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Shahzad Akbar emerges as ‘key figure’ in 190m pound corruption case – ARY News
- Shahzad Akbar emerges as ‘key figure’ in 190m pound corruption case ARY News
- Shehzad named key accused in £190m case The Express Tribune
- £190 Million Scandal: Shehzad Akbar Emerges as the Central Figure Pakistan Today
- Shehzad Akbar emerges as central figure in £190 million corruption case Aaj English TV
- Shehzad Akbar proven to be the key figure in £190 million corruption case Abb Takk News
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Review: Fritz 20 – A revolutionary leap forward in chess software
The journey from DOS to AI
By Paul Harwood (betterchess.net)
The Fritz series has undergone a remarkable transformation since its humble beginnings as a simple DOS program that could be easily defeated by amateur players. Today’s Fritz 20 stands as a formidable opponent capable of challenging world champions, while serving as an intelligent training partner that adapts to individual playing styles and skill levels.
My ChessBase 3.5″ floppy disks from 1990.
Enhanced human-like playing experience
Building upon the “human” playing concept introduced in Fritz 19, Fritz 20 takes artificial personality to new heights. The engine has been deliberately calibrated to be less tactically precise overall, focusing instead on a more positional style of play that mirrors human decision-making processes. This approach makes Fritz 20 less punishing of mistakes while providing a more realistic and educational playing experience.
New opponent personalities
Fritz 20 introduces several exciting new opponent types that cater to different playing styles and learning objectives:
Your personal chess trainer. Your toughest opponent. Your strongest ally.
FRITZ 20 is more than just a chess engine – it is a training revolution for ambitious players and professionals. Whether you are taking your first steps into the world of serious chess training, or already playing at tournament level, FRITZ 20 will help you train more efficiently, intelligently and individually than ever before.Hypermodern style: This personality employs flank openings like the Reti Opening and controls the center through piece placement rather than pawn advances, offering players exposure to hypermodern chess principles in practical play.
Configurable opponent: Perhaps the most innovative feature, this option allows players to customize their opponent’s characteristics using the style analysis framework from ChessBase 18. The system includes preset configurations modeled after chess legends including Fischer, Tal, Karpov, Capablanca (my personal favorite) and Lasker, complete with their characteristic opening repertoires and playing styles.
VIP personalities: The program offers additional legendary playing styles including Morphy, Lasker, and Capablanca, allowing players to experience games against some of history’s greatest chess minds.
Additional styles: Fritz 20 also introduces “Romantic” style for those who prefer tactical fireworks and combinational play.
Revolutionary AI commentary and voice features
One of Fritz 20’s most groundbreaking features is its integration of artificial intelligence for real-time commentary and voice interaction. The program can speak during games, offering situation-specific chess commentary that goes far beyond generic observations. With recognition of 170 different chess themes and patterns, Fritz provides varied and contextually relevant insights throughout the game.
The AI commentary system generates fresh content continuously, ensuring that players don’t encounter repetitive observations. The feature supports multiple languages and assigns unique voices to different opponent personalities, creating an immersive and personalized experience. The AI even demonstrates creativity, occasionally offering commentary in rhyming couplets or even limericks, adding an element of humor to the learning process.
Significant engine improvements
Under the hood, Fritz 20 features Frank Schneider’s substantially improved engine, boasting over 100 Elo points of strength gain compared to Fritz 19. This improvement translates to an estimated rating of approximately 3,580 Elo, placing it among the elite chess engines available today.
The engine’s performance was validated at the 2024 Computer Chess World Championship in Santiago de Compostela, where it shared first place among nine participants in the software category. The engine incorporates neural network evaluation, aligning with modern chess programming standards while maintaining its distinctive character that often provides alternative suggestions to the ubiquitous Stockfish engine.
Enhanced training features
Bullet training mode
Fritz 20 introduces a specialized Bullet Training mode designed to improve players’ performance under extreme time pressure. This feature allows precise time limit configuration, helping players develop the reflexes and nerve control essential for success in blitz and bullet games on online platforms.
Realistic time management
The program now operates with realistic time allocation, mimicking human time management patterns. Players can configure Fritz to play at different speeds, enabling various training scenarios such as practicing time pressure technique or learning to convert advantages in time scrambles.
Visual and interface improvements
Following the design language established by ChessBase 18, Fritz 20 features a completely redesigned user interface with modern, consistent button layouts and improved visual aesthetics. The program includes new fully animated 3D boards that enhance the visual appeal while maintaining the functional excellence that Fritz users expect.
Market position and accessibility
Fritz 20 is available through ChessBase’s official store, with upgrade pricing available for existing Fritz 19 users. The program continues ChessBase’s tradition of making sophisticated chess software accessible to players of all levels, from ambitious beginners to experienced tournament competitors.
Conclusion
Fritz 20 represents more than just an incremental update; it’s a paradigm shift in chess software design. By combining significant engine improvements with innovative AI-powered features and human-like playing characteristics, ChessBase has created a program that serves as both a formidable opponent and an intelligent training partner.
