This Just In: Upgrades And Downgrades

Denver area realtors are cautiously optimistic about the housing market in 2025. After a largely static year, realtors expect stable interest rates, a balanced market, more transactions, and a renewed interest in urban living. “I don’t think the market will change significantly,” said Craig Harcek with 8z. “Denver largely has a static population and I don’t think inventory will grow so fast we’ll see a deflation in value.” Stacie Staub with West+Main agreed.

MicroStrategy lost about 45% from its November peak, trading at about $300 after highs of $543 about six weeks ago. MicroStrategy is a publicly traded business intelligence company founded in 1989 that pivoted to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible in 2020. The company now holds well over 1% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist, and is now well underway to get its hands on 2%. With its strategy, MicroStrategy has enshrined its position as the largest corporate Bitcoin holder and attracted attention as a potential leveraged Bitcoin bet for institutional investors.

The content keeps flowing in Marvel Rivals with Season 1 on the way coupled with the highly anticipated Fantastic Four being made available as heroes. Before all that kicks off though, there are new cosmetics being added to the game in celebration of Lunar New Year, potentially piquing your interest. Here, we’ll take a look at what these Marvel Rival Lunar New Year skins are as well as how to get them if you’re looking to add new outfits to your collection. Marvel Rivals Lunar New Year skins explained There are two heroes that get fancy Lunar New Year makeovers — Moon Knight and Squirrel Girl — offering up some unique looks that are like no other in the game currently. For Moon Knight, his skin is named Lunar General which boasts an azure colored mask and scales, fitting for a guardian of the Temple of the Crescent Moon. Squirrel Girl’s is a little less menacing both in name and aesthetics.

Telegram — one of the top instant messaging mobile applications — rolled out non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles in the latest update. In a Jan. 1 post, Telegram announced “the first update of 2025, which includes collectible gifts that can be transferred or re-sent to other users.” Telegram users will also now have “the ability to send reactions to in-chat events, filters for message search, an in-app QR code scanner and so much more.” The details Gifts received on Telegram can now be upgraded to be made into NFT collectibles, with those having special attributes and being transferrable among users.

NEW YORK — Two deadly incidents on New Year’s Day — an attack being investigated as an act of terrorism in New Orleans and an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas — both involved vehicles that were rented on Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing company. Early Wednesday, 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter — killing 14 people who were celebrating the New Year.

Researchers at ByteDance have published 1.58-bit FLUX which is a new approach to AI model image generation compression as they aim to address current challenges of text-to-image models. In the published paper, the people involved state that while many of the popular text-to-image models have “demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities,” they have immense parameter counts and high memory requirements which pose challenges for deployment. This is highlighted as a potential barrier or difficulty on resource-constrained devices like mobile platforms. To overcome this, the team compressed the FLUX system to three values which reduced storage by 8x. “This work introduced 1.58-bit FLUX, in which 99.5% of the transformer parameters are quantized to 1.58 bits.