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New Yorkers are heading to the polls Tuesday to cast their ballots for the city’s next mayor. And it’s not just NYC that’s invested. The Democratic primary race between a fresh-faced 33-year-old democratic socialist and a seasoned politician clawing for a comeback has captivated the countrynot just because the top candidates couldn’t be more different, but because the election could offer a glimpse of what kind of democratic candidates Americans are seeking to elect in other upcoming races. (The person chosen to lead America’s biggest city will presumably be a Democrat and could help set the tone for the party’s platform nationwide.) A study in contrasts Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, the two frontrunners in the mayoral race, are starkly different candidatesa fact that Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor if elected, has played into leading up to election day. While Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as New York’s governor in 2021 over dozens of sexual harassment allegations, is backed by billionaire donors, centrists, and well-known democrats like Bill Clinton, Mamdani has the support of hard-leaning leftists like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York’s 14th congressional district. Prior to joining the mayoral race, Mamdani was essentially a political unknown. Still, he’s managed to gain major traction with emotional speeches, a captivating social media presence, and a laser-pointed focus on an issue that most New Yorkers (as well as most Americans) are deeply concerned with at present: lowering the cost of living. “This is the most expensive city in the United States of America and New Yorkers are tired of having to worry each and every hour of each and every day about whether they can afford to live here, Mamdani said yesterday to a crowd of supporters. Ranked-choice voting system adds additional drama Interestingly, in a rare move, the candidate isn’t just campaigning for his own leadership. He’s teamed up with other candidates, like State Senator Zellnor Myrie and city Comptroller Brad Lander, to block Cuomo from ranking in New York’s ranked-choice voting system, which was new to the city last year. The system means that New Yorkers can cast votes for, not one, but up to five candidates. Mamdani and other candidates have been preaching to supporters to fill out their entire ballot but “Don’t rank Cuomo.” Lander, meanwhile, had his own viral moment last week when he was taken into custody by federal immigration officials outside of a Manhattan courtroom, an incident caught on dramatic video. On the other end of the spectrum from Mamdani, Cuomo is leaning into his experience as a seasoned leader. This is not a job for a novice,” he told supporters this week. “This is not a job for a person who never really had a job before. We need someone who knows what they are doing on day one, because your lives depend on it.” In recent weeks, the race has been heating up with projections that have stunned and excited Mamdani supporters. While Cuomo was the clear frontrunner earlier this year, Mamdani pulled ahead in the most recent public poll, published Monday. How can I track NYC election results in real time? The polls don’t close in NYC until 9 p.m. Tuesday, but due to the city’s voting system, a final count could take a full week. If one candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, they’ll take the race. However, If no candidate emerges straight away, the tabulation of rankings would begin on July 1. Meaning, while NYC is already going to be hotter than your average summer day, the heat around this race could be even hotter. With so much riding on who New York’s next mayor will be, voters and interested parties across the country are bound to be following closely as the votes come in. Here are a few ways to stay up to date: Ways to watch: The New York Times will offer live updates on the race and election results as they come in. The outlet will show “simulated ranked-choice results for the first and final rounds of voting.” Find it here. PBS will show live election results as they come in, along with a live map to show how the city is voting in real time. Find it here. The Board of Elections will release “unofficial, first-choice-only votes” just after the polls close and continuously update the results. The results will be broken down into districts. Find it here. If you’re a New Yorker who isn’t sure which election district you live in, you can look it up here.
