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Popular rock frontman ‘doing great' amid battle with stage 4 cancer

Popular rock frontman ‘doing great' amid battle with stage 4 cancer

Yahoo21-07-2025
Brad Arnold, the lead singer of 3 Doors Down, had a positive update for fans amid his ongoing battle with stage 4 cancer.
'A lot of folks asked how I was doing the other day. I'm doin' great fam! Almost every day, I feel a little better,' Arnold wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday, July 6.
'Things seem to be going great. Thank you for every prayer you all have prayed. With so much faith behind me and my own faith within me, I have no doubt of the outcome of this fight,' the singer wrote. 'God will continue to fight this [battle] for me……..and God doesn't fail. I love y'all!"
Arnold's post was met with tons of supportive comments from fans and fellow musicians alike.
'Praying for you brother,' former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre wrote.
Meanwhile musician Drew Jacobs commented, 'My heart is with you brother' and country artist Jason Micheal Carroll wrote, 'Still sending love and prayers, bro.'
Arnold, 46, revealed his diagnosis with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), the most common type of kidney cancer, on May 7.
The cancer 'affects the tubules that filter waste from your blood' and 'involves surgery to remove the tumor or your entire kidney,' according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The frontman said the stage 4 cancer had metastasized into his lung. Despite the grim diagnosis, the singer felt optimistic.
'I have no fear. I really sincerely am not scared it at all, but it is going to force us to cancel our tour this summer and we're sorry for that,' Arnold said in an Instagram video.
The singer also asked fans to pray for him whenever they can.
'Thank you guys so much,' he said. 'We love you. See ya.'
Arnold, alongside Matt Roberts and Todd Harrell, formed 3 Doors Down in Escatawpa, Mississippi in 1996. The band is best known for its 2000 debut single 'Kryptonite,' which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was included on 3 Doors Down's multi-platinum debut album 'The Better Life.'
The band continued its success with its sophomore album 'Away from the Sun' in 2002. The multi-platinum project debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the hit singles 'When I'm Gone' and 'Here Without You.'
The band's third and fourth studio albums, 'Seventeen Days' and self-titled fourth album both debuted atop the Billboard 200 and were certified platinum certification by the RIAA. The band's fifth and sixth albums album, 'Time of My Life' and 'Us and the Night,' peaked at No. 3 and 14, respectively.
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Wordle hints today for #1,507: Clues and answer for Monday, August 4
Wordle hints today for #1,507: Clues and answer for Monday, August 4

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Wordle hints today for #1,507: Clues and answer for Monday, August 4

Hey, there! Welcome to the start of a new week. We hope it's a joyful one for you. One thing that will help keep a lot of folks happy is extending their Wordle streaks. To that end, here's our daily Wordle guide with some hints and the answer for Monday's puzzle (#1,507). It may be that you're a Wordle newcomer and you're not completely sure how to play the game. We're here to help with that too. What is Wordle? Wordle is a deceptively simple daily word game that first emerged in 2021. There is one five-letter word to deduce every day by process of elimination. The daily word is the same for everyone. Wordle blew up in popularity in late 2021 after creator Josh Wardle made it easy for players to share an emoji-based grid with their friends and followers that detailed how they fared each day. The game's success spurred dozens of clones across a swathe of categories and formats. The New York Times purchased Wordle in early 2022 for an undisclosed sum. The publication said that players collectively played Wordle 5.3 billion times in 2024. So, it's little surprise that Wordle is one of the best online games and puzzles you can play daily. How to play Wordle To start playing Wordle, you simply need to enter one five-letter word. The game will tell you how close you are to that day's secret word by highlighting letters that are in the correct position in green. Letters that appear in the word but aren't in the right spot will be highlighted in yellow. If you guess any letters that are not in the secret word, the game will gray those out on the virtual keyboard. However, you can still use those letters in subsequent guesses. You'll only have six guesses to find each day's word, though you still can use grayed-out letters to help narrow things down. It's also worth remembering that letters can appear in the secret word more than once. Wordle is free to play on the NYT's website and apps, as well as on Meta Quest headsets and Discord. The game refreshes at midnight local time. If you log into a New York Times account, you can track your stats, including the all-important win streak. How to play Wordle more than once a day If you have a NYT subscription that includes full access to the publication's games, you don't have to stop after a single round of Wordle. You'll have access to an archive of more than 1,500 previous Wordle games. So if you're a relative newcomer, you'll be able to go back and catch up on previous editions. In addition, paid NYT Games members have access to a tool called the Wordle Bot. This can tell you how well you performed at each day's game. Previous Wordle answers Before today's Wordle hints, here are the answers to recent puzzles that you may have missed: Yesterday's Wordle answer for Sunday, August 3 — LUMPY Saturday, August 2 — DAUNT Friday, August 1 — BANJO Thursday, July 31 — FRILL Wednesday, July 30 — ASSAY Today's Wordle hints explained Every day, we'll try to make Wordle a little easier for you. First, we'll offer a hint that describes the meaning of the word or how it might be used in a phrase or sentence. We'll also tell you if there are any double (or even triple) letters in the word. In case you still haven't quite figured it out by that point, we'll then provide the first letter of the word. Those who are still stumped after that can continue on to find out the answer for today's Wordle. This should go without saying, but make sure to scroll slowly. Spoilers are ahead. Today's Wordle help Here is a hint for today's Wordle answer: Adjective for something stiff and inflexible, such as a refusal to compromise. Are there any double letters in today's Wordle? There is a pair of repeated letters in today's Wordle answer. What's the first letter of today's Wordle? The first letter of today's Wordle answer is R. The Wordle answer today This is your final warning before we reveal today's Wordle answer. No take-backs. Don't blame us if you happen to scroll too far and accidentally spoil the game for yourself. What is today's Wordle? Today's Wordle answer is... RIGID Not to worry if you didn't figure out today's Wordle word. If you made it this far down the page, hopefully you at least kept your streak going. And, hey: there's always another game tomorrow.

