Nick Sadler and his wife had different ideas of what a chill Saturday looked like. He considered the weekend a blank slate — no set plans, the family’s moment to reset and chill. She was under the impression that time was up for grabs and put a short hangout on their calendar, which Sadler saw as his wife not taking his schedule into account. To settle the argument, he opened up ChatGPT, specifically the group chat function, which allows more than one human to interact with the technology. Sadler prompted the chatbot to act as a neutral mediator and to instruct them on their next moves. Sadler tells Vox that ChatGPT acted as a trusted friend, or even a therapist, suggesting both of them consider different perspectives. It attempted to pinpoint where the conversation broke down (“Both of you then behaved logically according to your own understanding. That means this is not primarily a respect problem. It’s a classification problem.”) and offered guidelines for future scheduling (“A simple question can prevent most of these arguments: ‘Is this an idea, or are we locking this in?’”)
Tech
How the BBC Guided Two Families Through Their First PC Purchases in 1998
Families in Britain approached a major household decision with a mix of excitement and uncertainty in the spring of 1998. A BBC program from the Computers Don’t Bite campaign followed two of them step by step as they bought their very first home computers. The episode captured the practical choices, the new vocabulary, and the hands-on setup that turned an expensive piece of equipment into something the whole household could use.
The Lyons family went to a specialty electronics store in search of a system that could handle the kids’ school projects, keep track of the household finances, and make some simple graphs without making them nuts. Jenny Lyons spoke with the salesperson about their needs, and they were guided to a Compaq 4620. This one contains a fast 266 MHz Pentium II processor, 48 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, and a built-in modem to accommodate the growing number of individuals who want to go online. Windows 95 was pre-installed, and the full bundle, including a printer, cost less than 1000 pounds. The Lyons bought a beautiful, ready-to-use system that promised plug-and-play capabilities right out of the box.
Sale
GEEKOM Air12 Mini PC for Business & WFH (2026), Intel 7505 (Up to 3.5GHz), 8GB RAM (Dual-Slot…
- [Unmatched Productivity for Office & Dev Workloads]: Powered by the Intel Pentium 7505 (25% faster single-core performance than the N95/N100/N…
- [24/7 Silent Stability & Metal Durability]: Built for non-stop performance. The Air12 features a strategic metal mid-frame, a 3x-reinforced shell, and…
- [Triple 4K & 8K Workspace Hub]: Transform your desk into a professional command center. With support for up to three 4K displays or one stunning 8K…
The Plummer family took a different approach, first looking through computer periodicals before purchasing a machine directly from the vendor. This was the material they felt most at ease with. They ended up with a system with similar fundamental specifications: a 200 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, and a color printer, all for less than 1000 pounds. The Lyons and Plummers both ended up with working home systems, but their choices were influenced by their own comfort levels.
Sue Davis and Dave Green tried to simplify the terminology in the sales brochures. RAM is essentially the temporary workspace that the computer uses while turned on; the CPU runs the apps from there. The ROM stores the machine’s permanent instructions for starting itself up. The hard drive holds saved data, letters, games, and photos. A family machine need adequate room to prevent games and paperwork from filling it up too quickly. Clock speed, defined in megahertz, is important since it determines how quickly the CPU can accomplish tasks, with numbers in the 200–266 MHz suggesting that the CPU will be much quicker than previous devices.
By the time the shoppers left the store, they had a decent idea of what to look out for. More megahertz is better, implying faster labor. Ordinary tasks will run smoothly with at least 32 MB of RAM, and 48 MB is a reasonable amount of space to spare. Hard drives with a capacity of 2 GB will sufficient for most basic operations, while 4 GB will provide some additional room.The presenters also underlined the importance of sticking to a reasonable budget, since £1,500 is about the maximum unless someone wants to get into professional creative work. They also recommended speaking with knowledgeable friends or reading a few periodicals before making a decision.
Setup day arrived for the Plummers, and what a sight it was: a box full of boxes containing everything they had bought. There was a monitor, the main computer unit, the printer, some speakers, a keyboard, a mouse, and a few cords. The color-coded cables made things a bit easier. They followed the steps in a manufacturer video and were quickly up and running on Windows 95. A quick test with Solitaire revealed a tiny glitch that was readily remedied by resuming with the trusted Ctrl-Alt-Delete combination or turning off and back on. After a brief delay, a call to the helpdesk supplied them with fantastic service.
Then followed software installation, with Microsoft Works coming on a CD-ROM and booting up with on-screen instructions. The application offered word processing, spreadsheets, and a basic database. The templates were all ready for use. One presentation showed a family letterhead all filled out with names and addresses, ready to be printed. Ordinary jobs become considerably more manageable without having to choose a program to conduct each activity separately.
