Latest news with #Mode
India Today
12-06-2025
- Sport
- India Today
Why Manolo Marquez's India stint proves FIFA Career Mode isn't real life
In FIFA Career Mode, managing both a club and a national team is a walk in the park. You're juggling transfer windows on Monday, coaching your national team to World Cup glory by the weekend, and somehow everything fits perfectly. No angry fans, no scheduling headaches, no real-life football, in all its boldness, tried to replicate that fantasy. When the All India Football Federation handed the reins of the national team to Manolo Marquez in June 2024 while he continued as head coach of FC Goa, it felt like a daring move. After all, Marquez had earned his stripes in the ISL—smart, composed, and technically sound. If anyone could make this work, maybe it was nearly a year later, the experiment looks like a bad glitch in the matrix. India's national team is in shambles—bottom of their qualification group, three matches without a goal, and fresh off a humiliating loss to 153rd-ranked Hong Kong. What was meant to be a visionary double role is now an awkward cautionary grip on bothThis was never going to be easy. Being the boss of a club like FC Goa takes everything out of a manager—training sessions, tactical prep, squad management, post-match breakdowns. Now add to that the job of reviving a struggling national team that hasn't qualified for a major tournament in years, and you've got a recipe for calendar doesn't bend. While Marquez focused on the ISL for half the year, the national team had to make do with part-time attention. There was no long-term plan. No time for deep scouting. No time for building chemistry. And when it came time for Marquez to switch hats and take charge of the Blue Tigers, he found a side that had no rhythm, no confidence, and no clue in the final bite, even with ChhetriadvertisementOne of the biggest criticisms of Marquez's tenure has been India's complete lack of attacking threat. In desperation, Marquez even coaxed 40-year-old Sunil Chhetri out of international retirement—India's greatest ever striker, a man whose finishing is still sharper than most in the squad. Chhetri's return should've added calm, experience, and most importantly, in the crucial match against Hong Kong, Marquez benched him. And when India's new-look frontline—including the likes of Ashique Kuruniyan—missed a golden opportunity with an open goal in the 39th minute, the decision came back to haunt him. Chhetri's absence was felt immediately. If it had been him on the end of that chance, many believe the ball would have kissed the net instead of the wasn't just tactical confusion. It felt like a team caught in between generations, with no direction and no trust in its own the I-LeagueAnother worrying trend under Marquez has been his apparent disregard for the I-League—the same competition that once nurtured some of India's biggest stars. From Sandesh Jhingan to Jeje Lalpekhlua, the I-League has long been the launchpad for raw, hungry talents who later made their name in the ISL and the national with his tunnel vision locked onto ISL fixtures, Marquez has shown little interest in recognising or rewarding performances outside the ISL bubble. That's not just an oversight—it's a missed opportunity to scout the next Chhetri or Gurpreet before they're priced out of speak about I-League, but there is a difference between I-League and ISL. The strongest position in India is ISL. To play 2, 3, 4, 5 good games in I-League is not enough; you need to perform good in ISL,' Manolo told reporters ahead of India vs the national coach doesn't look at the second tier, who will? Indian football doesn't have the luxury of ignoring grassroots or lower-division talent. The I-League isn't just a relic—it's still relevant. And for a country that needs depth more than ever, brushing it aside is a critical results, angry fansLet's be real—losing to Hong Kong stung. Not just because of the rankings (India were 26 spots above them), but because of how flat India looked. There was no urgency, no spark. That result followed a goalless draw with Bangladesh and another against Thailand. Three games, zero goals, and a growing wave of fan Marquez tried to hold it together: 'The dressing room is like a funeral,' he said. And it probably was. But at some point, the emotions have to be matched with solutions. And so far, they've been now need to win all four of their remaining qualifiers to stay alive. But even one win feels like a long shot at the scouting, no depthA national team job is not just about picking the best eleven players—it's about building a pipeline, finding talent from every corner of the country, and nurturing them. But how do you do that when you're already occupied running a club?Marquez, locked into FC Goa commitments, never had time to look at players outside the obvious ISL names. The scouting structure didn't evolve. Youth players stayed on the fringes. And India's attacking woes, defensive lapses, and tactical disarray were all signs of a team that had no one fully invested in its FIFA, all your scouting reports arrive in a neat list. In reality, it takes time, effort, and patience—none of which this dual setup tickingWith matches against Singapore on the horizon in October, pressure is mounting. Marquez hasn't said he wants to step down, but there's growing noise that a change might be maybe that's for the best. Eleven months into a two-year deal, the idea has clearly not worked. Indian football needs a coach who can dedicate everything to building this team from the ground up—not someone switching roles isn't FIFAWhat Marquez's stint has taught us is simple—this isn't a game. You can't manage a club and a national team like it's a save file on FIFA. Indian football needs full-time commitment, fresh ideas, and a system that supports long-term now, it's time to put the controller down and fix what's broken. Because in real life, there's no 'simulate match' button—and definitely no restart.
