Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Oh hey there! If you’re here, it must be time for Wordle. As always, we’re serving up our daily hints and tips to help you figure out today’s answer.

If you just want to be told today’s word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for June 26’s Wordle solution revealed. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

Where did Wordle come from?

Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once. 

Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.

Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Wordle.

What’s the best Wordle starting word?

The best Wordle starting word is the one that speaks to you. But if you prefer to be strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.

What happened to the Wordle archive?

The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles used to be available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it. Unfortunately, it has since been taken down, with the website’s creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times.

Is Wordle getting harder?

It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn’t any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle‘s Hard Mode if you’re after more of a challenge, though.

Here’s a subtle hint for today’s Wordle answer:

Working a ball of dough.

Does today’s Wordle answer have a double letter?

There are no letters that appear twice.

Today’s Wordle is a 5-letter word that starts with…

Today’s Wordle starts with the letter K.

The Wordle answer today is…

Get your last guesses in now, because it’s your final chance to solve today’s Wordle before we reveal the solution.

Drumroll please!

The solution to Wordle #1103 is…

KNEAD.

Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Reporting by Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo, Shannon Connellan, Cecily Mauran, Mike Pearl, and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.

Connections is the latest New York Times word game that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for June 26’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

What is Connections?

The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.

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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer. If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.

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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.

Here’s a hint for today’s Connections categories

Want a hit about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:

• Yellow: Military officers

• Green: Where can I charge my phone

• Blue: Customer needs

• Purple: Types of ads

Here are today’s Connections categories

Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:

• Yellow: Army Ranks

• Green: Place to Plug Something In

• Blue: Consumer Desire, Collectively

• Purple: ___AD

Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle.

Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.

Drumroll, please!

The solution to Connections #380 is…

What is the answer to Connections today

• Army Ranks: CAPTAIN, GENERAL, MAJOR, PRIVATE

• Place to Plug Something In: JACK, OUTLET, PORT, SOCKET

• Consumer Desire, Collectively: APPETITE, AUDIENCE, DEMAND, MARKET

• ___AD: ATTACK, PERSONAL, POP-UP, WANT

Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Is this not the Connections game you were looking for? Here are the hints and answers to yesterday’s Connections.

Mark your calendars for another big tech showcase in a couple of weeks.

Samsung confirmed to press on Tuesday that its next Galaxy Unpacked livestream event will happen on July 10 at 9 a.m. ET. It’ll stream on Samsung’s website as well as its YouTube channel, as always. One fun twist is that the event is in Paris this time, but if you’re watching from home, that’s mostly just window dressing.

Samsung Galaxy Unpacked July 2024: What to expect

Of course, the big thing on everyone’s minds is what exactly Samsung will announce here. The invite said it would involve “the next generation of Galaxy AI and the ever-expanding Galaxy ecosystem,” which helps a lot. Galaxy AI is the suite of AI features Samsung revealed at the beginning of this year, so it’s not surprising that we’ll hear more about what’s going on with that on July 10.

We’ll also likely (based on timing) hear more about the next batch of Samsung foldables, which will probably be follow-ups to the Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5 released last summer.

Get ready, folks. The tech events just don’t stop.

If you want to know how many Cybertrucks Tesla has sold, just wait for the next recall.

Two months ago, Elon Musk’s extremely angular EV was recalled because a pad on the accelerator came off, thanks to the soap used, and jammed the pedal to the medal. Result: all 3,878 Cybertrucks then on U.S. roads had to go back to the dealers. And the whole world learned just how many had been sold in the first six months.

Given that Musk has been predicting — nay, betting the future of the company on — 250,000 Cybertruck sales a year, this number was almost as embarrassing as the soapy pedal pad itself. Releasing it via a recall was about as unforced as errors get.

But with the latest Cybertruck recall, this time thanks to the windshield wiper, there’s good news on sales! Well, not good news if you’re a Cybertruck owner who now has to worry about both soap and rain. But good-ish news for Tesla: this time, they’re recalling 11,688!

In other words, now that the accelerator definitely won’t turn it into a death trap, an extra 7,810 Americans have been convinced that this child’s idea of a car is the truck for them. And that has nudged the Cybertruck past an important milestone: More have sold in eight months than DeLorean Motor Company sold in its entire three years of existence.

DeLoreans on parade in Toronto, 2022.
Credit: Anatoliy Cherkasov/NurPhoto via Getty Image

If you don’t know the DeLorean … well first of all yes you do, it was the time machine with the weird gull-wing doors in Back to the Future. That hit movie, alas, arrived two years too late for John DeLorean and his troubled company.