“It was like, ‘Well, next time just consider this’ and ‘maybe try saying this’ and ‘maybe try doing that,’” Sadler, a film producer, says. “We got some sort of advice to follow, but ultimately we’ve still got to do the work and we’ve still got to actually take the actions.”
Sadler, a 48-year-old self-proclaimed AI enthusiast, is no stranger to utilizing ChatGPT in his marriage. He’s used it to uncover the weaknesses in his arguments and to craft apology texts to his wife. “I put in purpose mistakes so she wouldn’t think I was just using ChatGPT,” he says.
But the pressures of parenting two young kids was kindling for their periodic annoying marital spats. Sadler and his wife considered couples counseling, but once he discovered ChatGPT could guide them through difficult conversations, they no longer felt they needed the help of a professional. One night, while sitting on the couch with his wife, Sadler launched ChatGPT and told his wife to talk to it as if it was a therapist. “In a way, it’s having a therapist on tap,” he says.
That people are turning to large language models to navigate their love lives isn’t entirely surprising. Relationships have peaks and valleys and, many times, exist in an emotional gray area. Chatbots, on the other hand, are authoritative in tone and confident, even when they’re wrong.
Some people are going a step beyond asking Claude to draft an apology text, and inviting AI into the most intimate moments of their lives: fights with their significant others. In other words, they are treating technology like an on-demand couples therapist. The tech, which could be ambiently listening or addressed directly via voice or text, might suggest someone use more “I” statements or prompt couples to ask questions like “Where did you feel unsupported?”
Research has suggested publicly available AI, like ChatGPT, is an effective intermediary in a dispute, with human subjects feeling less divided when AI was mediating. But AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand.
The desire for an authoritative, always-available guide in the midst of conflict is certainly seductive, but emotional matters are best reserved for human-to-human conversation. “The answer is typically not that you need some type of content strategy on how you should approach your next steps,” Amelia Miller, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, tells Vox. “But it’s much more that you need emotional support, which comes from asking other people that you care about what you should do in the situation, not asking a machine.”
Drawing from a shared reality
In her Bay Area therapy practice, Courtney Quattrini has seen her fair share of couples who leverage AI chatbots in their relationships, including using it as a practice conversation partner and to ghostwrite texts to their significant other. While none of her clients have let ChatGPT or Claude mediate a fight, some do bring in AI summaries of arguments from one person’s perspective to their sessions with her. “They’re ruminating or they’re thinking about their side of the fight: What am I going to come back and say, how am I going to prove that I’m right or wrong?” Quattrini tells Vox. “They’re summarizing the fight from their perspective, and then they’ll bring in the summary and present it almost like it’s objective, but of course it’s not objective.”
But much of the work in couples therapy centers on the idea that two things can be true at once, and is about getting both individuals to understand that their partner’s emotional reality is important. “When you’re coming in and you want to summarize who won a fight, that really doesn’t align with the work that we’re actually doing,” Quattrini says. Feeding AI your narrative doesn’t help you see the things you could have done differently.
But when both people in a relationship invite AI into the discussion, leveling the playing field, the technology draws from a version of the story that may be more closely aligned with reality. A few months into dating, Khalid Tawohid and his partner discovered they’d both been discussing their relationship with their respective AI chatbots. “How can we get our AIs to just talk to each other?” Tawohid tells Vox.
Earlier this year, the 25-year-old software engineer designed a workaround where both his and his partner’s Claude agents — drawing from each individual’s full chat history — could facilitate difficult conversations. The app, called Bridge, claims to provide scaffolding for the discussions and package disorderly thoughts in a more coherent manner. Instead of looking to a machine to validate your point of view, the machine, ideally, would hold your hand as you attempt that same conversation with a human. “This helps your AI have a real sense of identity of who this [other] person is because it’s two different AIs, one knows one person, one knows the other person, and they’re both vehemently going to defend their own person,” Tawohid says. “But together it gets you to a more shared sense of truth.”
Still, Tawohid isn’t convinced his AI chatbot mediation tool, Bridge, is even a good idea. He has shared Bridge with about 10 couples, all of whom have given him the feedback that they’d use it again, he says, but it isn’t widely available for use. Perhaps, he says, it could be a supplement to traditional couples counseling, a way to practice communication outside of the therapy room.
Ironically, though, Tawohid has come down on the side of mild AI skepticism. “It’s a combination of a journal and a therapist and a friend, but it is also not real. It’s also just a computer code,” he says. When he discovered he’d lost his ability to craft a sentence without help, he stopped writing with AI. Now he fears people could lose their relationships to chatbots, too.
Gateway to introspection or outsourcing sincerity?
