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I Wrote This While Trotting On a Dozen Different Walking Pads

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I Wrote This While Trotting On a Dozen Different Walking Pads


Most Versatile

Photograph: Kristin Canning

Lifesmart

TM2202 3-in-1 Treadmill

If you’re not keen on buying a standing desk, check out the Lifesmart 3-in-1 Treadmill. You can wheel the lightweight machine into any room, place the desk attachment across the handrail, and get to working and walking. The desk’s height won’t accommodate everyone—it was lower than I’d like, and I’m 5’4”. But for quick, basic work like answering emails or sitting in on a meeting, it got the job done just fine.

The 3-in-1 Treadmill gets its name from its ability to serve as a walking pad (with the rail down, the speed tops out at 3.7 mph), a treadmill (with the rail up, you can run up to 7.5 mph), and a workstation (with the rail up and desk attachment on).

It’s easy to set up, and transitioning between the walking pad, treadmill, and work modes is quick and simple (you just need to use a small tool to adjust the rail, which is magnetized so it can live on the rail and never get lost in a junk drawer). You can adjust the speed with buttons on the rails or with a Bluetooth remote, and a screen on the front of the machine cycles through your workout metrics. The sleek, modern design means you won’t be embarrassed to have it out in your living space. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have any incline options.

Quietest Pad

  • Photograph: Kristin Canning

  • Photograph: Kristin Canning

Flexispot

Auto Incline Walking Treadmill

This walking pad had the most intuitive setup of any on this list (likely thanks to its lack of a companion app, which oftentimes isn’t really necessary). I was able to set it up in minutes, and the remote connected right away, no Bluetooth pairing required. Like many walking pads, this one has a screen at the front that shows you your workout metrics. If you pause the machine to step off, you can pick right back up where you started, building on those metrics until you turn the machine off. One downside: It doesn’t track steps.

The Auto Incline Walking Treadmill offers a great incline range, going up to a level nine, or 12-percent incline. It’s one of the highest incline capabilities I’ve found in my testing. You can walk up to 4 mph on this machine, and you can connect your phone to play music through the speakers. The remote allows you to take on 30-minute, preprogrammed walking workouts, too, where the machine auto-adjusts the speed throughout (though not the incline). Otherwise, you can use it in manual mode and adjust the settings to your liking.



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The Best Cozy Earth Pajamas Deal We’ve Seen All Year

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The Best Cozy Earth Pajamas Deal We’ve Seen All Year


I love having a whimsical, comfortable wardrobe, and that doesn’t apply just to daytime clothes. My pajama collection is quite extensive, with the added requirement that each pair be both cooling and extra soft. I’m someone who overheats easily in her sleep, and with sensitive skin, it’s not a winning combination.

I’ve been growing my Cozy Earth pajama collection for years, usually getting a new set during Black Friday. Obviously, that shopping event has come and gone, but this sale gives you one more chance. And, believe it or not, it’s even better than what Cozy Earth ran sale-wise for its pajamas during Cyber Week.

Standard PJs

Courtesy of Cozy Earth



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We Just Found Out Taylor Swift Sleeps on a Coop Pillow—They’re Having a Flash Sale to Celebrate

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We Just Found Out Taylor Swift Sleeps on a Coop Pillow—They’re Having a Flash Sale to Celebrate


While I’m a mattress and sleep product expert, thanks to years of hands-on experience, I’m also aware that my opinion is not the end-all, be-all for everyone. However, when a megastar is also a fan of a product you’ve reviewed, it’s a good confirmation that you’re on the right track.

Taylor Swift, as it would turn out, is also a fan of Coop Sleep Goods—which we can confirm based on this December 10 Late Show With Stephen Colbert appearance.

Coop’s got some of our favorite pillows, particularly the Original Adjustable pillow. It comes in three shapes: the Crescent, the Cut Out, and the Classic, which is a traditional rectangular shape. I love (and regularly sleep on) the Crescent, which has a gentle curve on the bottom to allow for movement while maintaining head and neck support.



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Nvidia Becomes a Major Model Maker With Nemotron 3

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Nvidia Becomes a Major Model Maker With Nemotron 3


Nvidia has made a fortune supplying chips to companies working on artificial intelligence, but today the chipmaker took a step toward becoming a more serious model maker itself by releasing a series of cutting-edge open models, along with data and tools to help engineers use them.

The move, which comes at a moment when AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are developing increasingly capable chips of their own, could be a hedge against these firms veering away from Nvidia’s technology over time.

Open models are already a crucial part of the AI ecosystem with many researchers and startups using them to experiment, prototype, and build. While OpenAI and Google offer small open models, they do not update them as frequently as their rivals in China. For this reason and others, open models from Chinese companies are currently much more popular, according to data from Hugging Face, a hosting platform for open source projects.

Nvidia’s new Nemotron 3 models are among the best that can be downloaded, modified, and run on one’s own hardware, according to benchmark scores shared by the company ahead of release.

“Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress,” CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement ahead of the news. “With Nemotron, we’re transforming advanced AI into an open platform that gives developers the transparency and efficiency they need to build agentic systems at scale.”

Nvidia is taking a more fully transparent approach than many of its US rivals by releasing the data used to train Nemotron—a fact that should help engineers modify the models more easily. The company is also releasing tools to help with customization and fine-tuning. This includes a new hybrid latent mixture-of-experts model architecture, which Nvidia says is especially good for building AI agents that can take actions on computers or the web. The company is also launching libraries that allow users to train agents to do things using reinforcement learning, which involves giving models simulated rewards and punishments.

Nemotron 3 models come in three sizes: Nano, which has 30 billion parameters; Super, which has 100 billion; and Ultra, which has 500 billion. A model’s parameters loosely correspond to how capable it is as well as how unwieldy it is to run. The largest models are so cumbersome that they need to run on racks of expensive hardware.

Model Foundations

Kari Ann Briski, vice president of generative AI software for enterprise at Nvidia, said open models are important to AI builders for three reasons: Builders increasingly need to customize models for particular tasks; it often helps to hand queries off to different models; and it is easier to squeeze more intelligent responses from these models after training by having them perform a kind of simulated reasoning. “We believe open source is the foundation for AI innovation, continuing to accelerate the global economy,” Briski said.

The social media giant Meta released the first advanced open models under the name Llama in February 2023. As competition has intensified, however, Meta has signaled that its future releases might not be open source.

The move is part of a larger trend in the AI industry. Over the past year, US firms have moved away from openness, becoming more secretive about their research and more reluctant to tip off their rivals about their latest engineering tricks.



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