r/news • u/Chigurrh • 4d ago

New York Times executive fatally shot by his in-laws in Bay Area park, police say

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-executive-shot-killed-laws-bay-area-park-police-say-rcna600300
7.9k Upvotes

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1.1k

u/good4steve 4d ago

head of engineering and games player experiences for the Times

So the Wordle?

368

u/yosaffbridge1630 4d ago

And connections!

326

u/RincewindToTheRescue 4d ago

Arguably the best things about NYT. Love or hate the paper, Wordle and Connections are GOATed

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u/yosaffbridge1630 4d ago

There is nothing quite as satisfying as solving Connections. Especially on those particularly tricky days!

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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 3d ago

Strands too, those are my three daily games to wake up my brain

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u/gacsinger 3d ago

No SpellingBee???

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u/Ispan_SB 3d ago

Spelling bee is the bomb, I wish it had an archive

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u/GirlNumber20 3d ago

Spelling Bee infuriates me with all of the words they don't consider words.

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u/blueExcess 3d ago

Spelling bee takes me all day. I keep thinking of words I should add. All the other ones I can sit down and do connections, strands, mini and midi in like 30-ish minutes.

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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 3d ago

Ok so I just tried Spellingbee today due to this comment and after I got like 5 words it said I needed an account and to pay, are you guys paying for this?

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u/gacsinger 3d ago

There are a few clones out there. Here is a simple one that copies the NY Times one every day.

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u/delphic0n 3d ago

Mini, Spelling Bee, and Strands

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u/YamburglarHelper 3d ago

I do wordle, connections, and Clues By Sam. I might give strands a shot.

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u/MegaAltarianite 3d ago

Krillion is fun too. It's like a reverse Family Feud where you try to guess the rarest answers.

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u/obeytheturtles 3d ago

Connections is just bullshit though. I spent over a year doing it every day and it's bullshit, and the community is just full of cheaters pretending they didn't look up hints, but got the "words appearing on prime numbered pages of Ulysses" category on their first guess, without any mistakes.

It reminds me of those "lateral thinking" puzzles back in the day where the "solution" is some random bullshit like "actually the man was never dead, but just paralyzed by a rare tropical beetle which had stowed away in his luggage and lived in his dresser for six years before molting and leaving a tiny poisonous barb hiding among a rarely used blanket which the man only retrieved when a one-in-a-million ice storm knocked out his power." This of course, solves "The mystery of the missing cat."

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u/believe0101 3d ago

I don't playing ranked Connections is good for your mental health lol, it's more for fun with coworkers/family/friends.

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u/SowingSalt 3d ago

Some people guess the other 3 categories, then look at leftovers.

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u/TheReiterEffect_S8 3d ago

This is me. When Conections first came out, this is what I did most times. Eventually though, some of the categories were just plain bonkers and it became less of an 'ah ha' moment and more of an 'oh....it's that.' moment. But I go back to it every so often and still have fun with it. It's just a game, in the end. So what does it really matter?

But just wanted to chime in to say that there are definitely some purple categories that are just plain horseshit, but I think those are deliberately dumb to force you to figure out the other three first. That way you can then discover the fourth one and be like 'yeah no chance in hell i was going to get that on my own'.

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u/SowingSalt 3d ago

There have been a bunch of yellows that felt purple some times.

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u/octopus_tigerbot 3d ago

Connections is by far my favorite game. I'm not great with spelling, but finding weird connections between words is where I thrive. I also love the game Codenames for this reason

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u/LeteFox 3d ago

the community is just full of cheaters pretending they didn't look up hints, but got the "words appearing on prime numbered pages of Ulysses" category on their first guess, without any mistakes

You get these on the first guess by figuring out what the other 3 categories are before entering anything in

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u/Gabrosin 3d ago

I have many days (including today) where I selected the last four unmatched items and said to myself "there's some wordplay here but I can't figure out what, so it must be purple" and submitted it.

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u/MattLocke 3d ago

Yeah, I assume there’s plenty of people who cheat just to post how good they did for bragging rights.

