Feed aggregator

NYT Strands hints, answers for October 12

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 23:00

If you're reading this, you're looking for a little help playing Strands, the New York Times' elevated word-search game.

Strands requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There's always a theme linking every solution, along with the "spangram," a special, word or phrase that sums up that day's theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable

By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.

If you're feeling stuck or just don't have 10 or more minutes to figure out today's puzzle, we've got all the NYT Strands hints for today's puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for October 12 SEE ALSO: NYT Connections today: Hints and answers for October 12 NYT Strands hint for today’s theme: Toon time

These words will amuse you with their antics.

Today’s NYT Strands theme plainly explained

Various Looney Tunes characters.

NYT Strands spangram hint: Is it vertical or horizontal?

Today's NYT Strands spangram is horizontal.

NYT Strands spangram answer today

Today's spangram is Characters.

Featured Video For You Strands 101: How to win NYT’s latest word game NYT Strands word list for October 12

  • Foghorn

  • Petunia

  • Daffy

  • Foxy

  • Granny

  • Bugs

  • Porky

SEE ALSO: Hurdle hints and answers for October 12 SEE ALSO: Mini crossword answers for October 12

Looking for other daily online games? Mashable's Games page has more hints, and if you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now!

Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Strands.

NYT Connections today: Hints and answers for October 12

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 23:00

Connections is the latest New York Times word game that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for October 12's Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: Hurdle hints and answers for October 12 What is Connections?

The NYT's latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications' Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.

Tweet may have been deleted

Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.

Prime Day deals you can shop right now

If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.

Tweet may have been deleted

Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.

SEE ALSO: NYT's The Mini crossword answers for October 12 Here's a hint for today's Connections categories

Want a hit about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:

  • Yellow: Stuff you literally throw on

  • Green: Endure

  • Blue: Types of tweet

  • Purple: Tech beginnings

Featured Video For You Connections: How to play and how to win Here are today's Connections categories

Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:

  • Yellow: Draped Accessories

  • Green: Tolerate

  • Blue: Bird Onomatopoeia

  • Purple: Starts of Cell Phone Makers

Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.

Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.

Drumroll, please!

The solution to today's Connections #489 is...

What is the answer to Connections today

  • Draped Accessories: SCARF, SHAWL, STOLE, WRAP

  • Tolerate: BEAR, STAND, SWALLOW, TAKE

  • Bird Onomatopoeia: COO, GOBBLE, HONK, HOOT

  • Starts of Cell Phone Makers: APP, GOO, MOTOR, SAM

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

SEE ALSO: Mini crossword answers for October 12

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Connections.

Wordle today: Answer, hints for October 12

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 23:00

Oh hey there! If you're here, it must be time for Wordle. As always, we're serving up our daily hints and tips to help you figure out today's answer.

If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for October 12's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: NYT Connections today: Hints and answers for October 12 Where did Wordle come from?

Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once. 

Prime Day deals you can shop right now

Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.

What's the best Wordle starting word?

The best Wordle starting word is the one that speaks to you. But if you prefer to be strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.

What happened to the Wordle archive?

The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles used to be available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it. Unfortunately, it has since been taken down, with the website's creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times.

Is Wordle getting harder?

It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn't any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle's Hard Mode if you're after more of a challenge, though.

SEE ALSO: NYT's The Mini crossword answers for October 12 SEE ALSO: Mini crossword answers for October 12 Here's a subtle hint for today's Wordle answer:

Spot.

Does today's Wordle answer have a double letter?

There are no reoccurring letters.

Today's Wordle is a 5-letter word that starts with...

Today's Wordle starts with the letter S.

SEE ALSO: Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL. SEE ALSO: Hurdle hints and answers for October 12 The Wordle answer today is...

Get your last guesses in now, because it's your final chance to solve today's Wordle before we reveal the solution.

Drumroll please!

The solution to today's Wordle is...

STAIN.

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

Reporting by Chance Townsend, Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo, Shannon Connellan, Cecily Mauran, Mike Pearl, and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Wordle.

I read all the community notes on Elon Musk's X account. Here's what I learned,

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 18:20

The first thing to know about Community Notes on Elon Musk's tweets: there ought to be a lot more of them.

Community Notes, the Twitter/X fact-checks formerly known as Birdwatch, are often touted as one of the few good things to have survived the first chaotic year of Musk's ownership. These notes are user-generated, usually including links to high-quality sources. Like Reddit posts they live or die on upvotes ("helpful") and downvotes ("not helpful") — enough of the latter and they disappear. Anyone can sign up to contribute, if they don't have strikes against their account. Contributors are the only ones who get to see or vote on proposed notes before they're officially stamped on tweets.

Musk will often tout Community Notes as a sign that he cares about the quality of information on a service that is crawling with deliberate disinformation. He's smart to do so: one study has found that Community Notes increase trust in social media, and so could help bring X's fleeing users back. But he doesn't even need to put his thumb on the scale of the X algorithm to avoid them himself.

