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☆ Michael Haight is accused of killing his wife and 5 kids in a brutal Utah familicide. Police reports suggest he had a troubling pattern of aggression toward children.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-28 | by ( Erin Snodgrass | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Police say Michael Haight, 42, shot and killed his wife, Tausha Haight, 40, her mother, Gail Earl, 78, and the couple's five children, three girls, and two boys ages 4 to 17, before committing suicide. The couple had five children: Macie Haight, 17, Briley Haight, 12, Ammon Haight, 7, Sienna Haight, 7, and Gavin Haight, 4. The officer told her there was no indication Michael Haight would respond with violence, according to the report. At some point prior to the massacre, Tausha Haight told family members that her husband removed all the firearms from the home, her sister-in-law, told the AP. Park said he last met with Tausha Haight on Tuesday, January 3 — the day before the family's bodies were discovered.

☆ 'Looks like we're painting potatoes for Easter': Twitter users share their hilarious reactions to current egg prices
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-13 | by ( Jordan Hart | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Shoppers in California can expect the priciest eggs at nearly $8 for a dozen, The Washington Post reports. One user joked about painting potatoes instead of eggs for their Easter celebration. The deadly infection kills 90% to 100% of affected chickens within a couple of days, according to information reported by Insider's Alex Bitter. California shoppers reportedly face an even steeper price, paying about $7.37 for only a dozen, according to the Washington Post. Most farms affected in 2022 are already back to laying and supplying eggs again," Metz said, according to the report.

☆ Why egg prices are still going up
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-27 | by ( Danielle Wiener-Bronner | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

But nothing comes close to the rise in egg prices. In the year through November, not adjusted for seasonal swings, egg prices jumped 49%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wholesale prices hit a recordAvian flu has been a problem in the US for several months now, but in recent weeks wholesale prices have been hitting records. The supply squeeze isn’t the only thing contributing to higher egg prices, said Metz. Friday’s wholesale prices were the same as Thursday’s, the first time pricing held steady since October, she said.

☆ As tech companies pull back on spending, big office holiday parties are on the chopping block
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-22 | by ( Jordan Parker Erb | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Apparently, some tech workers are also missing their companies' holiday festivities — but not because they're bopping around in the Mountain West. As tech companies pull back on spending, big office holiday parties are on the chopping block. Cost-cutting is coming for startups — and big office holiday parties are first on the list. For startup founders and venture capitalists, the office holiday party is a December tradition. But this year, holiday parties in startup-land look a little different.

☆ John Carmack: Virtual reality titan is leaving Meta
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-18 | by ( Ramishah Maruf | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

New York CNN —Video game pioneer John Carmack is resigning from his consulting position at Meta with “mixed feelings” about the “end of his decade in VR,” he announced in a Facebook post Friday. Carmack stuck around through the company’s more than $10 billion investment into virtual reality technology. He was an early advocate for virtual reality, thought it was not uncommon for him to criticize Meta. Meta bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion, and now sells the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets. “I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover,” Carmack said.

☆ Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-20 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN Business —As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art? August Kamp's 2022 digital image "new experimental version, state of the art" is part of the exhibit "Artificial Imagination" at bitforms gallery in San Francisco. The exhibit features art made with and inspired by OpenAI's AI image generation system DALL-E. For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “just another tool”, he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past work to create new work in various ways. Marina Zurkow used DALL-E to help create her 2022 piece "A Questionable Tale (#1)".

☆ Elizabeth Holmes scheduled to be sentenced on Friday
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

CNN —Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos who was convicted of fraud earlier this year, is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday morning by a judge in court in San Jose, California. The list includes Holmes’ partner, Billy Evans, many members of Holmes’ and Evans’ families, early Theranos investor Tim Draper, and Sen. Cory Booker. Elizabeth Holmes (L), founder of Theranos, and her partner, Billy Evans (R), leave the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and US Courthouse in San Jose, California, on October 17, 2022. “The effects of Holmes and Balwani’s fraudulent conduct were far-reaching and severe,” federal prosecutors wrote in a November court filing regarding Holmes’ sentencing. “Elizabeth Holmes is never going to run a big company again,” he said.

