movement in mind, especially in open-plan spaces. Extra-long runners, oversized circles, and multi-shape layouts are also trending."Ultimately, the best maximalist rug for you is one that meets your home's needs while highlighting your personal style. In spaces where dramatic light fixtures or punchy paint colors aren't practical or allowed, a statement-making rug is the ideal solution. While trends will continue to evolve, honing in on a unique—even tailor-made—design will help ensure aesthetic longevity. Follow House Beautiful on Instagram and TikTok. #this #unexpected #rug #trend #taking

Menu Home News Hardware Gaming Mobile Finance Deals Reviews How To Wccftech Mobile London Couple Tracks Down And Recovers £46,000 Jaguar Using Hidden AirTag After Police Fail To Act On Real-Time Location Of Stolen Vehicle Ali Salman • Jun 14, 2025 at 06:08pm EDT Apple's AirTag accessory is becoming more than just a way to find lost keys with its advanced tracking system. The accessory is unexpectedly becoming a hero when it comes to recovering stolen vehicles. In a new real-world case that highlights the AirTag's precision tracking, a London-based couple successfully located and recovered their £46,000 Jaguar E-Pace, while the police failed to take immediate action despite having real-time location data. A couple used an AirTag to track their stolen Jaguar and recovered it themselves after police delayed their response. The incident took place on June 3 in Brook Green, Hammersmith, where the couple's Jaguar was stolen from their home. Little did the thieves know, the vehicle was stashed with an AirTag, which led the couple to the location of their car in a nearby neighborhood, Chiswick. The AirTag did its job quite well and provided the couple with the location of their stolen vehicle, which was then forwarded to the Metropolitan Police. Even after the police had the location of the stolen Jaguar, the response was not what the couple was expecting. The owner of the vehicle told BBC News: “I wanted to act quite quickly as my fear was that we would find the AirTag and not the car when it was discarded on to the street without the car, so I told them that we were planning to head to the location.” Instead of taking action and sending backup right there and then, the police merely acknowledged the risky plan and advised the couple to call again if needed. The couple decided to go to the location by themselves, which was a risky move. They found the car parked on a residential street, and after bypassing the remote security systems, the couple was able to remotely unlock the car and recover it successfully. In a statement shared by the Metropolitan Police, “This investigation is ongoing, and officers met the victim on Tuesday, 10 June, as part of their inquiries.” While the story ends with a win for the victims and for the AirTags, it does raise questions about police responsiveness in technology-assisted theft cases. Apple has never marketed the AirTags as an anti-theft device and instead, it warns users not to recover stolen property due to potential safety risks. All in all, we are glad that the stolen car was recovered and the couple was safe by the end of the day. Moreover, stories like these also highlight the growing role of smart tracking accessories used in the personal security space, alongside the growing need for authorities to take measures accordingly. Subscribe to get an everyday digest of the latest technology news in your inbox Follow us on Topics Sections Company Some posts on wccftech.com may contain affiliate links. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com © 2025 WCCF TECH INC. 700 - 401 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada #london #couple #tracks #down #recovers

In 2024, Egypt completed its 1,155km stretch of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway, a 10,228km‑long road connecting 10 African countries – Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa.   The imaginary of ‘Cape to Cairo’ is not new. In 1874, editor of the Daily Telegraph Edwin Arnold proposed a plan to connect the African continent by rail, a project that came to be known as the Cape to Cairo Railway project. Cecil Rhodes expressed his support for the project, seeing it as a means to connect the various ‘possessions’ of the British Empire across Africa, facilitating the movement of troops and natural resources. This railway project was never completed, and in 1970 was overlaid by a very different attempt at connecting the Cape to Cairo, as part of the Trans‑African Highway network. This 56,683km‑long system of highways – some dating from the colonial era, some built as part of the 1970s project, and some only recently built – aimed to create lines of connection across the African continent, from north to south as well as east to west.  Here, postcolonial state power invested in ‘moving the continent’s people and economies from past to future’, as architectural historians Kenny Cupers and Prita Meier write in their 2020 essay ‘Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans‑African Highway’. The highways were to be built with the support of Kenya’s president Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana’s director of social welfare Robert Gardiner, as well as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. This project was part of a particular historical moment during which anticolonial ideas animated most of the African continent; alongside trade, this iteration of Cape to Cairo centred social and cultural connection between African peoples. But though largely socialist in ambition, the project nevertheless engaged modernist developmentalist logics that cemented capitalism.  