Strands is a brand new daily puzzle from the New York Times. A trickier take on the classic word search, you’ll need a keen eye to solve this puzzle.

Like Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword, Strands can be a bit difficult to solve some days. There’s no shame in needing a little help from time to time. If you’re stuck and need to know the answers to today’s Strands puzzle, check out the solved puzzle below.

How to play Strands

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strand answers

Today’s spanagram

We’ll start by giving you the spangram, which might help you figure out the theme and solve the rest of the puzzle on your own:

Today’s Strands answers

• EGGS
• BACON
• GREENS
• TOMATO
• CHICKEN
• VINAIGRETTE

ChatGPT shook the world when we found out all of the things that it could do. Since then, people have used it to generate millions of pieces of media using the chatbot. However, for people who don’t want to use it to generate content for them, OpenAI just announced Canvas. This is a separate interface that people can use to help them with their writing and coding.

We’re at a point where much of the media we see on the internet could have come from an AI model. This is a sad reality, as AI is a powerful technology that could greatly increase a person’s productivity. However, there are far too many people who want to generate content for them and put forth zero effort into creating anything.

OpenAI just announced Canvas, a platform to help with your writing and coding

Canvas is a separate interface that you’ll be able to summon when you’re working on a project. To summon it, just type “use canvas” into the ChatGPT text field. When you do, you’ll see the Canvas pop up in its own windows.

Just like with ChatGPT, it will have access to files that you upload. OpenAI gives an example of creating a blog post from the users’ notes. When it generates the draft, you’ll have access to several editing tools to help you refine it. It can act as a copywriter for you if you need an assistant to help you edit your work. You can set the reading level, edit specific parts of the text, and even have it generate new titles for you. It will be just like having a human assistant with you.

OpenAI Canvas won’t only help you with writing. It will also help you with your coding. You’re able to select sections of your code and ask ChatGPt anything about it. You can ask it to add comments, review the code, fix bugs, and so on.

You’re also able to have it generate bits of code for you. All you have to do is type what you want ChatGPT to do, and it will perform the task.

You can access this feature if you’re a ChatGPT Plus or Teams user. Enterprise and EDU users will gain access next week.

At this point, you probably either love the idea of making realistic videos with generative AI, or you think it’s a morally bankrupt endeavor that devalues artists and will usher in a disastrous era of deepfakes we’ll never escape from. It’s hard to find middle ground. Meta isn’t going to change minds with Movie Gen, its latest video creation AI model, but no matter what you think of AI media creation, it could end up being a significant milestone for the industry.

Movie Gen can produce realistic videos alongside music and sound effects at 16 fps or 24 fps at up to 1080p (upscaled from 768 by 768 pixels). It can also generative personalized videos if you upload a photo, and crucially, it appears to be easy to edit videos using simple text commands. Notably, it can also edit normal, non-AI videos with text. It’s easy to imagine how that could be useful for cleaning up something you’ve shot on your phone for Instagram. Movie Gen is just purely research at the moment —Meta won’t be releasing it to the public, so we have a bit of time to think about what it all means.

The company describes Movie Gen as its “third wave” of generative AI research, following its initial media creation tools like Make-A-Scene, as well as more recent offerings using its Llama AI model. It’s powered by a 30 billion parameter transformer model that can make 16 second-long 16 fps videos, or 10-second long 24 fps footage. It also has a 13 billion parameter audio model that can make 45 seconds of 48kHz of content like “ambient sound, sound effects (Foley), and instrumental background music” synchronized to video. There’s no synchronized voice support yet “due to our design choices,” the Movie Gen team wrote in their research paper.

Meta says Movie Gen was initially trained on “a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets,” including around 100 million videos, a billion images and a million hours of audio. The company’s language is a bit fuzzy when it comes to sourcing — Meta has already admitted to training its AI models on data from every Australian user’s account, it’s even less clear what the company is using outside of its own products.

As for the actual videos, Movie Gen certainly looks impressive at first glance. Meta says that in its own A/B testing, people have generally preferred its results compared to OpenAI’s Sora and Runway’s Gen3 model. Movie Gen’s AI humans look surprisingly realistic, without many of the gross telltale signs of AI video (disturbing eyes and fingers, in particular).

“While there are many exciting use cases for these foundation models, it’s important to note that generative AI isn’t a replacement for the work of artists and animators,” the Movie Gen team wrote in a blog post. “We’re sharing this research because we believe in the power of this technology to help people express themselves in new ways and to provide opportunities to people who might not otherwise have them.”

It’s still unclear what mainstream users will do with generative AI video, though. Are we going to fill our feeds with AI video, instead of taking our own photos and videos? Or will Movie Gen be deconstructed into individual tools that can help sharpen our own content? We can already easily remove objects from the backgrounds of photos on smartphones and computers, more sophisticated AI video editing seems like the next logical step.

Presented by Xsolla

In a world of ever-declining revenue margins for game developers, direct-to-consumer is becoming essential. Cost-effective services, platforms and tools to build web shops are thick on the ground, and game companies of any size can afford to get set up, sell and rack up some astonishing numbers, says Artem Liubutov, head of monetization at Xsolla.

