Techy Teacher

So apparently, Amazon really, REALLY likes live sports.  The report that Amazon is working on a standalone sports streaming app is the latest potential development across the U.S. viewing landscape, as live sports have become the darling of major streaming services . The move, which appears to be still in the discussion phase, was reported this week by The Information . It would add to the live sports content Amazon already offers through the company's Prime Video platform — Thursday Night Football, along with Premier League coverage in the UK and New York Yankees games in four states. The new app would expand on these investments and likely make Amazon an even bigger player in an area that has already proven lucrative for them. SEE ALSO: Amazon's big NFL bet is an early win for Prime Amazon spent $1 billion to get exclusive rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football for 11 years beginning this season. It paid off right away, as the very first game it streamed, Kansas...

Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid , combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 , and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans. “By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.” But depending on how they’re used, tools like QuickVid threaten...

The first open-source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all. This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video , released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM , a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code. But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pretrained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload. Like ChatGP...

There's a feature on the Apple Watch that is intended to be able to detect your stress. And a new study claims that it actually works not only to detect your stress, but to predict it too. Or, rather, your Apple Watch can predict when you're not stressed out — which is kind of stressful. The existing feature allows Apple Watch owners to take an electrocardiogram — also known as ECGs or EKGs — with the ECG app directly through their watch. ECG tests record the timing and strength of your heartbeat; it's a test doctors use to learn about your heart rhythm and look for irregularities. According to the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging , doctors regularly use ECGs to perform stress tests, so it's not surprising that Apple would want to include ECG capabilities in their new tech. SEE ALSO: The Apple Watch's blood oxygen measurement might be guilty of racial bias "The ECG app can record your heartbeat and rhythm using the electrical heart senso...

As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel , a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed. Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film. “We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. It’s rumored that Meta and Luxexcel had already worked together on Project Aria , the company’s augmented reality (AR) research initiative. In September 2021, Meta unveiled the Ray-Ban Stories , a pair of smart glasses that can take photos an...

The leaker provided a couple of images of the unreleased MSI B760M Mortar Max motherboard equipped with a Renesas RC26008 clock generator. There's also a screenshot showing an Intel Core i5-12400 reaching 5GHz on the board, a 14 percent improvement over its stock 4.4GHz boost frequency. This board will reportedly... from TechSpot https://ift.tt/Ts2pNBj via

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Say cheese! Here are the best deals on Fujifilm instant cameras on Dec. 29: BEST BUDGET PICK: The Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 includes two AA batteries — $59.95 $76.95 (save $17)  BEST FOR TAKING SELFIES: The Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 (lime green) takes just 90 seconds to develop and includes a built-in selfie mirror — $69.90 $99.95 (save $30.05)    BEST RETRO STYLE: The Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 (brown) features brightness control and a kids mode for action shots — $265 $280 (save $15)  The holidays may be coming to a close, but there's still time to save on a number of tech products, including Fujifilm's Instax Mini instant cameras. Sure, smartphones are capable of taking flawless, Instagram-worthy photos. But there's something about a traditional instant camera that digital devices just can't replicate. Unlike most real film cameras, Fujifilm's Instax Minis develop film instantly, so you can have prints in hand moments after snapping the photo. ...

Tim Harned Contributor Share on Twitter Tim Harned is a managing director at Progress Partners . He has had an M&A and capital advisory career spanning more than 30 years making strategic transactions for Fortune 500 and early-stage enterprises. Ever since Elon Musk’s “be careful what you wish for” acquisition of Twitter, speculation about America’s first homegrown “super app” has soared. In October, Musk tweeted : “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal. For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have ...

