In a basement beneath City St George’s, University of London, senior leaders from NATO watch as four research teams from the UK, US, Netherlands and Austria, showcase their AI-controlled, autonomous drones. The groups are competing against each other as part of the NATO-funded SAPIENCE programme, designed to accelerate progress with this emerging technology, particularly in a world where drones on the battlefield are changing warfare, as demonstrated in Ukraine.
“We are still trying to understand what are the impacts of drones,” says Claudio Palestini, head of NATO’s Science for Peace and Security programme. “We have regular contact with Ukraine where we understand what they are doing with technology,” he says. “NATO is adapting to this new way of fighting, we are developing some concepts in the drone warfare sphere.”
While there are applications on the battlefield, Palestini is keen to stress that there is a dual nature to NATO’s work. “What we do [at NATO’s Science for Peace and Security programme], it’s not purely military,” he says. “We want to have technology development that can be used in the commercial sector, but also in the defence sector. And this is where cooperation with Ukraine helps.” Such work has echoes of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Advertisement
In London, the first of four events gets under way, simulating an indoor search and rescue scenario in an environment where GPS won’t work that is akin to the aftermath of a natural disaster. The team from City St George’s deploys two autonomous drones working cooperatively in a swarm configuration, with deep-learning algorithms driving navigation.
“We’re the only ones that used a neural network,” says Thomas Hickling, a PhD student and member of the team, highlighting how the group thinks this form of AI is better for mapping damaged infrastructure. Speed and reliability are also considerations, especially in life-saving scenarios. “We decided to use two drones as it’s much quicker and increases reliability,” says Hickling. “If one drone fails, you’ve got another one automatically. You can take over the jobs of the other drone.”
Future SAPIENCE events will test the teams’ technology in outdoor and mixed environments, performing a range of simulated tasks. While presented as a competition, Palestini sees this as a driving force behind acceleration and cooperation in the field. “We don’t expect to have a single winner,” he says. “We will have some sort of ranking, but all the ideas are good.”
Snowflake on Thursday made Snowpark Container Services generally available to enable customers to securely deploy and manage models and applications, including generative AI, within the vendor’s environment.
First unveiled in preview in June 2023, Snowpark Container Services is a fully managed service now available in all AWS commercial regions and in public preview in all Azure commercial regions.
Containers are a type of software that can be used to isolate applications for secure deployment. Snowflake’s new feature enables customers to use containers to manage and deploy any type of model, but they are optimal for generative AI applications because they enable customers to safely join large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI-powered tools with their data, according to Jeff Hollan, Snowflake’s head of applications and developer platform.
Given its role in helping user develop AI tools, Snowpark Container Services’ launch builds on Snowflake’s recent moves to customers with an environment for developing generative AI models and applications, according to Mike Leone, an analyst at TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group.
Advertisement
Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as Snowflake’s CEO in February when Frank Slootman stepped down after five years of leadership that included guiding Snowflake through a record-setting initial public stock offering. Since then, the vendor has aggressively added generative AI-related capabilities such as launching its own LLM, integrating with Mistral AI and tools to enable users to quickly create AI chatbots.
“There has definitely been a concerted effort to enhance Snowflake’s capabilities and presence in the market when it comes to AI and, more recently, GenAI,” Leone said. “Offerings like Snowpark are helping AI stakeholders like data scientists and developers use the languages they prefer.”
As a result of what it adds, Snowpark Container Services is a significant new feature for Snowflake customers, he continued.
“It’s a big deal for the Snowflake ecosystem,” Leone said. “By being able to easily deploy and manage containers right in the Snowflake platform, it helps customers more easily handle complex workloads and keeps things consistent across development and production stages.”
Advertisement
“While Snowflake Container Services provides developers a secure environment, it was revealed in May that the log-in credentials of potentially 160 customers had been stolen and used to gain access to their data, although the vendor has stated it has not found any evidence that the infiltration resulted from a vulnerability, misconfiguration or breach of the Snowflake platform.
Among the most prominent customers affected by the attack are AT&T, which filed a report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission detailing the effects of the attack, and Ticketmaster. Snowflake’s investigation into the stolen credentials and unauthorized access is ongoing.”
New capabilities
Generative AI has the potential to transform business by enabling almost any employee to easily work with data to inform decisions and by making trained experts more efficient in their roles.
Generative AI, when combined with an enterprise’s proprietary data, lets users work with that data using true natural language, greatly reducing the coding requirements and data literacy training previously needed to work with complex data management and analytics systems. As a result, non-technical workers can query and analyze data while trained users such as data engineers and data scientists are freed from mundane tasks that occupy much of their time.
