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.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
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Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… We’re in this together
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
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TONGS
SCOUR
COLD
HIDE
POLE
POUR
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• Strength in numbers
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 5th row
Last: right, 5th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #232) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #232, are…
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PACK
HERD
FLOCK
SWARM
SCHOOL
PRIDE
KNOT
COLONY
SPANGRAM: GROUPNAME
My rating: Easy
My score: Perfect
Sadly, today’s Strands didn’t include my favorite collective noun: a prickle of porcupines. I’m also partial to a conspiracy of lemurs. Aren’t they great! But it did include a KNOT (of snakes) among the far more prosaic likes of PACK, HERD, FLOCK and SWARM.
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This was a pretty simple Strands all told, but a fun one too. The most difficult part of it, as is often the case, was getting started, but once I was underway the answers all spilled out of my brain fairly quickly.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Sunday, 20 October, game #231)
OTTOMAN
RECLINER
TABLE
SOFA
FIREPLACE
SHELF
SPANGRAM: LIVING ROOM
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
Just in time for the 2024 US elections, the call screening and fraud detection company Hiya has launched a free Chrome extension to spot deepfake voices. The aptly named Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector “listens” to voices played in video or audio streams and assigns an authenticity score, telling you whether it’s likely real or fake.
Hiya tells Engadget that third-party testers have validated the extension as over 99 percent accurate. The company says that even covers AI-generated voices the detection model hasn’t trained on, and the company claims it can spot voices created by new synthesis models as soon as they’re launched.
We played around with the extension ahead of launch, and it seems to work well. I pulled up a YouTube video about the blues pioneer Howlin’ Wolf that I suspected used AI narration, and it assigned it a 1/100 authenticity score, declaring it likely a deepfake. Suspicions confirmed.
Hiya
Hiya threw a well-earned jab at social media companies for making such a tool necessary. “It’s clear social media sites have a huge responsibility to alert users when the content they are consuming has a high chance of being an AI deepfake,” Hiya President Kush Parikh wrote in a press release. “The onus is currently on the individual to be vigilant to the risks and use tools like our Deepfake Voice Detector to check if they are concerned content is being altered. That’s a big ask, so we’re pleased to be able to support them with a solution that helps put some of the power back in their hands.”
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The extension only needs to listen to a few seconds of a voice to spit out a result. It works on a credit system to prevent Hiya’s servers from getting slammed by excessive requests. You’ll get 20 credits daily, which may or may not cover the flood of manipulative AI content you’ll come across on social media in the coming weeks.
While iPads are cheaper and much handier to carry around than MacBooks, you often need an extra iPad accessory or two to make them as useful. While an attachable keyboard can be great for anyone with a writing job (hello!) an Apple pencil is critical for everything from studying to designing. Thankfully, it’s cheaper than ever to get the budget option with the USB-C Apple Pencil on sale for $65, down from $79. The 18 percent discount brings the accessory to $5 less than its Prime Day price.
Apple released its USB-C Pencil in late 2023 as a cheaper option than its counterparts, the second generation Apple Pencil and Apple Pencil Pro. This Pencil is compatible with all iPads with a USB-C port and offers the hover feature when using an M2 iPad Air or the iPad Pro. It also has some great perks like low latency, tilt sensitivity and pixel-perfect accuracy. However, it doesn’t have pressure sensitivity like its fellow Apple Pencils.
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Artificial intelligence is increasingly making its presence felt in more areas of our lives, certainly since the launch of ChatGPT. Depending on your view, it’s that big bad bogeyman that’s taking jobs and causing widespread copyright infringement, or a gift with the potential to catapult humanity into a new age of enlightenment.
What many have achieved with the new tech, from Midjourney and LLMs to smart algorithms and data analysis, is beyond radical. It’s a technology that, like most of the silicon-based breakthroughs that came before it, has a lot of potency behind it. It can do a lot of good, but also, many fear, a lot of bad. And those outcomes are entirely dependent on how it’s manipulated, managed, and regulated.
It’s not surprising then, given how rapidly AI has forced its way into the zeitgeist, that tech companies and their sales teams are equally leaning into the technology, stuffing its various iterations into their latest products, all in the aim of encouraging us to buy their hardware.
