Has your Switch 2 been running hot? You’re not alone. In fact, part of the problem might just be that you’re playing it during the summer—at least, according to a new statement from Nintendo. As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Nintendo’s official Japanese account posted a warning to both Switch 2 and original Switch players:

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Through X’s Google-powered translator, we can see that Nintendo’s post says the following:

Using Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 in a hot environment may cause the console to become hot. Please use it in a place between 5 and 35 ℃ as it may cause a malfunction. Recently, the temperature has been exceeding 35 ℃ for several days. Please be careful when using outdoors.

For those of us in the U.S., Nintendo is advising us to play our Switch 2 units in areas between 41 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s actually a little less forgiving than something like an iPhone, which Apple says should be used between 32 and 95 degrees.

But at the moment, we’re not focusing on the lower end of this range—it’s the 95 degree limit we need to think about. Nintendo’s warning comes as many countries around the globe experience a hot summer. Nintendo of Japan’s post focused on Japan, of course, but plenty of other regions have experienced heat waves exceeding 95 degrees. As such, if you decide to play your Switch 2 outside on a day that hot (or hotter), you may experience issues with your device.

Why can’t you use devices in extreme heat?

It’s not just your Switch 2—all technology (especially tech containing microchips) is susceptible to heat.

Microchips are designed to run up to a certain temperature threshold. The chip in your Switch 2 doesn’t max out at 95 degrees, however: That limit is there to ensure the chip doesn’t get close to its maximum temperature. Once the Switch 2 starts to get too hot, it’ll work to stay cool: Fans try to push hot air out, while the processor may slow down, resulting in noticeable lag in performance.

However, if none of these tactics work, and the console continues to get hotter, it’ll lock itself up, so you can no longer play it. It’s the same thing that happens if your smartphone gets too hot—you’ll need to take your Switch somewhere it can cool down, and once at a safe temperature, it’ll continue working as it should.

Switch 2 reportedly overheats

Playing the console outside when it’s too hot is perhaps the “best” way to push the Switch 2 to its temperature limits, but it might not be the only way.

Last month, some Switch 2 players started reporting that their consoles were overheating—fans would run fast, while games would freeze and crash. These issues appeared to happen in demanding third-party titles like Cyberpunk 2077, but also first-party games like Pokémon and Splatoon. Interestingly, these initial reports appear to have come primarily from players in Japan.

The Switch 2 is quite a bit more powerful than the original Switch, especially in docked mode, and while both the console and the dock have built-in fans for active cooling, it’s possible that higher-performance is leading to more warming than expected for players.

Not all players are experiencing this, though. This Reddit thread, for example, contains players who have Switch 2s that play mostly cool, while others note the console can get hot, especially in docked mode, but nothing serious. There’s a big difference between a console getting hot to the touch, but otherwise performing normally, and overheating, which can lead to performance and battery issues.

This Nintendo post on X could suggest that the worst of the overheating reports have come alongside a particularly warm summer—if the Switch 2 is prone to warming up during the best of conditions, then playing it outside or in a space without air conditioning on a hot day could result in overheating.

There’s not enough here for me to consider this a concerning trend, but it is good to keep in mind. If it’s too hot, find somewhere cooler to play your Switch.

(Washington, D.C., August 4, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins, joined by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., hosted Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey and signed six new food choice state waivers to further advance President Trump’s efforts to Make America Healthy Again.

When you start a conversation with ChatGPT, you probably don’t expect that chat to end up discoverable in a Google search—but that’s exactly what happened for some users. As TechCrunch highlights, if you filtered your search engine results by “site:https://chatgpt.com/share,” you could find the transcripts for real conversations people were having with OpenAI’s bot—chats you’d think remain private to the account they’re associated with were as easy to find as a recipe or tech hack.