The integration of voice commentary, personality-based playing styles, and advanced training modes positions Fritz 20 at the forefront of educational chess software. For players seeking to improve their game through engaging, personalized interaction with a world-class chess engine, Fritz 20 offers an unparalleled experience that bridges the gap between traditional computer chess and human-centered learning.
Whether you’re preparing for tournament play, seeking to understand classical playing styles, or simply wanting to enjoy chess against a responsive and entertaining opponent, Fritz 20 delivers a comprehensive solution that honors the rich tradition of the Fritz series while embracing the possibilities of modern artificial intelligence.
Your personal chess trainer. Your toughest opponent. Your strongest ally.
FRITZ 20 is more than just a chess engine – it is a training revolution for ambitious players and professionals. Whether you are taking your first steps into the world of serious chess training, or already playing at tournament level, FRITZ 20 will help you train more efficiently, intelligently and individually than ever before.Continue Reading
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It’s sexy! It’s Swedish! It’s everywhere! How princess cake conquered America | Cake
Illustration: Yue Zhang/The Guardian This spring, something strange started happening at the Fillmore Bakery in San Francisco, which specializes in old-school European desserts.
Excited customers kept asking the bakery’s co-owner, Elena Basegio, “Did you see about the princess cake online?”
The dome-shaped Swedish layer cake, topped with a smooth layer of green marizipan, had suddenly gone viral, increasing sales of the bakery’s already-bestselling cake.
After nearly a century of demure European popularity, “prinsesstårta” suddenly seemed to be everywhere: on menus at hip restaurants in Los Angeles and New York, trending on TikTok, even inspiring candle scents at boutique lifestyle brands.
The Swedish consulate in San Francisco confirmed the phenomenon, telling the Guardian that the trend appears to be driven by innovative American pastry chefs such as Hannah Ziskin, whose Echo Park pizza parlor has offered up a sleek redesign of the palatial pastry, as well as by online food influencers, some of whom have offered American bakers more “accessible” versions of the elaborate dessert.
Photograph: sbossert/Getty Images The reinvention of one of Sweden’s most cherished desserts as a trendy indulgence might seem like just another retro fad, like the renewed popularity of martinis or caviar. But as a product of the European country with the highest rating for gender equality between men and women, princess cake is more subversive than its smooth marzipan surface might suggest.
This is, after all, a cake so difficult to construct that it served as an early technical challenge on the Great British Bake-Off: its wrinkle-free marzipan dome is a fiendish feat of kitchen engineering. Americans are also leaning into the dessert’s more seductive qualities: to state the obvious, this is a breast-shaped cake topped with a rosy marzipan nipple. Its green coating might conjure up a buxom extraterrestrial, but that doesn’t really change the fundamental impression: this cake is very, very sexy.
Training the princesses
When Ziskin, the Los Angeles pastry chef, started serving slices of princess cake at her restaurant Quarter Sheets, many of her patrons were so unfamiliar with the dessert that they asked if she had created and named it herself.
In fact, the invention of the cake is credited to a prominent Swedish home economics teacher named Jenny Åkerström, whose students at her “renowned school of cookery” in the early 1900s included the princesses of Sweden. Åkerström turned this experience into the 1929 Prinsessornas Kokbook, a popular collection of recipes dedicated to her three royal pupils. “These Swedish recipes of good taste are recommended by their majesties Margaret, Matha and Astrid to her majesty the American housewife,” a 1936 English translation of the cookbook promised.
Photograph: Quarter Sheets Åkerström’s recipe for a marzipan-covered “gröntårta”, or green tart, is included in one of the later editions of her cookbook.
Princess cake went on to become the iconic Swedish dessert, one served at birthdays, graduations and office parties. It’s traditional to fight over who gets to eat the marzipan rose perched on top of the dome. Sweden’s tourism bureau estimates that half a million “Prinsesstårtor” are sold in the country each year. Since 2004, there’s even been a “princess cake week” held each September, during which some of the proceeds from cake sales are donated to a royal charity.
For Emelie Kihlstrom, a restaurant owner raised in Sweden and now living in New York, princess cake was so ubiquitous it felt a bit stodgy. “I wasn’t a huge fan, personally,” she said. “We have been eating it the same way always – there was never any variation.”
For her new French-Scandinavian restaurant Hildur, in Brooklyn, Kihlstrom decided to reinvent the classic dessert. Together with Simon Richtman, a chef who once worked for the Swedish consulate in New York, she developed a single-serving pink version of the cake, with queen’s jam – a mixture of blueberries and raspberries – instead of the raspberry jam, and a lighter diplomat cream in place of the traditional pastry cream filling.
At her restaurant, “It’s on every table,” Kihlstrom said. “It’s funny how it’s just become this phenomenon.”
Nearby in Brooklyn, the owners of BonBon, the TikTok-famous Swedish “candy salad” shop, have now opened Ferrane, a Swedish bakery which offers their own twist on princess cake. Their cocktail-glass mini cakes were inspired by the Swedish restaurant Sturehof, which now serves a tiny princess cake in a rounded coupe glass, Kihlstrom said.
