Tootfinder

I'm supervising 4 undergrads working on small pieces of my research project. Their role is to comb through archival materials, to identify a modest research question, and to write a long paper answering that question. One of the students dropped by my office this morning to chat about progress. Just before leaving, they said, "I've written papers before. But they were all based on things people'd already written - I knew the answer. This is so much more fun. I feel like a de…

Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece
that carefully documents his obvious physical decline.
Trump raged over the piece,
letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office
and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly.
This may seem typical of Trump,
but we think it gets at something deeper.
Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure
who …

Transcript: Trump Fury Erupts at NYT as Mental Decline Visibly Worsens
As Trump’s rage at the paper of record reveals too much, the author of piece on Trump as “lame duck dictator” explains how devastating it is for him that his carefully-cultivated illusion of strength is collapsing.

Perfect Network Resilience in Polynomial Time
Matthias Bentert, Stefan Schmid
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03827 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03827 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.03827
arXiv:2602.03827v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern communication networks support local fast rerouting mechanisms to quickly react to link failures: nodes store a set of conditional rerouting rules which define how to forward an incoming packet in case of incident link failures. The rerouting decisions at any node $v$ must rely solely on local information available at $v$: the link from which a packet arrived at $v$, the target of the packet, and the incident link failures at $v$. Ideally, such rerouting mechanisms provide perfect resilience: any packet is routed from its source to its target as long as the two are connected in the underlying graph after the link failures. Already in their seminal paper at ACM PODC '12, Feigenbaum, Godfrey, Panda, Schapira, Shenker, and Singla showed that perfect resilience cannot always be achieved. While the design of local rerouting algorithms has received much attention since then, we still lack a detailed understanding of when perfect resilience is achievable.
This paper closes this gap and presents a complete characterization of when perfect resilience can be achieved. This characterization also allows us to design an $O(n)$-time algorithm to decide whether a given instance is perfectly resilient and an $O(nm)$-time algorithm to compute perfectly resilient rerouting rules whenever it is. Our algorithm is also attractive for the simple structure of the rerouting rules it uses, known as skipping in the literature: alternative links are chosen according to an ordered priority list (per in-port), where failed links are simply skipped. Intriguingly, our result also implies that in the context of perfect resilience, skipping rerouting rules are as powerful as more general rerouting rules. This partially answers a long-standing open question by Chiesa, Nikolaevskiy, Mitrovic, Gurtov, Madry, Schapira, and Shenker [IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2017] in the affirmative.
toXiv_bot_toot

I recently debugged sound staying mute. Yet the speakers, bluetooth, pipewire, gnome all claimed everything is fine and connected.
That day I learned you can mute a tab group in a Sideberry.
via @…
https…

When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026,
what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface.
Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements,
while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question:
Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?
What’s changed since Minneapolis became a g…

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk
Federal agents have pepper-sprayed, tackled and detained people recording their actions. If you post your recordings of agents, you also risk the feds tracking you and those around you.

> Our conclusion is clear: AI is promising for quality assurance and marker training, but for the moment it’s nowhere near ready to take over high stakes marking.
https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2026/01/14/using-ai-in-mar…

Using AI in marking: why technical capability, fairness, and transparency all matter
Ofqual has published new research exploring artificial intelligence’s potential role in marking, as well as its current capabilities and constraints. Rather than providing definitive answers, the published working paper offers an overview of the topic, shares our current thinking, highlights …

Since Ghislaine Maxwell’scontroversial transfer to a low-security prison camp this summer,
her time at Texas’s FPC Bryan has prompted uproar over alleged favorable treatment
– including claims this week that she was provided custom-made meals and access to a puppy
Some of the recent accusations were in a 9 November letter that Jamie Raskin sent to Donald Trump.
The Democratic representative’s letter, which cited whistleblower information, demanded answers about Maxwel…