NZ Autocar
11-06-2025
- Automotive
- NZ Autocar
BYD Sealion 8 seven-seat PHEV SUV coming here
BYD New Zealand has confirmed that the Sealion 8 plug-in hybrid, a three-row SUV, will arrive locally by early 2026 or even late this year. EVs and Beyond talked with BYD NZ country manager, Warren Willmot, who said: 'We're hoping to get it slightly ahead of Australia for December,' said. 'But definitely Q1 2026' at the latest. The BYD Sealion 8 is the brand's largest SUV for export markets, joining the smaller Sealion 7 EV. Built on BYD's latest DM (Dual Mode) 5.0 hybrid platform, it offers two drivetrain options at launch. The entry-level will be DM-i (front-wheel drive) and a dual-motor AWD DM-p variant will also be available. Read our review of BYD Sealion 7 Premium here. Both models use a 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine (110kW/220Nm) paired with a front-mounted 200kW electric motor. The DM-p version adds a 141kW rear motor for all-wheel drive and enhanced acceleration. Expect the Sealion 8 DM-p to reach open road speed in a claimed 4.9sec, while the DM-i should manage it in 8.6 seconds. The DM-i uses a 19.0kWh Blade battery while the DM-p comes with fa 35.6kWh unit. These lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are part of BYD's cell-to-body integration strategy. The result is improved efficiency and structural strength. Pure electric range estimates are pending but should exceed 80km (WLTP) in the DM-p. 'Yes, we'll be taking both drivetrain options — DM-i and DM-p,' Willmot confirmed. 'BEV is probably 12 months after initial launch.' Inside, the BYD Sealion 8 offers a three-row layout for up to seven passengers. Expect also dual digital displays, and climate control across all rows. In DM-p trim, heated and massaging seats in the first and second rows will be standard. Safety items includes adaptive cruise, lane centring, blind spot detection, and autonomous emergency braking. Expect announcements of the BYD Sealion 8's price and specifications for New Zealand closer to launch. It will sit above the Sealion 7 in BYD's local line-up, offering a new electrified option for larger families and fleet buyers.
Time of India
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Mario Kart World Mirror Mode Explained
Image via: Nintendo If you feel you have conquered all the curves, drifts and shortcuts of Mario Kart World, then get ready to see them flipped upside down like hand standing down stairs. This fan-favorite challenge turns everything, literally upside down, sending even the most experienced racers into a tailspin. Far from being some gimmicky other world experience, Mirror Mode is a brutal gauntlet of muscle memory, flexibility and reflexes that function in a high speed environment. A Unfamiliar World, Upside Down Mirror Mode isn't exactly a new feature to the Mario Kart franchise. Originally debuted in Mario Kart 64, the plugin has returned in almost every game since Double Dash!! Its introduction into the arena of Mario Kart World comes with new wrinkles and added layers of complexity. Instead of making the game faster, similar to the introduction of 150cc from 100cc, Mirror Mode takes the existing tracks and mirrors them horizontally—left becomes right, right becomes left. Each circuit configuration is flipped, and even muscle memory turns into your foe. How to unlock Mirror Mode in Mario Kart World? How to Access Mirror Mode Gaining access to Mirror Mode is not an easy task. Read on to learn about our recent initiatives and at a minimum, what you'll need to implement them. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Always Put a Plastic Bottle on Your Tires when Parked, Here's Why Cleverst Undo P Switch Missions , found all over the game's huge free roam areas. Finish all 40 of them! Complete the Special Cup, which in turn requires unlocking and completing seven other Grand Prix cups. Many players have even said they need to fulfill extra requirements, such as unlocking other characters, obtaining a certain number of Peach Medallions, or achieving three stars on all Knockout Tour courses, so you should assume the requirements are cumulative. Mirror Mode, which inverts tracks to create a new challenge, is the game's method of rewarding completionists and serious racers. Modes Supported by Mirror Madness Once unlocked, Mirror Mode isn't just for Grand Prix. It seeps into almost every game mode, too: Selectable during engine class selection. Provides players with a new way to earn 5-star rankings, independent of old-school 150cc course progression. With the very portal we made our way through Peach's Kingdom, as one example, walk into one of these rainbow reflective portals to trigger a mirrored version of the free-roaming open world. A mirrored version of this already harsh mode doubles down on the difficulty. Each race in Mirror Mode counts toward your cumulative star rank, though. Looking to troll your friends? Private matches allow you to toggle Mirror Mode as well, even in casual settings. Top 10 Tips to Help You Win in Mario Kart World What makes Mirror Mode more than just a novelty is the way it challenges players to relearn tracks they knew by souled-out heart. It evens the competitive playing field and brings back the excitement of unpredictability. It's not even about raw pace. It's about knowing what's around you, adapting on the fly and being able to relearn muscle memory ingrained from hundreds of F1 races run. Mario Kart World's Mirror Mode isn't simply a copycat version of the game's tracks, it's a turned around reflection of your talents. Mirror Mode tells you that sometimes, everything you think is backward.