Ferrane’s Princess Cake, served in an elegant coupe. Photograph: Ricky Jackson/Ferrane Sturehof’s Yohanna Blomgren debuted their reinvented princess cake in Stockholm last September, and a spokesperson for the restaurant said that the classic dessert was having a “resurgence” in Sweden, as well as in the US.
The cocktail glass version has taken off far beyond the Swedish restaurant’s expectations. “Many guests visit us specifically to try it – some even mentioning they’ve travelled across the country just for the cake,” the Sturehof spokesperson wrote.
In Los Angeles, Ziskin has also tweaked the traditional recipe, making her chiffon cake with olive oil, to give it a flavor that’s “a little more savory, a little more grassy”, adding mascarpone to the whipped cream, for a “savory note”, and making both her “super tart” raspberry jam and her marzipan from scratch.
“It’s really light – the layers are light,” Ziskin said. “It’s something you can finish.”
Instead of forming the cakes into tricky-to-construct domes, Ziskin makes her princess cakes in long rounded logs. Slices of the cake are so popular that they sell out almost every night: “People will email in advance and ask us to hold slices for their dinner,” she said.
A Bon Appetit video of Ziskin making her “homage” to the Swedish national cake went viral last fall, garnering more than 1m views and sparking heated pushback in the comments over the use of mascarpone, the correct shade of green for the marzipan – and the missing marzipan rose. (Ziskin garnishes logs of her cake, which sell for $85 each, with real flowers.) “Why do Americans have to ruin everything,” one TikTok commenter asked. “If you’re doing something, do it properly.”
Then, in April, British baker Nicola Lamb published a “simplified” princess cake recipe in the New York Times – one made upside down in a bowl, to help with the difficulty of creating the dome shape. The Food Network’s Molly Yeh produced an even-easier square pan version.
By early May, the food site Eater had declared: “The Princess Cake Gets Its Princess Moment.”
For longtime American fans of princess cake, this fanfare of discovery has been a little befuddling. MacKenzie Chung Fegan, the food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, credited the “great mainstreaming of princess cake” to New Yorkers belatedly encountering a dessert that was already popular elsewhere.
“I lived in New York, a city of 8 million people and nearly as many bakeries, for 20 years and never spotted a princess cake in the wild,” she wrote. Growing up in California’s Bay Area, by contrast, princess cake had been a familiar treat available at many local European bakeries.
The KAFFEREP cream cake. Photograph: Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings superstore, has long offered its own princess cake, the “KAFFEREP Cream Cake,” in its frozen food aisle, and has also sold the cake in Ikea restaurants in the US since 2019. The Ikea cake comes in a tiny, single-size version, with pink marzipan instead of green, and has some very enthusiastic American fans on Reddit.
Ziskin, the Los Angeles pastry chef, said she grew up eating supermarket princess cake from the Viktor Benes bakery at Gelson’s, a southern California grocery.
“I’ve literally had princess cake for my birthday since I was five years old,” Ziskin said. “It was always part of my life.”
‘Real men eat princess cake’
For some Americans, the sheer femininity of princess cake can cause some anxiety.
“People come in and say, ‘I’d really like to give this cake to my husband, but is there a way to make it more masculine?” said Basegio, the owner of the Fillmore Bakery in San Francisco. “They’ll ask us to take the rose off the top, so it’s just green… We’ve been asked to make it blue, which we don’t do. It’s just cake.”
These concerns are “frequent” and they always come from women buying the cake for men, Basegio said, even though, “men, specifically, would be the demographic that love princess cake cake most”.
One of Basegio’s ex-boyfriends once made her a shirt that read, “Real men eat princess cake,” illustrated with a tattooed arm holding up the cake.
While princess cake might seem like a recipe that would be popular with trad wife influencers, that does not appear to be the case. I asked Ziskin about this. While not wanting to sound “snooty”, Ziskin said, she thought it might be a skills issue.
“It’s a difficult thing to make well and present well, without your marzipan cracking,” Ziskin said. “It’s kind of more in the world of professional baking … there’s something that’s a little inaccessible about it.”
If you make a mistake while frosting a cake with buttercream, “you can wipe it and do it again,” Ziskin said. “You can’t take back the final placement of the marzipan.”
There are online debates over where to find the best princess cake in the United States. Quarter Sheets is among the contenders: Ziskin said that Lost Larson in Chicago, Sant Ambroeus in New York, and Copenhagen Pastry in Los Angeles are also frequently mentioned.
As princess cake grows in popularity, Ziskin said, she’s excited to see people continue to experiment with the flavors of the traditional cake. And, she added, “I’m interested to see how certain countries react to that.”
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Tanner Usrey Tries Not to Party Too Hard on New ‘These Days’ Album
“People say I need a viral moment,” Tannery Usrey says. “But you know what? That moment happens every time I write a new song, and every time I step onstage. If you chase that viral moment, it’ll eat you to death.”
