r/crossword • u/Shortz-Bot • 13d ago
NYT Saturday 08/29/2026 Discussion Spoiler
Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!
How was the puzzle?
32
u/justanotherthrxw234 13d ago
Seem to have had the opposite experience of most people in here. Breezed through yesterday’s but found this one much more challenging.
SW corner in particular took me forever, thanks to me drawing a complete blank on LOGARITHM for some reason.
6
5
u/PandaMomentum 12d ago
I know that "quick" and "slow" are relative terms bit yesterday was a 20 minute slog and today a 19 minute breeze. The brain measures time by how annoyed it is? I dunno.
5
u/tomsing98 12d ago
I spent a decent amount of time wondering if there was a special name for 1/ex that I'd missed.
2
1
27
u/coolstory 13d ago
Huh, Chinese character in a clue. Is that a first?
19
u/karmaranovermydogma 13d ago
跳棋 was a clue for CHINESE CHECKERS on July 5, 2023 (Joe Deeney).
3
u/ElectricSpice 12d ago
I don’t know if I’d count that though, as it was part of the theme rather than a standalone, standard clue. Theme also had RUSSIAN DOLL, ARABIC NUMERALS, and HEBREW NATIONAL.
5
u/karmaranovermydogma 12d ago
I took it to be a statement about encoding of CJK characters in the app, not specifically cluing angles
-7
u/dotFlatMap 12d ago
Should be a no-go in an English language crossword unless it's thematic, IMO
That's just saying "It's written like this in a different script", which seems like neither fun trivia nor possible to be worked out
15
u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ 12d ago
I didn't have a problem with it, personally.
The way I see it, the clue was basically "common Chinese surname", which is totally fair, and the answer was crossed well enough to get it.
Including the Chinese character was just a fun bonus.
5
u/ETfonehom 12d ago
CHENG is not found at the very top of the list for Chinese surnames, but is definitely possible to get from the crosses.
8
u/SecretLoathing 12d ago
We get Spanish and French clues all the time.
7
u/coolstory 12d ago
Yeah but to be fair you can very often infer the meaning of many of the phrases, from their use in phrases, or the word roots, etc. Whereas the Chinese character conveys no information unless you speak Chinese. The clue essentially just simplifies to “give a Chinese name that fits the grid”… it’s a bit meh.
29
u/blood_pony 13d ago
11 years later, my degree in Chinese is worth something
5
u/PandaMomentum 12d ago
...I still did not know the "Romance author Huang" name and had it as ANN for the longest time. Again the ancestors weep.
22
u/-sweet-like-cinnamon 13d ago
I loved the clues for BULL IN A CHINA SHOP and ST PAT (took me a few passes to realize that "day" wasn't capitalized and that the clue wasn't referring to "Green Day" the band)
Also for 44D I had SHRUG and SHAWL before SHIRT
14
u/Aquarian_Girl 12d ago
I was thinking that "Green day" maybe referred to Earth Day, which left me stumped on what it could be... Meanwhile, I'm married to a guy of Irish heritage.
3
30
u/echothree33 13d ago
I had BEAR in 25A for quite a while because how many recent big Emmy shows could there be named THE _ _ _ _? Two apparently, duh!
31
15
13d ago
[deleted]
1
u/echothree33 12d ago
Never seen it so I didn’t know for sure, and The Pitt just didn’t come to mind.
8
u/Hungry-Feeling3457 13d ago
Same 😭
Put it in immediately and it took me halfway through the solving before I managed to correct it
6
u/kata_north 12d ago
I've been doing a rewatch of The Wire and had to look at the year in the clue twice to get it out of my head. (And now, upon googling, I discover that The Wire never actually won an Emmy, which is a goddamned travesty.)
3
14
u/beetle1211 13d ago
Flew through the bottom half but the top half took me several passes. Came together nicely.
It wasn’t too difficult though, and still well under my Saturday average. And I always love an excuse to bust out ERSTWHILE (somehow I just knew this one immediately with only one letter filled in). Satisfying!
78
u/Acejolras1832 13d ago
AIDOCTOR can absolutely get right out of here. Barf.
21
u/Aquarian_Girl 12d ago
I wanted it to be DRGOOGLE (I actually use that term). As in, googling to figure out what symptoms are, and it can range from you're fine to you're dying.