Lead image: Over a century in the making, the final stretches of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway are being finished. Egypt completed the section within its borders last year and a section over the dry Merille River in Kenya was constructed in 2019. Credit: Allan Muturi / SOPA / ZUMA / Alamy. Above: The route from Cairo to Cape Town, outlined in red, belongs to the Trans‑African Highway network, which comprises nine routes, here in black The project failed to fully materialise at the time, but efforts to complete the Trans‑African Highway network have been revived in the last 20 years; large parts are now complete though some links remain unbuilt and many roads are unpaved or hazardous. The most recent attempts to realise this project coincide with a new continental free trade agreement, the agreement on African Continental Free Trade Area, established in 2019, to increase trade within the continent. The contemporary manifestation of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway – also known as Trans‑African Highway4 – is marked by deepening neoliberal politics. Represented as an opportunity to boost trade and exports, connecting Egypt to African markets that the Egyptian government view as ‘untapped’, the project invokes notions of trade steeped in extraction, reflecting the neoliberal logic underpinning contemporary Egyptian governance; today, the country’s political project, led by Abdel Fattah El Sisi, is oriented towards Egyptian dominance and extraction in relation to the rest of the continent.  Through an allusion to markets ripe for extraction, this language brings to the fore historical forms of domination that have shaped the connections between Egypt and the rest of the continent; previous iterations of connection across the continent often reproduced forms of domination stretching from the north of the African continent to the south, including the Trans‑Saharan slave trade routes across Africa that ended in various North African and Middle Eastern territories. These networks, beginning in the 8th century and lasting until the 20th, produced racialised hierarchies across the continent, shaping North Africa into a comparably privileged space proximate to ‘Arabness’. This was a racialised division based on a civilisational narrative that saw Arabs as superior, but more importantly a political economic division resulting from the slave trade routes that produced huge profits for North Africa and the Middle East. In the contemporary moment, these racialised hierarchies are bound up in political economic dependency on the Arab Gulf states, who are themselves dependent on resource extraction, land grabbing and privatisation across the entire African continent.  ‘The Cairo–Cape Town Highway connects Egypt to African markets viewed as “untapped”, invoking notions steeped in extraction’ However, this imaginary conjured by the Cairo–Cape Town Highway is countered by a network of streets scattered across Africa that traces the web of Egyptian Pan‑African solidarity across the continent. In Lusaka in Zambia, you might find yourself on Nasser Road, as you might in Mwanza in Tanzania or Luanda in Angola. In Mombasa in Kenya, you might be driving down Abdel Nasser Road; in Kampala in Uganda, you might find yourself at Nasser Road University; and in Tunis in Tunisia, you might end up on Gamal Abdel Nasser Street. These street names are a reference to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s first postcolonial leader and president between 1956 and 1970.  Read against the contemporary Cairo–Cape Town Highway, these place names signal a different form of connection that brings to life Egyptian Pan‑Africanism, when solidarity was the hegemonic force connecting the continent, coming up against the notion of a natural or timeless ‘great divide’ within Africa. From the memoirs of Egyptian officials who were posted around Africa as conduits of solidarity, to the broadcasts of Radio Cairo that were heard across the continent, to the various conferences attended by anticolonial movements and postcolonial states, Egypt’s orientation towards Pan‑Africanism, beginning in the early 20th century and lasting until the 1970s, was both material and ideological. Figures and movements forged webs of solidarity with their African comrades, imagining an Africa that was united through shared commitments to ending colonialism and capitalist extraction.  The route between Cape Town in South Africa and Cairo in Egypt has long occupied the colonial imaginary. In 1930, Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell made the journey, sponsored by car brand Morris and oil company Shell Credit: Fox Photos / Getty The pair made use of the road built by British colonisers in the 19th century, and which forms the basis for the current Cairo–Cape Town Highway. The road was preceded by the 1874 Cape to Cairo Railway project, which connected the colonies of the British Empire Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division This network of eponymous streets represents attempts to inscribe anticolonial power into the materiality of the city. Street‑naming practices are one way in which the past comes into the present, ‘weaving history into the geographic fabric of everyday life’, as geographer Derek Alderman wrote in his 2002 essay ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas’. In this vein, the renaming of streets during decolonisation marked a practice of contesting the production of colonial space. In the newly postcolonial city, renaming was a way of ‘claiming the city back’, Alderman continues. While these changes may appear discursive, it is their embedding in material spaces, through signs and maps, that make the names come to life; place names become a part of the everyday through sharing addresses or giving directions. This quality makes them powerful; consciously or unconsciously, they form part of how the spaces of the city are navigated.  