For a decade, Usrey has toured relentlessly, with the music and hard-partying appeal to sustain a career playing clubs and dance halls in his native Texas. Then, one of his songs, “The Light,” appeared on Yellowstone in 2022, and Usrey landed a deal with Atlantic, releasing his 2023 debut album, Crossing Lines, in the wake. Suddenly, Usrey felt as though he was on the cusp of a breakthrough and became hellbent on making the most of the opportunity.
He does that on These Days, his second album, released on Friday. It’s a record that finds him assessing not just his songs, but his entire approach to music and touring — on These Days, Usrey grows up, fast.
“It’s about heartbreak, as usual, but the overall theme is more mature than what I’ve been writing about,” Usrey tells Rolling Stone. “It’s about counting the little wins, and that’s why I named it These Days. I want to appreciate every little moment, and every day that I make it through, and everybody else makes it through. It’s not all self-destruction anymore, it’s about real stuff.”
Usrey’s voice was what first endeared him to Texas crowds in the early 2010s, when he played acoustic shows with his older brother, Tim. He can sing with a country twang or hold a long blues note, and do both with his extensive vocal range. For These Days, Usrey wanted to showcase all that, which led him to tap Dave Cobb to produce.
“I think my voice shows on the record,” Usrey says. “[Cobb is] amazing at capturing voices, and I don’t think I’ve had anything like this yet. I needed to remind everybody else, and myself, ‘Hey, you can sing.’”
Usrey was raised on country music but eventually found himself drawn to the songwriting of the Texas and Red Dirt scenes, particularly the raw honesty in the lyrics of Cross Canadian Ragweed, Wade Bowen, and the Randy Rogers Band. He internalized that honestly, writing a string of songs that reflects his life experiences or state of mind. These Days is the distillation of years of Usrey refining that approach.
On the track “Better Weather,” Usrey laments a relationship undone by toxicity, repeating the refrain, “I’m prayin’ for better weather” as though trying to convince himself he’s put the relationship behind him.
“I was thinking about the person that got away,” he recalls. “You self-destruct out of a relationship but you still hope that they’re happy. You lie to them, and you tell them, ‘I’m good!’ but you still hope that they get the dream that they wanted.”
Meanwhile, “Do It to Myself” finds Usrey reckoning with the maturity he was searching for on this album. The song was written while he and Cobb were recording and Usrey caught himself partying just a little too hard.
“I got the idea while we were in the studio in Savannah,” he says. “Me and [drummer] Chris Powell, the night before, we’d drank about two bottles of tequila, just talking with each other. The next day, Dave says, ‘Let’s go out on a boat!’ I was seeing double. It felt like I was looking through 3-D glasses. And I was like, ‘Man, I guess I fucking do it to myself.’”
To lean further into personal introspection, Usrey collaborated with songwriters like Aaron Raitiere, Raina Wallace (formerly of the Lowdown Drifters), and Cobb himself — all writers who have embraced a personal worldview in their writing.
“I’ve been reading the Rick Rubin book The Creative Act,” Usrey says. “I read that you have to take in everything around you. I’ll be sitting at a restaurant, and I’ll overhear somebody talking, and I’ll take that story in. And I’ll take in myself, and what I’m going through, and what my friends and my family are going through.”
In the end, however, Usrey still sees writing and recording new songs as an opportunity to expand his high-energy live show. He is currently in the midst of a short run with Cody Jinks, winning over some of the “Hippies and Cowboys” singer’s fans in the process. He also has fall dates on the books opening for Ella Langley, his duet partner on 2023’s “Beautiful Lies.”
But the latter half of 2025 will feature Usrey on his own headlining Bad Love Tour, named after a song on These Days. He’ll hit venues like Bowery Ballroom in New York and the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, and is also on the bill of ACL Fest in Austin.
Usrey describes himself as a “road dog” who’d still be playing 200 dates a year if his team would let him, but he says for all the excitement of releasing a new record, the payoff — for him — happens when he’s onstage.
“I just want people to think it’s the best show they’ve been to,” Usrey says. “It sounds cocky, but that’s what I want: ‘Damn, that band’s fucking tight. He can sing.’”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
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Today’s ‘Quordle’ Hints And Answers For Sunday, July 13
Here’s some help with today’s Quordle, including hints and the answers.
Before today’s Quordle hints and answers, here’s where you can find the ones for Saturday’s game:
Hey, folks! Hints and the answers for today’s Quordle words are just ahead.
How To Play Quordle
For any newcomers joining us, here’s how to play Quordle: Just start typing in words. You have four five-letter words to guess and nine attempts to find them all. The catch is that you play all four words simultaneously.
If you get a letter in the right place for any of the four words, it will light up in green. If a word contains a letter from one of your guesses but it’s in the wrong place, it will appear in yellow. You could always check out the practice games before taking on the daily puzzle.
Here are some hints for today’s Quordle game, followed by the answers:
What Are Today’s Quordle Hints?
