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55 Best Early Black Friday Deals on WIRED-Tested Gear (2025)

WIRED

We found early Black Friday deals on WIRED-tested smart bird feeders, smartwatches, vacuums, and more. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping holidays of the year. Falling on the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, it's safe to expect Black Friday deals on thousands of items big and small. As always, the WIRED Reviews team will be scouring the internet to find truly good deals on items we've actually hand-tested and would recommend to a friend. While the official sales have not yet started, there are already some great early discounts on reliable gear.


OpenAI Locks Down San Francisco Offices Following Alleged Threat From Activist

WIRED

A message on OpenAI's internal Slack claimed the activist in question had expressed interest in "causing physical harm to OpenAI employees." OpenAI employees in San Francisco were told to stay inside the office on Friday afternoon after the company purportedly received a threat from an individual who was previously associated with the Stop AI activist group. "Our information indicates that [name] from StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees," a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. "He has previously been on site at our San Francisco facilities." Just before 11 am, San Francisco police received a 911 call about a man allegedly making threats and intending to harm others at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, which is near OpenAI's offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood, according to data tracked by the crime app Citizen.


MediaWorld Accidentally Sold iPads for 15 and Asked for Them Back: "It Was a Clear Mistake"

WIRED

The incredible offer appeared to loyalty card holders of the European electronics chain on November 8. After 11 days the company began contacting buyers, calling it a clear mistake. Italian electronics retailer MediaWorld has scrambled to fix a world-historic iPad pricing error. On November 8, an offer for loyalty card holders appeared on the website of MediaWorld, a European electronics retailer. No catch, no strings attached.


Hiker stumbles on massive medieval reindeer traps in Norway

Popular Science

The 1,500-year-old site was hidden beneath the dark, damp ice. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In the fall of 2024, a hiker named Helge Titland was trekking through Aurlandsfjellet, a mountainous region and plateau in Norway and got a little more than just some time with nature. Titland found some strange wooden stakes peaking out of melting snow. He wisely reported it to local archaeologists, but snow returned before the team could investigate.


Dynamic Revenue Sharing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Many online platforms act as intermediaries between a seller and a set of buyers. Examples of such settings include online retailers (such as Ebay) selling items on behalf of sellers to buyers, or advertising exchanges (such as AdX) selling pageviews on behalf of publishers to advertisers. In such settings, revenue sharing is a central part of running such a marketplace for the intermediary, and fixed-percentage revenue sharing schemes are often used to split the revenue among the platform and the sellers. In particular, such revenue sharing schemes require the platform to (i) take at most a constant fraction \alpha of the revenue from auctions and (ii) pay the seller at least the seller declared opportunity cost c for each item sold. A straightforward way to satisfy the constraints is to set a reserve price at c / (1 - \alpha) for each item, but it is not the optimal solution on maximizing the profit of the intermediary.


Break out the calculators: November 23 is Fibonacci Sequence Day

Popular Science

The cornerstone of modern math wouldn't be possible without the Hindu-Arabic numerical system. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most people know about Pi Day (3/14), but there are even rarer days on the calendar like Pythagorean Triple Square Day (9/16/25). The poetry of mathematics manifests everywhere in nature, but few numerical patterns are more common than the Fibonacci Sequence . First described in 1202 by mathematician Italian Leonardo Bonacci (Fibonacci is a shortening of or "son of Bonacci"), the concept involves adding 1 and 1 together, then doing the same for every successive pair of numbers.


Efficient Second-Order Online Kernel Learning with Adaptive Embedding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Online kernel learning (OKL) is a flexible framework to approach prediction problems, since the large approximation space provided by reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces can contain an accurate function for the problem. Nonetheless, optimizing over this space is computationally expensive. Not only first order methods accumulate $\O(\sqrt{T})$ more loss than the optimal function, but the curse of kernelization results in a $\O(t)$ per step complexity. Second-order methods get closer to the optimum much faster, suffering only $\O(\log(T))$ regret, but second-order updates are even more expensive, with a $\O(t^2)$ per-step cost. Existing approximate OKL methods try to reduce this complexity either by limiting the Support Vectors (SV) introduced in the predictor, or by avoiding the kernelization process altogether using embedding.


Efficient Second Order Online Learning by Sketching

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose Sketched Online Newton (SON), an online second order learning algorithm that enjoys substantially improved regret guarantees for ill-conditioned data. SON is an enhanced version of the Online Newton Step, which, via sketching techniques enjoys a running time linear in the dimension and sketch size. We further develop sparse forms of the sketching methods (such as Oja's rule), making the computation linear in the sparsity of features. Together, the algorithm eliminates all computational obstacles in previous second order online learning approaches.



TOD-ProcBench: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following in Task-Oriented Dialogues

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) settings, agents are required to strictly adhere to complex instructions while conducting multi-turn conversations with customers. These instructions are typically presented in natural language format and include general guidelines and step-by-step procedures with complex constraints. Existing TOD benchmarks often oversimplify the complex nature of these instructions by reducing them to simple schemas composed of intents, slots, and API call configurations. To address this gap and systematically benchmark LLMs' instruction-following capabilities, we propose TOD-ProcBench, a challenging benchmark featuring complex process instructions with intricate, fine-grained constraints that evaluates various LLMs' abilities to understand and follow instructions in multi-turn TODs. Our benchmark dataset comprises instruction documents derived from the high-quality ABCD dataset with corresponding conversations under human quality control. We formulate fine-grained constraints and action procedures as multi-level condition-action instruction statements. We design three tasks to comprehensively benchmark LLMs' complex instruction-following capabilities in multi-turn TODs. Task 1 evaluates how LLMs retrieve the most relevant statement from a complex instruction and predict the corresponding next action. In Task 2, we synthesize instruction-violating responses by injecting inconsistencies and manipulating the original instructions, and then we analyze how effectively LLMs can identify instruction-violating responses. Task 3 investigates LLMs' abilities in conditional generation of instruction-following responses based on the original complex instructions. Additionally, we conduct studies on the impact of multilingual settings and different instruction text formats on compliance performance. We release our benchmark under the Llama 3.3 Community License Agreement.