After a few months of using Bridge, Tawohid says he and his partner spend much less time talking to AI. They’ve had enough machine-facilitated conversations that they better understand each other’s thought patterns and triggers. Sadler, the AI-curious film producer, and his wife have similarly come to rely on AI less frequently because, he says, ChatGPT has taught them to be better communicators. “It just taught me to understand that she’s got a different perspective on things. If I’m not understanding where [she’s] coming from, just asking questions to say, well, what do you mean? And not jumping to conclusions,” he says.
Using AI as a therapeutic outlet can be instructive for people who aren’t in the habit of introspection, says Miller, the Harvard fellow. These chatbots can, in theory, be a tool for reflecting on an argument and for rehearsing what to say next. But sometimes the language the chatbot suggests is so far out of the realm of what your partner would actually say that its assistance is counterproductive.
For Josh Elledge and his wife, the stupid fight began over a haircut — or lack thereof. Elledge, a 54-year-old podcast consultant, was refusing to clean up his look (“I didn’t like something my barber said, and so I stopped going to him,” Elledge says) and his wife was not pleased. So she turned to an AI chatbot for assistance on how to break it to him. What she ended up saying to Elledge didn’t land. “It just made her opinion stronger in a way that wasn’t really helpful,” he says. “She’s conveying this stuff and I’m like, wow, you really think that? And she’s like, well, no, not really.” He says they “thankfully had the good sense” to distinguish between what she believed and what was the AI.
Once you relinquish enough of your critical thinking to AI, you run the risk of undermining the relationship you sought to fix. Therapists are trained to identify when a fight needs to be slowed, rerouted, or ditched altogether. But because chatbots never tire of hearing about your problems, you can get caught in a loop of rumination, perpetually mulling over the same frustrations and workshopping language on how to tell your husband you hate his haircut. At that point, who are you in a relationship with — a large language model, or a human? “That was an instance where maybe this isn’t a miracle process. You still have to just be really careful about not showing up as someone who you are not just simply because you defaulted to this AI being this authority in all things,” Elledge says.
AI chatbots are programmed to keep you engaged, but endless mediation and reflection isn’t exactly helpful. If you feel compelled to use one to navigate a squabble, give the technology guardrails. For example, Miller has created custom prompts that don’t exceed 10 or so exchanges with the AI and are meant to illuminate your own biases and shortcomings. But, ultimately, Quattrini, the therapist, says it’s important to remember that true counsel comes from a human who possesses the ability to read nonverbal cues, affect, and changes in body language. “Right now I think AI is a pretty dangerous mediator because it doesn’t have a nervous system,” she says.
The joy of being a person in a relationship with another person is getting through the hard parts together, even imperfectly. “We’re complicated people and no one really knows everything going on in everyone’s mind,” Tawohid says. “But humans are awesome, truly.”
One unique feature is a free “moving artwork” functionality. Imagine a static painting where a portion of the art, such as a river or mist over a mountain, is moving slightly. It’s calming and beautiful. At least dozens are available, but I’m not able to add my own. The TCL NXTVISION also features paintings in a slowly moving video format, but the video art on the Ember Artline looks more realistic. In particular, I was blown away by some of the subtle clips, including one scene that shows the sun passing over a mountain range in extreme hi-def.
Another unique feature is Match the Room. It uses a photo where the TV is situated, then generates AI images that fit within the space’s color scheme. Having my TV display art that fits the aesthetic of my family room’s brown walls and dark blue couch made me feel like an interior designer.
Then there’s the Omnisense feature, which claims to know when you leave the room. At that point, it turns off the art display, then powering it back on when you return. (For the sake of comparison, the TCL doesn’t have a motion sensor; most Ember models and the Frame Pro do have motion sensing.) During my testing, the Omnisense worked about 90 percent of the time, sometimes failing to clock my presence in the room and not turning on the Artline as it should. Amazon reps told me they have not heard this feedback before. Even so, the feature was mostly functional and is a great power-saving capability.
The Alexa+ voice search function proved limited on the Artline, though you can conveniently use it to raise the volume and start apps by voice. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use it to search for classic masterpieces, like Van Goghs or Rembrandts. However, the virtual assistant could answer questions about the weather, play music, provide sports scores, and even chat with you about politics. I loved using Alexa+ to find movies and shows. I made complex requests like “show me every thriller from the last two years that has an 80 percent score or higher on Rotten Tomatoes,” and that actually worked. You can also show Amazon Photos, animated art, and use Alexa+ to generate AI artwork. The AI artwork is a bit generic. That said, using voice commands to make art is unique and fun.