- Word 1 (top left) hint — type of canoe originally used originally by the Inuit. Also a travel search website
- Word 2 (top right) hint — criticize something as unnecessary
- Word 3 (bottom left) hint — adjective for something with a healthy reddish color
- Word 4 (bottom right) hint — in “Shake It Off,” Taylor Swift accurately declares one of these is gonna hate, hate, hate
- One word has a pair of repeated letters. Another has two pairs of repeated letters
- Today’s words start with K, D, R and H
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
What Are Today’s Quordle Answers?
Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Quordle answers.
This is your final warning!
Today’s words are…
That’s all there is to it for today’s Quordle clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Monday’s game if you need them. See you then!
If you’d like to chat about Quordle and New York Times word games such as Wordle, Connections and Strands (and to hang out with a bunch of lovely people), join us over at Discord! Also, subscribe to my newsletter, Pastimes!
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I’ve been using Amazon’s Alexa Plus for one day — here are my first impressions
I’ve waited two years to try out the new Alexa, which was first announced way back in 2023, and this week I finally got access to Alexa Plus. I’ve now spent 24 hours with Amazon’s generative AI-powered voice assistant, and it’s not just an improvement on the original; it’s an entirely new assistant.
Alexa Plus knows more, can do more, and is easier to interact with because it understands more. I can ramble, pause, sigh, cough, change my request mid-sentence, and it can adapt and respond appropriately. No more, “Sorry, I’m not sure about that.” Miraculous.
I’m impressed, but I found a few flaws. It’s no secret that Amazon has been struggling to reinvent Alexa; reports of delays and setbacks have plagued the project since it was announced. Amazon’s slow rollout of Alexa Plus is also a clue that confidence isn’t sky-high. While the expansion has recently ramped up (Amazon told me it’s now in “many millions” of homes), the upgraded assistant is still in Early Access. It’s a beta product, but that means it should get better.
I’ll publish an in-depth hands-on with Alexa Plus after spending a lot more time with it and testing the full list of new features it’s been pushing at me since arriving in my home. But here’s how I spent my first 24 hours with Alexa Plus along with my initial impressions of Alexa’s metamorphosis.
Echo smart displays get an updated UI when Alexa Plus is activated. Here it is on the Show 21. Alexa Plus landed on my Echo devices fairly late in the day, so, after going through some simple setup steps, my first experiment was having it help me cook dinner.
I asked Alexa for a recipe for salmon tacos, told it I wanted the first one it suggested, and asked it to read me the steps. This is something I’ve done many times before, and while Alexa responded with more detailed suggestions and in a more conversational tone, it mostly felt like business as usual.
But then, as it was reading me the steps, it displayed everything it was saying in a full-screen, chatbot-style interface on the Show 8 smart display, rather than just showing a static page of recipe steps and ingredients.
It’s a vast improvement over cooking with the old Alexa
At first, not having the recipe visible confused me. I couldn’t complete the steps as fast as Alexa was saying them. Then I realized that I didn’t need to keep going back to the screen to scroll through the recipe as I’m used to doing. Instead, I could just ask Alexa to read out the info as I needed it.
“Which spices do I need for the seasoning?” I said, standing in front of the spice cupboard. “How do I make the sauce?” I asked as I moved around the kitchen, getting the ingredients. Alexa replied with information pulled from the relevant sections. When I was putting the salmon in the air fryer, I asked, “How long do I need to cook the salmon?” Alexa replied with the right time, and I said, “Set a timer for that,” and it did.
It’s a vast improvement over cooking with the old Alexa, which can’t respond on the fly like that. And which also loves to close the recipe on me in the middle of cooking, and then pretend it had never heard of that recipe when I ask it to show it again.
But the new experience wasn’t perfect. At one point, I asked how much sour cream I needed. “I apologize, but the exact amount of sour cream for the white sauce isn’t specific in the recipe details I have.” It was right there in the ingredients list. Then it told me that one cup would probably be fine, as if it was guessing, even though that’s how much the recipe said.
Alexa also lost the recipe once or twice when I hadn’t interacted for a few minutes. A quick, “Alexa, can you show me that salmon taco recipe?” usually brought it back successfully. But once it completely forgot what it was doing and tried to gaslight me by saying we hadn’t had any conversations about salmon tacos today. I guess some things just don’t change.
Thursday morning coffee routine hiccup
The next morning, I walked into the kitchen and asked Alexa to make me a coffee. This normally triggers an Alexa Routine I created that turns on the Bosch coffee maker and starts making a coffee grande (Bosch lets you select specific coffee styles in its Alexa skill). This time, Alexa said, “I’m sorry, I can’t actually make coffee for you. Is there something else you’d like me to do instead?”
This is where the friction between the old Alexa’s command and control structure and the new, generative-AI Alexa’s method of listening to what I say and “deciding” what I want it to do became clear. Alexa couldn’t parse that I wanted it to run a routine from my smart home rather than have it do something for me.