Advertisement
With generative AI’s potential, many data management and analytics vendors have made developing generative AI-powered features a focus of their product development.
In addition, many enterprises have started to build models and applications trained on their proprietary data so the models and applications understand their business and can help inform decisions.
Among data platform vendors, AWS, Databricks, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have all focused on providing customers with environments for developing generative AI tools. Snowflake was perhaps not as aggressively developing its own environment for generative AI development as its rivals while Slootman was CEO.
“Snowflake has gone as far as creating their own LLM,” he said. “But they still have a way to go to catch up to some of their top competitors.”
Matt Aslett, an analyst at ISG’s Ventana Research, similarly said Snowflake is catching up to its rivals.
The vendor initially focused on traditional data warehouse capabilities, he noted. In late 2023, however, Snowflake unveiled Cortex, a platform for developing AI models and applications The platform includes access to a variety of LLMs and vector search capabilities and, even though many Cortex capabilities are still in preview, marked a significant step forward, according to Aslett.
It’s a big deal for the Snowflake ecosystem. By being able to easily deploy and manage containers right in the Snowflake platform, it helps customers more easily handle complex workloads and keeps things consistent across development and production stages. Mike LeoneAnalyst, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group
“While rival providers were in some cases quicker to add support for GenAI models and development, Snowflake took a leap forward in late 2023 with the launch of Cortex AI,” he said.
Advertisement
The general availability of Snowpark Container Services furthers Snowflake’s attempt to foster generative AI development.
The feature provides users with on-demand GPUs and CPUs to run any code, written in any language, next to their data, according to Snowflake’s Hollan. That could enable them to deploy and manage any type of model or application, whether AI or not. But it does include AI.
Critically, due to the containerized environment, Snowflake customers never need to move their data out of the vendor’s platform when developing generative AI, machine learning and other applications.
“It’s optimized for next generation data and AI applications by pushing that logic to the data,” Hollan said. “This means customers can now easily and securely deploy everything from [source code] for their application to homegrown models in Snowflake.”
Advertisement
Beyond providing a secure environment, Snowpark Container Services aims to both simplify model management and deployment and reduce the cost typically associated with model oversight.
Deployment and management often require piecing together various services from different vendors. Snowflake removes that need by providing a fully integrated managed service. In addition, by fully managing the containerized environment and adding a budget control feature, Snowflake says it is reducing operational costs while providing a measure of cost certainty.
Beyond its containerized environment and cost control features, Snowpark Container Services includes the following:
Diverse storage options to support applications such as deploying LLMs including local volumes, memory, Snowflake stages and configurable block storage.
Snowflake Trail to provide observability through integrations with observability specialists such as Datadog, Grafana and Monte Carlo.
Streamlined DevOps capabilities including programmatic ingress to help automate software development and IT operation tasks.
Aslett noted that Snowflake’s launch of the Snowpark development environment in 2020 was an important means of enabling data engineers, data scientists and developers to use the coding language of their choice in concert with their data.
“Snowpark Container Services takes that a step further,” Aslett said.
Advertisement
The feature advances Snowpark by letting customers use third-party software such as generative AI models and data science libraries with their data, he continued. The managed service includes products and services from Snowflake partners including Amplitude, Dataiku, Nvidia, Pinecone and SAS, which enables users to leave their data in Snowflake for processing.
“This potentially reduces complexity and infrastructure resource requirements,” Aslett said.
While now generally available, it took Snowflake more than a year to move Snowpark Container Services from private preview to general availability.
Between June 2023 and now, the vendor focused on advancing the feature’s governance, networking, usability, storage, observability and development operations capabilities, according to Hollan. In addition, Snowflake worked to make it more scalable and improve its performance.
Advertisement
One Snowflake customer that used Snowpark Container Services during its preview phases is Landing AI, a startup founded in 2017 by Andrew Ng that specializes in computer vision. Using the feature, Landing AI developed LandingLens, an application that trains and deploys computer vision models.
“[With Snowflake], we are increasing access … to AI for more companies and use cases, especially given the rapid growth of unstructured data in our increasingly digital world,” Landing AI chief operating officer Dan Maloney said in a statement provided to TechTarget.
Plans
With Snowpark Container Services now generally available on AWS, Snowflake plans to make the feature available on all cloud platforms, according to Hollan.