The main drawback of the Ember Artline compared to the Samsung Frame Pro is that the contrast is a bit washed out. I couldn’t find Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night when I scanned through the Artline’s available artwork, so I loaded it as a photo. When I did this on the Frame Pro, the incredible contrast and color quality provided a vibrant, realistic texture, like you could reach out and feel the grooves of thick brushstrokes. On the Artline, the same painting lacked texture and contrast.
Screen Play
Photograph: John Brandon
I was surprised to discover that the Ember Artline doesn’t use new screen technology—it’s roughly the same QLED tech as previous Amazon Fire and newer Ember televisions. Which is to say, the contrast ratio (which Amazon does not release) is not outstanding, based on my experience viewing multiple movies and shows. There’s a new anti-glare matte finish, though, that makes all of the artwork (and whatever content you are streaming) look more realistic.
Tech
Nvidia next? Broadcom’s value dropped by more than $440 billion as it posts disappointing forward outlook, prompting fears of AI bubble burst
- Broadcom shares plummet after it reports earnings beat for Q2 2026
- The company’s market cap shrank a mammoth 19% across two sessions after its earnings report was scrutinized by Wall Street, with its AI chip sales outlook being notably softer at $16 billion versus $17.2 billion for Q3
- The behavior may indicate a frothy AI market, where investors continue to obsess over future guidance and valuations versus current performance
Broadcom’s Q2 2026 earnings report, by all means, reads like that of a company that is gearing up to benefit from a splurge in AI spending across the next decade.
It posted record revenue, tripling its AI chip business year-on-year and topping its Q2 earnings-per-share (EPS) guidance.
All of this, however, failed to satisfy investors seeking details on where the company intended to continue building on its explosive growth trajectory later this year.
A market accustomed to ‘beat-and-raise’ AI forecasts
The fault here may not be Broadcom’s but the industry’s at large, with investors expecting much more than AI companies are willing to commit to in terms of future guidance.
Broadcom’s market cap at the time of writing stands at $1.88 trillion, still offering an impressive YTD gain of 14.09%, though it has corrected considerably from $2.28 trillion just last week (June 2, 2026).
Broadcom’s somewhat aggressive collapse, which also brought Friday’s AI- and chip-heavy selloff, returns focus to what is easily the biggest AI winner of them all: Nvidia.
All eyes on Team Green?
Nvidia, which currently sits at a considerably higher market valuation of $5.05T, also saw a significant decline in its fortunes as Broadcom’s drawdown forced the entire segment lower.
It did not see as big a decline as Broadcom but still sank nearly 6%, as investors continue to bank on sustained demand for its AI chips and a technological edge over its peers, as AI datacenter investments shift the conversation toward efficiency per token rather than raw token output per chip, and as power concerns continue to mount.
Nvidia is hardly immune to said flash crashes itself. When Chinese researchers pushed DeepSeek, along with the narrative that distilled models could effectively cut GPU requirements to a fraction of projections, the chip designer saw its shares drop a mammoth 17-18% in a single session, erasing nearly $600 billion from its market cap.
The chip designer responded by appreciating DeekSeek’s ‘ingenuity’ and highlighted that its chips were still just as important, if not more, going into the future, but the event underscored how quickly investors can react when any news emerges that appears to go against the grain of an everything-is-rosy narrative when it comes to AI stocks and chipmakers.
In a market that is now looking to usher in as many as 2 major AI IPOs in the near future – Anthropic and OpenAI at sub-trillion dollar valuations, one can understand why valuations are finicky, especially as investors are increasingly fickle about what direction to head in.
Explaining the situation or investor behavior in a market constantly chasing the next potential big winner is easier said than done. For context, the recent drop in crypto’s market cap was associated with investors freeing up capital to buy into SpaceX’s IPO, even as the company recently downplayed its AI ambitions
NVIDIA’s next report is on August 26, 2026, where it will reveal its Q2 2027 earnings. The event is likely to be volatile as investors look for signs of either a continuation or an abatement of current demand for AI chip stocks, even as multiple investors, including Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, warn of a massive bubble forming in today’s stock market.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
from the doge-screwworms-america dept
Back in March of 2025, when Elon Musk was spearheading his bullshit DOGE non-agency and running around cutting funding to all kinds of government programs under the notion that they were a blatant waste of taxpayer money, the cuts were so obviously haphazard and ill-informed that it was making everyone’s head spin. Then, after cuts to funding and staff were done, the very same Trump administration began scrambling to restore it after government agencies found themselves unable to function properly as a result.
But not every bit of funding was restored. Part of what DOGE cut was roughly 5,000 funding grants for USAID. One of those grants funded a detection and warning program for, you guessed it, screwworms!
