Looking for the most recentregular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.Connections: Sports Editionisn't too tough today, especially if you're a hockey fan, as I am. Read on for hints and answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition puzzle.For now, the game is in beta, which means the Times is testing it out to see if it's popular before adding it to the site's Games app. You can play it daily for now for free and then we'll have to see if it sticks around.Read more: NYT Has a Connections Game for Sports Fans. I Tried ItHints for today's Connections: Sports Edition groupsHere are four hints for the groupings in today's Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.Yellow group hint: Group of athletesGreen group hint: Detroit and Chicago, too.Blue group hint: The pink one is famous.Purple group hint: Fore!Answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition groupsYellow group: TeamGreen group: Original six NHL teamsBlue group: PanthersPurple group: Golf ____Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English WordsWhat are today's Connections: Sports Edition answers? The completed NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Jan. 9, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNETThe yellow words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is team. The four answers are crew, group, side and squad.The green words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is original six NHL teams. The four answers are Boston, Montreal, New York and Toronto.The blue words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is panthers. The four answers are Carolina, Florida, Northern Iowa and Pittsburgh.The purple words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is golf ____. The four answers are cart, clap, club and course.

How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. Were talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. Thats exactly what a bot would say, isnt it? I guess youre just going to have to trust me on this.Im taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days. The internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI slop. (Its not clear who coined the phrase but slop is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI.) A recent analysis estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, many news sites have covertly been experimenting with AI-generated content bylined, in some cases, by AI-generated authors.Slop is everywhere but Facebook is positively sloshing with weird AI-generated images, including strange depictions of Jesus made out of shrimps. Rather than trying to rid its platform of AI-generated content much of which has been created by scammers trying to drive engagement for nefarious purposes Facebook has embraced it. A study conducted last year by researchers out of Stanford and Georgetown found Facebooks recommendation algorithms are boosting these AI-generated posts.Meta has also been creating its own slop. In 2023, the company started introducing AI-powered profiles such as Liv: a proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller. These didnt get a lot of attention until Meta executive Connor Hayes told theFinancial Timesafter they went viral.The likes of Liv may be gone from Meta for now, but our online future seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier. What Cory Doctorow memorably termed the gradual enshittification of the internet (the degradation of services in pursuit of relentless profit-seeking) is accelerating. Lets hope Shrimp Jesus performs a miracle soon; we need it.

New (and old) challengers join the fight.The world's biggest fighting game tournament EVO is scheduled to announce this year's US game line up next week on 14th January, but it seems it might have already been revealed.In other words, if you would rather find out in the official broadcast, navigate away from this page right now. Otherwise, here's the lineup which seems to have been accidentally revealed in the scheduled live-stream's thumbnail image on YouTube.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Including "Express Micro SD Card".There have been all sorts of 'Switch 2' developments this week and now product listings for Nintendo's new hardware are supposedly showing up on GameStop's internal database.Some photos currently doing the rounds, which were originally shared by 'Opposite-Chemistry96' on the Switch subreddit, apparently reveals GameStop listings for multiple SKUs. For starters, there are a handful of "Express Micro SD Card" listings - covering 256GB to 1TB.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Zelda, Paper Mario and more.We're still in that part of the year where end-of-year events are taking place and next up is the 14th annual New York Game Awards.Although no Nintendo games are in the running for the 'Game of the Year' award, some first-party Switch titles have been nominated in certain other categories. This includes Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is up for 'best kids game' and Super Mario Party Jamboree has also been nominated in the same category.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Flipkart has hired Kabeer Biswas, co-founder of Indian delivery startup Dunzo, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce group expands its quick commerce business in the worlds most populous nation.Biswas will lead Flipkarts quick commerce business, called Flipkart Minutes, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. The move follows Flipkart engaging with Biswas over a potential acquisition of embattled startup last year, TechCrunch first reported.The talks fell due to complication in the ownership structure of Dunzo, which counts Reliance Retail as one of its largest backers. Reliance has all but written off Dunzo in the quarters since.The quick-commerce model delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes hasnt worked in most parts of the world, but its increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.Zomato-owned BlinkIt, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Nexus-backed Zepto currently lead the quick commerce market in India, but that hasnt deterred other big players from joining the race. Flipkart launched Minutes last year. Amazon began pilot of its quick commerce offering in the country last month. This is developing story. More to follow

Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that theres little real-world data left to train AI models on.Weve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge . in AI training, Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. That happened basically last year.Musk, who owns AI company xAI, echoed themes former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever touched on at NeurIPS, the machine learning conference, during an address in December. Sutskever, who said the AI industry had reached what he called peak data, predicted a lack of training data will force a shift away from the way models are developed today.Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data data generated by AI models themselves is the path forward. The only way to supplement [real-world data] is with synthetic data, where the AI creates [training data], he said. With synthetic data [AI] will sort of grade itself and go through this process of self-learning.Other companies, including tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models. Gartnerestimates 60% of the data used for AI and analytics projects in 2024 were synthetically generated.Microsofts Phi-4, which was open-sourced early Wednesday, was trained on synthetic data alongside real-world data. So were Googles Gemma models. Anthropic used some synthetic data to develop one of its most performant systems,Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And Meta fine-tuned its most recentLlamaseries of modelsusing AI-generated data. Training on synthetic data has other advantages, like cost savings. AI startup Writer claims its Palmyra X 004 model, which was developed using almost entirely synthetic sources, cost just $700,000 to develop comparedto estimates of $4.6 million for a comparably-sized OpenAI model.But there as disadvantages as well. Some research suggests that synthetic data can lead to model collapse, where a model becomesless creative and more biased in its outputs, eventually seriously compromising its functionality. Because modelscreatesynthetic data, if the data used to train these models has biases and limitations, their outputs will be similarly tainted.