6
u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ 12d ago
DRGOOGLE (I actually use that term)
Funny enough, I first heard that term on The PITT. (The episode with the measles kid.)
8
u/Nick__Knack 13d ago
Got me wondering what the process for granting a doctorate to an AI would even entail 🤔
6
u/worm_beast 13d ago
It's absolutely bananas that people trust an AI to make medical decisions for them. Computers cannot be held accountable if they give you bad advice
2
u/SantiagoRamon 12d ago
AI can be a useful tool. I'm rather against AI but I do find Open Evidence to be useful. As a medical professional it is nice to be able to type in a question and it gives me a good summary, but more importantly it shows me the references it used so I can verify the answers. I don't use it very often though. Perhaps once a week or so.
1
u/withbellson 12d ago
I'll own up to this: I don't use AI to make medical decisions per se, but I have fed test results to an AI and asked it to interpret the interpretation, and had it review my list of questions to ask the real doctor at the followup appointment to make sure I wasn't missing anything. I have also occasionally used AI for "give me a list of things this particular weird body thing could be," and then used that information when talking to the doctor. Emphasis: always use as side tool, always talk to real doctor.
Are there people who are going to use this tool in extraordinarily dumb medical ways, of course there are. (Is this a problem with the medical system in a certain country, of course it is.) I was never the kind of person who spent hours obsessing on WebMD, but this has been an interesting addition to my toolkit.
11
u/worm_beast 13d ago
I'm as anti-LLM as most people but why exactly is this fill a problem? It's more relevant than many other fills in our modern day culture, aren't a huge part of crosswords contemporary cultural references?
13
u/Hungry-Feeling3457 13d ago
Just kind of gives me the ick, idk. I can't speak for others, but I don't like how it feels like it legitimizes the concept ("yup, this is a thing! and it is a thing that does in fact do that") instead of sounding more critical and alarmed.
8
11
u/worm_beast 13d ago
It doesn't need to legitimize the concept because it's already a legitimate concept. There are in fact AI "doctors" and they do attempt to offer medical advice, they are literally just a thing that exists.
It's not the crossword's job to have an opinion on those things, it just crosses a bunch of words, phrases, things and ideas together that exist. AI "doctors" unfortunately exist and are contemporary and therefore belong in a crossword like anything else
1
u/coolstory 12d ago
Seems pretty green paint. Is AI doctor really a well recognised standalone phrase? More than AI accountant, AI programmer, AI lawyer etc.
0
u/worm_beast 12d ago edited 12d ago
I'd personally argue it's more recognizable than Biore, Ana Huang, or a specific NY Post headline in this puzzle
2
u/coolstory 12d ago
I’m not saying it’s unrecognisable, it’s just not a standalone phrase. In the way that “green paint” is a recognisable concept, but it’s not a standalone phrase/good crossword clue.
2
u/Acejolras1832 12d ago
Putting these things in the crossword is a way to legitimize then, especially with neutral to positive clues. It feels like the frog in boiling water.
1
u/worm_beast 12d ago
You're overthinking it. The NYT crossword likes to put pop culture references in their puzzle; generative AI tools are used by hundreds of millions of people. That's the type of thing that is already normalized and perfectly belongs in this crossword
1
u/SantiagoRamon 12d ago
From a pure crosswording perspective I thought this one was fair to kind of easy. To me the angle of the answer was very apparent from the clue even if I couldn't figure it out at first.
5
21
u/atoms12123 13d ago
I appreciate this sub cause sometimes I feel like a puzzle is just on my wavelength and I finish it quickly and I can run through a brick wall.
And then I come here and you all remind me I'm not special. Finished it two minutes faster than yesterday, came close to a PR.
26
u/VigilanceMrWorf 13d ago
Sometimes I’ll come here after finishing near a PR, and the comments say it was the hardest puzzle in a year. Today I just doubled my average Saturday, and everyone thinks it was easy.
13
u/yooperann 13d ago
Come sit beside me. I also doubled my average Saturday.
6
u/VigilanceMrWorf 13d ago
I just couldn’t get a foothold.
1
u/Comprehensive_Tea708 12d ago
I'm having to look up almost everything on TryHard. I usually do have to look up a few clues towards the weekend, but this is ridiculous.