These are traces that were once part of a dominant historical narrative; yet when they are encountered in the present, during a different historical moment, they no longer act as expressions of power but instead conjure up a moment that has long passed. A street in Lusaka named after an Egyptian general made more sense 60 years ago than it does today, yet contextualising it recovers a marginalised history of Egyptian Pan‑Africanism.  Markers such as street names or monuments are simultaneously markers of anticolonial struggle as well as expressions of state power – part of an attempt, by political projects such as Nasser’s, to exert their own dominance over cities, towns and villages. That such traces are expressions of both anticolonial hopes and postcolonial state power produces a sense of tension within them. For instance, Nasser’s postcolonial project in Egypt was a contradictory one; it gave life to anticolonial hopes – for instance by breaking away from European capitalism and embracing anticolonial geopolitics – while crushing many parts of the left through repression, censorship and imprisonment. Traces of Nasser found today inscribe both anticolonial promises – those that came to life and those that did not – while reproducing postcolonial power that in most instances ended in dictatorship.  Recent efforts to complete the route build on those of the post‑independence era – work on a section north of Nairobi started in 1968 Credit: Associated Press / Alamy The Trans‑African Highway network was conceived in 1970 in the spirit of Pan‑Africanism At that time, the routes did not extend into South Africa, which was in the grip of apartheid. The Trans‑African Highway initiative was motivated by a desire to improve trade and centre cultural links across the continent – an ambition that was even celebrated on postage stamps There have been long‑standing debates about the erasure of the radical anticolonial spirit from the more conservative postcolonial states that emerged; the promises and hopes of anticolonialism, not least among them socialism and a world free of white supremacy, remain largely unrealised. Instead, by the 1970s neoliberalism emerged as a new hegemonic project. The contemporary instantiation of Cape to Cairo highlights just how pervasive neoliberal logics continue to be, despite multiple global financial crises and the 2011 Egyptian revolution demanding ‘bread, freedom, social justice’.  But the network of streets named after anticolonial figures and events across the world is testament to the immense power and promise of anticolonial revolution. Most of the 20th century was characterised by anticolonial struggle, decolonisation and postcolonial nation‑building, as nations across the global south gained independence from European empire and founded their own political projects. Anticolonial traces, present in street and place names, point to the possibility of solidarity as a means of reorienting colonial geographies. They are a reminder that there have been other imaginings of Cape to Cairo, and that things can be – and have been – otherwise. 2025-06-13 Kristina Rapacki Share #cape #cairo #making #unmaking #colonial

Text-to-audio generation has emerged as a transformative approach for synthesizing sound directly from textual prompts, offering practical use in music production, gaming, and virtual experiences. Under the hood, these models typically employ Gaussian flow-based techniques such as diffusion or rectified flows. These methods model the incremental steps that transition from random noise to structured audio. While highly effective in producing high-quality soundscapes, the slow inference speeds have posed a barrier to real-time interactivity. It is particularly limiting when creative users expect an instrument-like responsiveness from these tools. Latency is the primary issue with these systems. Current text-to-audio models can take several seconds or even minutes to generate a few seconds of audio. The core bottleneck lies in their step-based inference architecture, requiring between 50 and 100 iterations per output. Previous acceleration strategies focus on distillation methods where smaller models are trained under the supervision of larger teacher models to replicate multi-step inference in fewer steps. However, these distillation methods are computationally expensive. They demand large-scale storage for intermediate training outputs or require simultaneous operation of several models in memory, which hinders their adoption, especially on mobile or edge devices. Also, such methods often sacrifice output diversity and introduce over-saturation artifacts. While a few adversarial post-training methods have been attempted to bypass the cost of distillation, their success has been limited. Most existing implementations rely on partial distillation for initialization or do not scale well to complex audio synthesis. Also, audio applications have seen fewer fully adversarial solutions. Tools like Presto integrate adversarial objectives but still depend on teacher models and CFG-based training for prompt adherence, which restricts their generative diversity. Researchers from UC San Diego, Stability AI, and Arm introduced Adversarial Relativistic-Contrastivepost-training. This approach sidesteps the need for teacher models, distillation, or classifier-free guidance. Instead, ARC enhances