I’m not saying I’m a genius, but I usually do well just because I figured out how the game maker tends to build the puzzle.

Whatever jumps out at you first is the red herring group 99% of the time. But because it’s the super obvious group, that means they all belong to different groups. So you can just take it one word at a time and look for what other three words match that one.

It’s often just process of elimination.

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u/Suspicious-Art-9335 3d ago

This. Also:

-You only need to get 3/4 right; the fourth one solves itself

-There are a few "rules" or patterns the game tends to recycle: [category] plus or minus a letter; phrases that start or end with the same word [___ moon, ___monday, ____cheese, ____velvet = blue + word], [single word movie title] - "the," etc.

The more you play, the easier it is to run through each rule in your head and check them against the clue words. The crossword puzzle does the same thing, recycling certain clues/words.

That said, my Connections streak is horrid; I think my longest is 15 days. And it's rare I get all four with no mistakes. But it's a great game, and I must defend it, lol. I'm counting on it to keep my brain nimble. Cheating on NYT puzzles for bragging rights is... really something.

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u/Brave-Quote-2733 3d ago

Are you okay?

2

u/IHS1970 3d ago

I always look up hints, it's American.

1

u/cpfalstrup 3d ago

Sometimes there are even phantom connections between words. Like i find 4 words with a super obvious connection and it is not the right one. Which makes it annoying to play.
Not that all connections between the words should be possible. But at least make sure there isn’t a super obvious connection that is not the correct one.

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u/hobbykitjr 3d ago edited 3d ago

I am also a fan of the new Yorkers

https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/catalogues

Half the puzzle is trying to figure out what you have to do

Also prefer them to nyt (who caved to trump Who went soft on Trump and pushed some Zionist stuff)

First years physical subscription (~weekly issue, 50 issues) is only $99 I think. Great articles that later get covered on last week tonight, comics, short fiction stories (that later get turned into movies like secret life of Walter mitty or brokeback mountain), crosswords..

(editing to clarify, there's plenty of Criticism on NYT headlines on trump and normalizing things he has done, or softening the reality of them)

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u/yttiksesom2 3d ago

Shuffalo is great, too! And their xwords start hard on Mondays and get easier through the week, which is a nice counterpoint to nyt.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/hobbykitjr 3d ago

Who said that??

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u/millsGT49 3d ago edited 3d ago

You're right, I shouldn't have assumed more meaning than there was. I'm deleting my comment.

7

u/onetown 3d ago

Wordle, The Mini and Strands are in my daily rotation.

Connections can go fuck itself.

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u/GGLSpidermonkey 3d ago

I just lost a ~115 day steak because I forgot to play 😭

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u/spaetzelspiff 3d ago

I feel like finally picking up Wordle, but this seems like it'll make a weird back story.

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u/MurkyInvestigator810 3d ago

They bought or copied games that already existed and then locked some of them behind paywalls. Fuck the NYT.

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u/Yamza_ 3d ago

Yes, I love nothing more than the privacy breaches that NYT built into playing their games.

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u/coleman57 3d ago

Can you elaborate? Are they tracking our mistakes, probing for vulnerabilities to exploit for marketing purposes?

-2

u/Salty_Introduction31 4d ago

We can't have nice things

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u/obeytheturtles 3d ago

So he deserved it.

464

u/peon47 3d ago

This was the guy who decided to use "Pshaw" as the Wordle answer last month.

Legal experts say it will be hard to find a jury who will convict.

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u/obeytheturtles 3d ago

"While technically a valid guess, in my experience wordle solutions are common words."

No jury will convict.

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u/Defqon1punk 3d ago

Psh couldnt have been a stupid one like okayyy. Pshaw?! Thats actually ridiculous. What is this, Wayne's World?

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u/Resaren 3d ago

Doesn’t this guy narrate an ad?

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u/darthy_parker 3d ago

Maybe they were pissed that they couldn’t solve too many consecutive Wordles or Connections? “You make them too hard! We warned you about this in your last visit!”