The Hindu
06-06-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Google AI Mode can make interactive visualisations of financial data
Google has started rolling out interactive chart visualisations in AI Mode in Labs so users can help compare stocks or prices during a specific time period. In a blog posted by the company, Google said that their advanced AI models are able to bring financial data to life drawing from historical and real-time data. 'Ask to 'compare the stock performance of blue chip CPG companies in 2024.' Instead of manually researching individual companies and their stock prices, AI Mode does the heavy lifting for you using Gemini's advanced multi-step reasoning and multimodal capabilities. And ask a follow up like 'did any of these companies pay back dividends?' and AI Mode understands what to research for you,' the blog noted. Users must enable AI Mode in Search Labs to test the feature. A report by 9to5Google also said that they had also restored the Lens and voice input to the Search bar on the Discover feed. Google Labs has also announced they're testing a new feature called 'Portraits' where users can interact 'conversationally with AI representations of trusted experts built in partnership with the experts themselves.' The company has an open call for people in the U.S. who want to partner with them for 'Portraits.'
The Star
06-06-2025
- Business
- The Star
Google's new AI-powered search has arrived. Proceed with caution
Recently, I asked Google to help me plan my daughter's birthday party by finding a park in Oakland, California, with picnic tables. The site generated a list of parks nearby, so I went to scout two of them out – only to find there were, in fact, no tables. 'I was just there,' I typed to Google. 'I didn't see wooden tables.' Google acknowledged the mistake and produced another list, which again included one of the parks with no tables. I repeated this experiment by asking Google to find an affordable carwash nearby. Google listed a service for US$25 (RM106), but when I arrived, a carwash cost US$65 (RM276). I also asked Google to find a grocery store where I could buy an exotic pepper paste. Its list included a nearby Whole Foods, which didn't carry the item. I wasn't doing traditional web searches on I was testing the company's new AI Mode, a tool that is similar to chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, where users can type in questions to get answers. AI Mode, which is rolling out worldwide in the coming weeks, will soon appear as a tab next to your search results. The arrival of AI Mode underscores how new technology is redefining what it means to search for something online. For decades, a web search involved looking up keywords, like 'most reliable car brands,' to show a list of relevant websites. Now, with generative AI, the technology that powers chatbots by using complex language models to guess what words belong together, you can ask more specific questions or make complicated requests. That could include directing it to create a chart comparing the five most reliable 2025 sedans. Google, which has already been showing AI-generated summaries on its search pages for the past year, said AI Mode was a new frontier for search that would complement – but not yet replace – its traditional counterpart. 'We're really trying for AI Mode to be best at a new class of questions that are harder, more specific, and really the best for when you're going back and forth trying to get something done,' Robby Stein, a Google executive who oversees the search product team, said in an interview. The prominent placement of AI Mode on shows that AI is rapidly becoming unavoidable. Meta has added a chatbot, Meta AI, in Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, and Microsoft has integrated AI into its Bing search engine and its latest Surface computers. What's unique about AI Mode is that the technology stitches together data from Google's vast empire of Internet services to provide an answer to a query. When you type a question, it could pull data from search queries on location information on Google Maps and Google's shopping data on consumer products. To help assess whether AI is the future of search, I tested the new tool against traditional Google searches for a multitude of personal tasks over span of about a week, including