Tootfinder

VA used a DOGE AI tool by Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia that hallucinated contract sizes to cancel 24 deals; Lavingia says "mistakes were made" (ProPublica)
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-veterans-affairs-ai-contra…

DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts
We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” one expert said.

Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to "Munch" Contracts Related to Veterans' Health (ProPublica)
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ai-tool-doge-veterans-affairs-contracts-sahil-lavingia
http://www.memeorandum.com/250606/p48#a250606p48

On the Wasserstein Geodesic Principal Component Analysis of probability measures
Nina Vesseron, Elsa Cazelles, Alice Le Brigant, Thierry Klein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04480

On the Wasserstein Geodesic Principal Component Analysis of probability measures
This paper focuses on Geodesic Principal Component Analysis (GPCA) on a collection of probability distributions using the Otto-Wasserstein geometry. The goal is to identify geodesic curves in the space of probability measures that best capture the modes of variation of the underlying dataset. We first address the case of a collection of Gaussian distributions, and show how to lift the computations in the space of invertible linear maps. For the more general setting of absolutely continuous prob…

Towards provable probabilistic safety for scalable embodied AI systems
Linxuan He, Qing-Shan Jia, Ang Li, Hongyan Sang, Ling Wang, Jiwen Lu, Tao Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yi Zhang, Yisen Wang, Peng Wei, Zhongyuan Wang, Henry X. Liu, Shuo Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05171

Towards provable probabilistic safety for scalable embodied AI systems
Embodied AI systems, comprising AI models and physical plants, are increasingly prevalent across various applications. Due to the rarity of system failures, ensuring their safety in complex operating environments remains a major challenge, which severely hinders their large-scale deployment in safety-critical domains, such as autonomous vehicles, medical devices, and robotics. While achieving provable deterministic safety--verifying system safety across all possible scenarios--remains theoretic…

Probability of Collision with Tethered Spacecraft
Yema Paul, Emmanuel Delande, Francois Vinet, Francois Laporte, Manuel Sanjurjo-Rivo, Aldo Tonnini, Joan-Pau Sanchez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04969

Probability of Collision with Tethered Spacecraft
This Engineering Note addresses the challenge of estimating the probability of collision for tethered spacecraft during close encounters with other space objects. Standard probability of collision methods, based on spherical hard-body assumptions, tend to be overly conservative when applied to long tether systems. We introduce a method that accounts for the tether's spatial extent and configuration uncertainty by maximizing the probability of collision over all physically admissible tether shap…

A Private Smart Wallet with Probabilistic Compliance
Andrea Rizzini, Marco Esposito, Francesco Bruschi, Donatella Sciuto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04853 h…

A Private Smart Wallet with Probabilistic Compliance
We propose a privacy-preserving smart wallet with a novel invitation-based private onboarding mechanism. The solution integrates two levels of compliance in concert with an authority party: a proof of innocence mechanism and an ancestral commitment tracking system using bloom filters for probabilistic UTXO chain states. Performance analysis demonstrates practical efficiency: private transfers with compliance checks complete within seconds on a consumer-grade laptop, and overall with proof gener…

You probably think vinyl records, cassette tapes or compact discs are retro; I get my new music releases on floppy disk.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03956 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLO_…

POPACheck: A Model Checker for Probabilistic Pushdown Automata
We present POPACheck, the first model checking tool for probabilistic Pushdown Automata (pPDA) supporting temporal logic specifications. POPACheck provides a user-friendly probabilistic modeling language with recursion that automatically translates into Probabilistic Operator Precedence Automata (pOPA). pOPA are a class of pPDA that can express all the behaviors of probabilistic programs: sampling, conditioning, recursive procedures, and nested inference queries. On pOPA, POPACheck can solve re…

Non-linear Multi-objective Optimization with Probabilistic Branch and Bound
Hao Huang, Zelda B. Zabinsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04554 https://

Non-linear Multi-objective Optimization with Probabilistic Branch and Bound
A multiple objective simulation optimization algorithm named Multiple Objective Probabilistic Branch and Bound with Single Observation (MOPBnB(so)) is presented for approximating the Pareto optimal set and the associated efficient frontier for stochastic multi-objective optimization problems. MOPBnB(so) evaluates a noisy function exactly once at any solution and uses neighboring solutions to estimate the objective functions, in contrast to a variant that uses multiple replications at a solution…

Trump Wants to Cut Tribal College Funding by Nearly 90%,
Putting Them at Risk of Closing
ProPublica found that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year.
Rather than fixing the problem, proposed federal funding cuts unveiled this week would devastate the schools, tribal education leaders say

Trump Wants to Cut Tribal College Funding by Nearly 90%, Putting Them at Risk of Closing
ProPublica found that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year. Rather than fixing the problem, proposed federal funding cuts unveiled this week would devastate the schools, tribal education leaders say.