Eliana Willis

Maria Diaz/ZDNETWhat’s the deal? The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro More

High blood pressure, or hypertension, affects an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide and results in 10 million deaths per year, according to the World Heart Federation. Impacting a person’s whole body and slowly damaging blood cells, hypertension is the number one risk factor for death on a global scale. There are effective means to treat high blood pressure, but it’s not always easy to detect and monitor. Dr. Kazuomi Kario, professor and chairman of cardiovascular medicine at Jichi Medical University, addressed the potential to manage high blood pressure with wearable technology like smartwatches in an article featured in the Journal of the American Heart Association.  Also: The best smartwatches: Expert testedRecent studies show that wearables are “validated and reliable” and “have been shown to perform well against current out-of-office BP measurement approaches.” However, there are limited devices that have the tech needed to take an accurate blood pressure reading. Still, there are options.  What is the best blood pressure watch you can buy right now? To help you find a smartwatch that functions as a blood pressure monitoring tool, we pulled studies from doctors to evaluate the best commercially available blood pressure watches, keeping in mind accuracy, data privacy, and price. The best blood pressure that you can purchase for the US market is the YHE BP Doctor Pro More

My kids love their Fire tablets, and I love the convenience of parental controls they offer. Maria Diaz/ZDNETAmazon is offering some huge deals on its latest Fire Kids Tablets, my kids’ favorite device for home and on-the-go entertainment. The newest Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids tablet More

Nina Raemont/ZDNETOne reason Oura has gotten so popular over the years is because of the smart ring brand’s partnership with FDA-cleared Natural Cycles More

Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Getty Images Social media platform Bluesky is relatively new, but it’s been growing exponentially as another platform experiences an X-odus. According to Altmetric, Bluesky may already favor a particular community: researchers.  Also: If you convert to a domain name on Bluesky, you MUST do this right away On Tuesday, the data company, which specializes […] More

NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images With the holiday season upon us, many companies are finding ways to take advantage through deals, promotions, or other campaigns. OpenAI has found a way to participate with its “12 days of OpenAI” event series. On Wednesday, OpenAI announced via an X post that starting on Dec. 5, the […] More

Cerebras used chain of thought at inference time to make a smaller AI model equal or better to a larger model. Cerebras SystemsCerebras Systems announced on Tuesday that it’s made Meta Platforms’s Llama perform as well in a small version as it does on a large version by adding the increasingly popular approach in generative artificial intelligence (AI) known as “chain of thought.”  The AI computer maker announced the advance at the start of the annual NeurIPS conference on AI.”This is a closed-source only capability, but we wanted to bring this capability to the most popular ecosystem, which is Llama,” said James Wang, head of Cerebras’s product marketing effort, in an interview with ZDNET. The project is the latest in a line of open-source projects Cerebras has done to demonstrate the capabilities of its purpose-built AI computer, the “CS-3,” which it sells in competition with the status quo in AI — GPU chips from the customary vendors, Nvidia and AMD.Also: DeepSeek challenges OpenAI’s o1 in chain of thought – but it’s missing a few linksThe company was able to train the Llama 3.1 open-source AI model that uses only 70 billion parameters to reach the same accuracy or better accuracy on various benchmark tests as the much larger 405-billion parameter version of Llama. Those tests include the CRUX test of “complex reasoning tasks,” developed at MIT and Meta, and the LiveCodeBench for code generation challenges, developed at U.C. Berkeley, MIT and Cornell University, among others. Chain of thought can enable models using less training time, data, and computing power, to equal or surpass a large model’s performance.  More

Jack Wallen/ZDNETWhen System76 announced that it would be creating a new Linux desktop environment from scratch and using the Rust programming language, I was skeptical, not in the company’s ability to deliver but the reason behind the choice. Pop!_OS has been an outstanding OS to date, a perfect re-imagining of the GNOME desktop (from which it was based) that was efficient and easy to use.Then, I started seeing the early mockups and realized the company wasn’t reinventing the wheel. It was re-creating what it already had… only without the GNOME dependencies. Also: You can test all the best Linux distros right in your web browser with this siteThat’s when it all made sense. By creating the OS in-house, it could tweak it to the exact specifications needed so that it would run beautifully on its hardware. And given the speed of Rust, it also made perfect sense that it’d use that particular language to build its new platform.According to the Pop!_OS site, System76 had this to say about its new OS: “We aim to liberate the computer with a new desktop environment powerful enough to build custom OS experiences — for users, developers, and makers of any device with a screen.”Well, the latest Alpha of Pop!_OS (a4) has been released, and it shows just how serious System76 is with its new operating system.I’ve been using Pop!_OS for nearly 10 years now (with a brief excursion into Ubuntu Budgie land), so I feel pretty confident when I say that the new COSMIC desktop takes everything that was good in Pop!_OS and made it even better.Also: This Linux distribution surprised me with its minimalistic yet highly-functional OSFirst off, COSMIC is more customizable than the previous incarnation. Without having to install a third-party extension, you can tweak the transparency of both the top bar and the dock. You can also configure the dock to “float” so it doesn’t touch the edge of the display. But more than anything, it’s the sheer speed of COSMIC desktop that makes the previous iteration feel sluggish. I installed Pop!_OS Alpha 4 as a virtual machine with only 3GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores and it performed as well (and better in some cases) than the host OS which had the full complement of RAM and CPU cores. That’s impressive.One of the biggest performance bumps is found in Pop Shop (the Pop!_OS app store, which is now called COSMIC Shop). Previous versions were well known for being slow and problematic. It would take forever to open and randomly crash. The new COSMIC Shop is light years ahead of that. Not only is the new COSMIC Shop exponentially more stable, but it also opens immediately… which is a relief.Same as it ever wasSystem76 made the right choice in not totally reinventing the wheel. The developers and designers could have gone back to the drawing board and created a desktop environment that was a total departure from what they’d been offering.That would have been a mistake.Also: Want to save your old computer? Try these 5 Linux distributionsInstead, they decided to simply remake what they had, keeping the UI almost identical to the previous releases. By doing this, System76 won’t have a bunch of frustrated users on its hands when COSMIC desktop is finally released for general availability. System76 smartly retained Flathub support for the OS (as well as baking it into Pop Shop), so installing applications of all sorts is just a click away. More