Monthly Archives: November 2023

My long quest to revive a ’90s Windows gaming cult classic

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The elusive, addictive gameplay that has been haunting my dreams for years.

As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I’ve found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I had lost forever.

Pendulumania is a cult classic in the truest sense of the word: Few people have heard of it, even in hardcore gaming circles, but those who have experienced it tend to have very fond memories of it. And while I shared those memories, it wasn’t until this week that I’ve been able to share my effusive praise for a game whose name and playable executable had eluded me for well over a decade.

Timeless design

The mechanics of Pendulumania are incredibly simple. You use the computer mouse to control a metal ring, which is attached via an elastic string to a white ball. The object is to carefully move the ring so the stretchy string and gravity can nudge the ball around a 2D plane, crashing into floating scoring orbs to collect points (colored orbs that randomly appear can make the ball larger or the string stronger as well). Be careful, though; if the elastic string stretches too far, it will break and your game will be over.

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Source: Ars Technica – My long quest to revive a ’90s Windows gaming cult classic

Amazon's Trainium2 AI Accelerator Features 96 GB of HBM, Quadruples Training Performance

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Amazon Web Services this week introduced Trainium2, its new accelerator for artificial intelligence (AI) workload that tangibly increases performance compared to its predecessor, enabling AWS to train foundation models (FMs) and large language models (LLMs) with up to trillions of parameters. In addition, AWS has set itself an ambitious goal to enable its clients to access massive 65 ‘AI’ ExaFLOPS performance for their workloads.


The AWS Trainium2 is Amazon’s 2nd Generation accelerator designed specifically for FMs and LLMs training. When compared to its predecessor, the original Trainium, it features four times higher training performance, two times higher performance per watt, and three times as much memory – for a total of 96GB of HBM. The chip designed by Amazon’s Annapurna Labs is a multi-tile system-in-package featuring two compute tiles, four HBM memory stacks, and two chiplets whose purpose is undisclosed for now.


Amazon notably does not disclose specific performance numbers of its Trainium2, but it says that its Trn2 instances are scale-out with up to 100,000 Trainium2 chips to get up to 65 ExaFLOPS of low-precision compute performance for AI workloads. Which, working backwards, would put a single Trainium2 accelerator at roughly 650 TFLOPS. 65 EFLOPS is a level set to be achievable only on the highest-performing upcoming AI supercomputers, such as the Jupiter. Such scaling should dramatically reduce the training time for a 300-billion parameter large language model from months to weeks, according to AWS.



Amazon yet has to disclose the full specifications for Trainium2, but we’d be surprised if it didn’t add some features on top of what the original Trainium already supports. As a reminder, that co-processor supports FP32, TF32, BF16, FP16, UINT8, and configurable FP8 data formats as well as delivers up to 190 TFLOPS of FP16/BF16 compute performance.


What is perhaps more important than pure performance numbers of a single AWS Trainium2 accelerators is that Amazon has partners, such as Anthropic, that are ready to deploy it.


“We are working closely with AWS to develop our future foundation models using Trainium chips,” said Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic. “Trainium2 will help us build and train models at a very large scale, and we expect it to be at least 4x faster than first generation Trainium chips for some of our key workloads. Our collaboration with AWS will help organizations of all sizes unlock new possibilities, as they use Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s secure, reliable cloud technology.”




Source: AnandTech – Amazon’s Trainium2 AI Accelerator Features 96 GB of HBM, Quadruples Training Performance

Microsoft Phone Link May Soon Let You Use Your Android Phone As a Webcam

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Microsoft Phone Link, previously known as Microsoft Your Phone, lets you control your Android phone from your computer. Now, the company appears to be working on letting you use your Android phone as a webcam with Windows computers, similar to how you can use your iPhone as a webcam on Mac. Android Authority reports: Microsoft’s Link to Windows v1.23102.190.0 for Android app includes code that suggests that the company is working on letting your Android phone provide a video stream to your Windows PC. This would effectively allow it to be used as a webcam. […] These strings indicate that once Microsoft’s Phone Link app is working on both connected devices, users would be able to start a camera stream that lets their phone’s camera be available to their Windows PC. The strings do not explicitly mention “webcam,” but other clues indicate that the feature would be related to video calls in some ways.