In addition, part of the vendor’s roadmap is focused on continuing to improve Snowpark Container Services with more enterprise-grade tools just as it worked to improve the feature throughout the preview process.
Advertisement
“Our team is investing in making it easy for companies ranging from startups to enterprises to not just build but also deliver, distribute, and monetize next-generation AI products across their ecosystems,” Hollan said.
Aslett said making Snowpark Container services available on Azure and Google Cloud is the logical next step. He noted that the release of the managed service is “significant” but that it needs to be more widely available than in just AWS regions.
“The next step will be to bring Snowpark Container Services to general availability on other cloud platforms and demonstrate to potential customers that Snowpark Container Services is [equal] in terms of security and reliability as well as integration to other Snowflake applications and features.”
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
One of the feature that separates the Arc browser from its competitors is the ability to customize websites. The feature called “Boosts” allows users to change a website’s background color, switch to a font they like or one that makes it easier for them to read and even remove an unwanted elements from the page completely. Their alterations aren’t supposed to be be visible to anyone else, but they can share them across devices. Now, Arc’s creator, the Browser Company, has admitted that a security researcher found a serious flaw that would’ve allowed attackers to use Boosts to compromise their targets’ systems.
The company used Firebase, which the security researcher known as “xyzeva” described as a “database-as-a-backend service” in their post about the vulnerability, to support several Arc features. For Boosts, in particular, it’s used to share and sync customizations across devices. In xyzeva’s post, they showed how the browser relies on a creator’s identification (creatorID) to load Boosts on a device. They also shared how someone could change that element to their target’s identification tag and assign that target Boosts that they had created.
If a bad actor makes a Boost with a malicious payload, for instance, they can just change their creatorID to the creatorID of their intended target. When the intended victim then visits the website on Arc, they could unknowingly download the hacker’s malware. And as the researcher explained, it’s pretty easy to get user IDs for the browser. A user who refer someone to Arc will share their ID to the recipient, and if they also created an account from a referral, the person who sent it will also get their ID. Users can also share their Boosts with others, and Arc has a page with public Boosts that contain the creatorIDs of the people who made them.
In its post, the Browser Company said xyzeva notified it about the security issue on August 25 and that it issued a fix a day later with the researcher’s help. It also assured users that nobody got to exploit the vulnerability, no user was affected. The company has also implemented several security measures to prevent a similar situation, including moving off Firebase, disabling Javascript on synced Boosts by default, establishing a bug bounty program and hiring a new senior security engineer.
Sitting in Athens during the first COVID-19 lockdown, entrepreneur Rania Lamprou watched online e-commerce exploding because of social distancing. But merchants still struggled with low conversion rates because their checkout processes were complicated, and they had to integrate multiple providers for payments, shipping, and loyalty programs.
“I knew there had to be a better way to reduce friction for both merchants and customers,” Lamprou told TechCrunch. So, she thought, why not turn the checkout process into a “checkout-as-a-service” platform that streamlined it for both merchants and shoppers? She started coding in Python.
But, she wasn’t alone. Tech giants Shop Pay and Bolt were in the same space, but were focusing on the U.S. market. Europe was less of a focus. Shop Pay, for example, had started back in 2014 and has now raised a total of $982.1 million. So what was Lamprou going to do with her tiny startup, which she’d named Simpler?
She brought on two friends she’d known from university, Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spyros Mandekis, started building the team, and they raised their first $1 million pre-seed round.
Advertisement
Today, Simpler has over 250 merchants, more than half-a-million registered shoppers, and expects to increase its revenue by 10 times by the end of 2025, said Lamprou. It recently also raised €9 million (about $10 million) in a pre-Series A round to double down in the U.K., Italy and Spain. Participating in the round were VentureFriends, MMC Ventures and Lamda Development.
“Yes, Bolt is a big, massive company, but they are focused on the U.S., mostly with handling fraud problems, like chargebacks. That is a very big problem in the U.S., but it’s not so much in Europe,” she said.
In Europe, she said, there are different issues: “We have to localize and add all these different solutions, different providers. Every country has different needs, customer preferences, different payment providers, loyalty coupons, etc.”
That’s important because European e-commerce sales increased 66% from 2019 to 2021. Despite a temporary decline, the market is expected to keep growing, potentially reaching $955 billion by 2028.
Advertisement
The solution turned out to be elegant.
On Simpler, merchants can outsource payments, shipping and loyalty programs into one system, which, the company says, boosts conversions and reduces complexity. For shoppers, it means a one-click buying experience across multiple stores and channels.