Just under 10,000 were sold between 1981 and 1983, when DeLorean went bankrupt. Reportedly, more than 6,000 of them are still on the road today.

The DeLorean was the last beautifully-designed stainless steel vehicle ever put on the market. Then came the Cybertruck, which is also made of stainless steel. To be fair, both companies found out how incredibly difficult it is to work with that material, and both were accused of shoddy production.

So with nearly 12,000 sales, Cybertruck mania is off and running, right? Naysayers might point to Musk’s sales goal, or they might wonder what happened to the two million alleged pre-orders. But hey, naysayers have no place in the new Tesla, where shareholders have so much blind faith in Musk they just voted to give him an extra $45 billion.

“If you want to know whether Cybertrucks are cool or not, ask a kid,” Musk said at that shareholder meeting. “Kids have no filter, right?” Right! They also usually have no wallet. Not to mention an understanding of how much of a pain it is when your new vehicle has to keep going back to the dealer.

The Cybertruck was also recalled this time because of a weird piece of trim in the truck bed that could fly off and hit other motorists. But hey, once you’ve got your new accelerator, your new wiper, and your new trim that won’t kill anyone, what else could possibly go wrong? Just make sure you pay no attention to the stories about rust spots (just perfectly normal grime!) or software errors that can leave you stranded, or car washes that turn this truck into a stainless-steel brick.

And if you do, well … maybe buy another one before the recall, to goose the sales figures? After all, given the massive drain on its accounts known as Elon Musk, Tesla needs all the cash you can give it.

The only thing better than watching the news for free is having all the free news from all channels in one place — and accessible via an app on your phone. 

With YouTube News livestream, you can watch any live newscast for free, and there’s plenty to choose from. 

Access the free news livestream on the YouTube app 

1. Open the YouTube app on your phone or device 

2. Click on the compass symbol directly under the YouTube logo 

3. Then you can either click “Live” and scroll down to “Live Now – News” or click “News” and scroll down to “Live Now: News”

4. Now, you can choose from the list of live newscasts and begin to indulge 

Access the free new livestream on YouTube.com

1. Go to YouTube.com 

2. Click the three lines next to the YouTube logo 

3. Scroll down to the “Explore” section

4. Then you can either click “Live” and scroll down to “Live Now – News” or click News and scroll down to “Live now: News“

5. Now, you can choose from the list of live newscasts and begin to indulge 

Live newscasts you can watch right now:

• NBC New NOW

• Dateline 24/7

• CBS News and their affiliates

• ABC News and their affiliates

• Bloomberg Business News

Nvidia has been riding high thanks to AI, the current center of attention in the tech industry. The chipmaker’s silicon is among the only such hardware that can provide the necessary processing power to enable resource-intensive commercial AI models.

Because of this, Nvidia has been sort of a bellwether for the AI industry — rising sky high as an indication of AI’s extreme rate of growth.

Over the past week, however, Nvidia has taken a huge tumble on the stock market, and has lost around $500 billion in value.

This is reverberating around Wall Street because Nvidia has been making shareholders rich of late. On June 18, for example, Nvidia surpassed both Microsoft and Apple to suddenly become the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion.

Now, just one week later, Nvidia is worth around $2.9 trillion, surrendering its most valuable company crown to Microsoft, valued at $3.3 trillion. The company now ranks third behind Apple, which is also worth over $3 trillion.

Nvidia is still doing just fine of course. And it’s likely to still be raking in plenty of revenue thanks to AI-related patronage from the likes of Elon Musk, who is reportedly building an Nvidia-based “supercomputer” via his AI company xAI. However, this recent downturn on the stock market might show that investors are sending a message that they’re not so bullish on the AI industry’s monumental claims of how they will change the world with their technology.

As multiple outlets have reported, AI companies have made big promises, but so far have had very little to show for it when it comes to actual meaningful change in the industry’s AI claimed to soon disrupt. On top of that, studies have found AI to be a massive energy and resource drain, which will certainly give at least some AI backers second thoughts about where the industry is headed.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to block API access in China, and Chinese companies are swooping in to fill the impending void.

According to Chinese state-owned newspaper Securities Times (via Reuters), users in China received an email saying they’re in a “‘region that OpenAI does not currently support’ and that additional measures to block API traffic from some regions would be taken starting July 9.”

ChatGPT is not available in mainland China, but users have gotten around that by using the OpenAI API. According to Securities Times, many Chinese startups have built applications using the API.

It’s unclear what prompted OpenAI to reportedly start restricting API access. But the company recently investigated and cut off five “covert influence operations.” One of these was a Chinese network called “Spamouflage” which reportedly used OpenAI models to research and generate social media posts targeting critics of the Chinese government. The Biden Administration has determined that generative AI models are a cybersecurity risk and has mandated security testing and evaluations of foundation models in the AI executive order.

As a result of the apparent move from OpenAI, Chinese companies with their own AI models have announced incentives to lure OpenAI users to their platforms. Per Reuters, Baidu is offering free migration to its Ernie chatbot with additional tokens for its flagship model Ernie 3.5. Similarly, Alibaba Cloud has offered free tokens and migration to its Qwen-plus model and Zhipu AI has launched a “Special Migration Program” for OpenAI API users, claiming its GLM model meets the same benchmarks as OpenAI’s models.

SAVE $44.85: Amazon Prime members can sign up for a free 3-month trial of Audible Premium Plus, which usually costs $14.95 per month.

Audiobooks and podcasts have become a way of life for some of us. People might assume we’re rocking out to classic rock or synth pop with our earbuds, but in reality we’re following along with an audiobook we simply cannot stop listening to. If you find yourself listening to podcasts or audiobooks often and are also an Amazon Prime member, today’s Audible deal could be perfect for you.

As of June 25, Prime members can get a free 3-month subscription to Audible Premium Plus, which typically costs $14.95 per month, saving you a total of $44.85 over the trial period. You’ll need to be a new Audible customer and a Prime member to score these savings, which expire on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Audible Premium Plus comes packed with options for those who can’t get enough podcasts or audiobooks. With a massive library, the service allows you unlimited access to thousands to options, including Audible originals you won’t be able to find elsewhere.

Included with an Audible Premium Plus membership is one free audiobook per month to keep. Premium Plus also grants access to special deals and sales. With the Audible app, you can set your desired listening speed, set a timer for when you’re heading to bed, or activate Car Mode while you’re driving to your weekend getaway. You can also download audiobooks to listen to later while you’re offline.

If this sounds like the deal for you, but you’re not an Amazon Prime member, it could be your sign to consider if a membership is right for your shopping needs. Deals are already rolling in ahead of the upcoming Prime Day sales event, which offers exclusive savings to members only. A Prime membership costs $14.99 per month, or you can grab an annual membership for $139.

If you’re looking for access to thousands of podcasts and audiobooks, an Audible Premium Plus membership could be perfect. Thanks to today’s deal, Prime members can sign up for a free 3-month trial and get thousands of hours of entertainment for the best price out there — free.

Dr Disrespect, a popular streamer, has been booted from his gaming studio after disturbing allegations surfaced about an apparent text conversation he had with a minor.

The video game streamer, whose real name is Herschel “Guy” Beahm, was unceremoniously kicked off Twitch four years ago. The public was unsure why. Now, reports suggest it was due to an inappropriate texting relationship with a minor.

An anonymous former employee on Twitch’s trust and safety team told The Verge that Beahm messaged a minor using Twitch’s now-defunct messaging service, Whispers, and attempted to set up a meeting at TwitchCon. Cody Conners, another former Twitch employee, posted on X alleging Beahm — though Conners did not say his name outright — was banned “because got caught sexting a minor.”

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Beahm, meanwhile, has denied any wrongdoing.

“Listen, I’m obviously tied to legal obligations from the settlement with Twitch but I just need to say what I can say since this is the fucking internet,” he wrote on X over the weekend. “I didn’t do anything wrong, all this has been probed and settled, nothing illegal, no wrongdoing was found, and I was paid.”

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In the wake of the allegations, Beahm is now out from Midnight Society, a gaming studio he co-founded.

On Monday, the studio posted a statement on X:

“On Friday evening we became aware of an allegation against one of our co-founder’s Guy Beahm aka Dr Disrespect.

We assumed his innocence and began speaking with parties involved. And in order to maintain our principles and standards as a studio and individuals, we needed to act.

For this reason, we are terminating our relationship with Guy Beahm immediately.

While these facts are difficult to hear and even more difficult to accept, it is our duty to act with dignity on behalf of all individuals involved, especially the fifty-five developers and families we have employed along with our community of players.”

Gizmodo reported that, during a stream on Monday evening, Beahm said he was taking a break from streaming because he was “burnt out.”