Phone Link can already access your camera and video conferencing apps, but this is just mirroring apps running on your phone. What you see on your phone screen is what you see on the computer. If you record a video, it gets saved to your phone as typical video recordings do. With the new functionality spotted above, Phone Link could potentially compete against Apple’s Continuity Camera features. With Continuity Camera, users can mount their iPhone to their Mac and then use the iPhone’s camera and microphone for FaceTime or other camera apps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Phone Link May Soon Let You Use Your Android Phone As a Webcam

Meta, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord CEOs will testify before the Senate over online child safety

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Social media’s negative impact on children’s and young adults’ mental health has been a growing cause of concern for parents and lawmakers. Now, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X are set to testify in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee on “their failure to protect children online.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are willing participants. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino are testifying after being subpoenaed.

Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham, its ranking member, released a statement expressing their frustration with Snap, Discord, and X’s initial refusal to have their CEOs participate and even accept the subpoenas. In Discord’s case, US Marshals visited their offices to serve the document. 

The senators further shared a feeling of hypocrisy at these platforms wanting a say in policy but fighting against getting involved in discussions. “When we held our first hearing on protecting children online with experts and advocates earlier this year, Big Tech griped about not getting an invitation. We promised them that their time would come,” Durbin and Graham stated. “We’ve known from the beginning that our efforts to protect children online would be met with hesitation from Big Tech. They finally are being forced to acknowledge their failures when it comes to protecting kids. Now that all five companies are cooperating, we look forward to hearing from their CEOs. Parents and kids demand action.” 

The Judiciary Committee has focused on this issue a great deal throughout the year, approving bills that would force online platforms to take more responsibility in protecting children (and be more transparent in their efforts) and improve reporting of online child sexual exploitation, among other steps. The hearing with the CEOs from the five tech giants was originally set for December but will now take place on January 31, 2024, at 10 AM ET. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-x-tiktok-snap-and-discord-ceos-will-testify-before-the-senate-over-online-child-safety-110559486.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Meta, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord CEOs will testify before the Senate over online child safety

Experience AI: Making AI relevant and accessible

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Google DeepMind’s Aimee Welch discusses our partnership on the Experience AI learning programme and why equal access to AI education is key. This article also appears in issue 22 of Hello World on teaching and AI.

From AI chatbots to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is here and rapidly transforming our world. It holds the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges humanity faces today — but it also has many serious risks and inherent challenges, like reinforcing existing patterns of bias or “hallucinating”, a term that describes AI making up false outputs that do not reflect real events or data.

A teenager learning computer science.
Young people need the knowledge and skills to navigate and shape AI.

Teachers want to build young people’s AI literacy

As AI becomes an integral part of our daily lives, it’s essential that younger generations gain the knowledge and skills to navigate and shape this technology. Young people who have a foundational understanding of AI are able to make more informed decisions about using AI applications in their daily lives, helping ensure safe and responsible use of the technology. This has been recognised for example by the UK government’s AI Council, whose AI Roadmap sets out the goal of ensuring that every child in the UK leaves school with a basic sense of how AI works.

Learner in a computing classroom.
Every young person should have access to learning AI literacy.

But while AI literacy is a key skill in this new era, not every young person currently has access to sufficient AI education and resources. In a recent survey by the EdWeek Research Center in the USA, only one in 10 teachers said they knew enough about AI to teach its basics, and very few reported receiving any professional development related to the topic. Similarly, our work with the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre has suggested that UK-based teachers are eager to understand more about AI and how to engage their students in the topic.

Bringing AI education into classrooms

Ensuring broad access to AI education is also important to improve diversity in the field of AI to ensure safe and responsible development of the technology. There are currently stark disparities in the field and these start already early on, with school-level barriers contributing to underrepresentation of certain groups of people. By increasing diversity in AI, we bring diverse values, hopes, and concerns into the design and deployment of the technology — something that’s critical for AI to benefit everyone.

