Keira Knightley said that she was “not aware” of demands to boycott JK Rowling prior to joining the cast of the new audiobook versions of the Harry Potter series.Knightley was speaking to Decider to promote her new Netflix movie The Woman in Cabin 10 (in which she plays a Guardian reporter), and was asked if she knew that “some fans are calling for a Harry Potter boycott”.Knightley said: “I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry. You know, I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure…
Salesforce announced Monday the latest version of its AI agent platform as the company looks to lure enterprises to its AI software in an increasingly crowded market. The customer relations manager giant unveiled the new platform, branded Agentforce 360, ahead of its annual Dreamforce customer conference that kicks off October 14. This newer version of Agentforce includes new ways to instruct AI agents through text, a new platform to build and deploy agents, and new infrastructure for messaging app Slack, among others. A notable aspect of Agentforce 360 is its new AI agent prompting tool, called Agent Script, which will…
Ben Stokes and Mark Wood will be "raring to go" in time for the Ashes, according to England pace bowler Brydon Carse.Talismanic England skipper Stokes missed the final Test against India in July because of a shoulder injury, while express paceman Wood has not played a Test since August 2024 as a result of elbow and knee problems.Both are looking to be fit for the first Test in Perth on 21 November, a series opener that Australia captain Pat Cummins has said he is "less likely than likely" to feature in because of a back injury.Carse, a Durham team-mate of…
Key Takeaways Warren Buffett has often drawn on the concept of a "Mr. Market," as created by his mentor, Benjamin Graham. The "Mr. Market" metaphor is intended to teach you to view market volatility more like a manic partner's mood, rather than as a guide to the real value of stocks. Successful investing often means doing the opposite of the crowd: buying quality businesses when fear drives prices down and selling when fear of missing out (FOMO) pushes them too high. Buffett's most important investment advice often involves a peculiar character investors need to understand: "Mr. Market is there to…
Exhibitions are meant to promote the sport and take it to new audiences. Organisers want the best players in the world to feature because they will sell more tickets. Roger Federer played Rafael Nadal in Cape Town in 2020 in front of 51,954 fans - a reported record, external for a tennis crowd at the time, albeit not an official match.Alcaraz - a gifted, highly entertaining shot-maker - plays a lot of exhibitions. He faced Americans Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe in New York and North Carolina respectively at the start of the yearAlcaraz and Tiafoe also took part in…
Matrices can be your Friends. By Steve Baker What stops most novice graphics programmers from getting friendly with matrices is that they look like 16 utterly random numbers. However, a little mental picture that I have seems to help most people to make sense of what's going on. Most programmers are visual thinkers and don't take kindly to piles of abstract math. Take an OpenGL matrix: float m [ 16 ] ; Consider this as a 4x4 array with it's elements laid out into four columns like this: m[0] m[4] m[ 8] m[12] m[1] m[5] m[ 9] m[13] m[2] m[6]…
Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas are a gift for a pianist as adept at balancing the playful and the profound as Mitsuko Uchida. Each is potentially a work of astonishing individual impact, yet they can come together to form something even greater than the sum of their parts.Perhaps it’s in the way that each sonata seems to pick up on and amplify the conflicts, beauties and struggles of the one before. Op 109 came to its close above a low rumble that Uchida made sound like an earthquake – Beethoven must have thought of sound as something to be felt…
Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly.Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called “high-level” because they work sort of like human language, written in commands and idioms that might fit in at a poetry slam. Generally speaking,…
Hull KR's Grand Final-winning trio Mikey Lewis, Jez Litten and Joe Burgess have all been named in England's final 24-man squad for the autumn Ashes Test series against Australia but there is no place for Super League's Man of Steel winner Jake Connor.Litten's only previous cap arrived against France in 2023, while Burgess, who scored two tries in Hull KR's triumph over Wigan on Saturday, returns to the England set-up after a 10-year absence. But Connor, who was also omitted from the squad get-together in June, has been unable to convince head coach Shaun Wane he deserves a spot amid…
Key Takeaways When forced to choose what to sacrifice in retirement, only 15% of Americans would cut the financial support they provide to family members, making it their least preferred option out of nine difficult choices.Americans would rather return to work, skip medical care, or move in with others (22%) than stop helping adult children, grandchildren, or aging parents.For many, family obligation outweighs personal security. When the Alliance for Lifetime Income surveyed Americans about what sacrifices they'd make to stretch retirement savings, reducing family financial support ranked dead last—chosen by only 15% of respondents. That figure is way behind having…
