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Ryan Mackenzie, running for re-election, is accused of ‘fabricating’ a career in the real estate industry

The Republican congressman Ryan Mackenzie has been accused of embellishing his résumé with private sector experience in real estate sales amid an acrimonious showdown over his Pennsylvania seat.

Mackenzie, who has previously been accused of lying about his age on Tinder, “was a real estate salesperson licensed in PA”, according to his LinkedIn profile, and biographies have consistently listed it has his former profession.

As the US president struggles to end his Iran war, and approval ratings hit new lows, he leans on a familiar gambit

Donald Trump knows the power of an image – of himself, with everyone from Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un to Kim Kardashian. How about George Washington?

As the US president struggles to end his war with Iran, and with his approval ratings hitting the lowest levels of his second term, he has in recent weeks posted a series of AI-generated images of himself alongside key historical American figures.

People are becoming convinced AI chatbots have helped them make scientific breakthroughs, cure diseases or invent new technologies. What does this reveal about a technology used by more than a billion people? A new series from The Guardian Investigates, coming soon

TL;DR: мы сделали llm_markup — Spark-приложение для массовой обработки данных через LLM API в существующем Airflow-контуре. Источник данных, промпт, формат ответа, лимиты и целевая таблица задаются конфигурацией. Инструмент берет на себя батчинг, распределение запросов, контроль нагрузки на API, валидацию ответов и сопоставление результата с исходными строками.

Меня зовут Дима Иванов, я дата-инженер в Lamoda Tech. Я работал над llm_markup и в этой статье расскажу, как мы пришли к его архитектуре и какие задачи пришлось решить, чтобы инструмент стабильно работал в продакшене. Разберем это на двух примерах: оценке качества поиска и классификации негативных отзывов.

Недавно мы обнаружили и сообщили администрации npm о серии вредоносных пакетов, которые содержат схожий код и стратегию размещения: сперва публикуется чистая версия (обычно это 9.9.0), через пару дней публикуется «обновление » с нежелательным функционалом. Подробнее о вредоносной логике читайте под катом.

Natalie McDonald, 34, and Valentina Foster, seven, died in fire less than mile from A66 crash, with police not ruling out links

A woman who died in a house fire along with her seven-year-old niece has been described as “a beautiful soul”.

Natalie McDonald, 34, died along with her niece Valentina Foster, seven, in the blaze in Grangetown, near Middlesbrough, in the early hours of Wednesday.

“If this is democratic socialism,” wrote one New Yorker under a mayoral Facebook post, “maybe it is the change we need.” She was referring neither to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s heavily scrutinized plan for city-run grocery stores, nor to his pied-à-terre tax on the rich, nor even to his trademark — though thus far, unrealized — vision for fast, free buses and universal childcare. 

No, she was talking about candy-colored scaffolding. The mayor recently made good on his plan to give a facelift to the city’s ubiquitous scaffolding, that odiously ugly green eyesore that envelops hundreds of miles of New York City sidewalks. Another New Yorker posted on TikTok complaining about a smattering of potholes on his street. By the time he got home from work, they had all been filled, setting off a maelstrom of viral requests, including one from a dateless Brooklynite looking for love: “Zohran, what are you gonna do to fix this?” (The mayor cheekily obliged with a list of local meet-cute spots.) 

Symbolic urbanism is having a moment, especially this summer in New York City, where the air is far too humid, but the potholes increasingly get filled, sometimes personally by the internet’s favorite millennial mayor himself. 

Mamdani’s embrace of what he calls “pothole politics” — a shrewd modern-day twist on the “sewer socialism” that once propelled some 20th-century leftists into office — has delighted and exhilarated New Yorkers who’ve long yearned for a City Hall that heeded their most mundane municipal calls over a scorching-hot subway station or a sidewalk full of cracks. 

With a smile plastered on his face, Mamdani has, in fact, filled potholes at a faster rate than any New York City mayor in years. In cities where everything seems to take forever to build, literally covering over these sites of everyday urban friction has become a powerfully visible form of political currency. 