“We’re seeing strong demand from both SMEs and enterprise-level businesses,” she said.
While Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify, Simpler is designed for all platforms. And, unlike Bolt, which focuses heavily on the U.S. market, Simpler is targeting the U.K. and Europe.
Advertisement
“We’ve built a robust end-to-end solution with three orders of magnitude less funding than Bolt,” she added.
I’m seeing double as I cruise down the highway in a 2024 Lincoln Nautilus, a hybrid-powered SUV under Ford’s luxury brand. I have Apple Maps running on the center touchscreen, projecting from my iPhone via Apple CarPlay. I’m also seeing the same map mirrored right above, taking up about a quarter of a massive display that spans the length of the dashboard.
That screen is the 48-inch Panoramic Display, which runs on Android Automotive OS, Google’s native vehicle platform (not to be confused with the phone projecting Android Auto). It merges what’s actually two pieces of curved glass in a mesmerizing and cinematic fashion, combining the instrument cluster with infotainment and some widgets. In the Nautilus, the whole system is called the “Lincoln Digital Experience.”
The right side of the Pano display is for widgets — you can display three at a time.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
But like most modern cars, former physical controls are being sucked into the digital world of the screen. To adjust airflow, I have to do the thing that many drivers dread doing: switching out of CarPlay navigation to the car’s native interface. But to my delight, as the Lincoln’s onscreen draggable digital airflow adjustment controls take over the 11.1-inch central display, Apple Maps continues to run on the Panoramic Display above.
Advertisement
To my delight, Apple Maps continues to run on the Panoramic Display
I start to get it. Most cars take an either-or approach with native-vs-projected operating systems. A few vehicles, like the Polestar 2, can also project Apple Maps to its instrument cluster screen. But the Lincoln’s larger, uncrowded pano display elevates the experience to the next level.
Like it or not, more and more cars are shoving HVAC controls into touchscreens — but Lincoln’s controls are responsive, at least.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Some automakers today are in a tug of war with Apple and Google because drivers are in love with their phones and prefer to use their mobile device’s interface over the car’s factory offering. Some manufacturers have made the controversial decision to either discontinue phone projection (GM) or never add it in the first place (Rivian and Tesla). But Ford is staking out a different position: it thinks it can do both.
Advertisement
And to the company’s credit, I think it works. Ford is embracing customer choice, and the new Nautilus provides what I think is the best balance of phone mirroring and built-in software that we’ve seen yet.
Three years in the making
Ford’s been working on its new infotainment system for a few years now, in a search for the optimal software provider that has taken the company from Microsoft to Blackberry — and now to Google. Ford and Google struck a six-year deal in 2021 to bring Android Automotive inside “millions” of vehicles, and the Lincoln Nautilus is the first to feature the fruits of that deal.
The partnership meant Ford would use Google as its cloud provider for its connected vehicle services, promising features like Google Assistant voice control to change climate settings, automotive-approved Android apps, and over-the-air software updates.
Advertisement
Android gives Ford “a chance to really have a stable platform”
In an interview on Decoder, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he’d only want his teams working on navigation software if it were better than the one on smartphones. “An Android or a Google Automotive Services gives us a chance to really have a stable platform,” Farley said.
Ford is now rolling out its new Android-based “Digital Experience” across its vehicle lineup. The company’s strategy is to go big with screens in the luxury segment and pare things back in vehicles like the 2025 Explorer — while also balancing its still-supported but comparatively slow QNX-based Sync 4 system, like in the 2024 Maverick.
The computer on wheels is a smartphone
Advertisement
It’s got a notifications dropdown like a smartphone.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
It doesn’t have every Play Store app, but more are coming.GIF: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Overall, Lincoln’s Digital Experience has me believing that automakers are finally able to deliver competent and intuitive infotainment. That said, I’m still connecting my iPhone. After all, that’s kind of the point.
I get a seamless transition from Google Maps on both the center and pano screens to Apple Maps via CarPlay. I enter and exit the vehicle multiple times, and most of the time, everything immediately connects, save for some limited blacked-out center screen delays, especially when connected wirelessly. I have similar success with my Google Pixel 8 Pro projecting to the Nautilus via Android Auto. It’s kind of funny seeing Google Maps and Assistant replacing, well, Google Maps and Assistant.
