Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

This week was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare. 

On the same evening, content delivery network mainstay Cloudflare announced it was cutting about a fifth of its staff in a realignment around AI, its competitor Akamai announced a seven-year, $1.8 billion deal with a leading LLM provider that Bloomberg identified as Anthropic. 

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said this was the largest deal in the company’s history and that it came after another large, unidentified frontier-model developer signed a $200 million deal last quarter.

“These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance and reliability that our cloud platform provides,” he said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Thursday. 

Akamai, which has 4,300 locations in 700 cities across 130 countries, won the deal against stiff competition from hyperscalers and neoclouds. He said Akamai’s ability to manage and scale complex distributed systems, as well as its low latency, tipped the scales in its favor. 

Given the supply chain constraints in datacenter space, especially as it relates to memory costs and the infrastructure needed inside of large datacenter buildouts, one analyst asked if Akamai planned any increase to its capital expenditures this year to pay for it. Akamai executive vice president and CFO Ed McGowan said that was not likely. 

“We’ve been able to get the supply chain ready. We anticipate receiving all the goods that we need to deliver this services over the next seven years within the next 12 months,” he said. “Now there’s always potential for slippage and delays, but we have mechanisms in our contracts to deal with, if, in say six months from now, prices were to go up. So we’ve taken that into consideration.” 

McGowan said it is a consumption-based contract over seven years, so as soon as Akamai ramps the necessary capacity, it will start taking revenue, which he expects to begin happening later this year. 

Winning this deal and ones like it has been Akamai’s goal in the AI era, Leighton said. 

“This has been the strategy all along. So we’re very pleased to be executing against it,” he said. “The goal has been to be deploying a distributed inference platform, distributed compute platform that would be desired by enterprises across the spectrum … The platform is to a point where we can do that, and I think you’ll see more of this going forward.” 

On the same day, across the country, Cloudflare was spelling out the bad news to its employees that it planned to cut the workforce by 1,100, roughly 20 percent. Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn said it was not about cutting costs, but about building a company that meets the AI moment. 

“We have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere,” they wrote in a blog post. 

Cloudflare’s revenues grew 34 percent year over year to reach $639.8 million in the first quarter. It posted a net loss of $22.9 million. It expects to pay up to $150 million in severance and benefit payments related to the layoffs. 

While Akamai’s stock price surged 26 percent on Friday, Cloudflare dropped 23 percent. With a market cap of over $69 billion, Cloudflare still has more than three times Akamai’s market cap. ®

The TCL QM8L SQD-Mini LED TV may be technically the company’s third-tier TV this year, but it’s good enough to give you a flagship-type experience for a very reasonable price.

In my time with the TCL QM8L, I was very impressed across the board — almost as much as my dad, who’s probably stole even more time using it than me during testing. Its bright screen makes daytime watching easy even in bright rooms, and TCL’s backlight tech does a great job of offering a clean image with no blooming, highlighting detail no matter how bright or dark the picture is.

Some Netflix subscribers are encountering a server error that prevents them from cancelling their memberships, at a time when the streaming platform has just raised prices across all of its US plans.

The error, identified by the code NSES-500, appears on Netflix’s standard “Something went wrong” page and has persisted for affected users across multiple devices and browser changes over at least a week, suggesting the problem lies within Netflix’s backend infrastructure rather than individual account settings.

One suggested workaround circulating in the same threads involves switching the account’s payment method to an expired card before attempting to cancel, a step that some users report bypasses the error screen where the conventional cancellation route continues to fail.

Reports of the issue have gathered significant traction on Reddit, where a thread on r/Anticonsumption documenting the cancellation block has drawn over 1,500 upvotes, with further threads on r/netflix showing a consistent pattern of subscribers hitting the same wall regardless of the workarounds attempted.

The price rise that preceded this error affected every tier of Netflix’s US subscription offering, a broad adjustment that pushed the Premium plan to $26.99 per month for 4K streaming and represented one of the more aggressive rounds of pricing changes the platform had pushed through in a relatively short window, giving subscribers fresh motivation to assess whether to stay.

That context makes the cancellation fault considerably more aggravating for those it affects, since any subscriber unable to complete the process before their billing date rolls over faces the prospect of being charged for another full cycle before they can exit the service.

Some users in the Reddit threads have reported that calling Netflix’s customer service line directly produced a successful cancellation where the online process had failed entirely, though this route requires navigating a support queue rather than using the standard account management tools.

Netflix has not acknowledged the error publicly, and no timeline has emerged for when the self-service cancellation flow is expected to return to normal working order.

When to watch Man City vs. Brentford

• Saturday, May 9, at 12:30 p.m. ET (9:30 a.m. PT).