“There’s just this thirst for competence right now,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told me, and Mamdani in particular has “brought a sense of joy and fun to the nuts and bolts of public administration.” It may even be enough to help restore some of the public trust needed for the more arduous, less palatable work involved in making our cities more liveable in the long run.

Sixty-nine percent of New Yorkers currently have a favorable view of Mamdani, according to a Siena Research Institute poll conducted earlier this month, meaning that he has already won over at least some of the one-third of residents who told the New York Times last September that they would never vote for him. He has higher ratings at this point in office than any NYC mayor in decades.

He is even more popular now than he was a few months ago, when the Knicks clinched their first NBA championship in decades, the sort of sports victory that can quantifiably boost an incumbent’s electoral prospects. So, no, it’s not the Knicks that have made Mamdani even more popular than he was during his mayoral honeymoon.

It is, quite possibly, the potholes. 

“There are easy issues for voters to understand about their local government, and then there are much more difficult issues,” said Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of the forthcoming book The Fog of Accountability. “When you make campaign promises about more difficult issues, you might pair them with some clear issues like potholes,” which are decidedly easy for voters to understand. 

But the bigger question is whether Mamdani or others like him can borrow from the public trust they earn from filling them to help move the needle on the hard stuff, “especially when those next things aren’t going to be what your constituents like as much,” like large-scale zoning reforms or tax hikes, he said. “They might be tougher policies to swallow.” 

Pothole populism, explained

“If government can’t do the small things,” Mamdani declared at a rally to mark his first 100 days in office, “how could you ever trust it to do the big ones? How can we promise to transform our city if we can’t pave your street?”

There’s plenty of data to back him up on this, not just in New York City but across the nation. For every extra week it takes their city to fix a nearby pothole, Chicagoans report being measurably less satisfied with their lives, according to one study. A separate survey found that Bostonites became 14 percent more trusting of their government after they were able to see it respond to complaints like potholes or broken street lamps. Much as doing the dishes or taking out the trash can be more romantic than the occasional pricey date night, these everyday municipal acts of service resonate with beleaguered urbanites.

Mamdani is not the first politician to build political capital on the strength of small, some even symbolic or aesthetic, infrastructural upgrades. Milwaukee, for example, elected a slew of leftists roughly a century ago who earned the pejorative moniker “sewer socialists” for their focus on small-scale engineering projects. These mayors understood that “it was not manifestos or ideological pamphlets that would win hearts and minds. It was about proving to people that the government could do things that had a sort of broadly shared benefit,” said Philip Rocco, a professor of political science at Marquette University. “They were picking really low-hanging fruit as a way of building a coalition.”

Milwaukee’s 20th-century socialist mayors went on to double the city’s size through annexation and new housing, built a pioneering sewage treatment plant, and set up the nation’s first Bureau of Economy and Efficiency. Along the way, they installed new street lights, drinking fountains, park benches, and countless other low-cost urban fixes that made everyday life safer, healthier, and more joyful. By 1936, Time was running a cover story about how six-term Mayor Daniel Hoan, “one of the nation’s ablest public servants,” had transformed Milwaukee into “perhaps the best-governed city in the US.” Hoan won election after election not because of his party affiliation (to be clear, literally Socialist with a capital S), but in spite of it, wrote Time, his competence and charisma charming even most conservative Milwaukeeans. 

Mamdani, who often invokes Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, clearly craves a similar legacy. He is actively attempting to disprove the idea that progressives today “are disconnected from reality, and that they have a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas,” Moynihan said, “but that they can’t actually govern” when it comes to the often unglamorous, nitty-gritty demands of public service.

According to Moynihan, Mamdani may also be inheriting elements of another lineage; “broken windows” theory, though he may be less apt to say so. While it’s best known now for justifying controversial policing policies like stop-and-frisk, he said the approach also took seriously the idea that your “quality of life depends upon fixing the small things in your neighborhood.”

