Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s the super-long one as always on Saturdays, and a few of the clues are tricky. But if you play all the other New York Times games, 13-Across will be easy. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: What people pay Extra for?
Answer: GUM

4A clue: Pre-meal prayer
Answer: GRACE

6A clue: Physicist Bohr
Answer: NIELS

7A clue: Line up a shot
Answer: AIM

8A clue: Photo ___ (P.R. events)
Answer: OPS

10A clue: “Zootopia,” but not “Zoolander”
Answer: PGMOVIE

12A clue: TV show with the initials “TV”
Answer: THEVIEW

13A clue: New York Times game with weaving, interconnected answers
Answer: STRANDS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: More bleak
Answer: GRIMMER

2D clue: Dubai’s country, for short
Answer: UAE

3D clue: Nickname of Seth and Evan’s friend in “Superbad”
Answer: MCLOVIN

4D clue: “See you in the mornin’!”
Answer: GNIGHT

5D clue: Fancy term for “noticed”
Answer: ESPIED

7D clue: Many N.Y.C. addresses: Abbr.
Answer: APTS

9D clue: Uses a needle and thread
Answer: SEWS

11D clue: Egg cells
Answer: OVA

Hastings will not stand for re-election to the company board at its June AGM and will instead ‘focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits’.

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is to step aside as chair of the company’s board in June, the streaming giant announced in a first-quarter earnings letter to shareholders yesterday (16 April) that caused stocks to fall with its lower-than-expected forecasts for Q2.

For Q1, the company declared revenue of $12.25bn, year-on-year growth of 16.2pc, operating income of $3.96bn at a margin of 32.3pc and net income of $5.28bn, while diluted earnings per share (EPS) was reported at $1.23. Each of these metrics was higher than the forecast given in the company’s Q4 earning report.

However, the letter’s forecasts for the April, May and June quarter – in terms of, for example, revenue ($12.57bn), year-on-year growth (13.5pc) and diluted EPS ($0.78) – are pessimistic in comparison to stock market predictions, according to Bloomberg, which noted that Netflix shares fell by around 9pc as a result of the Q2 estimates.

In delivering its results and forecasts, the quarterly letter also outlined three “areas of focus” for achieving the company’s “goals”: delivering “more entertainment value” to customers, leveraging technology to improve its service and “improving monetisation”.

Netflix is co-led by dual CEOs Ted Sarandos, who earned $53.9m in 2025, and Greg Peters, who made $53.19m last year; departing chair and co-founder Reed Hasting was the CEO for 25 years after Netflix was created in 1997.

The letter referenced the abandoned deal for Netflix to buy Warner Bros, suggesting the price wasn’t “right” – rival Paramount agreed to buy Warner for $110bn in February in a deal awaiting shareholder and regulatory approval.

Sarandos and Peters paid tribute to the departing Hastings in the letter, calling him “a true history-maker”, the entertainment platform’s “biggest champion” and “part of our DNA”.

Hastings co-founded Netflix in 1997 with Marc Randolph and brought it from an online DVD rental delivery service that went public in 2002 into the realm of streaming. He is a board member of Bloomberg, Anthropic and various educational nonprofit organisations.

The shareholders’ letter said he would not stand for re-election to the company board at its June AGM and would instead “focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits”.

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from the flood-the-zone-with-shit dept

Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.

By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!

Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.

This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.

“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.

Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.

Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.

But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.

And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.

With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.

On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”

“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.

And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”

I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.

And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.

Filed Under: ai, curation, filtering, steam, video games

Companies: valve

NASA of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover, which is being sent to Mars. The current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The timing is still being worked out, but the space agency says this won’t happen until at least 2028.

This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agency providing the rover, the spacecraft and the lander. The US will provide braking engines for the lander, heater units for the rover’s internal systems and, of course, assistance with the actual launch.

The rover will be outfitted with scientific instruments to look for signs of ancient life on the red planet. These include a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer and an organic molecule analyzer, which will come in handy as the vehicle collects samples at the Oxia Planum landing site.

This is a mission that has suffered years of delays for all kinds of wild reasons. It was actually first conceived . The rover mission was originally scheduled for 2009, after NASA came on board. Budget constraints forced NASA to drop out in 2012, so Russia signed on as the ESA’s launch partner.

During this period, the mission which . The ESA in 2022 after the country invaded Ukraine. This left the mission in doubt until 2024, when NASA .

However, the setbacks didn’t even end there. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to end NASA’s involvement with the project, and many others, . The current proposal was made while the around the Moon, . Here’s hoping the launch actually happens in 2028.