2022 was the kind of year that made us think, “What a time to be alive and reporting on transportation.” This year was absolutely dominated by conversations around the realities of bringing self-driving cars to market, the potential upheaval of the gig worker economy, micromobility dramas and, of course, all things Tesla. We took a look back at our top-performing transportation stories to determine what stood out as important to you, our dear readers. Ford, VW-backed Argo AI is shutting down Image Credits: Argo AI Autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI came onto the scene in 2017 with a $1 billion investment. Today, the company is no more after Ford and Volkswagen pulled out their investments. This one shocked the AV world, in particular because Argo had been in the middle of running a robotaxi pilot with Lyft in Austin and testing fully driverless technology in Miami . The shutdown of the company signaled two things: (1) Another round of consolidation is coming for self-driving t...

The Ryzen 9 7900 is said to feature 12 cores / 24 threads, 76MB of cache and boasts clock speeds up to 5.4GHz. The Ryzen 7 7700, meanwhile, will pack eight cores / 16 threads, 40MB of cache and speeds of up to 5.3GHz while the Ryzen 5 7600 reportedly... from TechSpot https://ift.tt/NO5vw1G via

The all-star cast is back for their last run in The Best Man: The Final Chapters, an 8-part episodic series streaming on Peacock. Here, the friends you first met in Malcolm D. Lee's directorial debut, The Best Man — the '90s hit that spawned the franchise — face their toughest challenges yet. After we last partook of their loaded holiday shenanigans in 2013's The Best Man Holiday , we meet on a tropical island for yet another wedding, this time between Quentin Spivey (Terrence Howard) and his fiancée of many hats, Xiomara Amani (Nicole Ari Parker). Everything's running the opposite of smooth for the friend group, until the infamous Shelby (Melissa De Sousa) crashes the wedding. With Shelby and Quentin’s long-awaited love/hate relationship cumulating in a surprising marriage (leaving the scorned ex-fiancée to an arson-fueled tour), the crew returns home to New York City, where the real adventure begins. Harper Stewart’s (Taye Diggs) award-winning book, Unfinished...

More than half of professional developers have CI/CD, DevOps and automated testing tools and services available at their organization, Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey uncovered . However, Stack Overflow noted, only 38% of the 34,906 respondents reported having a developer portal to make it easy to find tools and services. Similarly, data observability tools are only available to a minority of developers. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. These findings show that best practices that have become the norm at startups and tech companies are gaining ground more broadly, but also that there is still a lot of margin for progress to improve the efficiency and work environment of developers. “It’s kind of crazy that having CI/CD tooling in place, a DevOps function and Automated Testing are the only categories that are above 50%,” Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh told Tec...

An age of discovery is upon us. Big vessels, carrying robust robotic explorers and sometimes submersibles piloted by humans, embark on deep sea expeditions each year. This lightless realm remains a largely mysterious place , and just around 25 percent of the seafloor is decently mapped. Deep ocean missions are often considered the new exploration of little-known — or just never-visited — places on Earth. Down there, it's common for something to baffle scientists. On the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) six-month Voyage to the Ridge 2022 , biologists spotted a curious, living "blue goo" on the Caribbean seafloor , at some 1,400 feet down. Might it be an unusual new-to-science sponge? Or something else entirely? "We didn't know what it was," Derek Sowers, an expedition lead for NOAA Ocean Exploration, told Mashable. "We always discover stuff when we go out into the deep sea. You're always finding things that you have...

There are plenty of time-tracking apps for Mac that automatically log the hours you’ve spent signed-in. Some even offer granular data, telling you how much time you spent on a particular app. A new app called Balance is taking a slightly different approach to timekeeping, allowing users to manually punch in and punch out the time they are spending in front of a screen. Balance hopes to help users build a set of healthy work habits rather than get granular data about their productivity. It won’t tell you long you had Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chrome or any other application open on your machine, but will offer general insights into your overall usage of the system and time spent in various sessions in a week. To make this system work, Balance sends you a reminder if your machine has been on for more than five minutes but you have not clocked in. Clocking out is simple, too, just lock your Mac. Sadly, if your system goes to sleep, Balance doesn’t register a clock-out. Image C...