an existing pre-trained rectified flow generator by integrating two novel training objectives: a relativistic adversarial loss and a contrastive discriminator loss. These help the generator produce high-fidelity audio in fewer steps while maintaining strong alignment with text prompts. When paired with the Stable Audio Openframework, the result was a system capable of generating 12 seconds of 44.1 kHz stereo audio in only 75 milliseconds on an H100 GPU and around 7 seconds on mobile devices. With ARC methodology, they introducedStable Audio Open Small, a compact and efficient version of SAO tailored for resource-constrained environments. This model contains 497 million parameters and uses an architecture built on a latent diffusion transformer. It consists of three main components: a waveform-compressing autoencoder, a T5-based text embedding system for semantic conditioning, and a DiTthat operates within the latent space of the autoencoder. Stable Audio Open Small can generate stereo audio up to 11 seconds long at 44.1 kHz. It is designed to be deployed using the ‘stable-audio-tools’ library and supports ping-pong sampling, enabling efficient few-step generation. The model demonstrated exceptional inference efficiency, achieving generation speeds of under 7 seconds on a Vivo X200 Pro phone after applying dynamic Int8 quantization, which also cut RAM usage from 6.5GB to 3.6 GB. This makes it especially viable for on-device creative applications like mobile audio tools and embedded systems. The ARC training approach involves replacing the traditional L2 loss with an adversarial formulation where generated and real samples, paired with identical prompts, are evaluated by a discriminator trained to distinguish between them. A contrastive objective teaches the discriminator to rank accurate audio-text pairs higher than mismatched ones to improve prompt relevance. These paired objectives eliminate the need for CFG while achieving better prompt adherence. Also, ARC adopts ping-pong sampling to refine the audio output through alternating denoising and re-noising cycles, reducing inference steps without compromising quality. ARC’s performance was evaluated extensively. In objective tests, it achieved an FDopenl3 score of 84.43, a KLpasst score of 2.24, and a CLAP score of 0.27, indicating balanced quality and semantic precision. Diversity was notably strong, with a CLAP Conditional Diversity Scoreof 0.41. Real-Time Factor reached 156.42, reflecting outstanding generation speed, while GPU memory usage remained at a practical 4.06 GB. Subjectively, ARC scored 4.4 for diversity, 4.2 for quality, and 4.2 for prompt adherence in human evaluations involving 14 participants. Unlike distillation-based models like Presto, which scored higher on quality but dropped to 2.7 on diversity, ARC presented a more balanced and practical solution. Several Key Takeaways from the Research by Stability AI on Adversarial Relativistic-Contrastivepost-training and  Stable Audio Open Small include:  ARC post-training avoids distillation and CFG, relying on adversarial and contrastive losses. ARC generates 12s of 44.1 kHz stereo audio in 75ms on H100 and 7s on mobile CPUs. It achieves 0.41 CLAP Conditional Diversity Score, the highest among tested models. Subjective scores: 4.4, 4.2, and 4.2. Ping-pong sampling enables few-step inference while refining output quality. Stable Audio Open Small offers 497M parameters, supports 8-step generation, and is compatible with mobile deployments. On Vivo X200 Pro, inference latency dropped from 15.3s to 6.6s with half the memory. ARC and SAO Small provide real-time solutions for music, games, and creative tools. In conclusion, the combination of ARC post-training and Stable Audio Open Small eliminates the reliance on resource-intensive distillation and classifier-free guidance, enabling researchers to deliver a streamlined adversarial framework that accelerates inference without compromising output quality or prompt adherence. ARC enables fast, diverse, and semantically rich audio synthesis in high-performance and mobile environments. With Stable Audio Open Small optimized for lightweight deployment, this research lays the groundwork for integrating responsive, generative audio tools into everyday creative workflows, from professional sound design to real-time applications on edge devices. Check out the Paper, GitHub Page and Model on Hugging Face. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Mohammad AsjadAsjad is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is persuing B.Tech in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Asjad is a Machine learning and deep learning enthusiast who is always researching the applications of machine learning in healthcare.Mohammad Asjadhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/mohammad_asjad/Meta AI Introduces CATransformers: A Carbon-Aware Machine Learning Framework to Co-Optimize AI Models and Hardware for Sustainable Edge DeploymentMohammad Asjadhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/mohammad_asjad/Enterprise AI Without GPU Burn: Salesforce’s xGen-small Optimizes for Context, Cost, and PrivacyMohammad Asjadhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/mohammad_asjad/ServiceNow AI Released Apriel-Nemotron-15b-Thinker: A Compact Yet Powerful Reasoning Model Optimized for Enterprise-Scale Deployment and EfficiencyMohammad Asjadhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/mohammad_asjad/Researchers from Fudan University Introduce Lorsa: A Sparse Attention Mechanism That Recovers Atomic Attention Units Hidden in Transformer Superposition #stability #introduces #adversarial #relativisticcontrastive #arc