The New York Times thinks generative AI is like Pac-Man ghosts and also the Matrix, because nobody gets to be normal about this stuff anymore
The New York Times thinks generative AI is like Pac-Man ghosts and also the Matrix, because nobody gets to be normal about this stuff anymore

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The New York Times thinks generative AI is like Pac-Man ghosts and also the Matrix, because nobody gets to be normal about this stuff anymore

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The New York Times is being hazed by game dev social media over what I can only describe as one of the most naive articles about AI I've ever seen. The pointing and laughing is happening on BlueSky, among other places, over a paragraph that claims generative AI is being embraced by the videogame industry, which sure, makes sense, because we were giving those funny Pac-Man ghosts AIs in the past. And isn't that the same thing? No. No it's not—though being wary of simply taking a lone paragraph out of context, I went ahead and read the full thing. It does not get much better. Get out your bingo cards. The piece immerses us into a nice balmy pot of misunderstanding soup with the sentence "It sounds like a thought experiment conjured by René Descartes for the 21st century." Hoo boy. Its writer, Zachary Small, then goes on to reference this video that went viral a couple of years ago, wherein a YouTuber gets proportionately freaked out as generative AI NPCs start getting a bit existential in a tech demo by Replica. I'd link to Replica's website, but the company doesn't exist anymore which, to be fair, the article does acknowledge several paragraphs down. The NYT frames this as some kind of brush with the machine god: "Everything was fake, a player told them through a microphone, and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panicked disbelief. 'What does that mean,' said one woman in a gray sweater. 'Am I real or not?'" This sort of open-mouthed astonishment might've been apropos three years ago, when all of this tech was still relatively new, but AI doesn't actually think or understand anything. It didn't then, and it doesn't now. Here's a solid breakdown by MIT from the time period, which explains: "In this huge corpus of text, words and sentences appear in sequences with certain dependencies. This recurrence helps the model understand how to cut text into statistical chunks that have some predictability. It learns the patterns of these blocks of text and uses this knowledge to propose what might come next." In other words, what we might call an 'educated guess'. Replica's AI was trained on text written by people, and people have written about machines becoming self-aware before, which is why the NPCs spat out lines about being self-aware when they were told they were machines. This is like saying Google is sapient because it fed me a link to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot when I searched for it: A program taking educated guesses does not a singularity make. To be clear, generative AI has been having a major impact on videogames—both in the fact that there are legitimate use-cases being found, and in the fact that excitable CEOs are getting ahead of themselves and mandating employees use it, which is totally a normal thing you do with a technology you're naturally finding use cases for. The paragraph that active developers are dunking on, however, is this doozy: "Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy AI programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player's real-time movements." I'm just gonna rattle off the problems with this statement one-by-one. First up, which experts? Sure, Nvidia's CEO says AI is coming for everybody's jobs, but also, it's sort of his job to sell AI technology. You know who else said we'd all have to adapt to AI? Netflix's former VP of GenAI for Games, who stopped working there four months later. CEO of Larian Studios Swen Vincke (note: someone who actually makes games) isn't nearly as convinced—while the developer does use generative AI for the early, early stages of prototyping, basically anything thereafter is made by hand. CD Projekt is also steering clear, because the quagmire of legal ownership just isn't worth it. Some executives have done some restructuring that may or may not be related to AI—I certainly don't doubt that AI plays a part, but widespread layoffs and studio closures are also down to, say, buying a company for $68 billion, or flubbing a $2 billion investment deal. You know. CEO things. And then there's the coup de grâce on this lump of coal—the comparison to the ghosts in Pac-Man, as if that has anything to do with anything. No, the programming of Pac-Man's ghosts has nothing to do with generative AI or deep learning models, a completely different technology. Tōru Iwatani, a person, gave them their distinct 'personalities'. "We're gonna be making our games differently, but to say that it'll replace the craftsmanship? I think we're very far from it." Larian CEO Swen Vincke (GameSpot interview, April 2025) To be clear, this is about as relevant as saying the videogame industry's adopting AI because Crazy Taxi had a pointing arrow in it that leads to your next objective—it's a loose association by someone who saw the word "AI" twice and assumed those things must be related. I could continue ribbing on this thing. 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TV Star Dies After ‘Acute Prolonged Illness' Days Before Birthday
TV Star Dies After ‘Acute Prolonged Illness' Days Before Birthday

