Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

We all know that Google and other big players pick and choose what information people see, but we sometimes overlook it outside of the search and social media space. [Lauren Leek] decided to take a look at how Google Maps picks winners and losers in the restaurant scene in London.

Building a machine learning model to determine a new restaurant recommendation (as one does), [Leek] uncovered interesting, and perhaps concerning, elements of how Google Maps ranks restaurants. Broken down by relevance, proximity, and prominence, many new restaurants face the issue of not drawing traffic without reviews and vice-versa causing a vicious cycle. Relevance and proximity are fairly straightforward, but what goes into “prominence?”

[Leek] found that “it is not just what people think of a place – it is how often people interact with it, talk about it, and already recognise it.” This leads to chains and high foot traffic areas awash in reviews while more out-of-the-way places find it more difficult to draw traffic. Some of this is expected and would be happening even when word of mouth was the primary way to find out where to eat, but as with many things, the algorithm amplifies this, along with the undisclosed paid placement of restaurants in Maps results.

While still in its infancy, [Leek] built a public dashboard where people can sort restaurants in the city. The machine learning algorithm is designed to identify places that are hidden gems that punch above their Google Maps weight and may make you look like the trendy one (if you live in London).

Zooming out further, [Leek] found larger clusters that revealed restaurant “diversity, in other words, is not just about taste. It is about where families settled, which high streets remained affordable long enough for a second generation to open businesses, and which parts of the city experienced displacement before culinary ecosystems could mature.”

If you want to step outside the algorithm mayhem, how about a good old-fashioned Web Ring? We’ve also addressed what’s an AI versus an algorithm, and Cory Doctorow advised us on how to reverse course on the current wave of enshittification.

Adobe is a popular brand when it comes to all things creative, including AI content generation and editing. With its newly improved Firefly tool, Adobe has taken AI content generation a step further with realistic, real-time outputs.

In addition to being highly accurate, Firefly is also one of the most affordable tools on the market today. But is it the best AI video editor for your needs? Read on to find out. In this article, we’ve put Firefly to the test, examining its features, pricing, ease of use, and overall value for money.

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Single datacenter and just three services taken down by ‘upstream’ power problem, while the rest of a zone and region kept humming

Google Cloud last week experienced an outage that analysts say demonstrates that not all promises of cloudy resilience are created equal.

Google’s incident report explained that three services – the VMware Engine (GCVE), NetApp Volumes, and Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) – experienced a 15-hour outage due to a cooling failure in its europe-west4-a zone.

The report includes the following detail: “The datacenter serving europe-west4-a for GCVE, BMS, and NetApp has experienced a power failure, which subsequently caused a cooling failure.”

The important detail there is that Google uses a discrete datacenter for those three services.

Another notable element of the incident report is the admission that “An electrical fault occurred on the utility grid upstream of the datacenter, disrupting the electrical distribution gear and cooling equipment.”

Google hasn’t explained how an upstream failure caused that disruption but did say it “proactively turned down workloads in order to protect customer data from any risks posed by running infrastructure in a high temperature environment.”

Whenever your correspondent talks to hyperscalers or datacenter operators about how they ensure resilience, they tell me about their use of multiple redundant pieces of energy infrastructure, plus on-site generation capabilities that can keep a datacenter powered for days if necessary.

We’ve asked Google if it had generators or other energy sources at this site, and if so, why it nonetheless had to turn down workloads. We’ve not received a response at the time of writing. Google told us its incident analysis “is currently ongoing” and promised to follow up once it is available.

Hidden dependencies

We also asked Google if it advertises the fact that some of its services are tied to a single datacenter, a matter of interest because like other hyperscalers it divides its cloud into “regions” that typically comprise multiple “zones” spread across a city or other locale. Like its hyperscale peers, Google recommends placing workloads across different zones and regions to ensure resilience. Yet this incident shows some services can be tied to a single datacenter in a zone – and that those single datacenters can experience problems while the rest of the zone keeps working.

Analysts told The Register the outage shows organizations need to dig into clouds’ promises of resilience.

“The real issue is transparency: customers are generally told to use multiple zones and regions for resilience but are rarely given visibility into whether a particular managed service has a single-datacenter dependency within a zone,” said Biswajeet Mahapatra, principal analyst at Forrester. “As a result, many organizations assume the cloud abstraction provides more facility-level redundancy than may actually exist for specialized services.”

“The underlying architecture is not necessarily unusual,” he added. “AWS, Azure, and Google all operate services that rely on dedicated hardware, storage platforms, or tightly coupled infrastructure that may not be distributed across multiple facilities in the same way as core compute and storage services.”