Advertisement
Android Auto projecting on top of Android Automotive — I love having choices.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
My expectations are usually low with in-car software. But the Nautilus feels more like a capable, high-end Android device — and it even has Google Play Store apps. The usual suspects like Spotify and YouTube were already preinstalled, and I try a game called Asphalt Nitro 2, which performs well on the touchscreen as I swipe an autopiloting racecar in different directions. (I didn’t try playing with a Bluetooth game controller, but it’s supported.)
Asphalt Nitro 2 supports touchscreen controls or Bluetooth game controllers.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Games and streaming video apps only work while parked, and in the Nautilus, it works on the center touchscreen, but not on the pano display. Lincoln is including a new “pano mode” in the 2025 Navigator where games and video can work on either side of the big screen, but this function isn’t available in the Nautilus. And not all Google Play Store apps are there; I can’t download Netflix during my testing, but Amazon’s Prime Video is available, and I watched some Shah Rukh Khan Bollywood classics. (I forgot to log out, so enjoy the free movies, Lincoln.)
Advertisement
I played some music from Sirius XM radio and from my phone, and the 28-speaker Revel Ultima 3D audio system sounds great. The music widget on the right of the pano display displays album art, and you can control the music with a nifty touchpad on the steering wheel (although, sometimes, your thumb can slip and select the wrong item on the onscreen grid, kind of like swiping on an Apple TV remote).
The steering wheel touchpad follows a menu onscreen, and you can press in to select an item on the grid.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
There’s also Google Assistant, which can accept voice commands to change car settings like in-cabin temperature but couldn’t accept simple navigation requests for some reason. Lincoln communications manager Anika Salceda-Wycoco later tells me that it was a mistake on their part because they used the same Google account across multiple cars in the fleet, and it disabled the function.
Tesla lets you type while driving but Ford doesn’t
Advertisement
Regardless, voice would be your only option to change destinations on the move, as the onscreen keyboard does not pop up unless you’re parked. Annoyed, I pulled over and manually typed the address to my second destination on this trip. I’ve gotten used to my Tesla Model 3’s interface, where my wife could type the address on the screen for me while in motion — but that’s not possible in the Nautilus. Siri worked fine in CarPlay mode, but I can’t ask it to do things like turn on my AC seats.
2024 tech most of the time
But not all is chummy between the Lincoln and the smartphone interfaces. They do sometimes abruptly snatch each other onscreen. For instance, calling up Google Assistant while CarPlay is running creates an ugly transition to the built-in Lincoln interface. Same for when you’re in the Lincoln interface and you’re suddenly back in CarPlay when a text message comes. The upside is I have little issue wirelessly switching from CarPlay to Android Auto. A quick jump into Bluetooth settings lets me switch between my iPhone 13 Mini and Pixel 8 Pro without hassle, which has not been my experience in other vehicles.
Switching between devices on Bluetooth is smooth and fast.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Advertisement
Coming from Tesla’s Autopilot, which flashes a blue screen when you’re not paying attention, activating BlueCruise was a little startling. After I swiped my thumb on the steering wheel’s left touchpad and selected the corresponding box for BlueCruise on the onscreen grid, the Lincoln’s instrument cluster went all blue — sharply out of sync with the tranquil theme elsewhere on the pano display.
BlueCruise hands-free is very blue and out of place stylistically.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Lincoln’s menus on the touchscreen, however, work like a breeze, with gorgeous animations running in Epic’s Unreal Engine and a powerful processor with capabilities that clearly match some gaming Android phones.
Seatbelt check has a cool animation.GIF: Umar Shakir / The Verge
Advertisement
Even with all the processing power, Lincoln’s not doing too much. You’re not getting a super detailed interactive 3D model of the Nautilus you can spin around like Tesla does with its Cybertruck or colorful illustrations like inside a Rivian. But you get tasteful and swift transitions, a cool 3D whirlwind animation of passenger seats showing who hasn’t buckled up, and a futuristic PS5 aura-looking theme on the pano display.
Not a whole lot of animations on the touchscreen, but it’s smooth, and there’s an air freshener.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
It surprises me that the huge pano display isn’t too information-dense, and I never feel overwhelmed or annoyed with the placement of things like the fuel bar, speedometer, transmission mode, or remaining mileage (which, by the way, is often quite a lot — the Nautilus went almost 500 miles for me on one tank). And Lincoln put the display high enough that I find it less distracting than some heads-up displays I’ve seen. For some reason, though, when you accelerate, a wavy mana-looking bar increases horizontally, which almost feels like a challenge to go faster.
