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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 13.

Though I experiment with AI chatbots professionally, I've found many ways to incorporate them into my regular life, including as a parent to a lively baby and uncle to several nieces and nephews.

ChatGPT has been a surprisingly big help. It's not a babysitter, but it can be a real boon for trying new ways to entertain kids or just keep juggling all of the many simultaneous parenting roles without dripping any balls. It may even be able to provide the rarest of all commodities as a parent – free time.

Bedtime stories

(Image credit: Images created by DALL-E 3)

Every parent or caregiver has been here: it’s bedtime, and you're exhausted. You've somehow read every book you've ever bought for your kid all in one day, and you want to give them something new, but even your imagination feels depleted. If only you had a ready story, maybe something about a robot who loves pancakes?

ChatGPT can take vague ideas or random words and make something surprisingly entertaining from them. Try asking it: “Can you tell me a bedtime story about a dragon who loves tacos and befriends a unicorn who dislikes rainbows?” or "Create a bedtime story about a gentle giant who learns to make friends despite everyone being afraid of his size."

Jukebox lyricist

(Image credit: Images created by DALL-E 3)

My son loves music, and I love introducing him to new songs or making up new ones. However, Improv lyrics don't always cut it, especially if I'm entertaining his older cousins.

Rather than listen to "Baby Shark" and "Wheels on the Bus" on repeat, I use ChatGPT to bring new life to old tunes. I've asked the AI everything from "Write me a song about a dancing giraffe named Gerald who loves ice cream to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, LIttle Star," to "Give me lyrics to a song about a puppy who dreams of going to space to the tune of Hush Little Baby." And had pretty solid results, as you can see below.

"Oh little pup, looking at stars above
Dreaming of rockets, and moonbeams you love
Wearing your helmet, wagging your tail
Puppy astronaut ready to sail!"

Snack time

(Image credit: Images created by DALL-E 3)

Snack time with babies and toddlers can be a minefield with attempts to make things that are healthy but that they'll like. Trying to do it while also keeping an eye on the children is even more challenging.

Luckily, you can combine the two by asking ChatGPT for ideas. in the vein of "What are healthy snack ideas for children aged one, three, and five that they can also help make." The banana sushi rolls (banana slices rolled in granola), apple slices with peanut butter and cinnamon, and make-your-own berry yogurt parfaits have all been massive hits.

DIY games

(Image credit: Images created by DALL-E 3)

On rainy days, keeping kids entertained indoors can feel like taming wild animals. They were even bored with Bluey, which is a real warning sign. I turned to ChatGPT and asked for a game that didn't require screens, glitter, or immense patience.

ChatGPT delivered beautifully. "Come up with a simple game for young kids that doesn't require much setup or clean up," I asked. The answer was "Sock Toss Basketball," which employs laundry baskets and balled-up socks as a fun activity.

You could also try something like "What's a quick indoor activity for kids using only paper and markers?" and get a suggestion of making indoor treasure maps that the kids can populate with their favorite toys and treats.

Better boo-boos

(Image credit: Images created by DALL-E 3)

Kids get scrapes and sniffles; that's just inevitable. Keeping their spirits up and making the road to recovery bearable (for both of you) can be tricky, but I've found ChatGPT to have a lot of ideas.

Ask it, "How can I get my young child to take their medicine without complaining," and you'll get ideas about making a whole production for the "magic potion" or suggestions on incorporating it into the bedtime rituals they already like, maybe even embedding it in a bedtime story.

The same goes for applying a bandage or even sunscreen. You have a lot on your plate as a parent. It's not lazy to look for ideas from parenting forums or books, and ChatGPT is just another helpful tool that you can call on for very specific advice any time.

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Hints and answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 171, for March 13.

• Gemini Robotics is a new model
• It focuses on the physical world and will be used by robots
• It's visual, interactive, and general

Google Gemini is good at many things that happen inside a screen, including generative text and images. Still, the latest model, Google Robotics, is a vision language action model that moves the generative AI into the physical world and could substantially speed up the humanoid robot revolution race.

Gemini Robotics, which Google's DeepMind unveiled on Wednesday, improves Gemini's abilities in three key areas:

• Dexterity
• Interactivity
• Generalization

Each of these three aspects significantly impacts the success of robotics in the workplace and unknown environments.

