Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Looking for a spoiler-free way to find a connection? Looking for spoiler-free NYT Connections hints or just wondering why Connections is trending today? We've got what you need to understand the clues for today's puzzle without spoiling any of the answers. Of course, Mashable has also provided daily hints and answers for Connections, Wordle, and Strands for years, so we can help you if that's also what you need. While we are focused more on meanings than hints in this story, sometimes learning that many of the words have completely unrelated meanings is a clue in and of itself.

"Magic" is referred to here and there in the robotics literature, from "magical moments" afforded by a mobile bubble machine, to "spells" intended to entertain and motivate children--but what exactly could this concept mean for designers? Here, we present (1) some theoretical discussion on how magic could inform interaction designs based on reviewing the literature, followed by (2) a practical description of using such ideas to develop a simplified prototype, which received an award in an international robot magic competition. Although this topic can be considered unusual and some negative connotations exist (e.g., unrealistic thinking can be referred to as magical), our results seem to suggest that magic, in the experiential, supernatural, and illusory senses of the term, could be useful to consider in various robot design contexts, also for artifacts like home assistants and autonomous vehicles--thus, inviting further discussion and exploration.

Days after New Hampshire voters received a robocall with an artificially generated voice that resembled President Joe Biden's, the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls. The 2024 United States election would be the first to unfold amid wide public access to AI generators, which let people create images, audio and video – some for nefarious purposes. Institutions rushed to limit AI-enabled misdeeds. Sixteen states enacted legislation around AI's use in elections and campaigns; many of these states required disclaimers in synthetic media published close to an election. The Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency supporting election administrators, published an "AI toolkit" with tips election officials could use to communicate about elections in an age of fabricated information.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer. This is after he initiated a series of robocalls to New Hampshire residents with pre-recorded audio of President Biden's voice, using deepfake AI technology. The fake Biden told voters not to vote in the upcoming primary, saying "Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday." Kramer must pay 6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement. Kramer doesn't just face a fine; he also has criminal charges against him.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer for a series of illegal robocalls using deepfake AI technology and caller ID spoofing during the New Hampshire primaries. Kramer must pay 6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement. Kramer violated the Truth in Caller ID Act passed in 2009 that prohibits anyone from "knowingly transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information with the intent to defraud, cause harm or wrongfully obtain anything of value," according to legislative records. The law preceded the widespread usage of AI, but the FCC voted unanimously to have it apply to such deepfakes this past February. The phony robocalls delivered pre-recorded audio of President Biden's voice using deepfake AI technology to New Hampshire residents leading up to the 2024 presidential primary election.

Devindra: because like you could just always just take a photo of something and be like, yeah, that's how we wonder if it's going to Cherlynn: be a ram hog.

Covert communication (also known as steganography) is the practice of concealing a secret inside an innocuous-looking public object (cover) so that the modified public object (covert code) makes sense to everyone but only someone who knows the code can extract the secret (message). Linguistic steganography is the practice of encoding a secret message in natural language text such as spoken conversation or short public communications such as tweets.. While ad hoc methods for covert communications in specific domains exist ( JPEG images, Chinese poetry, etc), there is no general model for linguistic steganography specifically. We present a novel mathematical formalism for creating linguistic steganographic codes, with three parameters: Decodability (probability that the receiver of the coded message will decode the cover correctly), density (frequency of code words in a cover code), and detectability (probability that an attacker can tell the difference between an untampered cover compared to its steganized version). Verbal or linguistic steganography is most challenging because of its lack of artifacts to hide the secret message in. We detail a practical construction in Python of a steganographic code for Tweets using inserted words to encode hidden digits while using n-gram frequency distortion as the measure of detectability of the insertions. Using the publicly accessible Stanford Sentiment Analysis dataset we implemented the tweet steganization scheme -- a codeword (an existing word in the data set) inserted in random positions in random existing tweets to find the tweet that has the least possible n-gram distortion. We argue that this approximates KL distance in a localized manner at low cost and thus we get a linguistic steganography scheme that is both formal and practical and permits a tradeoff between codeword density and detectability of the covert message.

Positions of chess players in intransitive (rock-paper-scissors) relations are considered. Namely, position A of White is preferable (it should be chosen if choice is possible) to position B of Black, position B of Black is preferable to position C of White, position C of White is preferable to position D of Black, but position D of Black is preferable to position A of White. Intransitivity of winningness of positions of chess players is considered to be a consequence of complexity of the chess environment -- in contrast with simpler games with transitive positions only. The space of relations between winningness of positions of chess players is non-Euclidean. The Zermelo-von Neumann theorem is complemented by statements about possibility vs. impossibility of building pure winning strategies based on the assumption of transitivity of positions of chess players. Questions about the possibility of intransitive positions of players in other positional games are raised.

In one of her best books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie puts these words into the mouth of her least favourite character, Hercule Poirot: "Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it." All detective stories are an attempt to reflect this. Uncovering the truth through clever reasoning, observation and logic is wondrous. You are forced to look at the world anew: a misplaced chair is no longer just a chair, but indicative of a killer's escape; a removed lightbulb tells us the killer did not want to be seen.

What would you describe as intelligence; memorising notes for exams only to forget about them in the summer, or making funny jokes on the fly on seemingly any topic? How about a magician who performs strictly on a script or a magician who changes the routine ever so slightly depending on the audience? This isn't a case for who is'more intelligent', but rather, when something is an act of intelligence. Intelligence is a widely used term ("So and so is highly intelligent", "emotional intelligence", "artificial intelligence" etc.) across many aspects of life. It's often associated with the ability to learn and process information quickly, broadly or deeply.