Painted with oil in 1845, the room depicted in Balkonzimmer belonged to Adolph Menzels family apartment, on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin. Credit: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jrg P AndersTypical of many of Berlins 19th-century apartment buildings is the Berliner Zimmer: a corner room that forms the meeting point between the front of the building facing the street and the perpendicular side wing. With only a single window overlooking the central courtyard, the Berliner Zimmer tends to be gloomy a dim space for passing through. If you are lucky, it may receive a brief ray of sunshine at some point during the day.On a spring day in 1845, German painter Adolph Menzel made a painting of his Berliner Zimmer at just such an auspiciously sunny moment. He had recently moved into a new apartment that overlooked the Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlins first railway station which had begun its operations seven years earlier. Another painting from the same year shows the view out of this apartment window at night, along the flank of a neighbouring building and down into the railway stations shadowy yard. Most of the picture is dark cloud-strewn sky, the railway yard and its heavy machinery are cast in gloom, while a small disc of moon glances white on the tiled roofs of the railway buildings centre left.Menzels painting of his rooms interior is just the opposite. Pale spring light breathes through thin muslin curtains which frame the open window and billow gently into the room. A bright shaft of reflection lies on the polished parquet floor in the foreground, and shimmers on the back of a mahogany chair, turned askew towards the open window. A matching chair is back-to-back, also angled, like a mirror image reflected on an invisible diagonal plane. On the wall behind the chairs is an actual mirror, tall with a carved mahogany frame, reflecting a picture we cannot make out, shown at another oblique angle. The motion in this painting is all diagonal, and all the action occurs on the right. On the left is just a spread of parquet floor, a corner of red carpet and a bare expanse of wall. Hovering on this wall is an ambiguous patch of white: a painted void, as if unfinished.When Adolph Menzel painted his room, he was not yet the foremost painter of 19th-century Germany he was to become. While he then owed his fame to depictions of the court of King Wilhelm I, he also made countless pieces that focus on peripheral details and everyday incidents in Berlin. The city was being built up rapidly around him, and these early realist works are vivid visual documents which manifest a prephotographic compulsion to bear witness. Besides the intimate oil paintings of his own accommodation, his pencil drawings and gouaches sketch daily journeys through the outskirts of the city. He would walk around with sketchbooks, pencils and watercolours stuffed into his pockets to see what the streets, rural lanes, backyards and alleyways could offer up by way of subject matter. In these areas that ambiguously straddle both urban and rural, the city seemed to lie in wait, gathering on the horizon.Menzels work thrives on contingencyMenzels work, which has been deemed a kind of embodied realism, thrives on contingency. The painting of his room, known as Balkonzimmer (balcony room), is full of such contingencies. It is less a painting of the room and more of the light that floods in and the breeze that seems to animate it; of the space within the walls, rather than the walls themselves. The painting seems to open outwards, like a curious mind filling with thought. The ambiguous mark on the wall is a flourish of self-reflexivity. That this patch of paint is the works central focus suggests that paint is being employed literally tautologically to replicate its own material state.Menzel had moved into this apartment with his mother and sisters only a few weeks earlier and described it in a letter to a friend: in front of the Anhaltische Tor in Schneberger Strae, number 18, two flights up, where I will have more space and a dedicated room to paint. It is this dedicated room to paint that is the subject of Balkonzimmer, shown not straight on but towards the corner. Each corner, as Gaston Bachelard has it, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination. In a state of solitude, Menzel paints the paint on the wall. Finally alone in a room of his own, the artist can indulge in interiority. This painting, made in the century before Berlins rapid rise and equally rapid fall, depicts a calm before the storm. It remains filled with the breath of potential.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writers2025-01-09Reuben J BrownShare

TCL's CES mobile lineup includes the TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G, an Android handset with a brilliant display and competitive price point.