Across the 400 web shops Xsolla has launched, the minimum increase in game revenue has been in the range of 10% to 16% and the conversion rate, from logging in to the web shop to purchase, ranges between 40% and 60%, Liubutov says. And now 40 out of the top 100 grossing games in the world are working with them, including Tilting Point, Godspeed Games, Hyper Hyppo and Kefir.

“If a game has done things properly, if they transfer paying players and avoid spending marketing money on transferring non-payers, these numbers are totally doable,” he explains. “Big publishers, mid-size publishers, even relatively small mobile games can achieve that without spending a lot of money on marketing. You can do it very smartly with web shops.”

Adding player value

A web shop is really all about the value-add. It should be a place where players can find unique items that enhance the playing experience and offers valuable items. Thoughtful, high-value offers attract the most valuable players — the big spenders who enthusiastically spend beyond the $99.99 price point that traditional platforms are limited to.

“Web shops are perfect for whales and super-whales,” Liubutov says. “They’re willing to spend much more in exchange for additional value, which not only leads to increased average purchases, but also the number of repeat purchases, and as a result, retention and LTV, since they want to use what they bought.”

Web shops are also capable of re-anchoring players to a new price point — many developers have seen their price point go sky-high. As the new purchasing experience is entirely familiar to players, it increases their comfort in shelling out rather than to a shill inside their game.

So when a high price point is combined with a commensurate amount of perceived value, players can actually shift from one segment to another. For example, from dolphins to whales, from whales to super-whales.

“For some games, especially for core genres like 4X strategy and RPG games, these very expensive packages can bring more than 50 percent of all revenue in the game,” he says. “That’s something we didn’t expect three years ago, but now we’ve seen this happen more and more.”

Getting started for success

Setting up a web shop is easier than ever. Xsolla just launched Web Shop 2.0, as well as their Instant Web Shop, which can get you up and running in 24 hours. But doing it right demands some time and care right out of the gate. The analysis stage is particularly important, Liubutov says, and he identifies three major areas to dig into.

1. Analysis of already launched web shops, especially for games in similar genres. Pay attention to what they sell, their price tiers and what kind of promotions and live ops they’re using.

2. Analysis of the existing target audience and segmenting players — especially paying players, since they’re obviously your bigger fans and best customers. Break down which in-game activities have the most impact on every segment, and whether each segment responds better to discounts or to added value.

3. Analysis of items and offers in the game — determine which generate more revenue, and how each segment reacts to each price point.

And remember, there’s no limit to the price point in a web shop, and price experiments are easy to stage. A $10K package might sell, if there are enough dedicated players — and developers are often surprised to find that they have players who can and will spend far more than they thought.

“With web shops, the goal is to change behavior, to form a new spending habit — basically to make a paradigm shift,” Liubutov explains. “The new normal should be that mobile is where I play and the web is where I pay.” 

The five golden rules of building a webshop

While Xsolla has partnered with developers of every size to build and launch successful web shops, they’ve arrived at five principles, or golden rules, for success.

Rule #1

Treat the web shop as an extension of the game. To form a habit, everything should be easy. For example, if the web shop’s UI is different from the game’s UI, a player will face a learning curve when trying to figure out how to use the shop, where to go and how to pay.

“In the first nanosecond when players see the web shop, you want it to feel completely familiar, with the same colors, same buttons, same flow, same logic, same types of offers, same events happening, which makes it much easier to start purchasing,” Liubutov says. “It may sound pretty obvious, but almost everyone that we’ve seen, including the biggest publishers in the world, they keep making this mistake. It happens when two very separate teams operate on in-game purchases and on the web shops, without communicating with each other.”

Rule #2

Continuous communication is key. It’s an endless cycle of telling players about the existence of the web shop, and then continuously reminding them that it exists. Yes, they’re endless tasks, but they’re crucial for success. Build a direct communication tool immediately, if you don’t have one already, whether it’s Discord, Facebook or a forum.

Rule #3

Friction is your biggest enemy, and it leads directly to churn. Authentication is a big sticking point, as is laboriously entering payment methods, and making it difficult to calculate the difference in value between in-game offers and web offers.

Rule #4

Value is king in web shops. Liubutov recommends a 10% increase in value or a 10% discount to start. The benefit should be much higher than the transactional cost of a new game experience.

Rule #5

Leverage the web shop’s live ops power. It’s possible to just sell evergreen virtual currency packages and see a 10% increase in revenue. But by leveraging all the live ops capabilities — by segmenting players and doing personalized offers, loyalty programs, targeted bundles and first-time offers — the increase is staggering, Liubutov says. And the best way to do this is by having the in-game live ops team work with the web shop live operations.

“If you follow those five rules, if you pay attention to your metrics and think about value and push live ops, the increase in revenue can be very substantial. The pure ROI on doing a web shop is very high,” Liubutov says. “We know billion-dollar games that have now fully embraced a web shop strategy. It’s a number-one priority for these games, because of the value they’ve received in the last year or two working with us or doing this on their own.”

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