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
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Your Connections expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Connections today (game #469) – today’s words
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…
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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
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.
Nexus Yuval Noah Harari (Fern Press, out 10 September)
Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down: one minute you are reading something incisive, the next you are wading through banalities.
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Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a medieval historian most famous for his book Sapiens, a whistlestop history of humanity from the Stone Age to the present day. Its central thesis is that humans came to dominate the planet because we can believe in things that only…
The New York Times has introduced the next title coming to its Games catalog following Wordle’s continued success — and it’s all about math. Digits has players adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. You can play its beta for free online right now. In Digits, players are presented with a target number that they need to match. Players are given six numbers and have the ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them to get as close to the target as they can. Not every number needs to be used, though, so this game should put your math skills to the test as you combine numbers and try to make the right equations to get as close to the target number as possible.
Players will get a five-star rating if they match the target number exactly, a three-star rating if they get within 10 of the target, and a one-star rating if they can get within 25 of the target number. Currently, players are also able to access five different puzzles with increasingly larger numbers as well. I solved today’s puzzle and found it to be an enjoyable number-based game that should appeal to inquisitive minds that like puzzle games such as Threes or other The New York Times titles like Wordle and Spelling Bee. In an article unveiling Digits and detailing The New York Time Games team’s process to game development, The Times says the team will use this free beta to fix bugs and assess if it’s worth moving into a more active development phase “where the game is coded and the designs are finalized.” So play Digits while you can, as The New York Times may move on from the project if it doesn’t get the response it is hoping for. Digits’ beta is available to play for free now on The New York Times Games’ website
Google unveiled the Pixel 9 Pro Fold alongside Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL last month. For those unaware, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the successor of last year’s Google Pixel Fold. Undoubtedly, Google has done a pretty good job with the second iteration of its foldable device. However, like any other smartphone, it isn’t perfect. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold has downsides which are now being noticed, with one related to its charging speed.
The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has the slowest wired charging speed of the series
The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold reportedly has the slowest charging speed compared to other phones from the series. Today, Google confirmed 9to5Google that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold charging speed maxes out at 21W with the wired cable. Google hinted at the maximum power input received by the device based on the charging test carried out by its 45W charger.
That also means the Pixel 9 Pro Fold won’t receive any faster power input than 21W, even if you use a powerful charger. Well, the charging speed we are talking about here for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the same as the three-year-old Pixel 6. Surprising, right? Fortunately, this is not the case with other phones from Pixel 9 series.
In fact, all others got some generous charging speed boost from Google. For example, the Pixel 9 Pro XL has a capped wired charging limit of 37W. On the other hand, Google has slightly increased the charging speed on the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro compared to their predecessors.
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Wireless charging capabilities aren’t good either
Are you thinking about wireless charging speed? The Pixel 9 Pro Fold disappoints in that aspect too. It comes with a maximum Qi wireless charging speed of just 7.5W. What’s worse, Google recently confirmed that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold doesn’t work with the Pixel Stand too. Earlier this month, multiple reports hinted that it could be the reason why Google pulled the Pixel Stand 2 from the online Google Store.
All that said, if you want first-hand Android experience on a foldable with good battery life, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the right choice for you. However, if you are someone who is a fan of fast charging, this year’s foldable may not please you. But again, are you willing to give up on other aspects just for fast charging? Well, we’ll leave it up to you.
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.
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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.”
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“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.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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“We’ve built a robust end-to-end solution with three orders of magnitude less funding than Bolt,” she added.
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