Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

Microsoft won't be the sole cloud provider for OpenAI but can decide whether to deliver the company with capacity or allow another party to fill the need.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, President Trump suggested that he's open to the idea of Elon Musk or Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

After founding my pediatric mental health care company in 2021, one of our first patients was a child whod been referred to us from the emergency room (ER) after a deeply troubling experience in the healthcare system. She was put on medication by her primary care provider (PCP) to help her cope with emotional struggles following a breakup, but when the initial dosage didnt seem to work, her doctor kept increasing it. Over time, she developed severe side effects, including self-harm behaviors like hair-pulling. Desperate for help, her mother begged the PCP to take her off the medication, but the provider didnt know how to safely taper the dosage.In a state of panic, they went to the ER, but the ER isnt equipped to manage complex medication adjustments like this. Its not something they do. The PCP had referred the family to the ER for help, but the ER essentially sent them back. This left the mother in shambles, caught in a system where no one seemed ableor trainedto help.Sadly, this story is far too common. Providers often prescribe psychiatric medications without adequate training, relying on studies rather than clinical expertise. Its like trying to treat chest pain by prescribing heart medication without consulting a cardiologist first. You wouldnt manage an arrhythmia without expert input, yet we see this approach all the time in mental health care.But its not the PCPs faulttheyre not set up to handle mental health crises. Yet, the lack of collaboration and expertise in these situations have devastating consequences for families. Its a glaring symptom of a much larger crisis: the youth mental health epidemic.The alarming state of youth mental healthAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide rates among children and young adults increased by 62% between 2007 and 2021, with social media platforms contributing to feelings of inadequacy, isolation, and hopelessness. This alarming trend reflects a broader crisis: Between 2016 and 2020, 5.6 million children and adolescents were diagnosed with anxiety and 2.4 million with depression.While these figures predate the pandemic, the crisis has deepened in recent years, especially among adolescent girls, who face mounting social pressures, academic stress, and the pervasive impact of social media. In 2023, 73% of adolescent girls reported at least one mental health issue, with nearly half (48%) experiencing comorbid conditions.The unfair burden on pediatriciansThe youth mental health crisis isnt just staggering in numbersits playing out every day in pediatric clinics. With 74% of U.S. counties lacking child psychiatrists, pediatricians, who didnt sign up to manage mental health care, are now on the front lines because other mental health services are either full or inaccessible. These doctors have taken an oath to care for their patients, but theyre being asked to treat mental health conditions, often with inadequate resources and training.Its not their fault. The economics of mental health care in this country make it difficult to provide accessible, effective treatment, and the shortage of psychiatric prescribers only adds to the burden. The reality is, primary care providers are doing their best in a broken system that hasnt given them the tools or support to succeed.Consider this: fewer than 5% of pediatric patients are monitored according to the FDAs recommended schedule for antidepressants with black-box warnings, despite black-box warnings about increased suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Meanwhile, antidepressant prescriptions in children aged 512 have increased by over 40% from 2015 to 2021. These medications are powerful, and prescribing them without therapy or close monitoring puts kids at risk.Pediatricians are trying to do right by their patients, but the current system sets them up to fail. They need a model that supports them, alleviates the burden, and ensures kids get the right care.The case for collaborative careCollaborative care offers a solution that needs more attention. Its a model that exists but isnt widely implemented due to state regulations, reimbursement barriers, and provider shortages. By integrating psychiatry and therapy into the primary care setting, collaborative care makes the most of limited resources while ensuring kids receive holistic, evidence-based treatment.Heres how it works: Pediatricians oversee the medical home, supported by psychiatrists who provide guidance on medications, dosages, and side effects. Therapists work with families to build coping skills and address underlying issues. Together, these professionals create a comprehensive care plan that meets the childs physical and mental health needs.With the youth mental health crisis overwhelming existing systems, collaborative care extends the reach of scarce psychiatric resources and empowers pediatricians to provide informed, effective care. Its a model that just makes sense.Build a better systemPediatricians shouldnt have to shoulder the burden of youth mental health care alone. The crisis theyre facing in their clinics is a symptom of a larger systemic failureone that can only be addressed by breaking down the silos between primary care, psychiatry, and therapy.Psychiatric urgent care is an example of whats possible. It provides immediate, specialized support for kids in distress, bridging the gap between crisis care and long-term treatment. But for these models to succeed, they need to connect seamlessly with primary care, ensuring that kids and families have continuous, coordinated support.We also need changes in policy and reimbursement. Collaborative care must be reimbursed consistently across all states, including Medicaid. Without systemic support, even the best models cant scale to meet the demand.The path forwardIts time to recognize mental health as an integral part of overall well-being. This means equipping pediatricians with the tools and training they need, supporting them with psychiatric expertise, and fostering strong partnerships across care teams.The youth mental health crisis is urgent, but its not insurmountable. By embracing collaborative care and removing the barriers that prevent its widespread adoption, we can build a system that truly supports kids, families, and the providers who care for them.As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, Im calling on policymakers, healthcare leaders, and communities to take action. This isnt just about fixing a broken systemits about creating a new one that ensures every child has the chance to thrive.Monika Roots, MD is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and cofounder, president and chief medical officer of Bend Health.