Where to watch

• Man City vs. Brentford will air in the US on NBC Sports Network and Peacock Premium.

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Nothing less than a win looks likely to do for title-chasing Man City on Saturday as it hosts a Brentford side looking to build on its London derby win last weekend. 

Second-placed City has a game in hand over title rival Arsenal. However, the team comes into this weekend’s action five points behind the Gunners, having played out a tremendously entertaining 3-3 draw at Everton on Monday.  

Brentford enters this game in seventh place and with renewed hope of qualifying for Europe for the first time in its history following last weekend’s 3-0 win over London rival West Ham. 

Manchester City takes on Brentford on Saturday, May 9, at the Etihad Stadium, with kickoff set for 5:30 p.m. BST. That makes it a 12:30 p.m. ET or 9:30 a.m. PT start in the US and Canada, and a 2:30 a.m. AEST kickoff in Australia in the early hours of Sunday morning. 

How to watch Man City vs. Brentford in the US without cable

Saturday’s clash at the Etihad Stadium will be broadcast on NBC and streaming service Peacock. To catch the game live on Peacock, you’ll need a Peacock Premium or Premium Plus subscription. NBC Sports Network is available on platforms like YouTube TV.

Peacock offers two Premium plans, and after recent price increases, the ad-supported Premium plan costs $11 a month and the ad-free Premium Plus plan costs $17 a month.

How to watch the Premier League 2025-26 with a VPN

If you’re traveling abroad and want to keep up with Premier League action while away from home, a VPN can help enhance your privacy and security when streaming.

It encrypts your traffic and prevents your internet service provider from throttling your speeds, and can also be helpful when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks while traveling, adding an extra layer of protection for your devices and logins. VPNs are legal in many countries, including the US and Canada, and can be used for legitimate purposes such as improving online privacy and security. 

However, some streaming services may have policies that restrict VPN use to access region-specific content. If you’re considering a VPN for streaming, check the platform’s terms of service to ensure compliance.

If you choose to use a VPN, follow the provider’s installation instructions to ensure you’re connected securely and in compliance with applicable laws and service agreements. Some streaming platforms may block access when a VPN is detected, so verify whether your streaming subscription allows VPN use.

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Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in the UK 

This Saturday afternoon clash is exclusive to Sky Sports and will be shown on its Sky Sports Main Event channel. If you already have Sky Sports as part of your TV package, you can stream the game via its Sky Go app. Cord-cutters will want to set up a Now account and a Now Sports membership to stream the game. 

Sky’s standalone streaming service Now offers access to Sky Sports channels with a Now Sports membership. You can get a day of access for £15 or sign up to a monthly plan from £35 a month right now.

Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in Canada 

If you want to livestream EPL games in Canada this season, you’ll need to subscribe to Fubo. The service has secured exclusive rights to the Premier League and is broadcasting all 380 matches live. 

Fubo is the go-to destination for Canadians looking to watch the EPL, with exclusive streaming rights to every match. It currently costs CA$27 for the first month, then CA$31.50 per month thereafter.

Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in Australia 

Livestreaming rights for the EPL are now with Stan Sport, which is showing all 380 matches live, including this game.

Stan Sport will set you back AU$20 a month (on top of a Stan subscription, which starts at AU$12). It’s also worth noting that the streaming service is currently offering a seven-day free trial.

A subscription will also give you access to Premier League, Champions League and Europa League action, as well as international rugby and Formula E.

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As the Nintendo Switch 2 still doesn’t have access to the YouTube app, owners have managed to find a workaround on the console.

This workaround is via the free-to-play title Super Animal Royale and takes advantage of the news section embedded within the app. As shared by Reddit user JampyL, the news section surfaces YouTube videos that open inside the console’s browser and enables gamers to search for and watch any YouTube content freely.

Nintendo Switch 2 owners have found a workaround to access YouTube on the console through the free-to-play title Super Animal Royale, filling a gap that Google has yet to address with an official application.

Undoubtedly it’s a clever workaround, however it’s not without its compromises. Firstly, the browser-based playback caps resolution at just 360p which makes longer or detail-heavy content much harder to watch on a TV. In addition, users won’t be able to sign into their YouTube accounts which means there’s no access to personal playlists or recommendations.

The absence of a native YouTube application on the Switch 2 is a notable gap given that the original Nintendo Switch shipped with a dedicated YouTube app that remained available to users throughout the console’s life cycle, with that same legacy app remaining downloadable on Switch 2 hardware for owners who want a stopgap while waiting for a purpose-built successor.

Google confirmed during an earlier period that a YouTube application for the Switch 2 is in active development, though more than a year has passed since that acknowledgement without any further update on timing or availability, leaving the console without streaming video support that competing platforms have offered as standard for well over a decade.