As one might assume from conversations that weren’t meant to be shared publicly, some of these chats contained embarrassing or questionable discourse. TechCrunch said it found a user asking ChatGPT for help rewriting a resume for a specific job application, a job which TechCrunch was able to deduce based on the conversation. Another user asked ChatGPT questions that, according to TechCrunch, “sound like they came out of an incel forum,” though the outlet didn’t elaborate on the contents of the chat.

OpenAI’s experimental feature

Before you panic, there are a couple of caveats to this particular situation. First, OpenAI has since removed the ability to make chats public to search engines, and, from what I can tell, any new searches return zero results for ChatGPT conversations. Any chats you start now do not come with the risk of exposure—at least, not in this capacity. To that point, the exposed chats in question were only discoverable on Google because the users had explicitly opted into that feature. You would have needed to click the “share” button on a chat, choose a “create link” option, skim past an alert letting you know your name, chat instructions, and messages you add after the fact remain private, then hit a toggle to make that chat discoverable in search.

Some chats were archived by the Wayback Machine

Following the initial story, sleuths like those from Digital Digging discovered that some of these shared conversations even ended up archived on the Wayback Machine. By their count, 110,000 ChatGPT threads were accessible through this tool. Despite OpenAI’s efforts to erase the chats from search, many were still available to skim for anyone in the know and interested. Digital Digging’s article dropped on Aug. 1, and, at the time, OpenAI had not issued a take down request to the Wayback Machine concerning the chatgpt.com/share URLs. However, as of Aug. 4, the Wayback Machine says this domain is excluded, so it appears OpenAI did eventually make the request.

Why even make this a feature in the first place? OpenAI had this to say to TechCrunch: “We’ve been testing ways to make it easier to share helpful conversations, while keeping users in control, and we recently ended an experiment to have chats appear in search engine results if you explicitly opted in when sharing.”

That’s not overly clear, though it’s not hard to assume the benefit to OpenAI. The more exposure ChatGPT has, the better it is for the company. And as the internet increasingly moves toward both AI (think AI Overviews) and forum-based answers (think Reddit), I could see OpenAI thinking they have an opportunity to capitalize on the market here. If a user asks ChatGPT a question they think was answered well, perhaps they share it with search engines, so that other users benefit as well. Now, when someone googles that same question, maybe that ChatGPT conversation floats to the top of the search results, right next to the AI Overview or relevant Reddit threads.

OpenAI also isn’t the only company to experiment with public AI conversations. Back in June, we learned that Meta AI also had a function that would allow users to post their questions and generations—not to search, mind you, but to the public Meta AI feed. It seems AI companies are increasingly interested in publicizing AI-generated content, whether that’s a conversation you had with a chatbot, or an AI artwork that bot produced.

Chatbots are not private

You can now rest easy knowing your ChatGPT conversations won’t end up on the front page of Google. However, don’t assume that your chats with any bot are generally private. In fact, there’s a good chance the company that owns your bot is using your conversations to train their models, or that human reviews will even be able to see your chats.

Depending on the bot, there are some privacy settings you can enable to protect yourself. ChatGPT’s “Improve the model for everyone” setting controls whether or not ChatGPT can take your conversations to train their model—though disabling it won’t stop the company from storing your chats. Even temporary chats, which don’t appear in your history, remain on ChatGPT servers for up to 30 days.

As such, you really shouldn’t use chatbots for anything sensitive or personal. OpenAI’s Sam Altman offered a good reminder of this last month: During an interview with Theo Von, Altman discussed how so many of their users, especially young people, use ChatGPT as a therapist or life coach. Altman said: “Right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it … We haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.”

The NYT’s Connections is a brain-stretching game, the kind that will make you go “well, of course these words belong together,” and then: “oh, wait.” All you have to do is divide the 16 words or phrases into four groups of four, but the groupings can be tricky. I’m going to explain how the game works, but also how you’ll need to think about it to play it well.

I have an explainer here on the difference between Wordle, Strands, and Connections—all are NYT word games, but each one has a different flavor of gameplay and rewards different skills. Connections is best if you like wordplay and references to general knowledge. But you also have to have a high tolerance for being tricked, because this game makes liberal use of words’ double meanings, in deliberately devious ways. And if you get stumped, you can always check out our daily hints.