Kerry Wan/ZDNETThe biggest week in tech is here: the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). ZDNET is on the ground in Las Vegas and also keeping a virtual eye on the products and concepts that debuted on the show all week long.Also: The best CES 2025 products you can buy right nowSo far, we've seen announcements from big names like Samsung, Abbott, and Dell, as well as new and innovative brands with cool concepts. Here's the tech gear that has impressed us the most as we approach the final days of the Las Vegas convention.1. AI-integrated TVs Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETTVs are always big at CES, and this year, the common thread among new TV models seems to be AI integrations. For example, Samsung's new lineup of TVs takes advantage of AI upscaling to make older content look better through HDR Remastering, which enhances standard dynamic range content to high dynamic range levels.LG's AI-powered TV technology includes features like AI-powered recommendations with voice recognition, an AI chatbot and AI search, and an LG AI Concierge that tracks your preferences alongside search history to provide contextual insights based on what's playing on your screen.Plus, Google is improving its TV experience by incorporating its Gemini AI into Google Assistant to converse with your Google TV and ask more complex questions.2. A premium entry-level TV you can pre-order Kerry Wan/ZDNETTCL unveiled its QM6K, which brings the company's Mini LED technology to its entry-level QLED TV at an aggressive price. This TV sports the kind of brightness, contrast, and color depth you'd typically find in a much more premium model from the big TV vendors.Also:TCL won the opening of CES 2025 with a great new TV you can actually pre-orderBut TCL is offering it starting at$999 for the 65-inch QM6Kand you can even pre-order it today, a first at CES. But when you pre-order, TCL will also send you aQ75H 5.1.2 soundbarfor free (an $899 retail value). TCL is also offering the 75-inch QM6K and the 85-inch models for sale this week.3. Over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors Kerry Wan/ZDNETNot one but two over-the-counter glucose monitors debuted at CES on Tuesday to make glucose monitoring affordable and accessible for both diabetics and the general public. The one from Dexcom is targeted for those with Type 2 diabetes not using insulin (though people without diabetes can also use it) and attaches to your arm, tracking glucose levels 24/7. It also lasts up to 30 days and is connected to an app on your phone that delivers your readings. It's compatible with Android and iOS.Also: The best wearable tech we've seen at CESOn the other hand, the Lingo device from Abbott is for anyone looking for more insight into their general health and wellness by tracking glucose spikes. It uses personalized data to offer suggestions and coaching on eating habits, stressors, and exercise through a companion app. It's limited to the iPhone.4. A device that gives your phone a full charge in seconds Kerry Wan/ZDNETIn what might be one of the best mobile accessories we've seen at CES so far, the Swippitt charges your smartphone in just two seconds. You simply insert your phone (with the compatible battery phone case on it) into the Hub, and your case battery gets swapped out for another fully charged 3,500mAh battery that should last you a full charge.Also: CES 2025: These 9 best mobile accessories have impressed us the mostThere are a total of five batteries inside the machine, so multiple people can use it back-to-back, and it works with a companion app that allows you to check your battery's percentages and control what percentage you want it to be charged to. You can also make reservations so that not every spare battery is taking before you urgently need one.5. Circular's smart ring gets upgrades Circular/ZDNETIn what's arguably the fastest-growing wearables category, smart ring makerCircular made a huge announcementat CES. Alongside new heart health monitoring like Atrial Fibrillation detection included within the ECG capability and improved sensors, smart ring buyers can now figure out their ring size without the need for a physical kit -- something no other smart ring brand has done so far. You can try on the Circular 2 via Digital Ring Sizing, which uses a smartphone's camera to determine a user's ring size.6. A robot vacuum with an arm Maria Diaz/ZDNETYou know how you have to pick up clothes, toys, or other obstacles from your floor before running a robot vacuum? Well, Roborock has a solution: arobot vacuum with a mechanical armthat grabs small obstacles while it cleans.The Roborock Saros Z70's mechanical arm uses OmniGrip technology to remove obstacles under 8 oz while it mops and vacuums your floors. The flagship model is set to debut during the first half of 2025, and we can't wait to try it out in our homes.7. A rollable laptop from Lenovo Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETMove over foldable phones--now there is a rollable laptop. We were impressed byLenovo's 14-inch laptop with a "rollable" displaythat extends upwards over 16 inches. The expandable display is triggered by hitting a button on the keyboard, but it also responds by holding your palm out in front of the device, and then raising or lowering it will activate the display.Also:Intel's next-gen Core Ultra chips could set a new high standard for mobile computing in 2025When we demoed this laptop in person, we were able to fit two browser windows of