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time13 minutes ago

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TV Star Dies After ‘Acute Prolonged Illness' Days Before Birthday

TV star Loni Anderson has died aged 79 following a prolonged health battle two days before she would have turned 80. Anderson, best known for her role in WKRP in Cincinnati, died in a hospital in Los Angeles on Sunday, surrounded by her loved ones, her longtime publicist Cheryl J. Kagan told the Daily Beast. She was due to celebrate her milestone 80th birthday on August 5. Her family said in a statement, 'We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear wife, mother and grandmother.' Kagan confirmed Anderson died following an 'acute prolonged illness.' The star's major breakthrough came playing receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on CBS's WKRP in Cincinnati, based on a fictional AM radio station in Ohio. The standout role saw her nominated for three Golden Globe awards and two Emmy Awards. The hit show ran from 1978 to 1982. Anderson's career went on to include work in TV, movies and musical theatre as well as the 1995 memoir, My Life in High Heels. Key roles included starring in the TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story in 1980 (also one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's earliest acting roles), Stroker Ace with future-husband Burt Reynolds in 1983, The Lonely Guy with Steve Martin in 1984 and White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd in 1991. She also reprised her role as Jennifer Marlowe for two episodes of The New WKRP in Cincinnati in 1993. 'While facing her diagnosis with determination she continued working,' Kagan said in a statement. Her most recent role was 2023's Ladies of the '80s: A Divas Christmas, a TV comedy that saw her star with Morgan Fairchild, Linda Gray, Donna Mills and Nicollette Sheridan. Fairchild posted tributes to Anderson on X on Sunday, noting 'I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of the wonderful Loni Anderson! We did Bob Hope specials together & a Christmas movie 2 years ago. The sweetest, most gracious lady! I'm just devastated to hear this.' Steve Sauer, her manager of 30 years, said, 'Loni was a class act. Beautiful. Talented. Witty. ALWAYS a joy to be around. She was the ultimate working mother. Family first... and maintained a great balance with her career. She will be forever missed.' Friend Barbara Eden, who starred in I Dream of Jeannie, wrote on X, 'What can I say about Loni that everyone doesn't already know? She was a real talent, with razor smart wit and a glowing sense of humor… but, even more than that, she had an impeccable work ethic." Eden continued, 'Even beyond that, Loni was a darling lady and a genuinely good person … I am truly at a loss for words. My condolences to her family, her husband Bob, and her children, Deidra and Quinton. Loni, you were one in a trillion, my friend, and even a trillion more.' Born Loni Kaye Anderson in Saint Paul, Minnesota on August 5, 1945, her father was an environmental chemist, her mother was a former model. Anderson was married four times, including to fellow actor Burt Reynolds, who wed in 1988 before splitting six years later. While their messy divorce played out in the tabloids, Anderson made peace with Reynolds before his death in 2018, stating, 'We were friends first and friends last.' She married musician Bob Flick, from folk band The Brothers Four, in 2008. She has a daughter, Deidra, with first husband Bruce Hasselberg and adopted her son Quinton while married to Reynolds. She also has two grandchildren and two step grandchildren. Anderson had a lifetime commitment to raising awareness for COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) after growing up with parents who both smoked. Her family have asked for contributions in Anderson's name to be made to either the National Lung Health Education Program and the American Cancer Society. A private family service will be held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with a Celebration of Life at a later date. Solve the daily Crossword

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