Doubao (Chinese: 豆包) is an artificial intelligence assistant developed by ByteDance. == History == The chatbot was launched in August 2023. By November 2024, it had become China's most popular AI chatbot, with approximately 60 million monthly active users according to industry analytics. == Design == Doubao is powered by Volcano Engine (Volcengine), 120 trillion tokens consumed per day. == Variants == === Dola === The international version of Doubao is Dola which was launched in August 2023 as Cici. Dola is powered by OpenAI's GPT series of large language models and by Google's Gemini.
Colors!
Colors! is a series of digital painting applications for handheld game consoles and mobile devices. Originally created as a homebrew application for Nintendo DS (as Colors!), which was since legitimately distributed on PlayStation Vita, iOS, and Android, the project eventually evolved into an officially licensed application for Nintendo 3DS (as Colors! 3D) and Nintendo Switch (as Colors Live). == History == === Colors! === Colors! was originally released in June 2007 as a simple homebrew painting application for the Nintendo DS. It was developed by Jens Andersson, a programmer and designer on sabbatical from the games industry who wanted to experiment with the potential of the new handheld platform. Shortly after, Rafał Piasek created an online gallery where users could upload paintings made with the program. Colors! quickly became one of the best-known homebrew applications on the Nintendo DS, and in September 2008, it was also released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As of August 2010, it had been downloaded almost half a million times. It was voted the most popular homebrew application on the Nintendo DS by readers of the R4 for DS blog. Development of Colors! DS homebrew officially ended in December 2010 although the official gallery still accepted submissions from DS users until 2020 when Colors! Gallery was discontinued. === Colors! 3D === Colors! 3D is a successor to the application Colors! for the Nintendo 3DS. It was released as an officially licensed application for the Nintendo eShop in North America on April 5, 2012, and in the PAL region on April 19, 2012. It was later released in Japan on August 21, 2013, published by Arc System Works. Colors! 3D allows users to draw on five layers, each on their own stereoscopic 3D plane. Drawing is done on the bottom screen, while the top screen displays the painting in 3D. While drawing, players can use the various controls on the Nintendo 3DS to change layers, zoom and pan, and alter the pressure of their brush. Pressing the L button allows users to access a menu to change brush type, size, and opacity, modify the layers, use the camera to provide references, and more. When the user finishes their painting, they can export it to the SD card for viewing in the Nintendo 3DS Camera application. Users can also upload their finished creations to an online gallery, viewed on the 3DS or the official website. Gallery features include hashtags and the ability to follow artists and post comments. Each painting also features a replay feature that allows viewers to see how it was drawn. The application also features local multiplayer, allowing several people to work cooperatively on a painting. In April 2024, the developers of Colors! 3D collaborated with the Pretendo Network project to officially add support for the application, meaning Colors! 3D will continue to operate as normal when using Pretendo Network. ==== Reception ==== IGN gave the application a score of 9.0 and an Editor's Choice award, praising its simple interface and tutorials. Destructoid gave the app a 9.0, calling it "a simple and incredibly fun tool with an amazing community of artists proudly displaying their beautiful and funny 3D images." Nintendo Life gave the app a 9/10, stating, "Though lacking in any structured play, Colors! 3D’s robust free drawing system and unique ability to let anyone create their own three-dimensional artwork more than make up for this." === Colors Live === A Nintendo Switch successor called Colors Live (stylised as Colors L!ve) was released in 2020 after being funded via a Kickstarter campaign. This expanded upon the features of previous installments by adding new brushes, increasing the maximum number of layers to ten, and introducing blend modes. A new game mode called Colors Quest was also included. A pressure-sensitive pen called the Colors SonarPen was developed in collaboration with GreenBulb to facilitate drawing on the Nintendo Switch, and comes pre-bundled with physical copies of the game. ==== Colors Quest ==== This new mode acts as a story-driven adventure wherein players are given a daily drawing challenge with a specific theme and certain stipulations that must be fulfilled. Once the drawing is complete, players must anonymously score other players' submissions, these scores are then aggregated to produce a personal ranking that measures the improvement in the player's art skills over time.
