Maven 11 launches $30M lending pool on Maple as borrowers turn to DeFi
With liquidity drying up in the wake of CeFi contagion, borrowers are turning to decentralized finance for their credit needs.
Computers Tech Games Crypto Music and More
With liquidity drying up in the wake of CeFi contagion, borrowers are turning to decentralized finance for their credit needs.
Disney+ isn’t done raising prices. As part of its third quarter earnings report, Disney revealed that it’s hiking the price of the ad-free service in the US to $11 per month, $3 more than today, on December 8th. If you want to keep the same price, you’ll have to subscribe to the ad-supported tier launching the same day. In other words, the ad-backed plan won’t really be cheaper — you’ll just have to pay more to keep the uninterrupted experience you already have.
The media giant also said it would raise the price of ad-free Hulu by $2 to $15 per month on October 10th. If you can accept ads, you’ll also pay $8 per month instead of today’s $7. A $10 monthly outlay provides both Disney+ and Hulu with ads. A bundle offering ad-free Disney+, ad-supported ESPN+ and its Hulu counterpart is climbing by a dollar to $15 per month, but you’ll dip to $13 per month if you’re willing to tolerate commercials across all three. You’ll have to pay $20 per month to get the trio without any sales pitches.
Disney wasn’t shy about the reason for the price hikes. Although it added 14.4 million Disney+ subscribers during the quarter (for a total of 221 million across all services), the operating losses for its streaming-oriented division surged from $293 million a year ago to nearly $1.1 billion. The production costs for Disney+ and Hulu are soaring, and Disney wants to make that money back.
The performance contrasts sharply with a key rival. While Netflix is prepping its own ad-driven plan, it’s currently losing customers — it’s counting on advertising to return growth where Disney is simply hoping to make a profit. As rough as its finances might be, Disney+ is in a stronger position.
Well, well, well, Thursday again? That day of the week when you start feeling lighter because the weekend is coming, but everything starts getting a little more difficult, because…the weekend is coming. And that’s true for Quordle in addition to work.
So never fear! The answers are below. But first, maybe a few hints, and a little information about the puzzle, will help get your brain back to peak working condition.
Quordle is a five-letter word guessing game similar to Wordle, except each guess applies letters to four words at the same time. You get nine guesses instead of six to correctly guess all four words. It looks like playing four Wordle games at the same time, and that is essentially what it is. But it’s not nearly as intimidating as it sounds.
Yes, though not diabolically so.
Amid the Wordle boom of late 2021 and early 2022, when everyone was learning to love free, in-browser, once-a-day word guessing games, creator Freddie Meyer says he took inspiration from one of the first big Wordle variations, Dordle — the one where you essentially play two Wordles at once. He took things up a notch, and released Quordle on January 30. Meyer’s creation was covered in The Guardian six days later, and now, according to Meyer, it attracts millions of daily users. Today, Meyer earns modest revenue from Patreon, where dedicated Quordle fans can donate to keep their favorite puzzle game running.
“Kwordle.” It should rhyme with “Wordle,” and definitely should not be pronounced exactly like “curdle.”
Yes and no.
Your starting strategy should be the same as with Wordle. In fact, if you have a favorite Wordle opening word, there’s no reason to change that here. We suggest something rich in vowels, featuring common letters like C, R, and N. But you do you.
After your first guess, however, you’ll notice things getting out of control if you play Quordle exactly like Wordle.
Solving a Wordle puzzle can famously come down to a series of single letter-change variations. If you’ve narrowed it down to “-IGHT,” you could guess “MIGHT” “NIGHT” “LIGHT” and “SIGHT” and one of those will probably be the solution — though this is also a famous way to end up losing in Wordle, particularly if you play on “hard mode.” In Quordle, however, this sort of single-letter winnowing is a deadly trap, and it hints at the important strategic difference between Wordle and Quordle: In Quordle, you can’t afford to waste guesses unless you’re eliminating as many letters as possible at all times.
Guessing a completely random word that you already know isn’t the solution, just to eliminate three or four possible letters you haven’t tried yet, is thought of as a desperate, latch-ditch move in Wordle. In Quordle, however, it’s a normal part of the player’s strategic toolset.
In my experience Quordle can be a slow game, sometimes dragging out longer than it would take to play Wordle four times. But a sort of blunt-force guessing approach can speed things up. The following strategy also works with Wordle if you only want the solution, and don’t care about having the fewest possible guesses:
Try starting with a series of words that puts all the vowels (including Y) on the board, along with some other common letters. I’ve had good luck with the three words: “NOTES,” “ACRID,” and “LUMPY.” YouTuber DougMansLand suggests four words: “CANOE,” “SKIRT,” “PLUMB,” and “FUDGY.”
Most of the alphabet is now eliminated, and you’ll only have the ability to make one or two wrong guesses if you use this strategy. But in most cases you’ll have all the information you need to guess the remaining words without any wrong guesses.
If you’ve already run out of strategy, though, and you’re still stumped, here are some hints:
Synonyms for all four words are in the following sentence (in no particular order).
In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, I gathered my courage, donned my regionally appropriate hat, and chatted with my most spiteful acquaintance over a few airy pastries.