equal size on top of one another--making it comparable to working with an external monitor.8. World's first 500W charger Ugreen/ZDNETCES is the place where unprecedented innovations make their entrance, and this year we're seeing the world's first 500W charger. Ugreen's Nexode 500W charger has six USB ports -- five USB-C and one USB-A port. There's one USB-C port that supports up to 240W, while the other four each offer up to 100W, and the USB-A has a maximum output of 20W.Also: What's better than a power bank doubling as a hotspot? Its low priceUgreen says this charger is "powerful enough even for large, power-hungry devices like e-bikes."9. An AI-trained virtual wellness assistant Nina Raemont/ZDNETYou may know Movano Health for its Evie Ring, which launched last year, but today at CES, the company announced EvieAI, which is a wellness assistant located in the Evie app that users can consult for health information. What's unique about this AI tool is that it is trained on articles published in over 100,000 medical journals to improve the accuracy and complexity of responses.Movano says the wellness assistant can answer questions concerning symptoms, diseases, or procedures. Anyone with an Evie Ring can try out EvieAI in the app right now.10. Smart glasses with an invisible display Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETMost smart glasses on the market today have the smart display built into the lens, but Halliday debuted smart glasses at CES with an "invisible display," that is, the display is integrated into the frame. What the company calls the world's smallest optical module provides wearers with a field of view similar to that of a 3.5-inch screen. You have to look up to see the display, which we actually found quite comfortable when we demoed these glasses in person.Also: CES 2025: The 7 most advanced smart glasses we tried on - and lovedAnd, of course, the glasses are suited with AI tech features, such as real-time translations in more than 40 languages, a teleprompter text, turn-by-turn navigations, and more.11. Smart home collaborations Ring/KiddeSmart home devices are about to get even smarter thanks to a few key collaborations we've seen at CES. First off, Ring and Kidde are pairing up to launch a new collection of smart smoke and combination detectors featuring Ring technology. When the alarms detect harmful levels of smoke or carbon monoxide (CO), you'll receive a notification through the Ring app.Also: The best smart home tech of CES 2025In addition, Home Depot is throwing its hat in the ring of smart home tech with its new Hubspace devices, which will debut later this year. These new devices include a Remote Switch to control on/off functionality and brightness control for lights, as well as two Vissani AC units with smart climate control and customizable schedules and modes.12. TCL's new devices are easy on the eyes Kerry Wan/ZDNETTCL debuted two new devices that caught our eye and benefit your eyes. The TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G is a smartphone with Nxtpaper 3.0 display technology, which blocks blue light to promote visual comfort and reduce eye strain. And, of course, there's AI involved: the Smart Eye Comfort Mode and the Personalized Eye Comfort Mode adaptively configure the display's colors, brightness, and contrast levels based on the user's preference.The QM6K Mini LED TV is packed with features like precise dimming and brightness controls, a redesigned backlighting system to reduce the halo effect of images on screen, a new color optimization algorithm, and enough quantum crystals to render over one billion colors, which we are excited to test out.13. Lots of laptops Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETMonday seems to be the day dedicated to laptops, as we've so far seen announcements from HP, Dell, and Acer. HP's Elitebook series got an AI boost, and Dell nixed its XPS namesake to rebrand its entire portfolio into the Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. These Dell models will, of course, feature AI capabilities alongside Wi-Fi 7 support and snappy performance.Also: These new Wi-Fi 7 adapters will keep your old laptop future-proof for years to comeMeanwhile,Acer's lineup of devices is super versatile, thanks to their lightweight form factors and OLED displays. And gamers will appreciateMSI's CES announcement, which includes more than ten 18-inch laptops with new AMD processors and special edition designs.14. A hands-free smart lock with ultra-wideband Maria Diaz/ZDNETThere have been a few smart lock announcements at CES this year, but we think the Ultraloq Bolt Mission smart lock is the most groundbreaking. Not only does it use ultra-bandwidth (UWB) technology to unlock your door hands-free as you approach it, but UWB also allows for precision tracking of approved devices that is highly accurate and more secure.Also:Do you need a smart doggy door? I wasn't convinced until I saw this at CESThe lock also supports NFC devices--right now, just Androids, but the company plans to support Apple Home Key as well.15. An alternative to Dolby Atmos ZDNETEclipsa Audio isSamsung and Google's answer to Dolby Atmos. One big difference in this new 3D audio format compared to Dolby Atmos is that it doesn't have licensing fees; it will be a free and open-source audio format. So far, the format is available only onSamsung's 2025 lineupofCrystal UHDto Neo QLED 8K TVs and its 2025 lineup of soundbars, but we're excited to hear it in person nonetheless.CES 2025