As an e-commerce entrepreneur, I loathe Google. I know all too intimately after spending $2 million advertising on Google, that Googleyes, beloved Googleis in fact a monopoly.In 2020, the same year the federal government launched its antitrust lawsuit against Google for monopolizing search options in America, my companys Google ads account was mysteriously and erroneously suspended, resulting in a loss of over $150,000.Our team lost countless hours investigating the suspension and trying to get through to someoneanyone at Googlewho could help. We even had our lawyer send a letter. We quickly learned: Google is too big to care. Eventually, we created a workaround, which was not a solution but a triage to recoup revenue we were losing dramatically. We never heard from anyone at Google, the triage became a permanent fix, and we went on with our lives.The experience, however, altered my understanding of the world. The internet, I realized, was not equalit was monopolized by Google. When theres one main place where people go to search it, with approximately 90% of internet searches happening on Google, there is one main street where all the shoppers in the world are shopping.The internet is real estateImagine you want to sell lemonade on a hot day. Instead of multiple locations in your city for people like you to serve thirsty customers looking to drink lemonade, imagine there is only one small street that has three storefronts.As a business I want to be on this street, and this street is called Google. The first few results on a Google search are exceptionally prime real estate. Industry calls Google a high-intent marketing channel, which simply means people searching on Google are actively looking to make a purchase (thirsty people looking for lemonade).As a business I must compete against everyone in the world who wants American customers for these top three to four storefronts, also known as sponsored search results.The cost of doing business can get quite expensive when there are only three to four storefronts for lease on Main Street, continually being auctioned off at all hours of the day.How Google makes moneyWe all innately understand that Google searches the internet for results to an inquiry and prioritizes the results according to its algorithm.But search on its own doesnt pay. Google makes nearly 80% of its $278 billion dollar revenue (just in 2021) from companies like ours (and anyone) willing to pay top dollar to have their advertisements featured in the sponsored section above search results, for a search query.According to Google: Google Ads runs an auction every single time it has an ad space availableon a search result, or on a blog, news site, or some other page. Each auction decides which ads will show at that moment in that space. Your bid puts you in the auction.Relevancy is necessary to entice people to click on an ad and for Google to see it as related to the search terms. In addition, the responses are weighted to give an advantage to the highest bidder, meaning the company willing to pay the most for eyeballs and clicks usually wins.What about organic, unpaid search results?When I type in can a business survive without showing on Google search in Google, its AI overview response is: While technically possible, it is extremely difficult for a business to survive without being on Google in todays digital landscape, as most people use Google to search for businesses online, making it a crucial tool for reaching potential customers.The problem with this answer is that about 96% of webpages get zero organic traffic from Google search at all. If a business does not show up in those first few ad results it is unlikely that it will succeed.To be seen on Google one must almost always pay both for ads and for organic ranking through search engine optimization (SEO), a critical backend technique to get any form of visibility on Google. SEO has become so valuable that AI is now being deployed to steal competitor businesses years of SEO work in what are called SEO heists, which steal the organic ranking of a competitor business.The rise of LTV tacticsDigital marketing is expensive. In fact it is frequently more expensive than what the company will receive from a customer making an individual purchase. A company might charge $5 for a lemonade, even though it cost them $7 to get that purchase.With digital marketing so expensive, e-commerce businesses often push for more return from every customer through LTV: customer lifetime value. Simply put, consumers are valued by how much they spend over their lifetime with a company..The LTV push is inescapable these days as e-commerce companies try to keep customers close to balance the expense of digital advertising.Its the Now! Limited time if you sign up for email culture. And the Oh, actually sign up for text messages too! messaging. The please and thanks and like us on Instagram and tag us and tell your friends and get a free lemonade if you tell your friends and make free content for us tactics. And on and on.It is exhausting and never-ending for both consumers and entrepreneurs alike.But this is the world we live in. All e-commerce companies must optimize for Google or die. And that is the very definition of a monopoly, whether or not a court case says so.Maureen Brown is cofounder and CEO of Mosie Baby.

Tucked away in Jakartas business district is the Stalk Tree-Hugger. It is designed by RAD+ar, and it embraces five existing tall trees with a parametric fabric, building a mesmerizing play of light and shadows to support different commercial activities. The project focuses on creating a unique spatial experience while adopting and maintaining a simple yet functional design. The design is intended to be in complete harmony and tandem with the surrounding greenery. It includes a restaurant and lounge, protected by the shifting shadows of the trees, building an intimate and interesting ambiance.Designer: RAD+arVisitors are welcomed into the restaurant which feels inviting and yet mysterious. The tensile structures form dynamic patterns as they move harmoniously with the wind and the swaying trees, fostering an architectural setting that is nature-centric and feels quite comforting. The entrance is subtly merged with vertical plants, and it leads to a narrow, greenery-lined foyer that holds an upper bar-restaurant amidst the trees.The aforementioned upper bar-restaurant is topped with a lightweight steel-timber thatch roof. This unique roof provides shade and support to the parametric tensile structure. The roof doubles up as a facade and a diverse ceiling, transforming into a lovely lantern at night, that subtly enriches the cityscape, and elevates the ambiance of the space for different events, including music performances.The bar-restaurant occupies around 750 square meters, and it offers a unique experience unlike F&B outlets. The design team at RAD+ar was led by Antonius Richard, and they wanted to demonstrate how minimal intervention in nature can create versatile and interesting spaces for commercial activities. This project was a study by them, to understand how to better reduce natural interference while retaining the commercial value of the land.The project is a wonderful specimen of flexibility since it proves how experimentations with limitless permutations for natural elements and lighting are possible while causing minimal impact and disturbance to the existing landscape. The firm wanted to create a dynamic and free-flowing space that cleverly incorporates nature, and they were successful in doing so.They utilized attractors that created constantly changing properties. The different buildings also served as revolving shadows, letting visitors have an interesting experience under the shadows. The movement of the trees and the flowing wind helped to form a relaxing and tranquil space, where visitors can peacefully observe nature, and be around it.The post This Parametric Tensile Structure Is A Captivating Bar-Restaurant Amongst Trees In Indonesia first appeared on Yanko Design.

Donald Trump pardoned the creator of the worlds first dark-web drug market, who is now a libertarian cause clbre in some parts of the crypto community.

The exit will cut a huge chunk from the World Health Organizations budget, but the short-term financial gain for the US could come at the cost of disease outbreaks flaring up across the world.

Ross Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady corner of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances.

OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on Tuesdaya significant jump from 2023, when the company spent just $260,000 on Capitol Hill. The company also disclosed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for five years for Senator Lindsey Graham and started at OpenAI in October. The filing also shows activity related to two new pieces of legislation in the final months of the year: the Houses AI Advancement and Reliability Act, which would set up a government center for AI research, and the Senates Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would create shared benchmark tests for AI models.OpenAI did not respond to questions about its lobbying efforts.But perhaps more important, the disclosure is a clear signal of the companys arrival as a political player, as its first year of serious lobbying ends and Republican control of Washington begins. While OpenAIs lobbying spending is still dwarfed by its peersMeta tops the list of Big Tech spenders, with more than $24 million in 2024the uptick comes as it and other AI companies have helped redraw the shape of AI policy.For the past few years, AI policy has been something like a whack-a-mole response to the risks posed by deepfakes and misinformation. But over the last year, AI companies have started to position the success of the technology as pivotal to national security and American competitiveness, arguing that the government must therefore support the industrys growth. As a result, OpenAI and others now seem poised to gain access to cheaper energy, lucrative national security contracts, and a more lax regulatory environment thats unconcerned with the minutiae of AI safety.While the big players seem more or less aligned on this grand narrative, messy divides on other issues are still threatening to break through the harmony on display at President Trumps inauguration this week.AI regulation really began in earnest after ChatGPT launched in November 2022. At that point, a lot of the conversation was about responsibility, says Liana Keesing, campaigns manager for technology reform at Issue One, a democracy nonprofit that tracks Big Techs influence.Companies were asked what theyd do about sexually abusive deepfake images and election disinformation. Sam Altman did a very good job coming in and painting himself early as a supporter of that process, Keesing says.OpenAI started its official lobbying effort around October 2023, hiring Chan Parka onetime Senate Judiciary Committee counsel and Microsoft lobbyistto lead the effort. Lawmakers, particularly then Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were vocal about wanting to curb these particular harms; OpenAI hired Schumers former legal counsel, Reginald Babin, as a lobbyist, according to data from OpenSecrets. This past summer, the company hired the veteran political operative Chris Lehane as its head of global policy.OpenAIs previous disclosures confirm that the companys lobbyists subsequently focused much of last year on legislation like the No Fakes Act and the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act. The bills did not materialize into law. But as the year went on, the regulatory goals of AI companies began to change. One of the biggest shifts that weve seen, Keesing says, is that theyve really started to focus on energy.In September, Altman, along with leaders from Nvidia, Anthropic, and Google, visited the White House and pitched the vision that US competitiveness in AI will depend on subsidized energy infrastructure to train the best models. Altman proposed to the Biden administration the construction of multiple five-gigawatt data centers, which would each consume as much electricity as New York City.Around the same time, companies like Meta and Microsoft started to say that nuclear energy will provide the path forward for AI, announcing deals aimed at firing up new nuclear power plants.It seems likely OpenAIs policy team was already planning for this particular shift. In April, the company hired lobbyist Matthew Rimkunas, who worked for Bill Gatess sustainable energy effort Breakthrough Energies and, before that, spent 16 years working for Senator Graham; the South Carolina Republican serves on the Senate subcommittee that manages nuclear safety.This new AI energy race is inseparable from the positioning of AI as essential for national security and US competitiveness with China. OpenAI laid out its position in a blog post in October, writing, AI is a transformational technology that can be used to strengthen democratic values or to undermine them. Thats why we believe democracies should continue to take the lead in AI development. Then in December, the company went a step further and reversed its policy against working with the military, announcing it would develop AI models with the defense-tech company Anduril to help take down drones around military bases.That same month, Sam Altman said during an interview with The Free Press that the Biden administration was not that effective in shepherding AI: The things that I think should have been the administrations priorities, and I hope will be the next administrations priorities, are building out massive AI infrastructure in the US, having a supply chain in the US, things like that.That characterization glosses over the CHIPS Act, a $52 billion stimulus to the domestic chips industry that is, at least on paper, aligned with Altmans vision. (It also preceded an executive order Biden issued just last week, to lease federal land to host the type of gigawatt-scale data centers that Altman had been asking for.)Intentionally or not, Altmans posture aligned him with the growing camaraderie between President Trump and Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai all sat directly behind Trumps family at the inauguration on Monday, and Altman also attended. Many of them had also made sizable donations to Trumps inaugural fund, with Altman personally throwing in $1 million.Its easy to view the inauguration as evidence that these tech leaders are aligned with each other, and with other players in Trumps orbit. But there are still some key dividing lines that will be worth watching. Notably, theres the clash over H-1B visas, which allow many noncitizen AI researchers to work in the US. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is, as of this week, no longer a part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency) have been pushing for that visa program to be expanded. This sparked backlash from some allies of the Trump administration, perhaps most loudly Steve Bannon.Another fault line is the battle between open- and closed-source AI. Google and OpenAI prevent anyone from knowing exactly whats in their most powerful models, often arguing that this keeps them from being used improperly by bad actors. Musk has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the issue, alleging that closed-source models are antithetical to OpenAIs hybrid nonprofit structure. Meta, whose Llama model is open-source, recently sided with Musk in that lawsuit. Venture capitalist and Trump ally Marc Andreessen echoed these criticisms of OpenAI on X just hours after the inauguration. (Andreessen has also said that making AI models open-source makes overbearing regulations unnecessary.)Finally, there are the battles over bias and free speech. The vastly different approaches that social media companies have taken to moderating contentincluding Metas recent announcement that it would end its US fact-checking programraise questions about whether the way AI models are moderated will continue to splinter too. Musk has lamented what he calls the wokeness of many leading models, and Andreessen said on Tuesday that Chinese LLMs are much less censored than American LLMs (though thats not quite true, given that many Chinese AI models have government-mandated censorship in place that forbids particular topics). Altman has been more equivocal: No two people are ever going to agree that one system is perfectly unbiased, he told The Free Press.Its only the start of a new era in Washington, but the White House has been busy. It has repealed many executive orders signed by President Biden, including the landmark order on AI that imposed rules for government use of the technology (while it appears to have kept Bidens order on leasing land for more data centers). Altman is busy as well. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank reportedly plan to spend up to $500 billion on a joint venture for new data centers; the project was announced by President Trump, with Altman standing alongside. And according to Axios, Altman will also be part of a closed-door briefing with government officials on January 30, reportedly about OpenAIs development of a powerful new AI agent.