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If you’ve had interest in Comet, Perplexity’s AI web browser, you likely know it’s well gatekept. Perplexity has limited testing to a small pool of its Max subscribers, which costs $200 per month. Unless you’re willing to burn $2,400 a year on an AI subscription, you have likely resigned yourself to look into Comet from afar.

While Perplexity Max will remain $200 a month for the foreseeable future, you don’t actually have to pay this much in order to give Comet a spin. In fact, you don’t have to pay anything at all. That’s because Perplexity is now offering access to both Comet as well as Perplexity Pro, the company’s $20 per month ($200 per year) subscription, for free, for one year.

The deal is through PayPal and its subsidiary, Venmo. The company announced the partnership in a press release on Wednesday, spinning the news as an AI-enhanced way for PayPal users to shop. That’s per Ryan Foutty, VP of Business at Perplexity, who said, “The Comet browser is like a personal shopper and personal assistant all in one, so we’re excited that PayPal users will have early access to Comet.”

Whether users will actually treat Comet as a “personal shopper” is certainly up in the air. For its part, Perplexity pitches Comet as an AI-powered browser that acts as a both a “personal assistant” and “thinking partner.” You can look things up like you would with another internet-ready AI chatbot, but Comet is also able to perform tasks on your behalf. That reportedly includes shopping, but also things like booking meetings, replying to emails, researching, and autofilling passwords.

PayPal is offering Perplexity Pro, and Comet, through its new subscription hub: The company says this feature is designed to help users manage their subscriptions in one central location, and, to kick it off, your Perplexity Pro trial and subscription can be found here. As part of the promotion, if you link and pay for at least three subscriptions in this new hub, PayPal will credit you $50 cash back.

How to sign up for Perplexity Pro and Comet for free

If you’re interested in this offer, you have two ways to take advantage of it. PayPal says you can either find the promo in the PayPal app or the Venmo app. I didn’t find the promo in my Venmo app, but after downloading the PayPal app and signing into my account, I saw Perplexity Pro available under “Featured offers.”

You’ll need to link your PayPal or Venmo to the Perplexity subscription, and you’ll need to create a Perplexity account if you don’t have one already. If you have a Perplexity Pro subscription, you cannot take advantage of this offer.

While my Perplexity Pro subscription activated without issue, I’m not yet able to take advantage of the Comet offer. Right now, heading to the official Comet site while logged into my account, I have the option to sign up for the waitlist, or “skip the line” by upgrading to Pro. If I choose the latter, since I have Pro, it simply takes me to a page letting me know about the perks of the Pro plan—albeit, with no mention of Comet.

This might be something Perplexity is taking its time rolling out. Until then, I’ve put my account on the waitlist, just to see if that speeds things up.

There’s an art and a science to picking a good starting word when you play Wordle. My trusty starter of ARISE has served me so well for years I still use it daily. Emily Long, who writes our daily Wordle hints, often uses a slight tweak on that strategy, with RAISE. Computer analyses have highlighted other words, and longtime Wordle players each have their own opinion. One thing most of us can agree on, though: ADIEU sucks. Sorry.

That’s not to say it’s the worst word you could play first, but according to the New York Times, ADIEU is the worst out of the 30 most popular starters. But when they ranked the top 30 starters based on how effective they are at revealing letters in any given puzzle, the top five are SLATE, CRANE, LEAST, STARE, and RAISE, with ADIEU landing at number 30. (My personal favorite, ARISE, ranks seventh.)

Previously, a computer analysis suggested that CRANE is the best starter; another landed on SALET. Wordle devotees discuss the matter endlessly on forums, with some prioritizing words that haven’t been solutions yet, to keep their options open for a one-guess win. So let’s dig into all the factors that makes a good starter word for Wordle.

Vowels are important, but not that important.

I’m going to teach the controversy here. The argument in favor of ADIEU is that it contains four vowels, and you know the solution will have to contain at least one vowel. Thus, knocking out four of them in your first guess is pretty smart. (O and sometimes-vowel Y are the only ones not included.)

But there’s an argument to be made that vowels don’t narrow down your options enough to be useful. Most words in English remain perfectly legible with all the vowels eliminated. If all you know is a vowel or two, you don’t know much about the word. Here’s what I mean: If you play ADIEU and A lights up in yellow, yes, you know that there’s an A in the solution somewhere. But that tells you very little about what the solution actually is! There are tons of words with a letter A in them somewhere.

A better strategy may be to go with a consonant-heavy word at first, and worry about the vowels later. According to one local Wordle expert, “there are only five [vowels], and it’s almost never going to be a U.”

Do you want your starter to be a possible answer?

One of the computer analyses suggested SALET was the best starter. Not only does it have a good mix of common letters, but the position of the letters will give you the most information compared to, say, SLATE or STALE. Only one problem—what the hell is a salet? (OK, it’s a helmet that was used in European warfare in the 1400’s, but I had to look that up.) Similarly, TARSE is supposed to be another good one. But it’s unlikely the human editor of the Wordle puzzles will ever choose SALET or TARSE as the solution for the day.

