Author: Awais
Thanksgiving has a way of sneaking up on you. One day you’re browsing recipes, and the next you’re standing in your kitchen surrounded by grocery bags, wondering how you’ll get it all done. If you’re hosting this year, the list is daunting: menu planning, shopping, prep work, cooking a multi-course meal, setting the table and somehow keeping the kitchen from looking like a demolition site. If you haven’t started planning yet, it’s not too late. The key is breaking it down into manageable steps and using a few smart shortcuts to protect your time, budget, and peace of mind.Read more: I Cooked…
I thought I had the ultimate turkey the year my family took it to the fryer, but I was mistaken. I have come to realize that true turkey perfection is reached when the bird is brined and smoked, which creates an unbelievably juicy and savory piece of poultry. I view turkey as a blank slate, and the combination of a brine—this year I’m opting for a sweet honey variation—and smoke combine to add tremendous flavor to the otherwise dull bird. I’ve found the trick to this method is striking the perfect balance between the two main flavors, and the best…
What is the best internet provider in Los Angeles?CNET’s top pick for internet service in Los Angeles is AT&T Fiber and for good reason. With roughly 79% coverage across the city, AT&T is your best bet for fast fiber speeds, reliable performance and customer-friendly perks like included equipment and no contracts. It’s the ideal balance of speed, value and dependability for most. Spectrum is also a great option to consider. The provider offers three plans, ranging from $30 to $70 a month. If affordability is your top priority, Frontier Fiber is a solid alternative. Its $40 plan offers symmetrical 200Mbps…
Birds are pretty easy to identify by sight alone, but things are much more challenging when you can only hear their calls. Good news! Cornell University has an app that can do just that, and it’s completely free to use. Identifying bird calls is hard Call me a nerd (and you won’t be the first), but I think birds are pretty cool. I’m not at the stage where I carry a notepad and record sightings, but if I spot something new, then I’ll usually consult “The Book” and try to figure out what it is. Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek…
It’s that time of year again, folks. Baking season is finally here, which means cookies, pie, and all things dessert. And while we love revisiting our favorite homemade recipes just as much as anyone, even foodies need a shortcut sometimes. Whether you’re looking for a one-bowl wonder the whole family can help out with, or simply don’t want a sink full of dirty dishes, you can always turn to brands, such as Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, and Duncan Hines, to save the day. And if you’re already in need of a cozy treat to usher in the first snowy days of…
More than five years after making their debut, Sony’s WH-1000XM4 remain an excellent pair of noise-canceling headphones. And right now, Best Buy is offering a doorbuster deal that drops them to just $159.99 ($190 off) for a limited time, which is the lowest price we’ve seen this year. If you prefer the latest tech, you can also snag the newer XM6 for about $398 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.We once considered the XM4 to be the best headphones you could buy. We replaced them with the XM5, followed by the XM6 three years later, but the last-last-gen…
Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the idea of portability in gaming. While I gripped my Game Boy Advance tight in the backseat of my parents’ van, I dreamed about the days when I would be able to take full, console-quality games on the go. While my love for Nintendo still grows to this day, especially since the days of the Switch and the Switch 2, there’s something even more prevalent that has taken my fascination by storm. After growing disillusioned with Windows 11 on my ROG Ally, I longed for something simpler. Something that met a middle…
Since the conception of AI, researchers have always held faith in scale — that general intelligence was an emergent property born out of size. If we just keep on adding parameters and train them on gargantuan corpora, human-like reasoning would manifest itself. But we soon discovered that even this brute-force approach had its own shortcomings. Evidence suggests that a majority of our frontier models are severely undertrained and have inflated parameter counts (Hoffmann et al., 2022)3, which indicates that we might be spending compute in the wrong avenue after all. The Hidden Flaws of the AI Giants We made the…
Space is the right environment for a TV with this level of staggering contrast, and it’s not just the dramatic moments, but also the more subtly lit scenes that stand out. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is full of searing highlights and colorful bursts of space glow, but moments like the crisp sunrise on the Guardians’ plumb-brown shirts or the dark corridors of their small ship were just as impressive thanks to the Z95B’s masterful color gradients and shadow detail.That meticulous touch comes through in everything you watch, including plain old HD sitcoms like The Office, where I found…
Waymo continues to expand its reach, with the robotaxi company posting Friday that it’s now “officially authorized to drive fully autonomously across more of the Golden State.” Waymo already operates in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles (and outside California as well, in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix). But maps published by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles showed that the company can now test and deploy its autonomous vehicles across a much larger area in both the Bay Area and Southern California. In the Bay Area, Waymo’s approved areas of operation now include most of the East Bay and North…