Amazon isn’t the only company struggling to merge its voice assistant’s old functions with its new generative AI capabilities. This is a big part of why we’ve yet to see a smarter Siri in our HomePods or any major Gemini updates to Google Home beyond its own beta program.
The new smart home widget and calendar widget. I rephrased, saying, “Alexa, can you run my ‘make me a coffee’ routine?” It asked me which of my two coffee routines I wanted to run. I picked the one I wanted, and this time it ran.
For my second cup, I tried a different tactic. Instead of using a routine, I just asked it to tap into the capabilities of the connected appliance: “Alexa, can you ask my coffee machine to make me a coffee grande?” It worked.
This last action is a big change and one that should make using smart home gadgets much easier. When the new Alexa was first announced, then-Alexa chief Dave Limp told me it would be capable of disambiguating controls for smart gadgets; know what they’re capable of and use those tools when you ask for them without you having to do any setup. My first impressions here are promising, but I’ll be doing a lot more testing.
Breakfast with Wimbledon, score!
As I sat down with my coffee and granola, I put Alexa’s new conversational skills to the test. I wanted to talk about the most important event in the world right now: Wimbledon. My family is bored to tears by tennis, and it was too early to ping my go-to tennis buddy, Verge features editor Kevin Nguyen. So, I asked Alexa to tell me how the tournament was going.
After we talked back and forth about the championships, with Alexa giving me the lowdown on who was playing today, who were the favorites, as well as some interesting tidbits such as what would be historic about an Alcaraz win on Sunday, I asked for the score for the match that was currently taking place.
Disappointingly, I didn’t get the exact set / game breakdown, but it did accurately tell me that the first women’s semi-final was tied at zero sets each. I then asked it to show me the match on YouTube TV, and it launched the app on the Echo Show 21 I was using (which has FireTV software built in). However, I had to tune in to ESPN on my own. Nicely done, Alexa.
Lunchtime trip planning lies
We have a family camping trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park planned for later this month, so while making lunch, I asked Alexa for some day trip ideas. After a bit of back and forth, I settled on Gatlinburg. It suggested Ripley’s Aquarium, which I had not heard of, and will definitely check out, as well as the Dollywood theme park, which was already on our list.
A voice in your home confidently telling you something that’s not true hits a little harder than a chatbot lying to you in a text window
I asked if there were any deals on Dollywood tickets, and Alexa excitedly told me about a great deal where I could get a two-day ticket for just $42 a day. I asked it to help me book those, and it showed me a link, along with some generic tips for buying tickets and how to check out.
I pulled out my phone to open the chat — you can pick up any chat you start on an Echo device from the Alexa app, and soon on the web — and navigated to the Dollywood website. Once there, I learned that the pricing information Alexa had given me was wrong. I would be paying $122, not $84, for a two-day ticket. Bad Alexa.
Chatbots giving incorrect information isn’t anything new. And Amazon acknowledges that delivering accurate, real-time information is a “known limitation” for Alexa Plus. But somehow, a voice in your home confidently telling you something that turns out not to be true, hits a little harder than a chatbot lying to you in a text window on your phone or computer, where you can quickly fact-check it with a Google search.
An easier evening routine
That afternoon, I decided to try a feature I’ve been excited for: creating a smart home routine by voice. I’ve set up many, many, many routines in the Alexa app over the years, and it’s a fiddly, time-consuming process that often goes wrong. Telling Alexa what I want and having it figure out the details definitely appeals.
I started with something not too complicated. I told Alexa I wanted to dim the lights in the living room and kitchen to 60 percent, play relaxing music from the Echo Studio, and adjust the thermostat to 76 degrees. I said I wanted this to happen every night at 6PM, but I also wanted to trigger it with my voice at any time.
After a couple of minutes of back and forth, we ended up with two routines: one that runs every night at 6 and one that I can execute with a voice command whenever I like. (Alexa Routines can only have one trigger each, hence the need for two routines.) Alexa then offered to test the routine, which worked, and it then ran as scheduled. Good Alexa.
I’m mostly excited about this feature for my family, who rely on me to set things up for them. This should make it easier for them to bend our smart home to their will.
A few other thoughts from my first day with Alexa Plus
This just feels like a big waste of screen real estate. - The default voice is way too peppy. I immediately switched to one of the other options (there are 8 total), picking “feminine grounded,” which sounds the most like the original Alexa. What can I say, I’m a traditionalist!
- Controlling multiple smart home devices with one request is the bomb. I told Alexa to turn off the hallway lights, set the thermostat upstairs to 78, and start the vacuum in the kitchen. And it did it all. Excellent Alexa.
- I really like not having to say Alexa all the time. After the first summoning, I could talk to it without repeating the wake word, making conversations more free-flowing. A blue light on the screen or speaker indicates when it’s still engaged, but I’d like it if this would stay longer; it seems to time out after about 30 seconds.