Gartner Director Analyst Adrian Wong reminded The Register of the 2023 outage at Google Cloud’s europe-west9-a region, the cause of which was a water leak that Google said “originated in a non-Google portion of the facility.”

Google uses a tool called “Spanner” to replicate data across zones, but in the flooded zone Google’s Spanner configuration didn’t work once one building became unavailable.

“It is very hard to figure out how an individual region is architected,” Wong said. “Our customers are often surprised by that,” he added.

The incident report for last week’s outage includes an apology.

“We know how much you rely on Google Cloud, and we regret the impact on your productivity,” the document states, before promising a final incident report will detail “preventative actions.”

But as this incident shows, knowing how Google plans to avoid future incidents of this sort won’t arm customers with the knowledge to understand if those mitigations will address hidden design issues that can reduce resilience. ®

Google Photos is giving users an easier way to leave its Gemini-powered search when a simple keyword would do. A new toggle now sits at the top of the results page, letting users switch between Ask Photos and classic search without digging through settings.

The change appears to address feedback from people who opted into Ask Photos but wanted a quicker way to return to classic search when Gemini was slower or less useful for a straightforward query.

Why did Google add the toggle?

Ask Photos is built for complicated requests. It can understand natural-language questions and search for details inside images, including prompts such as “What’s my license plate?” Classic search is quicker when you only need to find a person, place, object, date, or keyword.

Reddit users complained about irrelevant results, missing keyword matches, and the disappearance of an obvious route back to classic search. Some found that the most reliable workaround was disabling Ask Photos through the Gemini settings entirely.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,500 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today — or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

• Rheya combines emergency battery power with software designed to predict sewage spills
• Power failures at pumping stations can turn routine blackouts into environmental pollution
• Rheya battery will predict the underlying causes of spills before they occur

UK startup Rheya Labs has developed backup batteries designed specifically to keep sewage pumping stations running during power failures across Britain.

The company was named one of 20 finalists in Ofwat’s £7.5 million Water Discovery Challenge, run by the Water Innovation Fund.

In 2001 a green-armored soldier woke up on a mysterious ring and changed everything for console shooters. Twenty-five years later Halo Studios has torn that entire campaign down to the studs and rebuilt it in Unreal Engine 5. Campaign Evolved is not a simple polish pass. Every corridor, every beach, every Forerunner structure has been constructed again from scratch. Side-by-side footage now circulating makes the gap impossible to ignore.

When you walk into the Cryo Bay of the Pillar of Autumn, the first thing you notice is the difference. The earliest chambers were basic boxes with flat panels and a gentle, even glow. In the new version, the same space is turned into a thick tangle of machinery, cables that appear to be hanging free, frost clinging to every surface, and crew members bustling about with purpose, and the light no longer simply sorta… fills the room like it used to. No, it bounces off polished metal, catches on frost, and creates these lovely soft shadows that appear to change and move every time you turn a corner.

As players step outside onto the Silent Cartographer beach, the difference becomes even more apparent. The original shoreline was a rather uninteresting expanse of sand and rock, with a limited outlook. However, Campaign Evolved takes the same shoreline and transforms it into an actual place. The waves are now smashing in with considerable volume, and rather than being flat smooth sheets of grass and scrub, they are pushing up through the sand in small groups. And way out in the horizon, you can see the distant rocks with their evident fissures and weathering. The ring continues to curve overhead, but the sky and atmosphere now adjust to time of day and weather in ways that the 2001 engine could never have predicted.

The most significant transition in materials can be seen in forerunner architecture. Early Halo structures were basically large slabs of concrete with simple geometric designs on them. The new buildings have the same immense scale and harsh shape, but each surface has fine grooves, slight discoloration, and reflective edges that catch the light in a completely different way depending on whatever angle you look at them from. Because the team has been able to push the level of detail without sacrificing performance, distant walls remain sharp rather than blurring, and the lumen lighting inside those same halls is a game changer, filling the space with soft bounced light and proper reflections that move with you as you move.

Character models and vehicles are making the same transition. Elites used to move around with these rigid, limited joints and basic armor plates. Every plate now has a genuine thickness, every joint has adequate articulation, and the energy shields respond with clearer visual input. The Warthog has gained some weight and is now more stable on the ground. The tires leave actual tracks, and as it goes, it creates actual heavy clouds of sand and dust that linger in the air for a while. Even little items like ammo crates and computer terminals now have readable lettering on them, and you can see all these wear marks that are worth looking closely at.

Campaign Evolved will be released on July 28 for the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC. Early footage shows that the technological leap is enormous, since the geometry is denser, the materials respond to light properly, and the surroundings can bear careful examination. The original game was groundbreaking for its time, but this upgraded edition simply brings the same plot and locations to life in a way that modern hardware can now handle.
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