Check out this new AI powered laptop, that motherboard that utilizes AI to overclock your CPU to the limit, those new webcams featuring AI deep-learning tech. You get the point. You just know that from Silicon Valley to Shanghai, share-holders and company execs are asking their marketing teams “How can we get AI into our products?” in time for the next CES or the next Computex, no matter how modest the value will actually be for us consumers.
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My biggest bugbear comes in the form of the latest generation of CPUs being launched by the likes of AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. Now, these aren’t bad products, not by a long shot. Qualcomm is making huge leaps and bounds in the desktop and laptop chip markets, and the performance of both Intel and AMD’s latest chips is nothing if not impressive. Generation on generation, we’re seeing higher performance scores, better efficiency, broader connectivity, lower latencies, and ridiculous power savings (here’s looking at you, Snapdragon), among a whole slew of innovative design changes and choices. To most of us mere mortals, it’s magic way beyond the basic 0s and 1s.
Despite that, we still get AI slapped onto everything regardless of whether or not it’s actually adding anything useful to a product. We have new neural processing units (NPUs) added to chips, which are co-processors that are designed to accelerate low-level operations that can take advantage of AI. These are then put into low-powered laptops, allowing them to use advanced AI features such as Microsoft’s Copilot assistant to tick that AI checkbox, as if it makes a difference to a predominantly cloud-based solution.
The thing is though, CPU performance, when it comes to AI, is insignificant. Like seriously insignificant, to the point it’s not even mildly relevant. It’s like trying to launch NASA’s JWST space telescope with a bottle of Coke and some Mentos.
Everything’s an AI powered this or that these days (Image credit: Future)
Emperor’s new clothes?
I’ve spent the last month testing a raft of laptops and processors, specifically in regard to how they handle artificial intelligence tasks and apps. Using UL’s Procyon benchmark suite (makers of the 3D Mark series), you can run its Computer Vision inference test, and that can spit out a nice number for you, giving you a score for each component. Intel Core i9-14900K? 50. AMD Ryzen 9 7900X? 56. 9900X? 79 (that’s a 41% performance increase, by the way, gen-on-gen, seriously huge).
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Here’s the thing though: chuck a GPU through that same test, such as Nvidia’s RTX 4080 Super, and it scores 2,123. That’s a 2,587% performance increase compared to that Ryzen 9 9900X, and that’s not even using Nvidia’s own TensorRT SDK, which scores even higher than that.
The simple fact of the matter is that AI demands parallel processing performance like nothing else, and nothing does that better than a graphics card right now. Elon Musk knows this – he’s just installed 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in xAI’s latest AI training system. That’s more than $1 billion worth of graphics cards in a single supercomputer.
Obscured by clouds
To add insult to injury, the vast majority of popular AI tools today require cloud computing to fully function anyway.
LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini require so much processing power and storage space that it’s impossible to run them on a local machine. Even Adobe’s Generative Fill and AI smart filter tech in the latest versions of Photoshop require cloud computing to process images.
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Large language models just require too much processing power to function on your home rig, sorry (Image credit: Google)
It’s just not feasible or possible to really run the vast majority of these AI programs that are so popular today on your own home machine. There are exceptions, of course; certain AI image-generation tools are far easier to operate on a solo machine, but still, you’re far better off using cloud computing to process it in 99% of use cases.
The one big exception to this rule is localized upscaling and super-sampling. Things like Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS, and even to a lesser extent AMD’s own FSR (although this is predominantly based on deep-learning models, applied via rasterization hardware, meaning you don’t need AI componentry) are fantastic examples of a good use of localized AI. Otherwise though, you’re basically out of luck.
Yet still, here we are. Another week, another AI-powered laptop, another AI chip, much of which, in my opinion, amounts to a lot of fuss about nothing.
Halloween season is finally here, meaning there’s no better time to watch a horror movie. Be it a tale of exorcism or a psychological thriller about the dangers lurking in every corner, horror movies have a unique way of tackling our primal fears, making us more alert, and giving us a much-needed fright. The streamer has a considerable collection of horror movies covering every subgenre and theme under the sun, so there’s no better place to be this Halloween season.
Some of the best new movies to stream offer chills and thrills while delivering a high-quality experience for terror-starved audiences. Netflix stays consistent every month with new and exciting arrivals that make up for whatever movies are leaving the service. We also found some of the best movies on Netflix, to give you something to watch between scary movies. With supernatural stories, psychological thrillers, and good old-fashioned slashers, these are the best horror movies that Netflix has to offer, and we wholeheartedly recommend them.
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