☆ Elon Musk is planning a subtle change to Twitter that could make it harder to stop the bots
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN Business —Elon Musk has been saying for months that he wants to stamp out spam and fake accounts on Twitter, but a subtle change he’s planning to make to the platform could complicate that goal. In a tweet this week, Musk said Twitter will stop showing notations such as “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter Web App” at the bottom of tweets, which are intended to indicate where users’ messages originate. He said researchers can consider it along with other factors, such as the specific tweets accounts post, the time frames in which the posts went up, and the sources they quote. Many academic researchers use Twitter’s API to study bots and misinformation on the social network. If a tweet was marked “Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter”, for instance, it would be clear that the post had been published both on Twitter and social network Mastodon.

In August, we spent a day driving around with Mr. Cook and his Tesla to assess the progress of this experimental technology. Tesla is driving But watch as the Tesla struggles to make sense of its environment, veering from the road into a motel parking lot. The experiences of beta testers like Mr. Cook are a window into the enormously ambitious and expensive bet that Tesla is making on self-driving technology. Guided by Tesla’s self-driving technology, the car drove along the river and over a bridge before reaching an intersection lined with trees. These companies are now preparing self-driving car services that will operate without backup drivers in places like San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

☆ Twitter battles wave of impersonators after launching new paid verification system
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-09 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN Business —Twitter appears to be battling a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators on its platform who have quickly gamed the company’s new paid verification system, hours after its launch. CNN has confirmed multiple verified Twitter accounts have been suspended by the platform after other users posted screenshots showing misleading content from the accounts. The fake verified accounts had posed as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Nintendo of America, the basketball player LeBron James, the software company Valve and others. Before being suspended, the impostor Nintendo account tweeted an image of the video game character Mario giving the viewer the middle finger. In an interview with CNN, Whelan said he managed to impersonate Trump by repurposing an old, spare account.

☆ What to know about Mastodon, the Twitter alternative
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-08 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

I am one of these Mastodon newcomers, trying it out of curiosity and because Twitter has felt increasingly toxic over time. Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/ShutterstockBut while it can be exciting to seek out a new social network, it can be tricky, too. Mastodon and Twitter have some similarities, yet they’re quite different — both in how they work and how they’re operated. I have mostly taken the more manual route by searching on Twitter for the word “Mastodon” to pull up people I follow who have added Mastodon usernames to their Twitter profile names. There also isn’t a Mastodon equivalent to Twitter’s quote-tweet feature, where you can repost another user’s post and append your own thoughts to it.

☆ With Twitter in chaos, Mastodon is on fire
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-05 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

CNN Business —In the week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up for a small social network called Mastodon has surged. Ascannio/Adobe StockRochko said in an interview Thursday that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Musk took control of Twitter. And she pointed out that Twitter users may migrate to Mastodon in particular because its user experience is pretty similar to Twitter’s. But unlike on Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network is less than 100 followers. A social-media escape hatchI’m not quite ready to close my Twitter account, though; for me, Mastodon is a sort of social-media escape hatch in case Twitter becomes unbearable.

One year and billions of dollars later, the so-called metaverse still feels years away, if it ever manifests at all. And Meta’s flagship social VR app Horizon Worlds can feel like a ghost town (albeit a ghost town with laser tag). Meta’s latest headset, the Quest Pro, is its first effort at combining the immersiveness of VR with the real world. The VR headset market is still tiny compared to, say, an established gadget market like console video games. A visitor to the 2022 Tokyo Game Show tests the Meta Quest 2 VR headset.