shopping for a toddler car seat, preparing for a Memorial Day barbecue and understanding the plot twists of a popular video game. The results were mixed, with lots of hits but also lots of misses, so I encourage people to use AI Mode with caution. Here's how it went. AI Mode vs Google Search For each of my experiments, I opened AI Mode in one browser tab and with its traditional search bar in another. I typed the same query in each tab, then compared AI Mode's answers with Google's top list of search results. That helped determine whether AI Mode was more effective or I was better off clicking on search results to find the answers. Searching for Things and Places My earlier examples of picnic tables, a grocery item and a cheap carwash were similar in that they involved asking Google to find places or objects in the real world. Each of those queries prompted Google's AI to pull my location information and scan sources found on the web. – Google's AI Mode list included two parks with no picnic tables, but when I used to do the same search, its top three results included parks nearby that had tables. – Google's AI Mode suggested that the carwash I visited was US$25 based on one user review that mentioned this price. But a Google search showed several Yelp reviews of the business, where people reported a more accurate range of US$50 (RM212) to US$70 (RM297). – Google's AI Mode generated a list of grocery stores, including Whole Foods, that potentially sold the aji amarillo paste I needed to make Peruvian chicken for a Memorial Day barbecue. When I did a normal Google search for the paste nearby, the search engine took me to an Instacart listing confirming that one of the stores listed by AI Mode, Berkeley Bowl, carried the paste. Winner: Google search by a long shot. AI Mode's suggestions were sometimes accurate, but failing to check its answers could lead you down the wrong path and waste your time. Google said users of AI Mode could share feedback so it could quickly learn. 'It's early days, and these are technologies that are just starting to roll out now,' Stein said. 'As we learn about how to improve it, we'll improve it as quickly as possible.' Product research In another test, I asked Google's AI to help me research toddler car seats. This is where I saw the technology's potential to become very useful. Unlike a traditional web search, which would require me to read reviews of various car seat models and jot down a list including their pricing and features, AI Mode did all of this for me. I typed: 'I'm shopping for a convertible car seat. Create a table for me including popular models from Graco, Chicco and others and include pricing and main features.' Google immediately generated a handy chart to make comparing five car seats easy. There were some hiccups: Some information was missing from the table, and I noticed that the pricing was wrong for two of the seats. Still, it was simple for me to ask the AI to make corrections, and overall, picking a car seat with this bespoke chart sped up the process for me compared with the old-school method. I tested AI Mode to research other products like birthday gifts for a 1-year-old and the best electric toothbrush. The suggestions were useful. Winner: AI Mode. It's a nifty shopping tool, though it's still wise to do a Google search to double-check the prices. Pop culture After becoming a sleep-deprived father with the attention span of a goldfish, I got in the habit of reading summaries of movies and TV shows with convoluted plots. Recently, I finished a popular video game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , which had a complex storyline. So I asked Google to summarise what had happened. Google gathered information from various video game blogs, Reddit posts and YouTube videos to piece together a cohesive summary of the game's plot and many twists. It was a satisfying recap. I tested AI Mode on other pieces of pop culture, like the Apple TV show Severance and HBO's The Last of Us , including how the latter show was different from the video game on which it's based. The tool generated similarly useful summaries. Winner: AI Mode. A traditional Google search will show you plenty of plot summaries of TV shows, games and movies on various sites. But sometimes you just want a quick and dirty bullet-pointed recap. Bottom line A traditional Google search is still best for the simple act of looking for things to do nearby, but AI Mode could prove to be a nifty tool for more tedious tasks like product research for online shopping – an instant chart comparing baby car seats is helpful, even if imperfect. Just always check the answers. As for whether this is the future of search, consumers will probably decide that over time. If most of you prefer to use AI Mode, it probably will gradually replace Google as we know it. I still prefer an old-school search, but my feelings could change one chart of baby gear at a time. – © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times
