WIRED brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio and got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. For extra trimming, we checked in on how those trees fared once they were taken home and decorated. Shopping for an artificial Christmas tree can be overwhelming, especially when you're doing it online. You'll find yourself staring at product photos, wondering: How realistic does it look? Will it shed all over my living room? Can you see daylight through the branches? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We got tired of guessing, so we did a little experiment. We brought 10 of the most popular artificial trees from three top brands (Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company) and hauled them to a photo studio in Kansas.

We brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio, had volunteers assemble them, then got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. 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. You can spend hours scrolling through lists of the best artificial Christmas trees and still end up wondering what to buy. How real does it look? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We decided to settle the debate once and for all by bringing the best-selling artificial trees from three leading brands into a studio for a blind-judged contest. We got 10 trees from Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company, then found 10 assemblers to put the trees together and fluff them.

Looking for all our top recommended vacuums? Here are our favorites in every style we've tested, from stick vacs to robot vacuums. 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. We've tried every kind of vacuum here at WIRED, and we've put together this list noting the best vacuum cleaner for every category we've tried.

If you care about good air, it's time for a dehumidifier. These are the best ones we've tested for everything from basements to drying laundry. 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. Even though I've spent the better part of my life living in humid New York City, I never owned a dehumidifier. I never had a basement, and I was ignorant of the benefits of a portable dehumidifier. I've been lucky in that I haven't had or at least known about a mold issue where I live.

Like many of you, I receive a variety of notifications by various means. Postal letters, email reminders, pop-ups on my laptop, audio signals on my mobile, highlighted chat application entries, text messages, phone calls, taps on the shoulder--the list is long! Thinking a bit more about this, one of the purposes of notification is to resynchronize otherwise asynchronous processes. You tell Google Assistant to set a timer for 15 minutes and go off to do something else. After 15 minutes, you get an audible reminder that the 15 minutes are up, and you should turn off the spaghetti before it turns to mush.

As of today, the Humane Ai Pin is dead--less than a year since its launch. Following an acquisition by HP, Humane shut down many of the core features of the artificial intelligence-powered wearable and deleted user data, rendering it useless. Yes, some functions remain, like checking battery life (useful!), but you can't access the voice assistant. If you spent 700 on the Ai Pin, you might be wondering what you can do now. These are the risks of being an early adopter, but not getting a refund on a device bricked before the warranty is even up feels like a rip-off.

Dreame is making a splash at CES this year with a new pool cleaner that's smart enough to gauge the shape of your pool before it dives in for a cleaning, along with a robot vacuum with retractable, obstacle-climbing legs. Slated to ship in March, the Z1 Pro robotic pool cleaner boasts Dreame's PoolSense technology, which intelligently recognizes pool shapes and adjusts its cleaning strategy for optimal results. With 8,000 GPH suction power and dual brush technology, the Z1 Pro promises thorough cleaning, removing debris from floors, walls, and waterlines. The Z1 Pro's LiFi Control System utilizes optical communication to offer precise control over cleaning patterns and paths. Dreame says its horizontal waterline cleaning technology is now 50 percent more efficient than in previous models, while the Auto Poolside Parking feature simplifies retrieval.

That's why robot vacuums have become the darlings of smart home technology, promising to tackle one of our most tedious household chores. But with hundreds of models flooding the market, ranging from basic bumper-car cleaners to AI-powered navigators, finding the right one can feel overwhelming. Here's how to pick a robot vacuum that actually delivers on its promise of making your life easier. And once you're ready to decide, browse our favorite robot vacuums and mops of 2024, where you'll find picks for every budget. A robot vacuum can be a game-changing addition to your home--if you choose the right one.

In this paper, we propose a new annotation scheme to classify different types of clauses in Terms-and-Conditions contracts with the ultimate goal of supporting legal experts to quickly identify and assess problematic issues in this type of legal documents. To this end, we built a small corpus of Terms-and-Conditions contracts and finalized an annotation scheme of 14 categories, eventually reaching an inter-annotator agreement of 0.92. Then, for 11 of them, we experimented with binary classification tasks using few-shot prompting with a multilingual T5 and two fine-tuned versions of two BERT-based LLMs for Italian. Our experiments showed the feasibility of automatic classification of our categories by reaching accuracies ranging from .79 to .95 on validation tasks.

We present DALE, a novel and effective generative Data Augmentation framework for low-resource LEgal NLP. DALE addresses the challenges existing frameworks pose in generating effective data augmentations of legal documents - legal language, with its specialized vocabulary and complex semantics, morphology, and syntax, does not benefit from data augmentations that merely rephrase the source sentence. To address this, DALE, built on an Encoder-Decoder Language Model, is pre-trained on a novel unsupervised text denoising objective based on selective masking - our masking strategy exploits the domain-specific language characteristics of templatized legal documents to mask collocated spans of text. Denoising these spans helps DALE acquire knowledge about legal concepts, principles, and language usage. Consequently, it develops the ability to generate coherent and diverse augmentations with novel contexts. Finally, DALE performs conditional generation to generate synthetic augmentations for low-resource Legal NLP tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DALE on 13 datasets spanning 6 tasks and 4 low-resource settings. DALE outperforms all our baselines, including LLMs, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements of 1%-50%.