Zero-overhead looping
In computer architecture, zero-overhead looping is a hardware feature found in some processors that enables loops to execute without the performance cost of traditional loop control instructions. Instead of software managing loop iterations, the processor's hardware handles repetition automatically, saving clock cycles and improving efficiency. This technique is commonly employed in digital signal processors (DSPs) and certain complex instruction set computer (CISC) architectures. == Background == In many instruction sets, a loop must be implemented by using instructions to increment or decrement a counter, check whether the end of the loop has been reached, and if not jump to the beginning of the loop so it can be repeated. Although this typically only represents around 3–16 bytes of space for each loop, even that small amount could be significant depending on the size of the CPU caches. More significant is that those instructions each take time to execute, time which is not spent doing useful work. The overhead of such a loop is apparent compared to a completely unrolled loop, in which the body of the loop is duplicated exactly as many times as it will execute. In that case, no space or execution time is wasted on instructions to repeat the body of the loop. However, the duplication caused by loop unrolling can significantly increase code size, and the larger size can even impact execution time due to cache misses. (For this reason, it's common to only partially unroll loops, such as transforming it into a loop which performs the work of four iterations in one step before repeating. This balances the advantages of unrolling with the overhead of repeating the loop.) Moreover, completely unrolling a loop is only possible for a limited number of loops: those whose number of iterations is known at compile time. For example, the following C code could be compiled and optimized into the following x86 assembly code: == Implementation == Processors with zero-overhead looping have machine instructions and registers to automatically repeat one or more instructions. Depending on the instructions available, these may only be suitable for count-controlled loops ("for loops") in which the number of iterations can be calculated in advance, or only for condition-controlled loops ("while loops") such as operations on null-terminated strings. === Examples === ==== PIC ==== In the PIC instruction set, the REPEAT and DO instructions implement zero-overhead loops. REPEAT only repeats a single instruction, while DO repeats a specified number of following instructions. ==== Blackfin ==== Blackfin offers two zero-overhead loops. The loops can be nested; if both hardware loops are configured with the same "loop end" address, loop 1 will behave as the inner loop and repeat, and loop 0 will behave as the outer loop and repeat only if loop 1 would not repeat. Loops are controlled using the LTx and LBx registers (x either 0 to 1) to set the top and bottom of the loop — that is, the first and last instructions to be executed, which can be the same for a loop with only one instruction — and LCx for the loop count. The loop repeats if LCx is nonzero at the end of the loop, in which case LCx is decremented. The loop registers can be set manually, but this would typically consume 6 bytes to load the registers, and 8–16 bytes to set up the values to be loaded. More common is to use the loop setup instruction (represented in assembly as either LOOP with pseudo-instruction LOOP_BEGIN and LOOP_END, or in a single line as LSETUP), which optionally initializes LCx and sets LTx and LBx to the desired values. This only requires 4–6 bytes, but can only set LTx and LBx within a limited range relative to where the loop setup instruction is located. ==== x86 ==== The x86 assembly language REP prefixes implement zero-overhead loops for a few instructions (namely MOVS/STOS/CMPS/LODS/SCAS). Depending on the prefix and the instruction, the instruction will be repeated a number of times with (E)CX holding the repeat count, or until a match (or non-match) is found with AL/AX/EAX or with DS:[(E)SI]. This can be used to implement some types of searches and operations on null-terminated strings.