Letters occur twice in three of today’s four words.
Nope.
B, C, P, and S.
Are you sure you want to know?
There’s still time to turn back.
OK you asked for it. The answers are:
Beret
Catty
Puffy
Spunk
We’re almost through this week. It’s Thursday. Everything is going fine, but the answer to today’s Heardle is a song you can’t quite pin down. There’s no way you can finish out the workweek in this kind of suspense. Thankfully, we’re here to help.
The answer will be spoiled below, and you can even play the song. But first, here’s some strategy, a few hints, and a little information about the game itself to help jog the answer loose from your brain before we just blurt out the solution.
Heardle is a song-guessing game along the lines of Worldle, mixed with the TV gameshow Name That Tune. The game presents a song introduction in the form of six short clips, and the player must guess the song. Clips start at one second, and get progressively longer, eventually totaling a maximum of 16 seconds.
The fewer clips it takes a player to guess the song, the more bragging rights they have when they share their success on social media or in a group chat. So far, the vast majority of the songs have been popular on U.S. and U.K. radio, and all are from the 1960s or later.
No. Heardle was created by a London-based designer named Glenn Angelo, during the February 2022 boom in Wordle derivatives. After its initial viral success, it was acquired by Spotify in July of 2022 for an undisclosed amount. Game functionality was not noticeably different after the change in ownership.
It’s pronounced “hurdle,” which would seem to explain why our research indicates many people find it online by searching something like “hurdle game,” or “hurdle wordle.”
The only way to up your Heardle game is to listen to a lot of pop music. Unlike Wordle, which can reward players for strategy, Heardle is almost a pure trivia game — meaning one either knows the answer or they don’t. It may seem like some Heardle puzzles are harder to solve — perhaps because the answer is on the tip of your tongue and you still lose, or because after learning the answer, you feel you could not have been expected to know it. Nonetheless, every Heardle puzzle is equally “hard,” because knowing or not knowing something is a binary.
If you have a look at the complete list of Heardle answers at Pro Game Guides, you’ll see some patterns emerge. Answers can be from any decade from the 60s to the present, but recent songs are a little better represented. In the past, perhaps due to being the creation of a U.K.-based music fan, there were occasionally artists most Americans probably have not heard, like Kevin Lyttle. After the Spotify acquisition, artists like Carrie Underwood, who probably aren’t well-known to the British, started to appear. But these are by no means clear trends. The only universal criteria seem to be that the songs are all hits, and that they’re sung in English.
And now, here come the hints.
The 1970s.
A solo artist.
Rock.
This one qualifies as soft rock, and might even be considered “yacht rock.”
Eric Clapton
“Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton.
Thursday! What a concept! The weekend looms on the horizons and there’s a brand new Wordle — what more could you want? Well, if what you want is a clue or two, our daily Wordle help is here for you.
The answer to the August 11 Wordle, puzzle #418, can be found at the end of this article. Before you get there, though, there are a couple of subtle clues to help you narrow it down, and as you scroll down, you’ll see we’ve gathered a selection of the best tips and strategies from our previous reporting to help you every day.
Former Reddit engineer Josh Wardle came up with the game in 2021 as a private exercise for him and his word game-loving partner. It eventually became a staple of their family WhatsApp messaging, and that’s when Wardle started to suspect he might have something special enough to merit a wider release.
Thousands of people around the globe now play this game each day, and fans have even created alternatives to Wordle inspired by the original format. This includes music identification game Heardle, Hollywood nerd faves Actorle and Framed, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.
Not the day you’re after? You’ll find the Wordle answer for August 10 here.
We have some ideas to help you pick the perfect first move. Such tips include choosing a word with at least two different vowels to rule those building blocks in or out, plus a few common consonants such as S, T, R, or N.
Also, even if you’re attached to your mathematically sound starter, once it’s been the answer on any given day it won’t be the answer again for a few years — so if you happen to get the elusive 1/6 result, celebrate by swapping out your starting five.
While you could once play the entire archive of past puzzles, the archive was taken down at the request of the New York Times, according to the site’s creator.
If you’ve been finding Wordle too easy, there is a Hard Mode you can enable to give yourself more of a challenge. But unless you activate this mode, we can assure you that Wordle isn’t getting harder.
The whole point of Wordle is that everyone’s solving the same puzzle, with the same answer, no matter where you are in the world. However, occasionally the puzzle game will accept two different correct solutions on the same day. This aberration is due to changes the New York Times began making after it acquired Wordle earlier this year, excising words form Wardle’s original list that the team considers obscure or potentially offensive.
To make sure you’re always getting the same puzzle as everyone else, refresh your browser before you play — don’t worry, the site will keep your streak.
It’s a verb, to do with obtaining information.
…the letter G!
Not today.
Ready?
It’s time to reveal the solution.
It’s…
GLEAN.
Don’t know the meaning of GLEAN? You’re not the only one! It’s a word used to refer to gaining information — usually information that’s not super clear or readily accessible: “Listening in on their cryptic conversation, I gleaned that they were trying to plan some kind of heist.”
Reporting by Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.