Now what? 

If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then take note of the other local electeds beginning to engage in botched attempts to recreate Mamdani’s pothole politik. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass earned scorn a few weeks ago for voluntarily posting a video in which she fails to fix a pothole because of a car parked atop it. The road ahead will not, in fact, be paved with good intentions alone. 

But while Mamdani has clearly earned the trust of much of his city, what he will do with it is just starting to take shape. As Mayor Hoan showed a century ago, it’s one thing to fill a pothole with a scoop of asphalt, but it’s another to make your city’s housing more affordable or make the buses run faster. 

And yet, it is possible that the political symbolism he is curating today might indeed make the path ahead easier. Just this week, Mamdani announced his biggest infrastructure project to date, a mammoth 10-year, $4 billion rebuild of a crumbling section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which two past mayoral administrations have tried and failed to fix. Whether or not he can be the one to pull it off will hinge on the public trust he cultivates today. 

“If Mamdani wants to get things done quickly, he’s going to have to implement a lot of policies that are a mix of really popular but perhaps minimally effective,” said de Benedictis-Kessner, “and ones that are much more effective but definitely not as popular.” 

Take rent control, which is very popular with voters, but, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has pointed out, does little to fix the roots of our dysfunctional housing market. By embracing it anyway, Mamdani is signaling that “he’s doing something that listens to his constituents,” said de Benedictis-Kessner, and the trust he earns from doing so could ultimately make “less popular policies that are actually much bigger in scale” more politically viable, like zoning reforms or density bonuses for developers. 

What I really want, my own personal North Star for good municipal governance in New York, is the Interborough Express, a long-awaited light rail line connecting Brooklyn and Queens that probably won’t be finished until at least 2031. Those are the kind of large-scale urban renovations that I’ll be writing about — and sometimes advocating for — in my new Vox newsletter, Nice Things. (Seriously, sign up!) But in the interim, I will settle for somewhere I can lock up my bike without lugging it up the stairs, or a subway station that isn’t quite so sweltering in the summertime. The little fixes that make our days just a little smoother, while also maybe laying the foundations for big changes.

No barrage of pothole-fixing blitzes will make the trains run on time or protect a city’s shore from flooding. But at a time when nobody thinks the government can do much of anything anymore, it’s a start. “To be able to argue, ‘Look, if you give me money, I will make things work,’” said Moynihan, “is a much more compelling argument if you can show that you are actually making things work.”

Час пользовательского теста в электромобиле — это несколько часов расшифровки вручную. Пока респондент выполняет задания в интерфейсе и отвечает на вопросы, исследователь фиксирует его действия, а потом вынужден превращать все сказанное в процессе в текст и выискивать в нем важные для работы моменты. И так с каждым участником.

Мы решили автоматизировать эту рутинную задачу, а в итоге начали развивать целое направление внутренних ИИ-сервисов. Как транскрибатор стал отправной точкой этого пути и что бы мы сейчас сделали иначе расскажу в этой статье. 

This email is a response to the 50+ podcast pitches that arrived in my inbox just last month, and keep arriving in growing numbers, from PR agencies and marketing teams at various companies. It's also a message to tech founders building stuff for developers: focus on building something that devs love, or find epic, and not hiring marketing/PR folks who then mass-email podcast hosts with AI-generated podcast pitches.

I host The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. Thanks to so many of you tuning in, the podcast is widely listened to – it's one of the top-ranked software engineering podcasts, and episodes typically reach 500K+ people. If you're listening to the podcast, or reading the newsletter: thank you!