Kenyan children work on a physical computing project.
Bringing diverse values into AI is critical.

By focusing on AI education from a young age, there is an opportunity to break down some of these long-standing barriers. That’s why we partnered with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to co-create Experience AI, a new learning programme with free lesson plans, slide decks, worksheets and videos, to address gaps in AI education and support teachers in engaging and inspiring young people in the subject.

The programme aims to help young people aged 11–14 take their first steps in understanding the technology, making it relevant to diverse learners, and encouraging future careers in the field. All Experience AI resources are freely available to every school across the UK and beyond.

A woman teacher helps a young person with a coding project.
The Experience AI resources are free for every school.

The partnership is built on a shared vision to make AI education more inclusive and accessible. Bringing together the Foundation’s expertise in computing education and our cutting-edge technical knowledge and industry insights has allowed us to create a holistic learning experience that connects theoretical concepts and practical applications.

Experience AI: Informed by AI experts

A group of 15 research scientists and engineers at Google DeepMind contributed to the development of the lessons. From drafting definitions for key concepts, to brainstorming interesting research areas to highlight, and even featuring in the videos included in the lessons, the group played a key role in shaping the programme in close collaboration with the Foundation’s educators and education researchers.

Interview for Experience AI at Google DeepMind.
Interviews with AI scientists and engineers at Google DeepMind are part of Experience AI.

To bring AI concepts to life, the lessons include interactive activities as well as real-life examples, such as a project where Google DeepMind collaborated with ecologists and conservationists to develop machine learning methods to study the behaviour of an entire animal community in the Serengeti National Park and Grumeti Reserve in Tanzania.

Elephants in the Serengeti.
One of the Experience AI lessons focuses on an AI-enabled research project in the Serengeti.

Member of the working group, Google DeepMind Research Scientist Petar Veličković, shares: “AI is a technology that is going to impact us all, and therefore educating young people on how to interact with this technology is likely going to be a core part of school education going forward. The project was eye-opening and humbling for me, as I learned of the challenges associated with making such a complex topic accessible — not only to every pupil, but also to every teacher! Observing the thoughtful approach undertaken by the Raspberry Pi Foundation left me deeply impressed, and I’m taking home many useful ideas that I hope to incorporate in my own AI teaching efforts going forward.”

The lessons have been carefully developed to:

  • Follow a clear learning journey, underpinned by the SEAME framework which guides learners sequentially through key concepts and acts as a progression framework.
  • Build foundational knowledge and provide support for teachers. Focus on teacher training and support is at the core of the programme.
  • Embed ethics and responsibility. Crucially, key concepts in AI ethics and responsibility are woven into each lesson and progressively built on. Students are introduced to concepts like data bias, user-focused approaches, model cards, and how AI can be used for social good. 
  • Ensure cultural relevance and inclusion. Experience AI was designed with diverse learners in mind and includes a variety of activities to enable young people to pick topics that most interest them. 

What teachers say about the Experience AI lessons

To date, we estimate the resources have reached 200,000+ students in the UK and beyond. We’re thrilled to hear from teachers already using the resources about the impact they are having in the classroom, such as Mrs J Green from Waldegrave School in London, who says: “I thought that the lessons covered a really important topic. Giving the pupils an understanding of what AI is and how it works will become increasingly important as it becomes more ubiquitous in all areas of society. The lessons that we trialled took some of the ‘magic’ out of AI and started to give the students an understanding that AI is only as good as the data that is used to build it. It also started some really interesting discussions with the students around areas such as bias.”

An educator points to an image on a student's computer screen.
Experience AI offers support for teachers.

At North Liverpool Academy, teacher Dave Cross tells us: “AI is such a current and relevant topic in society that [these lessons] will enable Key Stage 3 computing students [ages 11–14] to gain a solid foundation in something that will become more prevalent within the curriculum, and wider subjects too as more sectors adopt AI and machine learning as standard. Our Key Stage 3 computing students now feel immensely more knowledgeable about the importance and place that AI has in their wider lives. These lessons and activities are engaging and accessible to students and educators alike, whatever their specialism may be.”