With nearly 200 million people following him, if even a small percentage of his adoring fans are signed up to rate proposed Community Notes, they can swarm the system, intercept and rate any proposed note on Musk's account as "not helpful" before he gets another badge of fact-checking shame. As in this instance, where retweeting a false story about a bomb at a Trump rally was a step too far even for his fans (the original tweet Musk quotes was deleted; the Note remains).

Tweet may have been deleted

This helps Musk significantly. Because as any study of his tweets confirms, the bomb story isn't too much of an outlier: Musk is spreading misinformation constantly. The New York Times looked at one weeks' worth in September, and found one-third to be "false, misleading or missing vital context."

In July, the month Musk endorsed Trump, the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified 50 Musk tweets that had been debunked by independent fact-checkers. Not one of them got Community Noted, and they were viewed a total of 1.2 billion times.

As things stand on the unofficial Community Notes leaderboard, Musk is at #55, with 70 Community Notes so far. Several accounts that he frequently replies to and retweets are ranked in the top 10. The top account has more than 800 notes — but at a rate of 50 falsehoods a month, Musk would easily have outpaced them if oversight was equal.

So what can we learn from the 70 fact-checks that did actually get added to Musk's account? Here's your TL;DR.

Musk's early fibs weren't that big a deal. Tweet may have been deleted

A mere three of the 70 Community Notes on Musk tweets were before the date he brought that sink in to Twitter in October 2022. That doesn't tell us too much, since the Birdwatch service was soft-launched in January 2021 and only fully rolled out weeks before Musk arrived.

Still, we can see how minor the corrections were at first. In his first post with a Community Note, Musk claimed his Tesla Roadster was orbiting Mars; it's actually orbiting the sun somewhere out towards the asteroid belt (which is still quite a flex). The other two pre-Twitter Notes concern EV tax credits and Hyperloop tunnels, which he claims can't flood. Concerning, to use one of Musk's favorite words, but not a huge deal.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk's X will no longer pay creators based on ads but on engagement

In Musk's first week at Twitter, he racked up four more Notes. But they're harmless, even helpful. A couple point out when Musk is joking, in case it isn't clear. He calls Community Notes "awesome"; a Note provides further information on how to join.

Then on Nov 4, 2022, Musk claimed advertisers are "trying to destroy free speech in America" by fleeing the service. Community Notes stepped in to point out that advertisers were concerned about Musk's lax approach to security and misinformation as he gutted those teams. And a new more adversarial kind of Musk note was born.

There are more Community Notes on his tech posts than his political posts.

In 2023, Musk would receive 31 Notes. It's still his most fact-checked year. May 2023 — when Musk launched Ron DeSantis' campaign on X, and incorrectly claimed DeSantis had set "an all time record for fundraising" — is still his most fact-checked month.

But that doesn't mean he's getting fact-checked on his political statements. More Community Notes appear on his claims about the tech and media world, including a number of bizarre attacks on nonprofits (see notes on his tweets about the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, and NPR).

Musk is more vulnerable in the replies.

Of the 70 Community Notes on Musk tweets, a clear majority — 40 — are on tweets where Musk is replying to someone. That makes sense. The X algorithm artificially boosts Musk's regular posts, making sure that he shows up in your "For You" tab even if you don't follow him. But the algorithm doesn't push his replies, so falsehoods there are more likely to receive upvotes from Community Note volunteers acting in good faith.

And what falsehoods they've been! In a reply to his mother, Musk disavowed knowledge of his father's emerald mine; Community Notes simply used his own words against him, digging up a quote acknowledging that his father co-owned the mine. In a reply to a former employee, Musk claims there's no proof that plastics in the environment harm us; turns out there is. "Why would we have your home address?" he asks a verified user concerned about X potentially doxxing him to the IDF; a Note points out that verification requires ID with an address.

And he can't let well enough alone. When one supportive account posts a screenshot proudly proving that X is fair because "even Elon Musk can be Community Noted," Musk replies that the Note in the screenshot "is incorrect and the community already voted it away." That earns him another Community Note: nope, it's still there.

Musk loves Community Notes, except when he doesn't. Tweet may have been deleted

On seven out of the 70 posts, Musk invited the fact-check himself. Invariably he tags @CommunityNotes on a tweet he wanted to quote, and clearly already believed. On the stark statement he's pushing, he'll add a fig leaf by asking "is this true" or "is this accurate?" Nearly every time, the note that results provides context that Musk has missed.

Yet Musk rarely responds to the fact-check he's invited. The one time he did, he dug in his heels. "Community Notes is failing here," Musk wrote in February after claiming that it was impossible to sign into a Windows PC without a Microsoft account. No, the Note on this reply stated, you can do it — it just requires a workaround that "the average Andy" might not know about.