Generalization allows a robot to take Gemini's vast knowledge about the world and things, apply it to new situations, and accomplish tasks on which it's never been trained. In one video, researchers show a pair of robot arms controlled by Gemini Robotics, a table-top basketball game, and ask it to "slam dunk the basketball."

Even though the robot hadn't seen the game before, it picked up the small orange ball and stuffed it through the plastic net.

Google Gemini Robotics also makes robots more interactive and able to respond not only to changing verbal assignments but also to unpredictable conditions.

In another video, researchers asked the robot to put grapes in a bowl with bananas, but then they moved the bowl around while the robot arm adjusted and still managed to put the grapes in a bowl.

Google also demonstrated the robot's dextrous capabilities, which let it tackle things like playing tic-tac-toe on a wooden board, erasing a whiteboard, and folding paper into origami.

Instead of hours of training on each task, the robots respond to near-constant natural language instructions and perform the tasks without guidance. It's impressive to watch.

Naturally, adding AI to robotics is not new.

Last year, OpenAI partnered up with Figure AI to develop a humanoid robot that can work out tasks based on verbal instructions. As with Gemini Robotics, Figure 01's visual language model works with the OpenAI speech model to engage in back-and-forth conversations about tasks and changing priorities.

In the demo, the humanoid robot stands before dishes and a drainer. It's asked about what it sees, which it lists, but then the interlocutor changes tasks and asks for something to eat. Without missing a beat, the robot picks up an Apple and hands it to him.

(Image credit: Google)

While most of what Google showed in the videos was disembodied robot arms and hands working through a wide range of physical tasks, there are grander plans. Google is partnering with Apptroniks to add the new model to its Apollo humanoid Robot.

Google will connect the dots with additional programming, a new advanced visual language model called Gemini Robotics-ER (embodied reasoning).

Gemini Robotics-ER will enhance robotics spatial reasoning and should help robot developers connect the models to existing controllers.

Again, this should improve on-the-fly reasoning and make it possible for the robots to quickly figure out how to grasp and use unfamiliar objects. Google calls Gemini Rotbotics ER an end-to-end solution and claims it "can perform all the steps necessary to control a robot right out of the box, including perception, state estimation, spatial understanding, planning and code generation."

Google is providing Gemini robotics -ER model to several business- and research-focused robotics firms, including Boston Dynamics (makers of Atlas), Agile Robots, and Agility Robots.

All-in-all, it's a potential boon for humanoid robotics developers. However, since most of these robots are designed for factories or still in the laboratory, it may be some time before you have a Gemini-enhanced robot in your home.

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The 2025 iteration of the Mac Studio marks a new era in personal computing for Apple as it pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved, using what is essentially a bigger version of Intel’s now-defunct next unit of computing (NUC).

I pitted its full-fat, top-end version, the M3 Ultra with a 16TB SSD and 512GB of RAM against the competition to get a rough idea of how good a bargain it is. Unsurprisingly, it easily competes against some of the best workstation PCs in the world.

There’s a trio of ThreadRipper rigs, seven Xeon workstations (across three generations) and for good measure, Nvidia’s magnificent Digits and three of Apple’s very own PCs, the Mac Mini (M4 Pro), the Mac Pro (M2 Ultra) and a less capable version of the Mac Studio (M4 Max).

The entire table is at the end of this article. Note that some cells are empty because I simply don’t have the information at hand (e.g. size of some workstations, performance of Digits etc).

Credit where credit is due, Apple managed to deliver something I was not expecting it to do anytime soon: 512GB of unified memory in a computer.

That stroke of genius meant moving the comparison to Intel Xeon and AMD ThreadRipper Pro systems, far more expensive professional platforms compared to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core ones.

As well as zeroing on the workstation vertical, it also firmly signals Apple’s ambitions to be a major player in the red-hot local AI hardware market.

(Worth checking out my article published in June 2023 where I suggested that the Mac Studio would replace the Mac Pro (and make PC vendors nervous).

I analysed the prices of these systems (using the most up to date data I could find) and there’s no two way of putting it.

A $14,000 bargain if you’re after memory

The Apple Mac Studio Ultra, even at more than $14,000 is a bargain if you’re looking for as much system memory as possible, at $28 per GB.

That’s a bit less than Puget Systems and almost a third of what you’d pay for a maxed-out Mac Mini (or half the Apple Mac Pro with its puny 192GB RAM).