A stronger global AI community

Our hope is that the Experience AI programme instils confidence in both teachers and students, helping to address some of the critical school-level barriers leading to underrepresentation in AI and playing a role in building a stronger, more inclusive AI community where everyone can participate irrespective of their background. 

Children in a Code Club in India.

Today’s young people are tomorrow’s leaders — and as such, educating and inspiring them about AI is valuable for everybody.

Teachers can visit experience-ai.org to download all Experience AI resources for free.

We are now building a network of educational organisations around the world to tailor and translate the Experience AI resources so that more teachers and students can engage with them and learn key AI literacy skills. Find out more.

The post Experience AI: Making AI relevant and accessible appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.



Source: Raspberry Pi – Experience AI: Making AI relevant and accessible

Holiday Shopping 2023: FSF Endorses 802.11n WiFi, Opteron Boards & USB To Parallel Printer Cable

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The Free Software Foundation this week published their 2023 holiday shopping guide for services and products that comply with their pure free software standards, such as computer hardware devices that “respect your freedom” regardless of hardware age…

Source: Phoronix – Holiday Shopping 2023: FSF Endorses 802.11n WiFi, Opteron Boards & USB To Parallel Printer Cable

United Auto Workers seeks to unionize Tesla, BMW and other carmakers

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Fresh off successful contract negotiations with Ford, GM and Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across 13 automakers including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Hyundai, it announced. “To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union: now it’s your turn,” said UAW president Shawn Fain. 

The UAW said the organizing drive covers “more than a dozen” non-union automakers. It notes that many use a mix of full-time, temporary and contract employees “to divide the workforce and depress wages.” The union cited one example of a Hyundai assembly plant employee who worked for a subcontractor for eight years starting at $9.25 an hour before finally becoming a full-time Hyundai employee. 

Non-union automakers, including VW, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, Toyota and Subaru raised wages after the UAW’s negotiations with the big three. VW, for one, bumped them to $23.42 an hour, rising to a maximum of $32.40. However, they “lag far behind UAW autoworkers in wages, benefits and rights on the job,” the union said.

The UAW helped workers win a 25 percent raise over four years with the big three automakers, with the highest-paid Ford workers now earning $83,000 per year for a 40-hour work week (around $42 per hour). The union also gained reinstatement of cost-of-living allowances, shorter progression periods to top wages and a quicker conversion of temporary to in-progression (full-time) employees. 

Tesla employees have attempted to unionize the company before, and some alleged that the company fired them for that — though that claim was recently dismissed by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB has previously found that Tesla violated labor law by prohibiting employees from talking about workplace matters. Back in 2022, Elon Musk challenged the UAW to hold a vote at Tesla’s California factory.

Other automakers aren’t exempt from worker complaints, including startup Rivian. “The company likes to tell us we’re making the plane while flying it, and that explains a lot about the problems we have,” said one Rivian chassis worker. “We have all sorts of safety issues. Turnover is terrible. Every group has a story about a new employee who did not make it to first break. The lack of safety, the low pay, the forced overtime, there are so many reasons we need to be union.” 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/united-auto-workers-seeks-to-unionize-tesla-bmw-and-other-carmakers-100555374.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – United Auto Workers seeks to unionize Tesla, BMW and other carmakers

Firefox for Android is Getting Over 400 More Extensions in December

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Mozilla is opening the floodgates on extensions for Firefox on Android, with hundreds of new add-ons arriving in December. From a report: In a blog post, Mozilla explains that Firefox extensions compatible with Android will be “openly available” to users, with over 400 coming at launch. That launch will arrive on December 14. Technically, Firefox already supports extensions on Android. However, the library is a bit more limited as Mozilla details on a support page. With this new update, though, Firefox users will get a lot more options as developers will have a route to port desktop extensions to Android.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Firefox for Android is Getting Over 400 More Extensions in December

NASA and IBM are building an AI for weather and climate applications

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NASA and IBM have teamed up to build an AI foundation model for weather and climate applications. They’re combining their respective knowledge and skills in the Earth science and AI fields, respectively, for the model, which they say should offer “significant advantages over existing technology.”