The Switch 2 launched earlier this year to strong demand, with Nintendo reporting significant early sales figures, making the continued absence of a fully functional YouTube experience on the platform increasingly conspicuous among the broader library of missing media applications at this stage of the hardware cycle.

Google has not confirmed when a dedicated YouTube application will arrive on the Nintendo eShop, leaving Switch 2 owners reliant on workarounds for a feature the platform’s predecessor supported from relatively early in its own life cycle.

The basic assumptions behind online commerce are starting to fracture, says Paul Conroy, CTO at Square1, as he looks back at last week’s Stripe Sessions in San Francisco.

Stripe bills Sessions as its “internet economy conference”. Across a few days in San Francisco, thousands of people from around the world gathered last week to talk about the future of online commerce.

But for all the product launches and big-name keynotes, one fundamental shift kept surfacing – the basic assumptions behind online commerce are starting to fracture.

For more than 20 years, payment systems have been built on the assumption that bots are the problem. A good customer browses, hesitates, clicks around and eventually buys something. A suspicious customer lands directly on a payment page, provides almost zero behavioural signal and comes from a server farm rather than a smartphone.

Stripe Sessions 2026 made it very clear: that assumption is dead. In the next phase of commerce, it’s likely that the bot is actually the customer.

Agents need merchants they can understand

One of the clearest examples of this shift is the soon-to-be-everyday idea of asking an AI agent to buy you something. Not just “find me this jacket”, but something more concierge-like: “Get me a full outfit for hiking in France in July, within this budget.”

That request asks vastly more of a merchant than a traditional product search. A human can squint at a product page, read around missing information, infer whether two items might work together and gauge if a return policy feels fair. An agent needs that same information in a structured, reliable format. It needs to understand sizes, materials, compatibility and, crucially, whether a merchant can be trusted.

For merchants, agentic commerce raises a practical question – can your products, prices and policies actually be understood by machines?

This is why new commerce protocols are suddenly so vital. The Universal Commerce Protocol (supported by companies like Stripe, Shopify and Google) is an attempt to standardise how this should work. If agents are going to shop, merchants need a common way to tell those agents what they sell and how it can be bought. Businesses with messy product data will soon find themselves effectively invisible to machine customers.

The new unit economics of AI

This evolution also shows up when we look at agents paying for digital work in tiny increments.

One demo at Sessions involved a code review tool which charges based on tokens consumed. That sounds niche until you consider the economics of AI more broadly. As more companies rely on AI, the cost of inference becomes a massive operational risk. We have all seen the funny screenshots where someone persuades a fast-food chatbot to ignore the menu and write a React app instead. That unintended use is amusing until it is applied to a service with real inference costs behind it. If usage spikes, costs spike.

In the demo, the tool’s price was thousandths of a cent per token used. That is far too small to make sense through traditional credit card processing, so delayed billing in aggregate is common, though risky, for this type of merchant today. However, if an agent can call an API, use an authorised wallet, and make thousands of tiny payments as and when it consumes a service – while keeping processing fees low – viable microtransactions suddenly look very real.

How do you charge for AI-native services when the unit economics are too small, too fast-moving or too risky for traditional payment models? This is where stablecoins graduate from crypto buzzword to practical infrastructure.

The view from Europe

Spending a few days in San Francisco makes the difference in pace hard to ignore. Coming from Dublin, where the bus shelters are more likely to be selling phone plans or supermarket offers, it is striking to arrive somewhere where every billboard seems to be advertising some novel AI startup, or a company with a new way to move money.

Some of that is inevitably hype. But what is entirely real is that the US is actively wiring up the infrastructure to support these shifts. Stablecoin adoption and agent wallets are rapidly moving from theoretical concepts to live commercial deployments.

From a European perspective, that should make us slightly uncomfortable. We have a tendency to approach new financial infrastructure by regulating first. The rollout of the MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) framework is a perfect example. While it gives Europe necessary regulatory clarity, our heavy focus on compliance often means commercial deployment lags behind.

Consumer protection and stability are critical, of course. But there is a difference between moving carefully and moving so slowly that the next generation of infrastructure is built somewhere else, with someone else’s interests at heart. If AI-native commerce, agent wallets and real-time stablecoin microtransactions become the foundation of how online commerce is conducted, Europe cannot afford to watch from the sidelines. The challenge is to regulate well without regulating late.

The fraud arms race gets harder

The fraud angle is where this agentic ecosystem gets significantly more complicated.

Historically, fraud tooling has treated bot-like behaviour as suspicious by default. No normal browsing pattern, a single fast request to transact and a data-centre IP were strong signals that something bad was happening. In an agentic commerce world, a perfectly legitimate transaction will look exactly like that.