Most importantly, it is far, far cheaper than the likes of Dell or HP; turns out Windows workstations with half a terabyte RAM, don’t come cheap.

Remember that Apple uses unified memory which has a much higher bandwidth (800GB/s) than DDR5 memory (even across eight memory modules).

It delivers the type of performance you’d expect from an integrated GPU; as Servethehome’s Patrick Kennedy puts it, “The cost is high in the context of a workstation, but it is cheap when you compare it to NVIDIA’s cost per GB of memory”.

Remember as well that I have configured this workstation with a 16TB onboard storage; no other major player has access to that sort of storage unless you resort to RAID-0 across multiple much smaller SSDs.

There’s also the fact that it comes with 10GbE LAN by default as well as Thunderbolt 5, a data transfer technology not available to any other workstation at the time of writing, which, in due time, will pave the way for innovative external peripherals.

I also looked at 3 other composite metrics, all looking at processor performance (based on the popular Geekbench 6*) and not surprisingly, Apple excelled in all three: GeekBench point per dollar, Geekbench point per core and Geekbench point per volume.

The M4 devices (Mac Mini and Mac Studio) had the cheapest performance per $, at about $0.20, that’s almost 1/8th of the most expensive one (the HP G4).

It also had the highest performance per core (1623, 5X faster than the slowest processor, an Intel Xeon) and the highest performance per unit volume (more than 140x compared to the worst entry).

GPU details remain a mystery

The big unknown remains the official GPU metrics as it is difficult to gauge Apple’s graphics performance across different systems-on-chip as Apple doesn’t divulge additional data beyond core numbers.

For the sake of simplicity, I chose the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation as the default card - where possible - as it was the cheapest professional graphics card that came with 16GB of RAM. Only one entry used the more expensive RTX 4000 Ada Generation with 20GB of RAM.

Tech publication, TechPowerUp, estimates that the RTX 2000 AG should be slightly slower than an RTX 3060.

The Apple M3 Ultra scores just under 130,000 marks on the popular OpenCL Geekbench tests, that’s 50% faster than the RTX 2000 AG, so for a more balanced comparison, readers may want to substitute a more powerful (and expensive) card like the NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation.

* Geekbench 6 entries are sadly not averaged. So I picked what I considered to be the median on the first page of each CPU. Your mileage may vary.

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• Disney has released the first trailer for the live-action Lilo & Stitch
• It's our first peek at the entire cast, including Maia Kealoha as Lilo
• The film will make its theatrical debut on May 23, 2025.

We can finally say, ‘Aloha!’ to our first real look at the live-action Lilo & Stitch, thanks to the official trailer. And let’s just say as someone who loves Stitch – including the original, ‘Stitch has a Glitch,’ and the TV series – Lilo & Stitch: The Series – it’s a journey.

It’s pretty packed, displaying all sorts of emotions as we’ve come to expect from the main character, yet the two-minute and 24-second trailer does fly by. It also provides a first look at most of the cast, including Maia Kealoha as Lilo, Sydney Agudong as Nani, Billy Magnussen as Pleakley, and Zach Galifianakis as Jumba. Of course, we also hear plenty of Chris Sanders reprising his role as Stitch.

The trailer starts with the apprehension of Stitch – aka a ‘dangerous experiment’ – but it quickly falls off the rails with a glimpse of the iconic alien in a red starship. Then, we flash to Hawaii and see Lilo spotting a shooting star and wishing for a ‘best friend.’ Quick enough after that, we hear ‘fluffy,’ see Nani, the sounds of Elvis come through, and chaos err, fun ensues.

You can watch it for yourself below, and it’s our look at the film and the whole cast ahead of the release on May 23, 2025.

Lilo & Stitch is the latest live-action remake of an iconic Disney film. Snow White, another live-action remake, is set to release on March 21, 2025. It’s been a trend for Disney, which also did a live-action Beauty and the Beast – and you can now build the iconic castle from that franchise out of Lego – and The Lion King.

With Lilo & Stitch, though, the hype is here, and this could wind up being the best live-action remake from Disney as of yet. Especially with the original voice of Stitch – Chris Sanders – reprising his role and doing a lovely job, at least from the trailer so far.

The trailer also provides a first – if only super quick – at Pleakly, and Billy Magnussen, as well as Zach Galifianakis, but no signs of an animated Jumba as of yet. We also see Cobra Bubbles, played by Courtney B. Vance, and in the name of fan service – which this trailer does a lot of – we saw ice cream/a snow cone fall on the ground.