Beyond the screen
Advertisement
The real reason anyone should look at the Nautilus is the amazing pano display. The future of cars is certainly all in the software, and it feels like Ford has a good thing going, striking the best balance yet between in-car infotainment and the popular phone-based systems that most people prefer. I was pretty much sold as soon as I opened the door and it introduced me to a full Nautilus intro animation on the pano display, with waves animating to the sides and timely light streaks on the door.
The Nautilus is welcoming on the outside and the inside.GIF: Umar Shakir / The Verge
The screens work well enough, but not everyone wants them. Surveys have shown growing customer dissatisfaction with in-car tech, especially touchscreen software. People are overwhelmed, and Ford’s response seems to be to add more screens, which is not a guarantee for success. I have personally owned a 2014 Lincoln MKZ hybrid and consider myself tech-savvy. Longtime Lincoln fans who appreciate more physical controls (or at least dedicated touch buttons) on previous generation models, however, could find the digital experience too overwhelming for their taste.
But if they’re not, and Lincoln customers go gaga over the new screens, Ford could have stumbled on the right formula to make it, Apple, and Google all equal winners in the race to control the in-car experience.
Advertisement
Don’t sleep on Lincoln design.Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
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 clues.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Connections today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Connections expert
Advertisement
Your Connections expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Connections today (game #469) – today’s words
(Image credit: New York Times)
Today’s NYT Connections words are…
PASTEL
POOL
SUNTAN
SCULPTURE
PRINT
THIRD
NEUTRAL
DRAWING
NEW
ALLOY
OPEN
NEON
LOTTERY
SAVE
GRAYSCALE
RAFFLE
NYT Connections today (game #469) – hint #1 – group hints
What are some clues for today’s NYT Connections groups?
Yellow: Different tones
Green: Click here
Blue: Are you feeling lucky?
Purple: Copper and tin
Need more clues?
We’re firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today’s NYT Connections puzzles…
Advertisement
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
NYT Connections today (game #469) – hint #2 – group answers
What are the answers for today’s NYT Connections groups?
YELLOW: COLOR TYPES
GREEN: FILE MENU OPTIONS
BLUE: CHANCE TO WIN A PRIZE
PURPLE: WHAT “BRONZE” MIGHT MEAN
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Connections today (game #469) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Connections, game #469, are…
YELLOW: COLOR TYPES GRAYSCALE, NEON, NEUTRAL, PASTEL
GREEN: FILE MENU OPTIONS NEW, OPEN, PRINT, SAVE
BLUE: CHANCE TO WIN A PRIZE DRAWING, LOTTERY, POOL, RAFFLE
PURPLE: WHAT “BRONZE” MIGHT MEAN ALLOY, SCULPTURE, SUNTAN, THIRD
My rating: Easy
My score: Perfect
Those of you who play Connections on a laptop or PC may have had an advantage over people playing on their phones today, because you’ll have had a big hint for the green group. That connection is FILE MENU OPTIONS, and the fact that I was on my laptop to play and then write this column meant they were staring me in the face. OK, not literally – they were hidden within the menu – but they were certainly fresh in my mind. By that point I’d already solved blue, too, with LOTTERY and RAFFLE clearly going together and the other two not too hard to find (I did struggle a little with DRAWING).
Two down, one to go – and inevitably I found yellow rather than purple, although neither was actually too bad today.
GREEN: SPECIAL EDITION ADJECTIVES COLLECTIBLE, EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED, RARE
BLUE: “GREAT JOB!” IMPRESSIVE, NICE, PROPS, WELL DONE
PURPLE: EXTREMELY AWFUL, BLOODY, REAL, WAY
What is NYT Connections?
NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.
On the plus side, you don’t technically need to solve the final one, as you’ll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What’s more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.
It’s a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.
It’s playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
If a small quantum computer makes a small number of errors, will a large quantum computer make even more errors, making it completely useless? No, say researchers at Google who have made a key breakthrough in error correction for quantum devices, setting out a theoretical path to creating machines that are useful and practical.
Ordinary computers store data as bits that are either a 0 or 1, but errors can cause the bit to “flip” to the wrong value, which is why devices from smartphones to supercomputers have built-in error correction.…
Sport3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
Sport3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
CryptoCurrency3 days ago
Technology3 days ago
News3 days ago
News3 days ago
Technology3 days ago
MMA3 days ago
MMA3 days ago
Football3 days ago
Fashion Models3 days ago
Politics3 days ago
Science & Environment3 days ago
Science & Environment3 days ago
Politics3 days ago
News3 days ago
Money2 days ago
News1 day ago
You must be logged in to post a comment Login