Current AI models such as GraphCast and Fourcastnet are already generating weather forecasts more quickly than traditional meteorological models. However, IBM notes those are AI emulators rather than foundation models. As the name suggests, foundation models are the base technologies that power generative AI applications. AI emulators can make weather predictions based on sets of training data, but they don’t have applications beyond that. Nor can they encode the physics at the core of weather forecasting, IBM says.

NASA and IBM have several goals for their foundational model. Compared with current models, they hope for it to have expanded accessibility, faster inference times and greater diversity of data. Another key aim is to improve forecasting accuracy for other climate applications. The expected capabilities of the model include predicting meteorological phenomena, inferring high-res information based on low-res data and “identifying conditions conducive to everything from airplane turbulence to wildfires.”

This follows another foundational model that NASA and IBM deployed in May. It harnesses data from NASA satellites for geospatial intelligence, and it’s the largest geospatial model on open-source AI platform Hugging Face, according to IBM. So far, this model has been used to track and visualize tree planting and growing activities in water tower areas (forest landscapes that retain water) in Kenya. The aim is to plant more trees and tackle water scarcity issues. The model is also being used to analyze urban heat islands in the United Arab Emirates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-and-ibm-are-building-an-ai-for-weather-and-climate-applications-050141545.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – NASA and IBM are building an AI for weather and climate applications

Another Look At The Bcachefs Performance on Linux 6.7

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Immediately after the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed into the Linux 6.7 kernel I began running some benchmarks on this new copy-on-write file-system. Shortly thereafter some scalability improvements and disabling a debug option by default were merged. So with the Bcachefs work for Linux 6.7 settling down the past few weeks, here’s a fresh look at how Bcachefs is performing against the likes of EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs.

Source: Phoronix – Another Look At The Bcachefs Performance on Linux 6.7

How to Install PostgreSQL from Source in Linux

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PostgreSQL, an open-source relational database management system, is widely renowned for its robust features and extensibility. In this tutorial, we will explain how to install PostgreSQL 16 using source code installation on Linux systems.

The post How to Install PostgreSQL from Source in Linux appeared first on Linux Today.



Source: Linux Today – How to Install PostgreSQL from Source in Linux

Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO

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Following Sam Altman’s rollercoaster of a return as OpenAI’s CEO, the company announced — on the eve of ChatGPT’s first anniversary — that it will now include Microsoft as a non-voting observer on its board. The question remains as to why the firm’s largest investor wasn’t on its board in the first place, but this seems to be somewhat addressed for now, at least. Altman is joined by co-founder Greg Brockman who resumes his role as President, whereas Mira Murati, who very briefly served as interim CEO throughout the drama, will return to her role as CTO.

The announcement also confirms a new board consisting of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor (chair), former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and original member Adam D’Angelo, who is also Quora’s co-founder and CEO. It was earlier rumored that Altman’s exit was partly influenced by D’Angelo’s seeming conflict of interest, as OpenAI was developing a potential competitor to Quora’s Poe service — the latter offers OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, along with several other text-generating AI models.

D’Angelo’s presence on OpenAI’s new board came as a surprise, and Altman took to X to address the elephant in the room. “Quora is a large customer of OpenAI and we found it helpful to have customer representation on our Board.” The exec added that D’Angelo “has always been very clear… about the potential conflict and doing whatever he needed to do,” including offering to leave the board, if necessary. As to why the original board wanted Altman out, he said “it is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the board.”

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever was a former board member who allegedly led the ouster of Altman. The exec later openly admitted that he “deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions” (with Elon Musk begging for attention in his thread), and he had since voiced his support for Altman’s return as CEO. In his open message, Altman says “I harbor zero ill will towards him,” and that his team is figuring out a way to let Sutskever continue his work at OpenAI.