The podcast only has guests who, as as a software engineer, I'm excited to talk to and learn from. These folks typically fall into one of these categories:

• Built/builds epic pieces of technology. Examples include Chris Lattner (built LLVM, Swift, Mojo), Anders Heljsberg (created C#, TypeScript, TurboPascal), Andrey Breslav (created Kotlin), Greg KH (longtime Linux maintainer), Kat Cosgrove (longtime Kubernetes release lead), Mitchell Hashimoto (Terraform, Ghostty).
• Works at a company I find very interesting and relevant. Examples include Boris Cherny at Anthropic (created Claude Code), Elizabeth Stone (CTO at Netflix: a company whose engineering culture I've been fascinated with), or Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec (leads S3 at AWS)
• Is a deep domain expert - typically with a decade+ of experience. For example, Nicole Forsgren (developer productivity, DORA, SPACE), Laura Tacho (DX), Alice Ryhl (Rust), Robert Erez (CI/CD)
• Deep thinkers with a decade+ of experience. For example, Kelsey Hightower, Grady Booch, or Charity Majors.

As the podcast has become more popular, I am getting overloaded with pitches from PR people, Comms people, and Marketing people, though. The typical pitch is usually AI-written, and goes something like this:

From <CommsPerson@Startup.com>

Hi Gergely,

I have a potential guest and topic that feels unusually aligned with The Pragmatic Engineer’s audience.

X is the co-founder and CEO of Startup, which now serves ## million developers and ## thousand companies. The platform processes {large number of business metrics} every day, giving CEO a large-scale view into how engineering ability and team expectations are changing as AI-generated code becomes standard.

The useful conversation would not be a Startup product story. It would examine questions engineering leaders are actively dealing with:

- AI-generated topic #1 assumed to be a fit for the podcast
- AI-generated topic #2
- AI-generated topic #3

CEO has built Startup from its earliest days in Location all the way to global enterprise scale. He/she can bring both operating experience and concrete data instead of generic AI predictions.

Would this be worth exploring for the podcast?

Best,

MarketingPerson
Startup

I get 10-20 of these pitches, per week, in my inbox. Until now, I've been ignoring them, but then MarketingPerson sends two more follow-ups. I now have an AI agent monitoring my inbox, and I decided to at least send an AI reply to explain why I'm not sending a response to these pitches.

If you look at how my podcast works, it should be obvious to why such guest requests are not a good fit - and why having founders wanting to talk about their own startup would be a bore of a topic, and, frankly, a waste of time for 99% of listeners – possibly more.

But to spell it out to the marketing folks:

A) Send out AI emails: expect nothing back. Don't expect a response to an AI-written email, or a templated email. I get it, you think it's a numbers game: send a tweaked email out to 100 podcasts, and hope that at least one replies. In reality, by playing the same game as everyone else does, you are assisting to the noise, and end up drowning yourself in it as well.

And this goes not only to you, as a marketing person, but also to a founder/CEO who thinks they can put in zero effort in A Thing and get great results: you're kidding yourself. To those founders who have set themselves the goal of being invited onto a specific podcast: I'd challenge you, ask a former guest, how they got invited? I can already tell you that it sure wasn't an AI-generated email sent out by a marketing person they hired!

B) My podcast doesn't take self-pitches. The only type of pitch I listen to is a software engineer telling me "wow it could be great to have this and this person on the podcast, because of this thing they built/thing they did." In these cases, I check out that thing they built or thing they did. When a lot of people tell me the same thing, I might listen more.

But a CEO recommending themselves as a podcast guest? Or their marketing or PR team recommending the same? Ignore.

But to leave these marketing folks with some advice:

If your CEO/founder has so much to say about a topic: say it and write it! Ironically, every time I look up what the founder has written about the topic they (or their marketing team) are pitching, there's nothing! Nada.

If the pitch is sincere, then write down your thoughts! Post it on your company blog or personal blog.

But if you're just looking for "distribution", "free publicity", mass emailing podcasts is not how to go about it. Everyone is doing it, and it's not working for anyone.

The only founders you see on podcasts who are worth listening to? They built some epic stuff, are often hands-on, and they did not mass-email dozens or hundreds of podcasts with an AI-generated, generic agenda to talk about.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of the performer - whether you met him or admired his work

Tim Curry, performer of screen and stage, who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, has died aged 80.

