Retail
Some of Our Favorite Noise-Canceling Headphones Are 100 Off if You Act Fast
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra get a rare discount until the end of the day. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Bose is well known for its noise-canceling headphones and earbuds, and the high-end QuietComfort Ultra (9/10, WIRED Recommends) are currently marked down to just $329 on Amazon, with the same discount at Best Buy . You'll have to move fast, though, as both sites feature countdown timers with less than 24 hours remaining as I write this.
Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?
Cory Doctorow's theory of "enshittification" explains how tech platforms rot from within. As AI grows more profitable--and powerful--it risks the same fate. Cory Doctorow speaks onstage during Unfinished Live at The Shed in New York City. As one does these days, I ran my itinerary past GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the top choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down Via Margutta.
I Used Squarespace's Blueprint AI to Design a Website
Blueprint combines AI and curated designs to get your website up and running in a few minutes. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Squarespace wants you to build a website with AI. Its Blueprint AI feature began life as a guided website design system in 2023, but, like many things these days, it was revamped with artificial intelligence.
China's biggest shopping event starts five weeks early to revive spending
China's biggest shopping event starts five weeks early to revive spending It's known to be China's biggest online shopping event - taking place on 11 November each year. But this year, Single's Day sales have already begun in mid-October, as part of efforts by Chinese retailers to boost spending in a sluggish market. China has been plagued with issues like growing youth unemployment, a prolonged property crisis, steep government debt and an ongoing trade war with the US - all of which is making the country's consumers cut back on spending. The Chinese government has been spending billions - through family subsidies, more wages and discounts for consumer goods in a bid to counter this, but retail sales growth is still failing to meet expectations. Originally created by Alibaba as a Chinese shopping festival, Singles' Day is akin to Amazon's Prime Day or Black Friday promotions elsewhere in the world.
Cascading Adversarial Bias from Injection to Distillation in Language Models
Chaudhari, Harsh, Hayes, Jamie, Jagielski, Matthew, Shumailov, Ilia, Nasr, Milad, Oprea, Alina
Model distillation has become essential for creating smaller, deployable language models that retain larger system capabilities. However, widespread deployment raises concerns about resilience to adversarial manipulation. This paper investigates vulnerability of distilled models to adversarial injection of biased content during training. We demonstrate that adversaries can inject subtle biases into teacher models through minimal data poisoning, which propagates to student models and becomes significantly amplified. We propose two propagation modes: Untargeted Propagation, where bias affects multiple tasks, and Targeted Propagation, focusing on specific tasks while maintaining normal behavior elsewhere. With only 25 poisoned samples (0.25% poisoning rate), student models generate biased responses 76.9% of the time in targeted scenarios - higher than 69.4% in teacher models. For untargeted propagation, adversarial bias appears 6x-29x more frequently in student models on unseen tasks. We validate findings across six bias types (targeted advertisements, phishing links, narrative manipulations, insecure coding practices), various distillation methods, and different modalities spanning text and code generation. Our evaluation reveals shortcomings in current defenses - perplexity filtering, bias detection systems, and LLM-based autorater frameworks - against these attacks. Results expose significant security vulnerabilities in distilled models, highlighting need for specialized safeguards. We propose practical design principles for building effective adversarial bias mitigation strategies.
'Surveillance pricing': Why you might be paying more than your neighbour
'Surveillance pricing': Why you might be paying more than your neighbour You go into a store to buy a two-litre bottle of milk at your local supermarket and pay $3. But the person before you in the queue paid $3.50. And the person after you paid $2. What if those prices were based on your personal data or circumstances, or even the battery power on your phone? This may sound like science fiction, but it's not as far-fetched as you might think. In July, US group Delta Air Lines revealed that approximately 3 percent of its domestic fare pricing is determined using artificial intelligence (AI) - although it has not elaborated on how this happens. The company said it aims to increase this figure to 20 percent by the end of this year.
Using LLMs to Directly Guess Conditional Expectations Can Improve Efficiency in Causal Estimation
We propose a simple yet effective use of LLM-powered AI tools to improve causal estimation. In double machine learning, the accuracy of causal estimates of the effect of a treatment on an outcome in the presence of a high-dimensional confounder depends on the performance of estimators of conditional expectation functions. We show that predictions made by generative models trained on historical data can be used to improve the performance of these estimators relative to approaches that solely rely on adjusting for embeddings extracted from these models. We argue that the historical knowledge and reasoning capacities associated with these generative models can help overcome curse-of-dimensionality problems in causal inference problems. We consider a case study using a small dataset of online jewelry auctions, and demonstrate that inclusion of LLM-generated guesses as predictors can improve efficiency in estimation.
The Best PC Monitor for Most People Is 75 Off
Dell's excellent 4K monitor is a perfect second screen for working from home. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. If you're tired of staring a tiny laptop screen while working from home, consider scooping up our favorite desktop monitor for almost 25 percent off its normal price. The Dell 27 Plus 4K (8/10, WIRED Reivew) is currently marked down to just $228 on Amazon, the lowest we've seen yet for this smart and practical 4K screen.
Walmart is blowing out Greenworks electric mowers, blowers, pressure washers and other yard tools
Save hundreds on Greenworks electric tools, which are even more powerful than their gas-powered counterparts. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. If you're still pull-starting your lawn mower (or any of your yard tools), it's time to bring your yard care routine into the modern era. Right now, Walmart has a wide assortment of Greenworks lawn care tools deeply discounted. That includes mowers, as well as blowers and chainsaws, all of which will be very helpful when the leaves start falling in just a few short weeks.