This creates a catch-22 for merchants. Block good agents, you lose revenue. Allow bad agents, you lose money. The old signals are failing in both directions.

This came up repeatedly during Sessions. There is a new arms race developing: fraudsters using AI to scale attacks and probe weaknesses, and Stripe using its own AI models in Radar to detect and respond. What I found most interesting was the frankness in many of the talks. There was no triumphalism, just a lot of, “we do not have this fully figured out just yet”. How do we authenticate intent? Who owns the transaction when a user has delegated the decision to an agent?

These are existential questions for businesses operating on low margins. The same automation that makes new buying experiences possible makes abuse much cheaper to attempt.

Clean APIs and the human element

Between talks in the main hall, instead of piped-in background music, a live string quartet played pop covers. It sounds like a tiny thing, and it won’t appear in anyone’s ROI model, but it was a conscious decision somebody somewhere in Stripe made, to make the room a nicer place to be.

That theme of the hidden utility of beauty came up during Patrick Collison’s interview with Sam Altman. Altman noted that Stripe has cared to an almost irrational degree about design and beauty in its APIs for years. That aesthetic consistency was designed to appeal to human developers, but ironically, it may become their biggest advantage in a world of agents. Agents, it turns out, benefit from the exact same things human developers do – clear APIs, coherent abstractions and predictable behaviour. Stripe spent years making itself easier for developers to choose, putting it in a remarkably strong position now that software starts choosing tools too.

During that same interview, there was an interruption as a protester with a guitar walked down the aisle, singing that music and art should be made by humans, not machines. It was a strange and funny moment. The Moscone Center acoustics are so good, many thought he was part of the show initially, before he was hurriedly escorted away. There were numerous callbacks to this during subsequent talks – John Collison noted that an AI demo that was taking too long to run could have used a guy with a guitar to keep people entertained – but it served as another reminder that AI is changing more than commerce. It is colliding directly with culture more broadly, for better and worse.

The future is unevenly distributed

For visitors to San Francisco, Waymo’s autonomous cars navigating the hills still feel like a futuristic tourist attraction. For locals, they are just more traffic.

Agentic commerce feels a lot like those driverless cars. It brings to mind William Gibson’s famous line about the future being already here, just not evenly distributed.

While agentic commerce is unevenly distributed, it is very much here. The businesses that prepare now by cleaning up their data, rethinking their pricing for microtransactions and strengthening their fraud controls will be ready for a fundamentally new kind of customer.

The ones that wait may find the agents have already learned to shop somewhere else.

Paul Conroy is CTO at Square1, an award-winning digital transformation agency specialising in payments and online publishing. He was also among the first cohort of Stripe Partner Advocates – a group of technical leaders with deep payments experience, chosen to collaborate directly with Stripe product teams. Disclosure: Square1 is a longtime collaborator of Silicon Republic.

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The red-light therapy market shows no signs of slowing down. According to Fortune Business Insights, the industry is projected to grow from $1.21 billion in 2026 to $1.76 billion by 2034. Riding that wave is Hong Kong-based Megelin, which is currently running its largest Mother’s Day sale yet, offering major discounts on most of its LED devices and select electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) tools.

I’ve been testing the Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask for the past two weeks as part of a six-week trial. While I’m still forming my final verdict, I already have some early thoughts (more on that below). In the meantime, check out the standout deals because some of these discounts might be too good to pass up while they’re live.

This Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask Is $270 Off

Megelin

Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask

The Megelin Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask combines 660-nanometer (nm) and 1,064-nm lasers with a 660-nm LED light for a more intensive treatment. The brand claims it can help smooth wrinkles, soothe inflammation, reduce pigmentation, and minimize redness. After two weeks of testing, I haven’t noticed any visible changes in my skin just yet, though to its credit, I also haven’t experienced any irritation or adverse reactions.

My biggest issue was the initial unboxing experience: The mask had a strong chemical odor that reminded me of formaldehyde. For a device that sits against your face and doesn’t have a mouth opening, that’s not exactly reassuring. Wiping it down and letting it air out significantly reduced the smell, but it definitely made for a less-than-ideal first impression.

That said, the mask itself is extremely comfortable. The soft, flexible silicone contours well to the face, and the dual-strap design keeps it secure without feeling restrictive. Treatments are quick and easy to customize thanks to four different modes, all controlled through an attached remote. And because it’s cordless, you’re free to move around while using it.

At full price, it’s a steep investment compared to its competitors. But with the current $270 discount, it becomes a much more compelling option, especially given the added laser therapy component, which isn’t as common at this price point. I’ll continue testing through the full six-week period before sharing my final verdict, but if you’re tempted to take advantage of the sale now, Megelin does offer a 60-day money-back guarantee and a one-year warranty.