Category:
E-Commerce
Back in March, to mark International Womens Day, LOreal launched a short film called The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, a 18-minute profile of the advertising copywriter who coined the brands iconic tagline, Because Im Worth It. For the past 50 years, its been the global beauty giants own version of Just Do It. But this is far from the usual self-congratulatory brand hype video. Directed by Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot, the film spotlights the fights Specht had to win in order for her vision to come to life in 1971. Close to 80 years old during filming, Specht didnt pull any punches. She paints a picture of what advertising in that era looked like, both outwardly in the world, and internally as a business. In the ’70s, most of the advertising for womens products were from the perspective of men, or in service to men. This will make you pretty . . . for your man. This will clean the house better . . . for your husband and children. In the film, she describes male colleagues who were always arguing with her and taking credit when something worked. She recalled how during pitch and idea meetings for LOreal Preference hair color, male colleagues had suggested an idea that cast the woman as an object, rather than the subject. I was feeling angry. Im not interested in writing anything about looking good for men. Fuck em, says an elderly, and terminally ill, Specht in the film, before looking straight down the camera to the male camera operator. And fuck you, too. The film won the Grand Prix for the film category at the Cannes Lions of Creativity last week, and is currently streaming on TED, AMC+, and Prime Video. McCann global CEO Daryl Lee credits his colleague Charlotte Franceries, president of McCann Paris and the agencys lead on the LOreal business. The fact that we made this true story about one woman is because Charlotte said to me, we are all benefiting as McCann and as L’Oreal Paris from the power of one woman’s truth and no one knows her name, says Lee. What could have been The original ad for LOreal Preference hair color that first used the line, Because Im Worth It is a single shot of a woman walking towards the camera, explaining why she likes it, and how it makes her feel. @lorealparis Our original Preference ad from 1973. You know the line but do you know the story of the woman behind our iconic tagline? #LorealParis #iamworthit#OnRegardeQuoi #thefinalcopyofilonspecht son original – LOréal Paris – LOréal Paris In the doc, we find out that spot almost never happened. In fact, Specht went behind her bosses’ back to create the ad after her agency produced and the brand approved a spot with almost the exact same script, except it was a man speaking the words on behalf of his wife, walking silently beside him. Its clear that 50 years later it still made Specht angry. Angry enough to not want to talk about advertising or that campaign ever again. But director Ben Proudfoot convinced her to participate. To get Proudfoot involved, producer Brendan Gaul says the key was to give the director 100% creative control. Our intention was to create a film from the beginning, not a piece of advertising that looked like a film, says Gaul. And the distinction there actually is in the creative control. The distinction is also in how the film rolled out. Not as part of an ad campaign, but on the film festival circuit. After premiering at Tribeca X in June 2024, it earned Best Short Documentary at HollyShorts Film Festival, Best Short Documentary and the Best Atlantic Filmmaker Award at Lunenburg Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the Chelsea Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Hot Springs Documentary Festival. Relevant past and present Franceries says that the entire doc process began as an exercise for LOreal to interrogate the relevance of its longtime tagline. That after 50 years or so, perhaps it was losing a bit of its meaning to people. We needed to keep it but had to give it a much stronger meaning, says Franceries. And the documentary is the most efficient piece of content weve done to convince people about the true meaning. Since its release, the film has attracted more than two billion impressions, and increased brand consideration for LOreal by 70% among viewers. Its a story of the past that does not sugarcoat the role both LOreal and McCann played as corporations and as work environments to contribute to the culture Specht was reacting against. Lee says thats important because it shows how relevant it is to constantly be checking for blindspots, both as a person and a company. And in an environment where more and more corporations are receding away from DEI commitments, the message of the film is as important as it was 50 years ago. The blind spot is always going to be inclusion,” says Lee. Business is now speed, seamlessness and scale, and you have to keep checking yourself to say, Okay, we could do this faster, but someone is not speaking up, or someone is not participating, and they could be the person who unlocks the truth here.’ Specht died in April 2024 at the age of 81. She never saw the finished film. Thankfully, her voice still lives on. “I’m not interested in advertising, I don’t give a shit, she says in the film. Its about humans; its not about advertising. It’s about caring for people because . . . we’re all worth it, or no one is worth it.