Following the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s confirmation on Wednesday that the New World screwworm fly has reached south Texas for the first time in decades, questions are being raised about what role DOGE cuts played in what could become a crisis to the nation’s cattle industry.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gutted the United States Agency for International Development, which included a program dedicated to preventing the spread of the parasite across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report from Agri-Pulse published last March, which cited a list of cut programs sent to Congress.
The screwworm prevention program was part of roughly 5,300 grants and programs cut from USAID. The program also monitored outbreaks of avian flu in Asia, according to the report.
Everyone who was paying attention knew then that screwworm flies were a major problem. These parasites infect livestock, pets, and sometimes humans by burrowing into their flesh to lay their eggs, potentially killing the host in a matter of weeks. A mass-infection event would decimate the livestock of cattle specifically in America, which is already at an extremely low level. That reduction in cattle counts occurred because there are fewer ranchers today than before, which is itself due to the increasing costs of raising cattle in America. Those costs would be for fuel, parts for ranching equipment, and fertilizer. And you can explain most of those rising costs on a combination of tariffs and our idiotic maybe-war with Iran.
Meanwhile, the cost of beef has been further driven higher because of a USDA import ban on Mexican cattle that has been in place since May of 2025. You’ll never guess why that ban was put in place.
“The United States has ordered the suspension of livestock imports through ports of entry along our southern border after the continued spread of the New World Screwworm in Mexico. Secretary Berdegué and I have worked closely on the NWS response; however, it is my duty to take all steps within my control to protect the livestock industry in the United States from this devastating pest,” said Secretary Rollins. “The protection of our animals and safety of our nation’s food supply is a national security issue of the utmost importance. Once we see increased surveillance and eradication efforts, and the positive results of those actions, we remain committed to opening the border for livestock trade. This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety.”
But those increased efforts never came to pass, in part because DOGE cut the funding for them. This government doesn’t have the ability to claim they didn’t know screwworm flies were a problem. Its own USDA said it was. The Trump administration can’t claim it isn’t responsible for the reappearance of the parasite or blame the rising cost of beef and milk on someone else. Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran are directly responsible for it, and any significant issue with screwworm flies will cause that cost to rise even further.
Hell, ranchers have apparently been screaming about this to try to get the government’s attention for months and months now.
Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.
And now we’re here, once again, with another once-eliminated issue that will plague the American people due to this administration’s rank incompetence. Just like the measles. This government is leading us backwards.
So what’s the plan for screwworm flies now? Fly-sniffing dogs and the release of millions of sterile male flies to crowd out the parasite’s ability to reproduce. And that actually is the proper plan to combat this thing… long term. But not in the immediate, which is why we’re likely to see it spread.
The plan to prevent a US outbreak of the New World Screwworm focuses on deploying hundreds of millions of genetically-altered sterile flies. Experts, though, say the supply of sterile flies is too low to immediately impact and halt the growing screwworm population.
60 years our country has been without the New World Screwworm. And now it’s back. Because this government would rather do government cut dinner theater than the hard work of governing.
So they next time you’re at the grocery store and can’t believe the price of a steak, you can thank the Trump administration for it.
Filed Under: cattle, doge, elon musk, screwworm, trump admininstration, usaid, usda
iOS 27 has the usual Apple headline grabbers, led by Siri AI, Apple Intelligence upgrades, and broader system improvements coming this fall. But some of the best day-to-day changes sit much lower on the feature list.
Apple is making smaller changes across Mail, Photos, Home, accessibility, connectivity, AirDrop, and even alarms. They won’t dominate keynote clips, but they could remove the tiny annoyances people run into long after the novelty of a major update fades.
Which fixes sound instantly helpful
Start with Mail, because search is one of those features people only notice when it fails. iOS 27 adds a new ranking system designed to push more relevant results to the top, which should help when a receipt, boarding pass, or appointment confirmation is buried under years of inbox debris.
The other sleeper fix is smoother network switching. iPhone will more seamlessly choose between Wi-Fi and cellular, which could help when you’re leaving home with Maps running or trying to keep a FaceTime call alive while moving between networks. AirDrop and AirPlay are getting speed boosts too, with faster transfers and quicker nearby-device discovery. Bad handoffs are tiny failures, but they make an expensive phone feel dumb fast.
What changes for shared photos
iCloud Shared Albums are getting friendlier for mixed-device groups. Android and Windows users will be able to join and contribute more easily through iCloud.com, which should help families and group chats that don’t live entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem.
Apple is also adding full-resolution sharing, filtering, reactions, more invite options, and expiring Shared Albums. That’s overdue housekeeping for a feature that feels simple until a trip ends and everyone starts asking where the photos went. The Photos app is getting another handy trick too, with an option to save a still image from a video frame.
