Comment on E-Books & Self-Publishing Roundup, September 23, 2014

Connections is the latest New York Times word game that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

Elon Musk's OpenAI competitor is getting ready to raise some big money from Silicon Valley. According to new, anonymously-sourced reports from The Information and TechCrunch, Musk's AI company xAI is currently raising $6 billion on a $18 billion pre-money valuation, and the deal is expected to close in a matter of weeks. SEE ALSO: If you're a paying X user, Elon Musk wants his Grok AI to write your posts for you, report says Musk's ten-month-old AI company is looking to take OpenAI on directly after Musk openly criticized and feuded with the AI giant that he helped create.

(NEW YORK) — Rooting for Donald Trump to fail has rarely been this profitable. Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate’s latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Truth Social itself. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Several of these investors interviewed by The Associated Press say their bearish gambles using “put” options and other trading tools are driven less by their personal feelings about the former president (most don’t like him) than their faith in the woeful underlying financials of a company that made less money last year than the average Wendy’s hamburger franchise. “This company makes no money.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers are assailing websites using a prominent WordPress plugin with millions of attempts to exploit a high-severity vulnerability that allows complete takeover, researchers said. The vulnerability resides in WordPress Automatic, a plugin with more than 38,000 paying customers. Websites running the WordPress content management system use it to incorporate content from other sites.

Enlarge (credit: US EIA) On Thursday, the US Department of Energy released its preliminary estimate for the nation's carbon emissions in the previous year. Any drop in emissions puts us on a path that would avoid some of the catastrophic warming scenarios that were still on the table at the turn of the century.

Enlarge (credit: Discord) Spy Pet, a service that sold access to a rich database of allegedly more than 3 billion Discord messages and details on more than 600 million users, has seemingly been shut down. 404 Media, which broke the story of Spy Pet's offerings, reports that Spy Pet seems mostly shut down.