☆ These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +13 min

AI Image/Stable DiffusionHanson, who’s based in McMinnville, Oregon, is one of many professional artists whose work was included in the data set used to train Stable Diffusion, which was released in August by London-based Stability AI. Once available only to a select group of tech insiders, text-to-image AI systems are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. A piece by illustrator Daniel Danger that was included in the training data behind the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. But removing pictures of an artist’s work from a dataset wouldn’t stop Stable Diffusion from being able to generate images in that artist’s style. Hanson, for her part, has no problem with her art being used for training AI, but she wants to be paid.

☆ Texas sues Google over alleged ‘indiscriminate’ biometric data collection
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-20 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

CNN Business —Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Google on Thursday, alleging the tech giant had violated the state’s biometric privacy law by “indiscriminately” collecting voiceprints and facial recognition data from users and non-users of the company’s products without their consent. “Of course, this is only visible to you and you can easily turn off this feature if you choose and we do not use photos or videos in Google Photos for advertising purposes. The company has also allegedly listened in on Texans “without regard to whether a speaker has consented to Google’s indiscriminate voice printing,” according to the complaint. In February, the state claimed a now-shuttered Facebook photo-tagging tool — which was the subject of a $650 million biometric privacy settlement in Illinois last year — had also been a violation of the Texas biometric law. Texas has multiple lawsuits ongoing against Google, including two other consumer protection cases and an antitrust case targeting Google’s dominance in digital advertising.

☆ Meta’s headset makeover yields a $1,500 toy in search of a purpose
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

On Tuesday, Meta unveiled its latest effort in that mission, the Meta Quest Pro headset. But it costs $1,500 — nearly four times that of the company’s cheapest Quest 2 headset. Wages are up an estimated 5% this year in manufacturing — that’s not keeping up with inflation, but it is in line with the national average. “But by and large our manufacturing jobs today are high tech.”Bottom line: The labor story in America remains one where the narrative of recent history doesn’t quite hold. In most downturns, we’ve seen manufacturing decline, giving it a bad rap as a job that’s going extinct.

☆ Meta’s newest VR headset is impressive. Here’s why you probably won’t buy it
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

CNN Business —Meta’s newest virtual-reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro, is a slick, powerful device. Buyers can pre-order the Quest Pro as of Tuesday, and it will ship out on October 25. Meta's latest VR headset, the Quest Pro, is aimed at business users and costs $1500. Updated hand controllersThe headset is also more of a mixed-reality headset than a VR headset, as it isn’t meant to block out all ambient light all the time. The Quest Pro headset has sensors that can track your eyes and facial expressions.

☆ Meta is using AI to generate videos from just a few words
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-29 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Now, Meta researchers are taking AI a step further: they’re using it to concoct videos from a text prompt. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on Thursday about the research, called Make-A-Video, with a 20-second clip that compiled several text prompts that Meta researchers used and the resulting (very short) videos. Even so, it demonstrates a fresh direction AI research is taking as systems become increasingly good at generating images from words. If the technology is eventually released widely, though, it will raise many of the same concerns sparked by text-to-image systems, such as that it could be used to spread misinformation via video. As with massive, popular AI systems that generate images from text, the researchers pointed out that their text-to-image AI model was trained on internet data — which means it learned “and likely exaggerated social biases, including harmful ones,” the researches wrote.

☆ Amazon’s $999 dog-like robot is getting smarter
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-28 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

And Astro will now work with a real-time subscription service from Amazon’s smart-doorbell company, Ring, to provide security monitoring to small and medium-sized businesses. Smarter TVsAmazon unveiled a new series of Fire TV Omni QLED models – the first Fire TV to ship with Dolby Vision IQ. Kindle ScribeFifteen years after launching the Kindle, Amazon is introducing a higher-end version that also serves as a writing device. Its Echo Auto device ($54.99) is now smaller, sleeker and can be more easily mounted in a vehicle. A smarter Echo Show 15Amazon also announced a number of software updates coming to its existing Echo Show 15, a device the company said is especially popular in the kitchen.