Which upgrades are easy to miss
Accessibility gets some of the strongest smaller additions in iOS 27. VoiceOver can provide richer image descriptions, while a new captioning feature can generate synchronized subtitles for videos. It can also translate existing captions, which could make saved clips and shared videos easier to follow without a separate app.
The tiny utility pile keeps going. Alarms, timers, alerts, and system sounds can be separated from ringtone volume, so one setting doesn’t have to govern every noise your iPhone makes. Notes can copy and paste Markdown, which is deeply unsexy unless you write for the internet, in which case it’s basically a tiny holiday.
These aren’t the loudest iOS 27 changes, but they’re the kind that may make the phone feel a little less needy every day.
offbeat
Prochain arrê: Gare du Bork! French capital city train does the tech can-can
BORK!BORK!BORK! Good news from the Paris Metro. To show off the nation’s technological prowess, Parisian techies have eschewed such fripperies as advertisements and transit information in favor of a good, old-fashioned directory browser.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader “DJ Finsletown,” the screen adorned a carriage of Line 11 at the Chatêlet terminus earlier in June. It looks to us as though a web server threw a bit of a wobbly and showed users its undercarriage.
Then again, France did give us the can-can dance, in which participants perform high kicks that reveal their underwear, so perhaps this is simply the tech version of the music hall standard.
Our reader pondered whether the system behind the scenes was struggling with a recent heatwave, or the borkage was the result of some over-exuberance by football fans following PSG’s recent Champion’s League final victory.
What is perhaps more likely is that some techie in a backroom somewhere opted for a Gallic shrug rather than reaching for the inevitable CTRL-ALT-DEL to revive the stricken system.
Line 11 is notable for being one of the least-used lines of the Paris metro system until a recent extension. It also featured some of the oldest-running stock and was notable for rubber-tired trains and heat that might make London’s Central Line commuters mutter “steady on.”
It was also one of the last lines to be constructed in central Paris, on the former route of the Belleville funicular. The funicular, which ran along the streets in a manner familiar to San Francisco residents, ceased operation just over 100 years ago, in 1924. Line 11 got the nod in 1935.
As for the web server disgorging its contents, that is a far more modern innovation. Heck, it might even be some AI advert demonstrating what might, or might not, happen if an agent is let loose on a system. In the case of the latter, a borked display would, we suspect, be the least of the problems faced by passengers.
Or, as our reader joked, “Probably likely the train’s IT systems just went on strike, like all good French fonctionnaires!” ®
Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was an especially tough one, I thought. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.
I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.
If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far
Hint for today’s Strands puzzle
Today’s Strands theme is: Dramamine, anyone?
If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Maybe a yacht.
Clue words to unlock in-game hints
Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:
- SACK, SNACK, SING, BOAT, DINT, RADS, MESS, SENSE, WARD
Answers for today’s Strands puzzle
These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:
- DECK, WAVES, DRINKS, SNACKS, DANCING, SEASICKNESS
Today’s Strands spangram
The completed NYT Strands puzzle for June 9, 2026.
Today’s Strands spangram is IMONABOAT. To find it, start with the I that’s five letters down on the far-left row, and wind across.
Quick tips for Strands
#1: To get more clue words, see if you can tweak the words you’ve already found, by adding an “S” or other variants. And if you find a word like WILL, see if other letters are close enough to help you make SILL, or BILL.
#2: Once you get one theme word, look at the puzzle to see if you can spot other related words.
#3: If you’ve been given the letters for a theme word, but can’t figure it out, guess three more clue words, and the puzzle will light up each letter in order, revealing the word.
Buying new tools can be expensive, and if you only need them for one or two jobs, it might not seem worth the money. Investing in an attachment for an existing tool rather than forking out for a new one might seem like a good alternative, but there are many pitfalls to be aware of. There are certainly plenty of weird third-party drill attachments available on sites like Amazon, but if you buy an attachment from a no-name brand, there’s a significant risk that it won’t perform as well as advertised. It might even be a safety hazard, as YouTuber Project Farm found out firsthand when he bought a selection of drill attachments to see if they could replace his power tools.
Some of the attachments he tested proved to be up to the task for occasional use, but others broke during testing, and a few were downright dangerous. The first attachment he tested, a vegetation cutter, was particularly sketchy. The cheap Chinese-made attachment had sharp but flimsy blades and partially came apart during testing, with a fastener breaking off while the attachment was spinning. If another fastener or two had detached, it could have very easily sent the blade flying. Project Farm deemed the attachment “the most dangerous […] I’ve ever tested,” but it wasn’t the only attachment in the video that proved to be a safety risk.