- The new smart home widget is great. The Show 21 and 15 have a whole new UI, with redesigned widgets that are cleaner and more useful. The smart home widget, in particular, is a big improvement, being more interactive and customizable. I also really like the redesigned calendar widget, which can go full screen and show day, week, and month layouts. There’s still no option to keep the Show fixed on a full-screen widget, though, and the new UI feels cramped on the Show 8 and 5.
- There’s too much chatbot. The text transcript of a conversation taking up the whole screen feels clunky and overwhelming, especially on larger screens like the Show 21. A smaller window showing the chat with the rest of the content still visible would be better.
After one day with Alexa, I’m impressed. Despite some slip-ups, it did make my life better, which is very promising. While there are some rough edges to smooth out, several promised features are still MIA, and I’ve yet to put any of the flashier agentic abilities like booking a plumber, a restaurant, or an Uber — the changes I’ve seen so far are mostly good.
The big shift for my household will be getting used to more personality in our AI
However, I am super skeptical about how well it will interact with my smart home. Asking Alexa to run that coffee routine the next morning prompted the worrying response, “I can’t run Routines on demand.” Based on several Reddit threads, it seems some existing skills and APIs aren’t jiving well with the new administration.
A significant difference between a smart home voice assistant and a Chat-GPT-style chatbot is that the former can take actions in your home. This makes it potentially both more useful and more problematic. If ChatGPT hallucinates that the weather outside is frightful in a text box, it’s not going to do much damage. You can see how an AI with control of my smart thermostat could cause problems if it gets hold of the wrong end of the weather stick.
The biggest shift for my household with Alexa Plus will be getting used to more personality in our AI. My kids are 14 and 17. They’ve basically grown up with Alexa, and this new version is totally different. My 14-year-old daughter’s first reaction to hearing it was shock. “That’s not nice!” she gasped. “The way it talked back to you.”
It wasn’t that Alexa was rude; she was objecting to the extra personality it exhibited. She’s firmly of the opinion that machines should not try to act like humans. I’m on the fence, but after spending some more time with Alexa Plus, I might be picking a side. We’ll see.
Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
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Elon Musk claims his America party will change US politics. Experts disagree | US news
“You want a new political party and you shall have it!” Elon Musk declared in early July.
The world’s richest man is never one to shy away from grandiose statements, and he continued: “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
The America party, Musk hopes, will be a viable alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties: a political organization that can influence the future of US politics. He has mooted running candidates for two to three Senate seats and up to 10 House districts. Given the tight divide between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Musk believes capturing the small number of seats “would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws”.
Given there is consistently strong support for an alternative to the Big Two parties, it should be a good idea, right?
Wrong, said Bernard Tamas, professor of political science at Valdosta State University and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties.
“At this moment in American politics, I see no evidence that you’re going to get another party winning seats in Congress and actually being able to have an impact in the government,” Tamas said.
“It’s not just the money that Democrats and Republicans have. They have all the resources. They have the money. They have 150 years of structure. They have all the professional politicians, and they have all the consultants, and they have all the Madison Avenue ad companies working for them.”
The whole concept of the America party seemingly came together in a matter of weeks, following the famous row between Musk and Donald Trump. And as with many ideas born out of spite and fury, certain elements appear to have not been fully thought through. Americaparty.com, for example, is already registered to someone else, who now appears to be trying to sell the domain name for $6.9m. On X, which Musk owns, @AmericaParty was already taken, so the new venture had to opt for @AmericaPartyX.
It’s not yet clear what the party will stand for, beyond opposition to Republicans’ ballooning of the national debt. Musk has yet to elaborate on the “contentious laws” his politicians would challenge, and there is no party platform or manifesto.
In any case, third parties have rarely, if ever, been successful in the way Musk envisages. But where they can make a difference is in highlighting issues and pressuring the main two parties to act.
“In terms of the parties that really had a big impact, they didn’t win seats,” Tamas said. “The job of third parties is disruption. It’s to sting like a bee. It’s to cause pain.”
Tamas pointed to the Progressive party in Wisconsin and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party, which managed to win key victories over relief for unemployed constituents and banking reform in the state, as examples of political groups that have managed to inflict such a bee sting. That doesn’t appear to be what Musk is going for, however, despite there being an opportunity for a stinging insect.
“Here you have the Republican party moving farther and farther to the right, and farther and farther in this kind of Maga direction, with nobody in the Republican party in Congress willing to stand up at all to Trump or this movement,” Tamas said.
“It’s a perfect opening for a third party. This is what it looks like historically. But you’re not going to replace them. What you do is you attack them for this. You’re trying to pull them back towards the center.
“This is how the third parties have always succeeded. The idea is you cause them pain, and what they do, if it works, is they shift back towards something that reflects more what the public wants, or deals with the issues that the third party is bringing up.”
Parties that have pursued the getting-people-elected approach have fared less well than the pain-inflictors. Forward party was founded by Andrew Yang, who had previously run for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 2022, with the slightly call-to-arms style slogan of “Not left. Not right. Forward.” These days the party barely features on the national political landscape, although it does continue to bleat out social media content – a recent 4 July post on Instagram attracted almost 40 likes.