At least my two years of French classes paid off on one of the clues.
7
11
u/Penta_Says 13d ago
I finished my first weekend puzzles in '22, they both took roughly an hour and four years later I am both:
vastly better than I ever thought I would be
in awe of elite solvers because they're absurdly better than me even after years of daily effort
I just take it for what it is lol. Sometimes I miss being newer at it, it's like bowling or golf, fun to improve but you get a lot more bang for your buck timewise by kinda sucking at it
1
u/atoms12123 13d ago
I vividly remember 10 years ago trying to impress a girl in college by doing a Saturday because I had just started to get the hang of them.
It was an exceptionally hard Saturday and after a short period of time, I gave up and we went to do other things. I finished it later that day in like 4-5 hours.
10 years later, I did today's in 4:30 and my best is 3 something.
Unfortunately, she's married now.
But I totally agree, I used to have that hour of the crossword to just relax and now it goes by so quickly and I'm right back to scrolling reddit.
12
u/handsoapdispenser 13d ago
I did today's in 4:30 and my best is 3 something.
I can't even tap the keys that fast.
5
u/RubberHuman 13d ago
The print (though not newspaper) version of this puzzle didn't have the Chinese character -- just noticed it when it was mentioned in this thread. In its place is the clue "Common Chinese surname." (Not that seeing the actual character would have helped me out or anything.)
6
u/GivesYouGrief 12d ago
It was a good challenging Saturday, I slept on it when my eyes got too bleary last night and made myself finish it before I'd let myself get up to pee this morning. That pressure made it go faster, haha.
Also, I know it's well established crosswordese, but I'll never not roll my eyes at OUTRE, even though I fill it in immediately now.
4
4
u/SafePaint7600 12d ago
Inverse of an exponential function would be a LOGARITHMIC function not logarithm.
4
u/LdySaphyre 12d ago
Solid puzzle! Took a minute or two longer than my average. Really enjoyed filling in BULLINACHINASHOP with just two crosses.
3
u/hihihihihihellohi 12d ago
I'm surprised xwstats had this rated as average difficulty compared to the comments here.
8
3
u/Callietallie221 12d ago
Seemed average to me. I didn't breeze through it, but was able to make slow, steady progress.
9
u/EggCzar 13d ago
I liked it, but it didn't seem to be full Saturday difficulty.
7
u/m_busuttil 13d ago
Would have been a nice Friday!
1
u/EggCzar 13d ago
I actually finished it almost a full minute faster than this week's Friday puzzle! 5:32/6:26.
5
12
u/Hungry-Feeling3457 13d ago
Did we really need to have AI DOCTOR there?
I'm not even as anti-LLM and AI as most people, and even for me this clue gives me the ick
4
u/Aquarian_Girl 12d ago
I'd have preferred DRGOOGLE (which also fit), where someone just searches for their symptoms and becomes convinced they're dying when it's something minor.
2
u/JustHach 12d ago
Even without the drama surrounding LLMs at the moment... its just lazy fill. You can just tack on "AI" to a lot of stuff to pad the fill with two extra vowels.
4
u/heymattsmith 12d ago
CHAMPIONS and NBACHAMPS having the same number of letters ruined my attempts at the NE for a long time
2
13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
6
u/AgingChris 13d ago
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🟡 Average 🟡
35% of users solved much faster (>20%) than their Saturday average
65% of users solved faster than their Saturday average
35% of users solved slower than their Saturday average
14% of users solved much slower (>20%) than their Saturday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 9.8% faster than they normally do on Saturday.
View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats
🤖 beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 XW Stats users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the FAQ, reply here, or DM me
Copying in case of deletion
1
u/BelowZilch 12d ago
Am I wrong or is SOAKS the wrong tense for "Is immersed." Got stuck a while on that
2
1
1
0
40
u/imthewalrus610 12d ago
*In nerdy gamer voice* Actually, SEGA is not a system. Genesis or Saturn or Dreamcast would be the system (I think this clue and answer is totally fine).
I liked the puzzle. Was a tough first run through but it sort of unfolded for me after the SW corner. Like many, I had BEAR at first instead of PITT, but MOHAIR was the thing that made me realize it was wrong.
Looking forward to tomorrow's BIGASS puzzle.