The vegetation cutter was one of several risky attachments
The second attachment that Project Farm tested was a circular saw attachment that had to be manually assembled and was missing some key safety features. For starters, there was no blade guard, and there was also no way to center the blade on the shaft. The blade also proved to be poor quality, and as a result, Project Farm couldn’t get a clean cut. Comparing the attachment to a circular saw from a major brand, the difference was night and day. Not only was the circular saw far faster, but it also produced a much neater cut.
It’s well worth watching the whole video to see the range of attachments tested and their varying performances. A few attachments worked surprisingly well for occasional use, and a couple of DeWalt attachments that Project Farm tested were decently capable. However, given the hit-and-miss quality of most of the attachments he tested, we can safely conclude that attempting to replace all of your power tools with drill attachments isn’t a good idea.
One or two of them might be genuinely useful, but plenty of others will likely be poorly built and, in a worst-case scenario, could leave you needing a trip to the nearest emergency room. Some drill attachments get good ratings on platforms like Amazon, but it’s best not to rely on them to do a job that would otherwise require a dedicated tool.
OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, potentially listing this autumn. Anthropic filed last week at $965bn. SpaceX lists Thursday at $1.8tn. The AI public market is about to absorb three mega-listings.
TL;DR
OpenAI submitted confidential IPO paperwork to the SEC on Monday, the company confirmed. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are advising on a potential listing that could come as soon as the autumn, according to people familiar with the matter.
The filing makes OpenAI the third major AI-adjacent company to move towards public markets in a single week. Anthropic filed confidentially last week at a $965 billion private valuation. SpaceX, which now includes xAI, is expected to begin trading on Thursday at roughly $1.8 trillion.
OpenAI’s hedged language
“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said in a statement. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
The company is also planning a tender sale of shares in the coming weeks to provide liquidity to employees before any public listing. OpenAI completed a $122 billion funding round in March at an $852 billion valuation, the largest private raise in history.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
The competitive pressure
Anthropic’s valuation leapt past OpenAI’s for the first time in its latest private round, hitting $965 billion as its revenue surged. That reversal, combined with SpaceX’s imminent $1.8 trillion listing, creates pressure for OpenAI to establish a public-market benchmark before its competitors define the terms.
OpenAI has told investors it plans to spend roughly $600 billion on AI infrastructure by 2030. That kind of capital requirement is difficult to fund indefinitely through private rounds, even at OpenAI’s scale.
The challenges in the filing
The S-1, when it becomes public, will need to address several known issues. OpenAI reportedly missed certain internal revenue and user growth targets. Several key executives have departed or stepped back from their roles.
The company’s restructuring from a non-profit to a for-profit entity is ongoing, and the failed Musk lawsuit to block the conversion, while legally resolved, surfaced internal documents that will be scrutinised by public-market investors.
Three IPOs, one question
The convergence of OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX in public markets within months of each other will test whether investor appetite for AI is deep enough to absorb three mega-listings simultaneously. SpaceX alone is seeking $75 billion.
If all three succeed, AI companies will have raised more capital from public markets in a single year than in the entire history of the sector. If demand falters, the one that files last will pay the highest price for waiting.
Whether you’re a novice getting your PPL, an experienced pilot with thousands of hours of flight time, or an avid simmer, you’re probably familiar with the basics of aircraft weight and balance. Arguably, it’s one of the most important and fundamental concepts of flight; you cannot fly an aircraft that is overweight, nor can you fly one with all its weight in the nose or tail. Okay, that much is common sense, but let’s be more specific. Why, exactly, does this matter so much? Why do rules like MTOW and center of gravity need to be accurately calculated?
The short answer is that manufacturers determine what is and isn’t acceptable for their specific aircraft from the factory, and list these parameters as reference points. If any of these aren’t adhered to, then you won’t be able to sustain flight, if indeed you can take off at all. That’s because an overweight aircraft cannot produce enough lift to overcome the force pushing all that weight toward the ground, and an unbalanced aircraft will either want to go nose up or nose down to the point where it’s uncontrollable.
Full lectures are available online for free that describe this phenomenon in detail, such as this one from the Free Pilot Training YouTube Channel. You could also peruse the official FAA handbook on the topic. But what about a more general overview and basic guidelines to get you started? That’s what we’ll address in this article. Let’s take a look and explain the physics behind these concepts.
Why an aircraft’s weight matters
If you’re a frequent flyer, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that many international and budget flights have baggage weight restrictions, generally around 30 to 40 pounds. Why this limit is so important relates to an aircraft’s overall weight and where that weight is placed — more on the second point later.
Firstly, what exactly is weight? In aeronautics, weight is defined as the force generated by gravity pulling the aircraft back to Earth. Every component of the aircraft bears a specific weight, which is all calculated on the Newtonian equation of W=mg, or Weight = Mass multiplied by Gravity. The mass is determined by a component’s material composition; an object’s mass is its total density multiplied by its volume. Therefore, a denser part in the same space is heavier than an identical part made from a less dense material.