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E-Commerce
Just this past weekend, social and gaming platform Roblox saw a peak of 30.6 million concurrently active players, the company announced Tuesday. One game in particularthe record-breaking viral gardening sim Grow a Gardendrew a peak of 21.6 million concurrent players. While previous blockbuster games from Fortnite to World of Warcraft primarily run on servers managed by their own developers and publishers, Roblox is distinctive in that its games and experiences are created by third-party developers. And those developers are free to update and tweak their game code at any timewith Roblox’s servers expected to manage the traffic load, even seamlessly updating the experience for players already logged in. “Most of us computer scientists were taught that you’d never publish your entire code in one go, and you do it when your traffic is low,” says Anupam Singh, senior vice president of engineering at Roblox. “In our case, it’s almost the opposite.” That’s because preannounced updates to big-name games naturally draw crowds of players, and no gamer wants to be stuck on an old version of the software in an era when screenshots rapidly circulate via group chat and social media. And since Roblox tries to avoid restricting how experienced creators run their games and when they can deploy them, game code, images, and other assets need to be sent quickly and simultaneously to Roblox’s content distribution network and edge servers as soon as they’re ready to go and certified to meet Roblox content standards. It’s one of several challenges that have led Roblox’s engineering team to develop a sophisticated system of capacity and resilience planning, rigorous testing, and on-call engineering staffing for weekends, when players flock to the platform in droves. The company has a network of 24 edge data centers around the world, handling much of the game experience. When players click a play button to launch a specific game, they’re connected to the most appropriate data center by an algorithm that can take into effect factors like which server their friends are playing on, their geographic location relative to the servers, and connection speed between the player’s device and each server. The system as a whole sometimes considers up to 4 billion combinations of players and servers per second, and the company has for years been optimizing the process with an ultimate goal of being able to handle 10 million players joining games in a period of just 10 seconds. After all, today’s internet users are no longer used to loading delays in launching new content, especially not the younger users who make up many of Roblox’s core audience. “We all remember the time when you just assumed that a little buffering is okay,” Singh says. “But there’s an entire generation of users who don’t think buffering happens on the internet.” Those edge servers, plus additional cloud computing capacity that can be spun up to meet weekend demand, are connected to a pair of core data centers that manage services like the Roblox website, content filtering and recommendation algorithms, as well as the game publishing system. The edge servers connect to those core servers via a global private network, with redundant bandwidth available in case it’s necessary. “I’ve learned in this job that cable being cut is a very regular occurrence,” Singh says. During those busy weekends, there’s a rotating schedule of on-call engineers ready to respond to any incidents. Even C-suite executives participate, Singh says, with on-call workers expected to have a Roblox-approved computer and a good internet connection during those shifts. When the unexpected occurs, an incident manager leads the response, able to command everyone (including executives); infrastructure like AI transcription is in place for any necessary calls. The company strives to avoid casting blame to get incidents resolved properly and quickly, with incident managers empowered to approve resources as necessary to get the job done. “The on-call has the ability to say, Okay, give them 2,000 more servers, if that’s what’s needed right now, Singh says. If a problem does pop up that limits capacity, the company has systems in place to gracefully scale services down, though it tries to avoid impacting players who are already engaged in a game, and won’t operate without some necessary features, like text content filtering. On Monday, engineers with responsibility for code relating to any weekend incidents meet to discuss what happened, and on Tuesday, the company begins capacity planning for the weekend ahead. It’s also when Roblox observes TACO Tuesday, an acronym for “test actual capacity on Tuesday,” meaning engineers run tests constraining the resources available to code to ensure it runs properly under high traffic. Starting this year, Roblox has also rolled out a “chaos-testing” system, which deliberately injects errors, capacity constraints, and process restarts into the system to make sure it functions under stress. Like Roblox game creators, engineers are also empowered to make updates to their code at any time, with hundreds of deployments possible during a weekday. And by Friday, the team is ready to roll out and test any needed extra cloud capacity based on demand projections for that weekend. Making weekly decisions about capacity is essential in a world where games can go viral in a short amount of time. “Every three or four weeks, there’s a new big hit, so we’ve changed our capacity planning to be weekly,” Singh says. “And honestly, we would love for it to go to almost daily, where if there’s a hit within a day, we should still be able to find capacity.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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