(Image credit: Disney)

All in all, the official trailer has leveled up my excitement for Lilo & Stitch, and if you weren’t sold as of yet, I think this will do the trick. In the meantime, I will head to one of the best streaming services – Disney+ – to rewatch the original, the sequel, and some other Stitch content.

And if you're looking to pass the time in the lead-up to the film, we've seen a trove of new Lilo & Stitch toys and collectibles. Here are a few of our favorites.

From 730 pieces, you'll build your own Lego version of stitch, which has the character enjoying an ice cream cone and rocking a a flower on his head. Also available at Lego for $64.99.View Deal

This high-tech version of Stitch stands over 18 inches tall and produces over 100 sounds and movements.View Deal

At 152 pieces, you'll build a compact version of Stitch in the Lego Brickheadz style.View Deal

Lilo & Stitch will hit theaters on May 23, 2025.

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Y2K is heading to one of the best streaming services, joining a host of other great movies arriving on Max in March. You'll have to wait a little longer for this one, as it's released on April 4, but there's plenty to sink your teeth into before then.

Max continues to impress me with its huge library of A24 movies, two of which were listed when I rounded up 6 Max movies and shows I’m most excited about.

If you haven't seen much about Y2K, you can check out the bonkers trailer below, and I mean that in the best way possible. Unfortunately, the movie was a box office and a critical flop, but I'm willing to make my mind up about it. If nothing else, it's a very fun concept.

What is Y2K about?

(Image credit: A24)

Kyle Mooney's directorial debut, Y2K, follows a group of friends as they discuss New Year's Eve plans while their parents are out. It's a big one as it marks a new millennium, but their celebrations don't go as planned after the year 2000 problem causes all technology worldwide to come to life and turn against humanity. This makes for some baffling situations, as anything electronically powered starts to attack, such as a toy car, a fan, and more.

The concept is silly enough to be considered ridiculous by some, but I'm hoping this one will be fun, even if it's not particularly highbrow.

It won't be arriving at the best Max movies round-up due to its poor Rotten Tomatoes score, but it might find a place in my personal recommendations. We'll have to wait and see!

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Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle No. 1,363 for March 13.

Hints and answers for Connections for March 13, #641.

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• Researchers from Mandiant saw a new hacking campaign targeting Juniper Networks routers
• They attributed it to a Chinese actor, targeting telcos, defense, and tech firms
• Users are urged to upgrade and scan their devices

Chinese hackers are targeting Juniper Networks routers with different modifications of a backdoor malware, in an attempt to access defense, technology, and telecommunications organizations in the US, and Asia.

Google’s cybersecurity team Mandiant wrote an in-depth analysis on the group earlier today. As per the report, the researchers first spotted malicious activity in mid-2024, and attributed it to the China-nexus espionage group UNC3886.

TechRadar Pro has reported about this threat actor on numerous occasions in the past, when they were observed targeting VMware, Ivanti VPN, and other products, with backdoors and malware.

Six malware samples

Mandiant says that the attackers infiltrated Junos OS-powered devices by circumventing Veriexec, (Verified Exec), the device’s kernel-based file integrity subsystem that protects the OS from unauthorized code binaries such as libraries and scripts.

“Execution of untrusted code is still possible if it occurs within the context of a trusted process,” the researchers explained. “Mandiant’s investigation revealed that UNC3886 was able to circumvent this protection by injecting malicious code into the memory of a legitimate process.”

UNC3886 targeted its victims with six distinct malware samples, all of which are a variant of the TINYSHELL backdoor with unique capabilities. While all have the same core backdoor functionality, they differ in terms of activation methods and different OS-specific features.

Mandiant says that the attackers “continue to show a deep understanding of the underlying technology” of the appliances being targeted, and recommended users upgrade their Juniper devices to the latest images. These include mitigations and updated signatures for the Juniper Malware Removal Tool (JMRT), which should be activated after the upgrade to scan the integrity of the endpoints.

“At the time of writing, Mandiant has not identified any technical overlaps between activities detailed in this blog post and those publicly reported by other parties as Volt Typhoon or Salt Typhoon,” Mandiant added, suggesting that Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and UNC3886, are distinct entities (but possibly working under the same umbrella).

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