Nuclear electronics
Nuclear electronics is a subfield of electronics concerned with the design and use of high-speed electronic systems for nuclear physics and elementary particle physics research, and for industrial and medical use. Essential elements of such systems include fast detectors for charged particles, discriminators for separating them by energy, counters for counting the pulses produced by individual particles, fast logic circuits (including coincidence and veto gates), for identification of particular types of complex particle events, and pulse height analyzers (PHAs) for sorting and counting gamma rays or particle interactions by energy, for spectral analysis. == Elementary components == Some of the essential components that make up the elements of a nuclear electronic analysis system include: Detectors Bias voltage supplies Preamplifiers Discriminators Coincidence and veto logic gates Counters Pulse height analyzers These elements were originally developed and built in the laboratories of the scientists doing the pioneering work in the field, but are nowadays designed, developed, and manufactured by a variety of specialized vendors: EG&G Ortec Oxford Instruments Stanford Research Systems Tennelec CAEN
InteLex Past Masters
InteLex Past Masters is a collection of full-text web-based scholarly editions of classic works in the humanities. InteLex Corporation was founded in 1989 by its current chief executive officer, Mark Rooks, to produce electronic versions of the works of the great philosophers, based on existing scholarly editions. The company is located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Its databases are marketed to academic institutions, with pricing based on the individual collections purchased. Content is provided in XML and searchable image format and is accessed through the InteLex Corporation website. In addition to philosophy, subject coverage includes religious studies, English literature, women's writing, social science, and history of science. InteLex databases are found in institutions in over 65 countries around the world.
Video Super Resolution
RTX Video Super Resolution (RTX VSR) is a video scaling feature by Nvidia. It was released on February 28, 2023. == History == The feature was first unveiled during CES 2023 as RTX Video Super Resolution. It uses the on-board Tensor Cores to upscale browser video content in real time. Video Super Resolution was initially only available on RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs, while support for 20 series GPUs was added afterwards; it is now available on all Nvidia RTX-branded GPUs. The feature supports input resolutions from 360p to 1440p and a max output of 4K and comes without support for HDR content although that could be likely added in the future. Nvidia released RTX Video Super Resolution 1.5 with improved video quality and RTX 20 series support on October 17, 2023. == Reception == According to ComputerBase, although "the algorithm is not yet working flawlessly", the feature is "overall recommendable".
Modulation error ratio
The modulation error ratio (MER) is a measure used to quantify the performance of a digital radio (or digital TV) transmitter or receiver in a communications system using digital modulation (such as QAM). A signal sent by an ideal transmitter or received by a receiver would have all constellation points precisely at the ideal locations, however various imperfections in the implementation (such as noise, low image rejection ratio, phase noise, carrier suppression, distortion, etc.) or signal path cause the actual constellation points to deviate from the ideal locations. Transmitter MER can be measured by specialized equipment, which demodulates the received signal in a similar way to how a real radio demodulator does it. Demodulated and detected signal can be used as a reasonably reliable estimate for the ideal transmitted signal in MER calculation. == Definition == An error vector is a vector in the I-Q plane between the ideal constellation point and the point received by the receiver. The Euclidean distance between the two points is its magnitude. The modulation error ratio is equal to the ratio of the root mean square (RMS) power (in Watts) of the reference vector to the power (in Watts) of the error. It is defined in dB as: M E R ( d B ) = 10 log 10 ( P s i g n a l P e r r o r ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {MER(dB)} =10\log _{10}\left({P_{\mathrm {signal} } \over P_{\mathrm {error} }}\right)} where Perror is the RMS power of the error vector, and Psignal is the RMS power of ideal transmitted signal. MER is defined as a percentage in a compatible (but reciprocal) way: M E R ( % ) = P e r r o r P s i g n a l × 100 % {\displaystyle \mathrm {MER(\%)} ={\sqrt {P_{\mathrm {error} } \over P_{\mathrm {signal} }}}\times 100\%} with the same definitions. MER is closely related to error vector magnitude (EVM), but MER is calculated from the average power of the signal. MER is also closely related to signal-to-noise ratio. MER includes all imperfections including deterministic amplitude imbalance, quadrature error and distortion, while noise is random by nature.