The implication: A tech billionaire who's been logging into Windows machines for decades is not the average Andy.

Nor does this particular tech billionaire get Community Noted like the Average Andy would, at least so far. And it doesn't seem the service will do anything whatsoever to rein in "Dark MAGA" Musk during the last month before the U.S. elections.

Why? Because, like a good Community Note, we ought to note the limit of Community Notes — using clear language and high-quality sources.

Here's a thorough debunk of Musk's repeated claim that "illegal" immigrants are voting in U.S. elections; none of his posts on this subject have been noted. (Ironically, Musk himself may have been at one time an "illegal" immigrant — you'd think the writers of sassy notes would enjoy pointing this out.)

Here's a debunk of his "you have said the actual truth" reply to an antisemitic screed last year. A tweet so infamous, advertisers fled, and yet it was not noted.

Here's a debunk of his "voter fraud in Virginia" post from the last week, also not noted.

We could go on, but you get the point. If volunteers cannot overcome the Musk downvoters to append correctives on this kind of nonsense, there's very little he can say before election day that will be fact-checked.

Noted.

Why the Donald Trump biopic 'The Apprentice' was made and the ironic reason it needed a Kickstarter to cover legal fees

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 17:27
Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova and Ali Abbasi go into detail on the reason they made the 'The Apprentice' and how Donald Trump tried to stop it from being seen.

How fake Hurricane Milton AI images can have real consequences

Mashable - Fri, 10/11/2024 - 15:58

AI-generated images and videos about Hurricane Milton might not just be annoying clickbait. They could also be connected to scams and disinformation campaigns.

In the aftermath of the category 3 hurricane that devastated parts of Florida, social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Facebook have been inundated with AI-generated content. Some AI-generated images and videos are easier to spot than others, like the obviously played-for-laughs image of a girl hugging an alligator on a boat in the pouring rain.

Tweet may have been deleted

Others are more convincing, like AI-generated images of a flooded Disney World that initially duped many — even getting shared by a Russian propaganda outlet.

Tweet may have been deleted

The outcome might just be the spread of disinformation, which is bad enough, but AI-generated internet trash is also used to lure people into scams.

SEE ALSO: How to identify AI-generated images Hurricane Milton AI slop is everywhere

At this point many have seen the fake images of the Disney World walkways under water. But a quick scroll on TikTok shows AI-generated footage of Hurricane Milton wreaking havoc.

Some of the videos are labeled as AI-generated videos with hashtags or captions, but it's easy to imagine how they could be shared and exploited by someone else. Karen Panetta, IEEE fellow and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University, describes how AI-generated content can be weaponized to incite panic and confusion. "Less than 30 percent of our adult public understands what AI can do. So you can put some misinformation out to the general population with a scary headline, you're going to get a lot of people panicking," said Panetta.

To be clear, the actual damage done by Hurricane Milton is devastatingly real. But when AI-generated content comes into play, it makes users question reality. That in turn can create mistrust and fertile ground for hurricane conspiracy theories. Case in point, one X user claimed the footage from NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick was fake, and even suggested Dominick wasn't in space. The footage has since been verified as authentic.

Tweet may have been deleted

But to add to the confusion, some satellite images claiming to be of Hurricane Milton were debunked by Snopes as being mis-captioned or AI-generated.

Beware of scams using AI-generated images

Aside from misinformation and disinformation in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, experts say to be vigilant about scams. The Federal Trade Commission issued a press release the day before Milton made landfall warning consumers to look out for "those looking to take advantage of natural disasters by engaging in potential fraud or price gouging."

And according to Panetta, scams like fake charities can make themselves more persuasive by using generative AI. "In any disaster there's always something that goes on where [scammers] try to set up web pages for fundraising that aren't legitimate," said Panetta. "What's happening now is that because of the easy access to AI-generated imagery, it's being used to add credibility and say, 'Look, it's not just me asking for money. Look how horrible this is.'"

The viral AI-generated image of the little girl holding a puppy and crying in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene is a perfect example of how an image can pull on the heartstrings and evoke the desire to donate, even if it's fake. While savvy internet users might realize it's fake, others may not know and those people are easy targets for scams.

Some of the AI-generated images of Hurricane Milton might seem like innocuous instances of some kid eager to show off their generative AI skills. But that's not always the case. The false sense of innocence might be part of a way of getting people to let their guard down. "It's a whole strategy. How do I bait people in? And then once I have you convinced that I'm legitimate, there's an ask in there," said Panetta.

"There's always money at the end," she added.

While natural disasters like Hurricane Milton might make people exceptionally vulnerable, it's all the more vital to apply critical thinking and think twice before reacting to anything online. The FTC says scams will often insist on payment through wire transfer, gift card, payment app, cryptocurrency or in cash, and recommends looking at its resources on how to avoid scams after a weather emergency.

Pages

Subscribe to Page Integrity, Inc. aggregator