All of these factors go into an aircraft’s structural Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW), the absolute weight limit the aircraft can safely take off with. This is a hard limit that doesn’t change with external factors like altitude and air pressure; the equations account only for the gravitational force and density. Therefore, a Boeing 737 has this same weight limit regardless of whether it’s in Denver or Amsterdam, though its actual safe takeoff weight will be lower in Denver’s thin air.
Manufacturers want to shed as much weight as possible without compromising structural rigidity to allow for more fuel, passengers, cargo, and on-board systems to be carried. They can also increase the weight the aircraft can carry during takeoff by adding more power, more durable structural members, or even small rocket engines that provide extra speed, known as JATO (jet-assisted takeoff).
Why weight placement matters
If the weight is the total force pushing down on the aircraft, then its center of gravity is the point where that weight is evenly distributed. In other words, if you were on a seesaw and a different weight was opposite you, it’s where you (or the weight) would need to be for that seesaw to be perfectly balanced.
Take a basic front-engine airplane, for example. You have a big lump of engine in the front and nothing in the back — common sense means the aircraft is nose-heavy. To balance that out, you have the aircraft’s tail, which provides a certain amount of downward force to counteract the force exerted by the weight differential. This can then be extrapolated to all aircraft as well; a typical passenger airliner, for instance, will account for the weight of all passengers, cargo, and fuel on board, which is why some flights have weight limits.
Now you know how to find the balance; next is the Center of Lift (COL). You want the COL slightly behind the center of gravity (CG), so the aircraft naturally tends to go nose-down. This tendency has a term: the Angle of Attack, or AOA, which is defined as the angle at which the wing’s chord line (an imaginary line from the leading to the trailing edge) intersects the wind. A higher AOA means the aircraft is pitched up. Too much AOA and the aircraft stalls; too little and it’s plummeting. You want to balance the aircraft so that the COL naturally tends to keep the aircraft at the ideal AOA, allowing it to fly without stressing its control surfaces. An awkward CG is why some rear-engine aircraft, like the Boeing 727, proved especially tricky to fly.
Can AI ever be a good couples therapist?
POV: You’re a Crypto Miner Who Starts With One GPU
Train passenger who harassed woman sentenced in first prosecution under new law
-
Fashion4 days agoWeekend Open Thread: Evereve – Corporette.com
-
Crypto World4 days agoJensen Huang Approves Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron for NVIDIA (NVDA) HBM4 Memory Supply
-
Sports7 days agoFrench Open 2026 results: Alexander Zverev beats Rafael Jodar and will play Jakub Mensik in semi-finals
-
Tech7 days agoCryZENx Releases Fresh Playable Content Deep Inside Jabu-Jabu for His Ocarina of Time Remake
-
Business6 days agoTrump Taps Housing Chief Bill Pulte as Acting Intelligence Director After Gabbard Exit
-
NewsBeat7 days agoRepublicans balk at Trump’s attempt to appoint a MAGA enforcer to lead National Intelligence
-
Business2 days agoThe Pain Points Taking a Fragile Tech Rally Down a Notch
-
Crypto World3 days agoSenator Cynthia Lummis Calls CLARITY Act the Most Consequential Financial Legislation of This Generation
-
Entertainment2 days agoThe Best Mystery Series of All Time Is Surging on Streaming 30 Years After It Ended
-
Crypto World4 days ago
LBank Surpasses 25 Million Users Worldwide as AFA Partnership Continues to Drive Global Growth
-
Tech2 days agoMicrosoft unveils seven homegrown AI models in new bid for ‘long term self-sufficiency’
-
Tech4 days agoMicrosoft launches MXC, an OS-level sandbox for AI agents, with OpenAI and Nvidia already on board
-
Tech3 days agoSuspicious Polyfill login prompts pop up on Toshiba, Muji websites
-
NewsBeat1 day agoAlexander Zverev wins the French Open to finally earn a 1st Grand Slam title
-
Crypto World2 days agoTrump’s AI Ownership Plan Could Benefit Anthropic at OpenAI’s Expense
-
Crypto World1 day agoAnatomy of the June crypto crash: Fed, Iran, Saylor
-
Business6 days agoPagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Presents at Bank of America 2026 Global Technology Conference Transcript
-
Business4 days ago(VIDEO) Justin Bieber Delivers Surprise Happy Birthday Serenade to Diners at Los Angeles Mexican Restaurant
-
Tech4 days agoRCS Messages Between iPhone and Android Get End-to-End Encryption With iOS 26.5
-
Tech4 days agoMeta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents
You must be logged in to post a comment Login