So do you want your starter to be a possible answer? If the answer is yes, you’ll also want to skip the obscure words. You’ll also want to skip any words that have been used in recent memory. To my knowledge, Wordle has never repeated a solution, but that’s surely a streak that can’t continue forever. You can look up lists of past Wordle solutions, but so far—as of fall 2025—the following strong starters haven’t yet been used as solutions, but totally could be (in my opinion). Take your pick:

• ARISE (someday my word will come!)

• STEAL

• STEAK

• CARET

• ADIEU (maybe??)

Your starter should mesh with your solving style

Scientific analysis aside, I don’t think there’s much point to picking the theoretically best starter word; you need to find your best starter word. The human brain does not narrow down the problem space in the same way as a computer. I like when I find vowels early, because having the vowels helps me sound out the words in my head. If I know there are vowels in the second and fourth places (say, _A_E_) I know it is probably a two-syllable word. I run through the available letters, trying them out in each position in my head. (SABER? CARET? LAYER?) For me, a vowel-heavy starter is helpful. For you, it might not be.

When choosing a starter, consider the way you think through the possibilities when you’re halfway through the puzzle. What starters will set you up for success with your preferred solving style? If your brain works best when you know the initial letters of the word, maybe choose a starter like TRASH, which gets a lot of common beginning consonants into the mix right away.

My own approach splits the difference: I think about my starters as a pair. With ARISE and TOUCH, I get intel on all five vowels and five of the most common consonants. If you play ADIEU, I think you need to be prepared to follow it up with THORN. 

Don’t forget about Y, the sometimes vowel

Should you include Y in your starter? Most of us don’t, but there’s a good argument to be made for getting it in the mix fairly early in the game.

Y flies under the radar since it’s an end-of-the-alphabet letter. The tendency is to think it must be as rare as X and Z. But Y is fairly common (worth 4 points in Scrabble to X’s 8 and Z’s 10), showing up in words like FUNNY and JAZZY (JAZZY being perhaps the hardest word that has ever appeared as a Wordle answer). Words that end in Y also often have a double letter—like the N and Z in those examples—so make sure to consider that as you’re narrowing down the possibilities.

You may recall from grade school that the vowels are “A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y.” (You may even have learned “…and sometimes Y and W.”) That’s because Y really can stand on its own as a vowel! The ending Y in FUNNY is an example: U is the vowel for the first syllable, and Y is the vowel for the second. There are also words that contain a Y as their only vowel, like GLYPH, NYMPH, and TRYST.

So if you’re working through a Wordle and you don’t seem to have enough vowels to make a word, stick a Y in a guess somewhere—preferably at the end. LANKY or HORNY might be good picks for when you’re stumped.

(Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today signed a new five-year contract for American made fire retardant with Perimeter Solutions, supporting the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior’s aerial wildland fire suppression programs. The agreement secures significant savings, putting the American taxpayer first, while strengthening our manufacturing base by keeping fire-retardant production made in America.

(Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today signed a new five-year contract for American made fire retardant with Perimeter Solutions, supporting the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior’s aerial wildland fire suppression programs. The agreement secures significant savings, putting the American taxpayer first, while strengthening our manufacturing base by keeping fire-retardant production made in America.

(Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing more than $8 million for five new projects to reduce wildfire risk, protect water quality, and improve forest health across the nation. This expands President Trump’s mission to improve the lives of American families, support rural communities, and expand domestic timber production.

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This refurbished ASUS 14″ Chromebook CX1400 (2022) sits in a very specific lane: affordable, simple, and reliable. At $189.99 on StackSocial right now, it isn’t trying to compete with premium MacBooks or Windows ultrabooks. Instead, it’s meant to give you a capable everyday computer for cheap, without looking or feeling disposable. The 14-inch Full HD display with slim NanoEdge bezels keeps it from feeling dated, and at just 3.59 pounds, it’s light enough to carry around all day.

Under the hood, the Intel Celeron N4500 isn’t going to wow anyone with performance. It’s a dual-core processor with a base speed of 1.1 GHz that can burst up to 2.8 GHz. That’s enough for web browsing, Google Docs, Zoom calls, and streaming, but not for heavy workloads. The 8GB of RAM is actually a pleasant surprise at this price point—it keeps multiple Chrome tabs from slowing the whole system to a crawl. Storage is 128GB eMMC, which is better than the 64GB you usually see in budget Chromebooks, but it’s still flash storage, not a proper SSD. If you’re storing a lot of files locally, it’ll feel cramped, though most Chromebook users live in Google Drive anyway.

It’s a Grade “A” refurbished unit, meaning it should look close to new, and it’s a 2022 model that comes with a one-year warranty. But, of course, you’re buying into older hardware that won’t receive ChromeOS updates forever, though support is guaranteed through June 2031—so, six more years of automatic updates, which is actually decent for a budget device. If you need a travel laptop, a backup for the kids, or just a no-fuss machine for email and streaming, this is a smart buy at under $200. But if you’re hoping for future-proof performance or want something that can replace a full-fledged laptop for work or creative projects, this one probably isn’t the right fit.