At its inception, Forward party figures claimed both the Republican and Democratic parties had become too radical, and said their new venture “can’t be pegged to the traditional left-right spectrum because we aren’t built like the existing parties”.
Somehow, a promise to not really have a firm ideological stance on anything isn’t a very sexy pitch to voters. Among the “elected affiliates” named on Forward’s website are the former mayor of Newberry, Florida, a town of 7,300 people, and a man who “is responsible for sanitation and utilities” in the Connecticut borough of Stonington – population 976 people.
There is widespread support for a third party. Polls have repeatedly shown that people want a third party. But what that looks like remains to be seen. In Musk’s own survey on social media asking if people wanted him to start a new party, only 65% said yes, and 34% said no, although a poll in early July showed that 14% of voters said they would be very likely to support the party, with 26% somewhat likely.
There are already issues with the America party becoming a viable third choice. Musk is approaching eccentric political advisers, including Curtis Yarvin, a rightwing tech blogger who has argued American democracy has run its course and the country should instead be run by a dictator-esque CEO.
A more fundamental problem with the America party is unique to Musk: people really don’t like him. A poll last week found that 60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Musk, compared with 32% in favor.
America shall have a third party, Musk declared at the start of his new venture. But does America want this kind of third party, with these kind of aims, run by this kind of man?
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Some Tomatoes Are Evolving Backwards in Real Time
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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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Evolution is often portrayed as stepping toward ever-greater complexity, but the natural world is filled with examples of organisms actually reverting back to a previous evolutionary state.
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A new study examines this process in progress with tomato plants in Galápagos, finding that plants on the newer, western islands have developed alkaloids similar to eggplant relatives millions of years ago compared to modern tomato plants.
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It’s possible these plants developed this strategy because the newer islands are barren and less biologically diverse, so the ancient molecule might provide better protection in such a harsh environment.
The famous ape-to-man illustration, known as The March of Progress, depicts evolution as a one-way street toward evolutionary perfection—but nature isn’t always so simple.
Many organisms have displayed what appears to be “reverse evolution,” or regression, where ancient attributes of past ancestors seem to reappear down the evolutionary line. Cave fish, for example, will lose eyesight and return to a state similar to a previous ancestor that lacked this visual organ, but the argument remains whether this is reverse evolution or simply the ending of an evolutionary pathway that creates a vestigial organ.
Of course, complex animals are not the only ones that appear to rewind the evolutionary clock. A new study in Nature Communications, led by scientists at University of California (UC) Riverside, analyzed species of tomato in the Solanaceae family, comparing populations from both eastern and western islands of the Galápagos—that famous Pacific island chain that inspired Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory nearly 200 years ago.
The team specifically analyzed the tomato’s alkaloids, a bitter molecule that acts as a kind of pesticide to deter would-be predators and fungi. On the eastern islands, the tomatoes exhibited alkaloids similar to modern tomatoes, but on the western islands—which are geologically younger than the eastern ones—the tomatoes exhibited changes in four amino acids in the enzyme that makes these alkaloid molecules. They found this simple change caused the tomatoes to create alkaloids more similar to eggplant relatives from millions of years ago, seemingly reversing evolution.
“It’s not something we usually expect, but here it is, happening in real time, on a volcanic island,” UC Riverside’s Adam Jozwiak, lead author of the study, said in a press statement. “Our group has been working hard to characterize the steps involved in alkaloid synthesis, so that we can try and control it.”
However, this “reverse” wasn’t a spontaneous event. The researchers theorize that the cause of this evolutionary quirk could be traced to the new, western islands themselves. While the eastern islands are millions of years old, the western ones are only hundreds of thousands of years old and are still forming today. This means these islands contain less biological diversity as well as more barren soil. This more ancient landscape may have pushed the tomato to then adopt a more ancient survival strategy.
“It could be that the ancestral molecule provides better defense in the harsher western conditions,” Jozwiak says. “Some people don’t believe in this, but the genetic and chemical evidence points to a return to an ancestral state. The mechanism is there. It happened.”
Whether organisms experience “reverse” evolution could largely be chalked up to semantics. With both cave fish and Galápagos tomatoes, evolution did its usual work of making life fit for the conditions at hand. Usually that means improving into ever greater complexity, and at other, less often times, it means reverting back to a golden oldie.
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The Best Co-op Games for Every Situation
Styled after 1950s cartoons, you might expect Cuphead to be an easy, light-hearted adventure. While it is light-hearted, it’s no walk in the park.
The game starts with an ill-fated deal with the devil. You play as Cuphead, who inadvertently becomes the devil’s debt collector. Luckily, you can bring along your brother, Mugman, to help take down everyone on the devil’s list in hopes of earning your freedom. While challenging, taking on unique, well-designed boss encounters with a fantastic art style is very fun — especially when you bring a friend.
Price: $19.99
Number of players: 1-2
Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch
Genre: Side-scroller action/adventure, bullet hell, platformer
Co-op style: Split screen
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