☆ This guy is using AI to make a movie — and you can help decide what happens next
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-25 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

“Salt” is the brainchild of Fabian Stelzer. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. Many of Stelzer's "Salt" images use terms like "35mm" and "sci-fi." Just as AI image generators have already unnerved some artists, Stelzer’s experiment offers an early example of how disruptive AI systems could be to moviemaking. Released in 2016 and starring “Silicon Valley” actor Thomas Middleditch, it’s thought to be the first film that used AI to write its script.

☆ ATP roundup: Three-time champ Gilles Simon advances in Metz
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-21 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland beat the Czech Republic's Jiri Lehecka 6-4, 6-4. San Diego OpenIn a matchup of two American qualifiers, Mitchell Krueger took down Christopher Eubanks 6-4, 6-4 in the first round at San Diego. Krueger, who will face Australian seventh seed James Duckworth in the second round, won a hefty 34 of his 39 first-service points (87.2 percent). Japan's Taro Daniel dispatched American qualifier Emilio Nava 6-4, 6-3. 1 seed Daniel Evans of Great Britain in the next round.

☆ Stellantis invests in Turin as part of switch to electric
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-20 | by ( Giulio Piovaccari | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

REUTERS/Massimo Pinca/File PhotoTURIN, Italy, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Stellantis (STLA.MI)signalled its commitment to the historic carmaking city of Turin on Tuesday with an investment to boost its role in electric vehicle production and as a centre for the recycling of cars and their parts. The Franco-Italian group signed an agreement with its partner Punch Powertrain to increase production of electrified dual-clutch transmissions (eDCT) for hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles at its Mirafiori plant in Turin, the carmaker said on Tuesday. Chief Executive Carlos Tavares said the company was investing upwards of 10 million euros in the gearbox upgrade, without giving a precise figure. Turin is the historic home of Fiat which merged with France's PSA last year to form Stellantis. At full production, the Mirafiori and Metz facilities together will supply all relevant Stellantis manufacturing sites in Europe.

☆ Stellantis invests in Italian plant as part of switch to electric
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-20 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com RegisterWorkers install a flag with the logo of Stellantis, the world's fourth-largest automaker which starts trading in Milan and Paris after Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot maker PSA finalised their merger, at the main entrance of FCA Mirafiori plant in Turin, Italy, January 18, 2021. REUTERS/Massimo Pinca/File PhotoTURIN, Italy, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Stellantis (STLA.MI) signed an agreement with its partner Punch Powertrain to increase production in Italy of electrified dual-clutch transmissions (eDCT) for hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the carmaker said on Tuesday. The upgraded facility will be developed within Mirafiori, Stellantis' main plant in Turin, northern Italy, and it will complement the existing capacity of a plant in the French city of Metz, it added. The new Mirafiori e-Transmissions Assembly site is expected to start production in the second half of 2024. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com RegisterAt full production, the Mirafiori and Metz facilities together will supply all relevant Stellantis manufacturing sites in Europe.

☆ AI won an art contest, and artists are furious
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-03 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

CNN Business —Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Courtesy Jason M. AllenAllen’s winning image looks like a bright, surreal cross between a Renaissance and steampunk painting. Midjourney is one of a growing number of such AI image generators — others include Google Research’s Imagen and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. “This is the literal definition of ‘pressed a few buttons to make a digital art piece’,” another Tweeted. Allen is glad the debate over whether AI can be used to make art is capturing so much attention.

☆ Meta's problem is that the metaverse is supremely uncool
▼ + stars: | 2022-08-25 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

The biggest problem: It just doesn’t look cool. To get into the metaverse in the first place, you first have to strap on a bulky headset like Meta’s $400 Quest device. VR avatars also need to respond in real time to the ways we move our faces and bodies, which requires powerful computing and graphics processing. Still, FedEx Ground is refusing to offer the kind of across-the-board financial relief to its contractors that Patton and others are seeking. “We recognize that current economic conditions are posing new challenges,” FedEx Ground said in a statement.

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