Curry got Tony nominations for his varied stage work on Broadway as Mozart in Amadeus, Alan Swann in My Favorite Year and as King Arthur in Monty Python’s Spamalot. He also made a supremely creepy Pennywise the Clown in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It. But above all he is most remembered for one role: Dr Frank-N-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the screen version of the 1973 stage show.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of artist Yayoi Kusama – whether you met her, or appreciated her work

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese outsider artist who became a global superstar, has died aged 97.

Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc announced in a statement on Thursday.

There has been plenty of change over the summer at Stamford Bridge after last season left sour taste

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 3rd (NB: this is not necessarily Suzanne Wrack’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 3rd

Даже хорошо спланированный проект может столкнуться с меняющимися требованиями, техническим долгом, сопротивлением внутри компании и бесконечным расширением первоначальной задачи. В таких условиях руководителю приходится не столько следовать выбранной методологии, сколько принимать решения по ходу работы.

Этим ситуациям посвящена секция «Управление проектом и продуктом» на INFOSTART A&PM EVENT 2026, который пройдет 12–14 ноября в Санкт-Петербурге.

Чем отличаются DQN, PPO, SAC, AlphaZero и другие модели reinforcement learning друг от друга? В этой статье я простым языком разберу основные алгоритмы обучения с подкреплением и покажу на одной карте, как они связаны между собой.

Большинство лаунчеров для Android повторяют одну и ту же концепцию сетки иконок. Чтобы открыть приложение, нужно листать бесконечные рабочие столы и тянуться пальцем до нужной иконки.

Я решил сделать SwipeLauncher — открытый лаунчер с круговым меню, где любое действие или вложенное меню открывается одним свайпом из любой точки экрана.

В этой статье я расскажу, как проект прошел путь от простого прототипа на 4 стороны света до динамической сетки на Jetpack Compose, с какими подводными камнями Android пришлось столкнуться и как устроена математика свайпов под капотом.

This live blog is now closed.

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

On Wednesday, Trump officially signed a proclamation on Wednesday that suspends higher tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef imports for 90 days. This comes after backlash to the proposal – designed to lower grocery costs for Americans in the run-up to the November midterms.

Several Republicans – in states with sizable cattle farming industries – have criticized the policy, saying it is a short term solution that will stymie ranchers’ ability to rebuild their herds.

Four leading livestock and agricultural organizations also wrote a letter to the president on Wednesday urging him to reverse course.

“Flooding the market with discounted foreign beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd, strengthen food security, or lower grocery bills in a lasting way,” the groups wrote.

Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington, before traveling to Houston, Texas where he’ll headline a Republican National Commitee (RNC) fundraiser, and help boost Ken Paxton — the state’s attorney general and Republican nominee for Senate.

A reminder that Paxton beat long serving Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary earlier this year after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Paxton is set to face Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico in November.

Elderly Aids Ltd, which sells call-blocking devices, made 758,053 cold calls between May 2024 and February 2025

A company that made its money promising to protect elderly people from nuisance calls has been fined £190,000 for “hounding” them with hundreds of thousands of nuisance calls of its own.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said Elderly Aids Ltd, a company selling call-blocking devices, made 758,053 cold calls between May 2024 and February 2025 to try to sell its products.

Привет, Хабр! Меня зовут Дмитрий Наумов, я работаю в команде Yandex Cloud Postbox. Это API для надёжной доставки писем. В статье поделюсь опытом, как мы развивали аналитику в нашем сервисе: на старте она спокойно уживалась в общей транзакционной СУБД с операционными данными, но с ростом нагрузки всё изменилось. Данные переместили в отдельное хранилище, и нужно было выбрать способ трансфера данных между операционной базой и этим хранилищем.

