You'll get the best VPN experience by paying, but prices don't have to be steep. When talking about the best VPNs, I frequently warn about the dangers of trusting free VPNs without verifying them. Although there are a few free VPNs worth recommending, many other free providers are ineffective, malicious or looking to profit off their users (or sometimes all three). Even the best free VPNs work a lot better once you subscribe and access their full service. This can be frustrating if you want to enjoy the benefits of a VPN but don't have the budget for yet another subscription.

Urban land-use allocation represents a complex multi-objective optimization problem critical for sustainable urban development policy. This paper presents novel computational intelligence approaches for optimizing land-use allocation in mixed-use areas, addressing inherent trade-offs between land-use compatibility and economic objectives. We develop multiple optimization algorithms, including custom variants integrating differential evolution with multi-objective genetic algorithms. Key contributions include: (1) CR+DES algorithm leveraging scaled difference vectors for enhanced exploration, (2) systematic constraint relaxation strategy improving solution quality while maintaining feasibility, and (3) statistical validation using Kruskal-Wallis tests with compact letter displays. Applied to a real-world case study with 1,290 plots, CR+DES achieves 3.16\% improvement in land-use compatibility compared to state-of-the-art methods, while MSBX+MO excels in price optimization with 3.3\% improvement. Statistical analysis confirms algorithms incorporating difference vectors significantly outperform traditional approaches across multiple metrics. The constraint relaxation technique enables broader solution space exploration while maintaining practical constraints. These findings provide urban planners and policymakers with evidence-based computational tools for balancing competing objectives in land-use allocation, supporting more effective urban development policies in rapidly urbanizing regions.

There's a certain peace of mind that comes from being able to see who's outside your door before you even get up from your seat. If you haven't yet made the jump, or you want an upgrade, the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro is on sale for its very best price of 150 ahead of Prime Day. The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro is usually available for 230 and, unlike other similar products, it's not constantly on sale, making this 35% discount even more enticing. The video doorbell captures head-to-toe images in 1536p, which means you'll get a full view of who's outside your door, what's on the porch, and well beyond that. There are many useful features you'll end up loving.

There is so much world to see and not enough time to see it. And there's definitely not enough time to spend combing through a bunch of different flight ticket aggregators looking for the best price. Thanks to its AI-powered flight deal search, a OneAir Elite lifetime membership will save you that time. So you can spend more time seeing the world and less time figuring out how to get there. Right now, a lifetime subscription is available for 69.99 with the coupon FLY30 at checkout.

We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an unknown distribution from which we are given a polynomial number of samples. Our first result is a general impossibility for the case of correlated distributions of values even between just one seller and two buyers, in contrast to the case of one seller and one buyer (bilateral trade) where this is possible. Our second result is an efficient learning algorithm for one seller and two buyers in the case of independent distributions which is based on a novel algorithm for computing optimal mechanisms for finitely supported and explicitly given independent distributions. Both results rely heavily on characterizations of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatible mechanisms that are strongly budget-balanced.

Content is one of the most affordable ways to scale your marketing efforts and extend your brand's reach. Considering you can get a lifetime premium subscription to Write Bot for the web's best price, it's an excellent time to invest in your content marketing. While ChatGPT might catch most of the headlines, it's far from the only tool available to help you write more content. Write Bot uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques to help you write 100x faster without sounding like a bot. All you have to do is choose your use case, fill in the blanks with as much (or as little) detail as you'd like, and Write Bot delivers content in a ready-to-use format.

We introduce a new software toolbox for agent-based simulation. Facilitating rapid prototyping by offering a user-friendly Python API, its core rests on an efficient C++ implementation to support simulation of large-scale multi-agent systems. Our software environment benefits from a versatile message-driven architecture. Originally developed to support research on financial markets, it offers the flexibility to simulate a wide-range of different (easily customisable) market rules and to study the effect of auxiliary factors, such as delays, on the market dynamics. As a simple illustration, we employ our toolbox to investigate the role of the order processing delay in normal trading and for the scenario of a significant price change. Owing to its general architecture, our toolbox can also be employed as a generic multi-agent system simulator. We provide an example of such a non-financial application by simulating a mechanism for the coordination of no-regret learning agents in a multi-agent network routing scenario previously proposed in the literature.

Each week, I receive tons of questions from my listeners about tech concerns, new products and all things digital. Sometimes, choosing the most interesting questions to highlight is the best part of my job. This week, I received questions about old computers, fake videos, Jeff Bezos' phone and more. Do you have a question you'd like to ask me? Tap or click here to email me directly.

Whatever the country is, when the mobile commerce data from online retailers and brands is compiled, the key findings states that purchase and transaction through mobile devices are continuously increasing. There is nothing surprising as it's a logical extension of the way smartphones are in the use. The way mobile devices are creeping into our lives portrays a positive picture of mobile usage in the future. This is the reason that the retailers have increasingly put their sights on and investing heavily their resources into E-commerce app development. Advocates believe that it's a golden ticket to potentially augment the sales and customer experience.

Machine learning is becoming so smart that algorithms designed to set prices in online marketplaces are mirroring each others' behaviour to raise prices. Algorithms using self-learning AI are popular systems that have become adopted by Amazon to constantly learn and set the best prices in order to drive website profit. An experiment by researchers in Bologna used algorithms similar to those manipulated by online shopping sites and found they were able to'collude' to artificially hike up prices. The researchers showed that this could happen entirely out of human control, as the independent AI systems were able to learn each others' behaviours. Machine learning is becoming so smart that online price setting algorithms are mirroring each others' behaviour to raise prices and with a goal to raise profits.