In the same official announcement, OpenAI’s new Chair, Taylor, assured that the company will “enhance the governance structure,” and put together “an independent committee of the Board to oversee a review of the recent events,” for the sake of the organization’s stability.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-joins-openai-board-as-sam-altman-returns-as-ceo-023844090.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO

Today's NYT Connections Hints (and Answer) for Thursday, November 30, 2023

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So many BIRDS today, and yet none of them are what they seem. If you’re looking for the Connections answer for Thursday, November 30, 2023, read on—I’ll share some clues, tips, and strategies, and finally the solutions to all four categories. Along the way, I’ll explain the meanings of the trickier words and we’ll learn how everything fits together. Beware, there are spoilers below for November 30, NYT Connections #172! Read on if you want some hints (and then the answer) to today’s Connections game. 

If you want an easy way to come back to our Connections hints every day, bookmark this page. You can also find our past hints there as well, in case you want to know what you missed in a previous puzzle.

Below, I’ll give you some oblique hints at today’s Connections answers. And farther down the page, I’ll reveal the themes and the answers. Scroll slowly and take just the hints you need!

NYT Connections board for November 30, 2023: COTTAGE, ESCAPE, REBECCA, ROBIN, DUCK, CREAM, GOOSE, SKIRT, STRING, BIRDS, SAY, ROPE, HOBBES, DODGE, NOTORIOUS, WATSON.

Credit: Connections/NYT

Does today’s Connections game require any special knowledge?

Today is a good puzzle for movie buffs. One category relates to movies, and another to famous fictional characters.

Hints for the themes in today’s Connections puzzle

Here are some spoiler-free hints for the groupings in today’s Connections:

  • Yellow category – Get out of the way!

  • Green category – Other possible entries in this group could be PSYCHO and LIFEBOAT. 

  • Blue category – Always the bridesmaid…

  • Purple category – Think dairy.

Does today’s Connections game involve any wordplay?

There’s a fill-in-the-blank with three nouns and a verb; they’re trying to be cute.

Ready to hear the answers? Keep scrolling if you want a little more help.

BEWARE: Spoilers follow for today’s Connections puzzle!

We’re about to give away some of the answers. Scroll slowly if you don’t want the whole thing spoiled. (The full solution is a bit further down.)

What are the ambiguous words in today’s Connections?

  • DUCK and GOOSE are both BIRDS, but you’ll find those three words in different categories today. 

  • HOBBES is the philosopher who famously said that life without government would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” HOBBES is also the stuffed tiger in the comic strip Calvin and HOBBES. 

  • A COTTAGE is a little house in a bucolic setting. It is also a much-maligned member of the cheese family. 

What are the categories in today’s Connections?

  • Yellow: AVOID

  • Green: HITCHCOCK MOVIES

  • Blue: SIDEKICKS

  • Purple: ____ CHEESE

DOUBLE BEWARE: THE SOLUTION IS BELOW

Ready to learn the answers to today’s Connections puzzle? I give them all away below.

What are the yellow words in today’s Connections?

The yellow grouping is considered to be the most straightforward. The theme for today’s yellow group is AVOID and the words are: DODGE, DUCK, ESCAPE, SKIRT.

What are the green words in today’s Connections?

The green grouping is supposed to be the second-easiest. The theme for today’s green category is HITCHCOCK MOVIES and the words are: BIRDS, NOTORIOUS, REBECCA, ROPE.

What are the blue words in today’s Connections?

The blue grouping is the second-hardest. The theme for today’s blue category is SIDEKICKS and the words are: GOOSE, HOBBES, ROBIN, WATSON.

What are the purple words in today’s Connections?

The purple grouping is considered to be the hardest. The theme for today’s purple category is ____ CHEESE and the words are: COTTAGE, CREAM, SAY, STRING.

How I solved today’s Connections

The first thing I pick out is that ROBIN, HOBBES, and WATSON are all sidekicks (to Batman, Calvin, and Holmes, of course). But I’m not sure about a fourth, so it’s time to move on. 

I see the cheeses next: COTTAGE, CREAM, STRING, and SAY. (“Say cheese!”) 🟪 Then we have SKIRT, ESCAPE, DODGE, and DUCK. 🟨 

I’m tempted to use REBECCA as the fourth sidekick, just because she’s a name, but then I remember the DUCK and GOOSE series of books. That’s it! 🟦 I have absolutely no clue what unites BIRDS, NOTORIOUS, ROPE, and REBECCA, but they’re Hitchcock movies. 🟩

Connections 
Puzzle #172
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩

How to play Connections

I have a full guide to playing Connections, but here’s a refresher on the rules:

First, find the Connections game either on the New York Times website or in their Crossword app. You’ll see a game board with 16 tiles, each with one word or phrase. Your job is to select a group of four tiles that have something in common. Often they are all the same type of thing (for example: RAIN, SLEET, HAIL, and SNOW are all types of wet weather) but sometimes there is wordplay involved (for example, BUCKET, GUEST, TOP TEN, and WISH are all types of lists: bucket list, guest list, and so on).

Select four items and hit the Submit button. If you guessed correctly, the category and color will be revealed. (Yellow is easiest, followed by green, then blue, then purple.) If your guess was incorrect, you’ll get a chance to try again.

You win when you’ve correctly identified all four groups. But if you make four mistakes before you finish, the game ends and the answers are revealed.

How to win Connections

The most important thing to know to win Connections is that the groupings are designed to be tricky. Expect to see overlapping groups. For example, one puzzle seemed to include six breakfast foods: BACON, EGG, PANCAKE, OMELET, WAFFLE, and CEREAL. But BACON turned out to be part of a group of painters along with CLOSE, MUNCH, and WHISTLER, and EGG was in a group of things that come by the dozen (along with JUROR, ROSE, and MONTH). So don’t hit “submit” until you’ve confirmed that your group of four contains only those four things.

If you’re stuck, another strategy is to look at the words that seem to have no connection to the others. If all that comes to mind when you see WHISTLER is the painting nicknamed “Whistler’s Mother,” you might be on to something. When I solved that one, I ended up googling whether there was a painter named Close, because Close didn’t fit any of the obvious themes, either.

Another way to win when you’re stuck is, obviously, to read a few helpful hints–which is why we share these pointers every day. Check back tomorrow for the next puzzle!



Source: LifeHacker – Today’s NYT Connections Hints (and Answer) for Thursday, November 30, 2023

Elon Musk on X antisemitism controversy: “Don’t advertise. Go f*** yourself”

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Illustration of a shovel being used to bury the Twitter logo

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Elon Musk addressed an antisemitism controversy in characteristically unwise fashion during a public interview today, telling businesses to “go fuck yourself” and to stop advertising on the social network formerly named Twitter.

Musk spoke on stage at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in an interview conducted by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin asked Musk about trying to gain back advertising from businesses that pulled ads from X after Musk posted a favorable response to an antisemitic tweet.

“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” Musk said in response to Sorkin’s question (see video).

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments



Source: Ars Technica – Elon Musk on X antisemitism controversy: “Don’t advertise. Go f*** yourself”

2 municipal water facilities report falling to hackers in separate breaches

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2 municipal water facilities report falling to hackers in separate breaches

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In the stretch of a few days, two municipal water facilities that serve more than 2 million residents in parts of Pennsylvania and Texas have reported network security breaches that have hamstrung parts of their business or operational processes.

In response to one of the attacks, the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in western Pennsylvania temporarily shut down a pump providing drinking water from the facility’s treatment plant to the townships of Raccoon and Potter, according to reporting by the Beaver Countian. A photo the Water Authority provided to news outlets showed the front panel of a programmable logic controller—a toaster-sized box often abbreviated as PLC that’s used to automate physical processes inside of industrial settings—that displayed an anti-Israeli message. The PLC bore the logo of the manufacturer Unitronics. A sign above it read “Primary PLC.”

WWS facilities in the cross hairs

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration on Tuesday published an advisory that warned of recent attacks compromising Unitronics PLCs used in Water and Wastewater Systems, which are often abbreviated as WWSes. Although the notice didn’t identify any facilities by name, the account of one hack was almost identical to the one that occurred inside the Aliquippa facility.

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Source: Ars Technica – 2 municipal water facilities report falling to hackers in separate breaches