В статье под катом покажу, как менялась наша система и как мы понимали, что текущее решение себя исчерпало: сначала аналитика начала тормозить транзакции, потом перестали справляться индексы, а затем мы упёрлись в ограничения типовых сценариев трансфера данных. Каждый раз это был сигнал к переходу на следующий уровень архитектуры.

Зачем писать свой 3D-движок в 2026 году? Чтобы заглянуть «под капот» современной графики. В этой публикации делюсь практическим опытом разработки Shuttle Engine: от прямого обращения к VRAM по 64-битным GPU-указателям и оптимизации на Vulkan 1.3 до создания гибкого кастомного окна на Win32 API и систем отладки кадра.

Силовой корпус — это не просто каркас и обшивка. Он должен выдерживать вибрации при запуске, нести оборудование, передавать нагрузки от креплений и служить основой для солнечных панелей, радиаторов и антенн.

Поэтому материал корпуса приходится выбирать сразу по нескольким параметрам: массе, прочности, жесткости, теплопроводности, электропроводности и способности работать в вакууме.

Разберемся, какие материалы для этого подходят и что из них потенциально можно получить из лунного сырья.

Updates from County Championship day one
England v Pakistan: second Test, day one – join our OBO
Get in touch with Tanya on email or BTL

Shackles Gloucestershire’s Joe Phillips with his sixth ball.

An early wicket at Scarborough on the mottled outfield grass, Adam Lyth obligingly nudging behind. Yorks 5-1.

Jamie Smith’s counter-attacking 61 helped England reach 248 for 9 on a tough day for batting at Lord’s

The toss is now scheduled for 12pm BST, with play to begin at 12.20. We pray.

Yeah, we all saw it coming.

Kremlin threatens British targets inside and outside Ukraine and says UK and France bear ‘direct responsibility’ for Ukrainian strikes on Russia

Commenting on the asylum figures, home secretary Shabana Mahmood said:

A little over two years into office and the asylum backlog is down, the number of asylum seekers in hotels is falling, illegal working arrests are at record levels, and deportations and returns are up markedly.

Small boats numbers are also now falling, but we are not complacent and there is more we must do.

Привет, Хабр!

На связи снова Максим Мотиков, аналитик киберугроз в «Гарде».

Ручной анализ вредоносного файла как наведение порядка в квартире: можно справиться за пару часов или же застрять с этой задачей на несколько недель. Всё зависит от сложности семпла, степени обфускации и других факторов.

Однажды я разбирал вредонос с тестового стенда целую неделю и в итоге справился лишь наполовину — до анализа протокола взаимодействия с С2 дело так и не дошло. Тогда я задался вопросом: а можно ли ускорить такую работу с помощью LLM и не потерять в качестве анализа. Оказалось, что можно и даже нужно.

Под катом расскажу, как мы реализовали связку популярной среды для реверс-инжиниринга IDA Pro и LLM на практике, что получилось по итогам тестирования нескольких семплов, каковы плюсы и минусы подобной схемы. В статье вы найдете и краткую инструкцию по настройкам.

Мы не предлагаем универсальный пошаговый гайд, как повысить эффективность реверс-инжиниринга с помощью ИИ, а делимся нашим кейсом такой оптимизации.

Ксения Носулько, старший математик-программист, C3D Labs, рассказывает о новых функциях 3D-моделирования в решателе C3D Solver.

Модуль С3D Solver предназначен для управления взаимосвязями между геометрическими объектами. Он состоит из двумерного и трехмерного решателей, которые обеспечивают автоматическое обновление геометрии при изменениях с сохранением всех ранее наложенных взаимосвязей. Эти взаимосвязи могут быть как размерными (например, расстояния или углы между объектами), так и логическими — совпадение точек, фиксация радиусов, параллельность, перпендикулярность и прочее.

В 2D-решателе появилась поддержка нового объекта — вспомогательной оси. Он задается точкой и направляющим вектором. Ось не является кривой, однако, подобно любому линейному объекту, подчиняется наложенным на нее ограничениям.

Пример кода: