My alma mater of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social continues to disgrace itself by participating in the cultural erasure of #Palestine. Thanks to the Columbia Spectator for covering this.
Strategyproof Tournament Rules for Teams with a Constant Degree of Selfishness
David Pennock, Daniel Schoepflin, Kangning Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05235 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05235 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05235
arXiv:2512.05235v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among $n$ teams in a league. Such a mechanism should satisfy the natural properties of monotonicity and Condorcet consistency. Moreover, from the league's perspective, the winner-determination tournament rule should be strategyproof, meaning that no team can do better by losing a game on purpose.
Past work considered settings in which each team is fully selfish, caring only about its own probability of winning, and settings in which each team is fully selfless, caring only about the total winning probability of itself and the team to which it deliberately loses. More recently, researchers considered a mixture of these two settings with a parameter $\lambda$. Intermediate selfishness $\lambda$ means that a team will not lose on purpose unless its pair gains at least $\lambda s$ winning probability, where $s$ is the individual team's sacrifice from its own winning probability. All of the dozens of previously known tournament rules require $\lambda = \Omega(n)$ to be strategyproof, and it has been an open problem to find such a rule with the smallest $\lambda$.
In this work, we make significant progress by designing a tournament rule that is strategyproof with $\lambda = 11$. Along the way, we propose a new notion of multiplicative pairwise non-manipulability that ensures that two teams cannot manipulate the outcome of a game to increase the sum of their winning probabilities by more than a multiplicative factor $\delta$ and provide a rule which is multiplicatively pairwise non-manipulable for $\delta = 3.5$.
toXiv_bot_toot
The retreat of US military from Europe is long overdue and a blessing in disguise, Europe should be able to defend itself without the help of the US in the future. NATO should be replaced by an European defence entity.
#eu #defence
A lot of companies in tech are non-profit if we're honest. But the issue really is that by being a "non-profit tech company" you kinda align yourself the the idea of the tech company itself and all the baggage that brings. It's where a lot of the issues (for example with Mozilla) come from
https://ma…
Recently, during a TTRPG session:
Rebekah, the Galliard: *happens to be with part of her pack in the Umbra, tries to pick-lock an umbral door*
Door: *is picked*
Door: *relocks itself*
Rebekah: *stares*
Rebekah: *leans against the door, whispers* "Hey, nice door …"
Over the voice chat: *audible sputtering*
Storyteller: "Not while I'm drinking!"
Ha ha — but also note that the 21% figure is itself •generated by an automated tool•:
❝The next day, he got a response from Max Spero, chief executive of Pangram Labs in New York City, which develops tools to detect AI-generated text. Pangram screened all 19,490 studies and 75,800 peer reviews.…Pangram’s analysis revealed that around 21% of the ICLR peer reviews were fully AI-generated, and more than half contained signs of AI use.❞
The word “revealed” is doing way too much work there.
1/
Re this from @…:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115632304917619952
I needed to replace* my lovely extra long yoga mat and I’ve been angry for a week that I can only buy longer mats (I’m 178 cm tall, most mats are about 180) that are also wider. My new cute blue mat got delivered today in time for my class and … actually it was great. The extra width means less shuffling between poses for long limbs.
* the top layer unstuck from the bottom layer and stuck to itself instead to create a sort of curly lettuce effect, after years of loyal service!
xAI partners with El Salvador to deploy Grok across 5,000 public schools, reaching 1M students in an "AI-powered education program" over the next two years (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/11/elon-musk-el-salva…
"Etwa 80 % der Amerikaner sind der Meinung, dass #KI stark reguliert werden sollte, und weniger als 20 % der Amerikaner glauben, dass KI in den nächsten 20 Jahren einen positiven Einfluss auf Amerika haben wird. Das sind schockierende Zahlen, um es gelinde auszudrücken. KI liegt in der öffentlichen Vorstellung nur knapp vor Kinderschändern. Und doch besteht die wichtigste KI-Politik des Weißen H…
For those of you in Europe that just had #DST end, I hope you remembered to update your clocks and watches. My watch already updated itself correctly, as you can see. 😉
#ClockChange #TimeChange
Aeolian dune simulation (made in 2017) for #MeerMittwoch:
The images show a screenshot of the JavaScript application to create the simulation and some Houdini renders of exported height fields. The sim itself had 5 macro params to control the behavior of the interactive deposit/erosion/transportation process. It supported tileable patterns, customizable seed terrain (images) and ran r…
I want to throw away all my computers, maybe even my ThinkPad. But who really holds the right to judge how I live? Authority itself is a chain meant to be shattered.
#Anarchism #Syndicalism
#SilentSunday Wiggonholt Parish Church, #WestSussex. The church's dedication has been long forgotten, if it even had one. The parish itself was even abolished in 1933, being merged with Parham.
Hey, this is my last photo from the hike last weekend. I didn't manage to capture the whole Vista so I tried to zoom in on some distant #mountains. In the mid you can see the #jochberg.
Usually you see epic photos from atop this mountain but not from the mountain itself.
And well, …
I'm no math surgeon, but there's 342mil people in the US. 70 of 342 is around 20%, or 1 in 5 Americans.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:f7utvjkqbgwfjonqtpfcf5fu/post/3m4pc4toy7s2z
An open admirer of Adolf Hitler,
#Nick #Fuentes preaches to his 1.2 million X followers that the MAGA movement’s biggest problem is that it’s not racist enough.
Since the death of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA,
Fuentes has been attempting to take his place as a major MAGA leader.
F…
"CSKA, its owner, managing director, and even the banks it dealt with were all explicitly named in #sanctions lists.
West Ham defended itself by citing “force majeure”. The club argued that it was impossible to make the payments without violating British law.
But #FIFA insisted: a…
Moody Urbanity - Action Required II 🧭
情绪化城市 - 行动指南 II 🧭
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html
Do you have the ability to write code for Apple platforms? Do you know what MDM / device management is? Do you understand what Compliance is? Do you care about being able to use a Mac or iPad or iPhone for work or school?
Does the idea of dealing with the bugs that can crop up from things like "this needs to be reliably managed like a server, but a human randomly sleeps it mid-process and when it wakes up it's in a different country!" sound interesting to you?
If so - come be my direct co-worker!
Need to be able to be based in/work within the US, but the team itself is fully remote. Multiple positions open.
Feel free to DM me with questions
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200628824-0836/software-engineer-test-infrastructure
Hey all, there are some photos from a hike in the #schwarzwald
Actually we thought that it would just take us less than an hour - but it wasn't simply a straight walk :-D
It was raining from time to time - which was indeed pretty cool. A) there was noone around except us and B) the colors were often just insane. Fully saturated green, the brown from the wood - and sometimes…
The last light of 2025....
(...is giving me big hopes for 2026, against all odds!)
#LandscapePhotography #Sunset #Alps
London is establishing itself as a center for quantitative finance; filings show trading firms XTX, Qube, and Quadrature each made £1B revenue in the past year (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8a6502c3-f244-4b61-880b-b20cf03299cc
'Pfade und Wege' / 'paths and ways' (? Or trails 🤔) #FotoVorschlag
Yes, that's a topic for me again 😉
This is from a trail that I did a couple of times already in different seasons. And this sections just offers such a cool view to the south.
The trail itself varies quite a bit in all terms - which I totally like. Well - enjoy!
For #MonochromeMonday and #Photomontag ... I visited this spot twice now and it looked SO different. Once with a lot of fog in the evening, the other time earlier with less fog.
Not just was it the fog that ws different. But once there were NO birds at all. And the other time it w…
Sources: Infinite Reality, rebranded as Napster, told staff that $3B in funding from an unnamed investor is not coming, calling itself a "victim of misconduct" (Phoebe Liu, Iain Martin/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/202<…
#FotoVorschlag 'Fortbewegungsmittel' 'Means of transportation'
1/.
I do not have that many photos of my beloved means of transportation.
The photo itself has also some context which I've written in my blog: