Author: Awais

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, and the theme is interesting. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So…

For the sixth year in a row, SpaceX is on course to set a new annual launch record for the Falcon 9 rocket, highlighting SpaceX’s increasing dominance in orbital launch activity, as well as the success of its reusable booster system in enabling frequent, cost-effective flights. The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company is set to complete 159 Falcon 9 launches by the end of the year, beating last year’s annual tally of 132 — 134 if you count the two Falcon Heavy launches, each of which used three Falcon 9 boosters. While some of the launches have involved satellite deployments for…

Years of catering parties and large events that called for countless labor-intensive, highly manipulated small bites have made me truly appreciate the beauty of simple but intentional, well-crafted party apps, particularly those that are easily shareable, such as refined, velvety smooth homemade pâté or a fun, boldly-flavored dip you can prep hours or even days in advance. So, I’ve rounded up 10 make-ahead holiday app recipes that take the stress out of entertaining. They include modern takes on classic and retro party fare, like bourbon-spiked chicken liver pâté paired with sweet-tart cranberry juice gelée and elevated cheese balls, along with…

YouTube is rolling out title A/B testing globally to all creators with access to advanced features, expanding the testing capability beyond the select group that had early access. The announcement came via the platform’s Creator Insider channel, clarifying how the feature works and addressing common questions from creators. Title A/B testing joins thumbnail testing in YouTube’s “Test and Compare” tool. You can test up to three titles, three thumbnails, or combinations of both on a single video. How Title A/B Testing Works The A/B testing tool compares performance across experiment variations over a set period of up to two weeks.…

[Submitted on 1 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 3 Dec 2025 (this version, v2)] View a PDF of the paper titled CuES: A Curiosity-driven and Environment-grounded Synthesis Framework for Agentic RL, by Shinji Mai and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language model based agents are increasingly deployed in complex, tool augmented environments. While reinforcement learning provides a principled mechanism for such agents to improve through interaction, its effectiveness critically depends on the availability of structured training tasks. In many realistic settings, however, no such tasks exist a challenge we term task scarcity, which has become a key…

Jackson, technically “vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives,” will retire in “late January 2026,” Apple says. Newstead, who is currently Meta’s chief legal officer, will take over Apple’s general counsel role on March 1st, 2026, from Adams, who has been Apple’s general counsel since 2017.With Jackson’s retirement and Newstead coming on board, Apple is also making some organizational shifts and shifting some responsibilities to Williams’ COO replacement, Sabih Khan. As described by Apple:The Government Affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which it will be led by…

So it’s official: TechRadar readers are more Android fans than iPhone users. A result that I was mostly expecting, but not with quite as much of a gap.Around the start of November, I posted a poll asking the big question: are TechRadar readers iPhone or Android? After several weeks, the results are in: 62% of poll participants are part of the Android Army, while 29% are Team Apple, and 10% use both.Now, the sheer volume of choice when it comes to Android phones, including the picks of the best Android phones, would mean such phones are going to be the…

The aisles of World Market are where your foodie dreams come true. As the name implies, the retailer stocks goods from around the world. Furniture, home goods, accessories—you name it, there’s a good chance World Market has it. And out of all the aisles of beautiful (and very tempting) merchandise, its global food section is the greatest of all.  Stocked to the brim with unique foods, World Market is the place to find international goodies to fit anyone’s appetite. The chain stocks a range of fan-favorite delectables from around the world, like Pocky or Bubs, and even pantry staples such…

4 of the Machine Learning Advent Calendar. During the first three days, we explored distance-based models for supervised learning: In all these models, the idea was the same: we measure distances, and we decide the output based on the nearest points or nearest centers. Today, we stay in this same family of ideas. But we use the distances in an unsupervised way: k-means. Now, one question for those who already know this algorithm: k-means looks more similar to which model, the k-NN classifier, or the Nearest Centroid classifier? And if you remember, for all the models we have seen so…

For decades now, it’s been fairly well established that once you turn 40 you should start paying attention to your body. That’s when women are supposed to start getting mammograms and men are supposed to start paying a bit more attention to their prostates. Over the next decade, you’ll start getting colonoscopies, and from then on out, it feels like a gradual march of doctor’s appointments and tests until your body collapses sometime in your ‘70s or ‘80s.But what if modern medicine has the timeline all wrong? What if we’re testing some middle-aged people unnecessarily for diseases they’ll most likely…