Where to play Connections

Connections is a New York Times game, so it’s available on the paper’s Games page and in their Games app. A new, numbered puzzle is available every day, much like the daily Wordles.

How to play Connections

The game presents you with 16 tiles that each have a word or short phrase on them. On each move, your job is to select four tiles that you think form a group. Groups are usually the same type of thing (like HAIL, RAIN, SLEET, SNOW) but there’s usually at least one grouping that relies on wordplay. For example, one puzzle grouped DOUBT, SHADOW, MOVIE, and VOTE—those are all things you can cast.

If you’re wrong, the tiles will shake. If you’re close, you’ll get a message that says “one away” to let you know you had three of them right. If you’re right, a colored bar will appear near the top of the board (showing the four words as well as revealing their theme) and any remaining tiles in play will rearrange into the bottom of the board.

You have four mistakes available. When you run out, the game is over, and you’ll get to see the answers you missed.

Even though there are four groups, you only need to figure out three of them. By the end, there will be four tiles remaining that have to be in the same group. For some extra puzzle-y fun, try to figure out the theme before you submit that last group for your gimme point.

Why Connections can be so frustrating (and how to avoid dumb mistakes)

The game is designed to be tricky. The puzzle designers will often put in a group of five or more words that fit the same category, but obviously only four of them can make up a legal group. Or they’ll take four things that could go together, but assign each one to a different category based on a double meaning that each word has.

To give you an example, in my first-ever attempt at this game, I submitted an obvious grouping: RAIN, HEAT, SNOW, and SLEET. Not a valid group, the game told me. Huh?

But a moment later that “Huh?” was replaced with an “Aha!” as HEAT matched up with JAZZ, BUCKS, and NETS to make a set of NBA teams. Elsewhere on the board I saw HAIL was not there as a gesture or greeting, but was the proper partner for the wet-weather words. RACE CAR, which seemed to be an outlier—there were no other vehicles—turned out to be part of a set of palindromes.

How to win at Connections

As I discovered on my first play, the point isn’t to look for just any four-word grouping, but to try to discover the groupings that the puzzle makers had in mind. So don’t be too trigger-happy when you see your first possible connection. Look at the items you’ve identified; could any of them fit elsewhere?

It’s also strategic to mentally put a name to the thing your four potential matches have in common. The game’s help screen hints that the categories will never be as broad as “names” or “verbs,” so make sure you’ve pinned down something specific. Note that my initial guess was just “weather,” but the real grouping turned out to be “wet weather.” The game will name the theme after you correctly guess the grouping.

One Redditor suggests jotting down potential groupings on a piece of scratch paper, even if you end up with more or fewer than four words in each of those groups. Once you see them all written down, something might jump out at you.

I tried this on a Connections puzzle that had a bunch of words that might be cat names, and some religious words whose exact theme was unclear. The rest were a mystery to me. So I started writing down possible groups:

• Cats: Sylvester, Chester, Felix, Garfield, Tom (Five? That’s too many.)

• Religious words: altar, reliquary, abbey, temple, shrine (Again, too many!)

• ???: high

• ???: rocky

• ???: silk

• Presidential first names: Grover, Calvin, Harry…and, wait, Chester!

As soon as I began writing that last group—the presidential first names—I realized that Chester could fit there too. Taking Chester off the cat list leaves me with only four cats, so I returned to my game board and guessed the presidents and then the cats. Both were correct.

All that was left to do was to figure out which of the religious words could fit with high, rocky, and silk. Those three are all (literal or metaphorical) roads, so their partner is Abbey Road. Get it?

(Washington, D.C., August 4, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins officially kicked off the inaugural Great American Farmers Market yesterday on the National Mall with an evening of festivities honoring America’s farmers, freedom, and 250 years of agricultural heritage.