'They mirror our own impermanence: always in motion, always fading. Magical yet melancholy, the trees offer both a celebration and a gentle farewell, rolled into one.' Evergreen trees are full of symbolism. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Used with permission of Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Imagine for a moment if visitors from another planet observed humans buying, selling, and decorating billions of trees every year.

Holiday shopping scams spike during Black Friday and Cyber Monday as data brokers sell personal information to cybercriminals who target shoppers with realistic fake emails and texts.

This holiday season, more shoppers are expected to use chatbots to figure out what to buy. This holiday season, rather than searching on Google, more Americans will likely be turning to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines this year compared to 2024, according to a recent shopping report from Adobe . OpenAI is already moving to capitalize on the trend: Last week, the ChatGPT maker announced a major partnership with Walmart that will allow users to buy goods directly within the chat window. As people start relying on chatbots to discover new products, retailers are having to rethink their approach to online marketing.

Nintendo fans across the US are breathing a sigh of relief as they tear apart the boxes housing their new Nintendo Switch 2 video game consoles. On-again, off-again trade tariffs implemented by Donald Trump, which precipitated pre-order delays from Nintendo, made the 5June release date of the highly coveted hardware feel more like a hope than a certainty. A potential price hike up from 450 loomed over launch day, but would-be buyers' fears did not come to fruition. The Japanese console maker managed to luckily launch its device squarely within a 90-day tariff pause issued by the president. If tariffs on countries like India and Japan return to the levels proposed during Trump's "Liberation Day" speech at the start of April, however, experts say Nintendo will have to limber up for yet another delicate trade policy dance.

Make gaming easier for the video game enthusiast in your life. Finding a gift for the gamers in your life can be difficult, especially if you have no idea what type of tech they'd like. Well, Amazon has you covered this holiday season. During their early Black Friday sales, Amazon has sales on gaming accessories and consoles that every type of gamer is sure to love! In an era where gaming is not just a hobby but a lifestyle, the right present can really enhance the gaming universe and make a gamer's setup more comfortable. These 10 gifts cater to various aspects of gaming, ensuring that you can find something that will be cherished by the gamers in your life.

TL;DR: Koofr gives you 1TB of secure lifetime cloud storage for 109.97 through December 8 -- the ultimate gift for organized minds. Holiday shopping for someone who has everything? Give them something they'll actually use -- Koofr Cloud Storage. Plus, if you need something last-minute, you won't have to wait for it to ship! Koofr makes storage simple with end-to-end encryption, file sharing, and the flexibility to connect multiple cloud accounts in one place. Whether your giftee is backing up photos, syncing work documents, or sharing family videos, they'll love how easy it is to store and access their files.

Apple reported strong demand for the iPhone 16 in its quarterly earnings report on Thursday, though overall sales in China slightly decreased year-over-year. The company reported 94.9bn in revenue, up 6% year-over-year, and 1.64 in earnings per share (EPS). The company's earnings slightly beat Wall Street projections of 94.4bn in sales and an EPS of 1.60. The company saw 46.2bn in revenue from iPhone sales, up from 43.8bn year-over-year. Fourth-quarter revenue from its services division, which include subscriptions, increased from 22.31bn to 24.97bn year-over-year.

Structured pruning of modern large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a way of decreasing their high computational needs. Width pruning reduces the size of projection weight matrices (e.g., by removing attention heads) while maintaining the number of layers. Depth pruning, in contrast, removes entire layers or blocks, while keeping the size of the remaining weights unchanged. Most current research focuses on either width-only or a blend of width and depth pruning, with little comparative analysis between the two units (width vs. depth) concerning their impact on LLM inference efficiency. In this work, we show that a simple depth pruning approach can compete with recent width pruning methods in terms of zero-shot task performance. Our pruning method boosts inference speeds, especially under memory-constrained conditions that require limited batch sizes for running LLMs, where width pruning is ineffective. We hope this work can help deploy LLMs on local and edge devices.

This holiday season, put less of an emphasis on things, and give some more thoughtful gifts. For instance, if you or someone you love wants to learn how to code, now's a great time to give the gift of knowledge. That's because The 2023 Complete Python Certification Boot Camp Bundle is on sale for the holiday season for just $19.99. This bundle includes 12 courses on Python and more from some of the web's top instructors, including Dr. Chris Mall (4.6/5-star instructor rating) and ZENVA Academy (4.4/5-star rating). It's suitable for absolute beginners, with courses covering the foundations of Python and slowly elevating towards more advanced subject matter.

'The Big Weekend Show' panelists weigh in on busy holiday travel ahead and Amazon using AI robots to help with the holiday shipment rush. They say this is the most wonderful time of the year -- and quite possibly, it could be. That is, except if you anticipate having combative relatives in your home during the holidays. If you're worried about the possibility of fights or quarrels over any number of topics during the holiday season, mental health experts shared strategies and insights for how to diffuse arguments and how to speak to relatives about your concerns. And, if all else fails, you might even need to revoke invitations ahead of time if matters can't be addressed.