Tootfinder

Friday Jan 23
Ice Out
No Work
No School
No Shopping
https://bsky.app/profile/4loveofwisdom.bsky.social/post/3mczpk6h7722n

Gottfrid Svartholm one of the co-founders of the pirate bay website, at his work station.
#Piracy #Privacy #Security

🤦🏻 Golf lesson: Study shows political polarization hurts performance at work
#politics

Golf lesson: Study shows political polarization hurts performance at work
Few workers face more scrutiny than professional athletes. Every movement is measured, every outcome quantified, and every performance evaluated against objective standards. So when UC Berkeley Haas researcher Tim Sels wondered how America's deepening political polarization was affecting workers' performance, he turned to one of the most comprehensive data sets on individual human performance: the PGA Tour.

One of the strongest factors in building and motivating an organization as a leader is saying out loud regularly that you care about people.
As Alicja frames, it's the difference between knowing what ice cream tastes like and actually eating ice cream.
It is so SO meaningful to tell people that you care about them, that you value their expertise and work, that they deserve to be respected and supported, and so on. Customize it to the individual situation: identify what someo…

Weekend Reads
* VPN IPv6 leaks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19698
* ACME protocol brief history

Smoothing Rough Edges of IPv6 in VPNs
How do commercial VPNs interact with IPv6? We show two "rough edges" in how commercial VPNs handle IPv6. First, we show that many IPv4-only VPNs leak IPv6 traffic to the ISP. Individual use VPNs in part to conceal their local IP addresses, so such leaks reduce user privacy. While prior work has studied VPNs in testbeds, we use a new dataset of 129k VPN-using daily visitors to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com that quantifies these leaks and show 12 VPNs previously considered safe still leak for at least 5%…

I never get tired of messing around with little circuits like this and seeing how they work. This is an Arduino board from @… running an example that loads data into a shift register. The source code does this with a single call to shiftOut() which hides all the details, but on a scope you can see the individual bits being added serially.

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

Microwave electrometry with quantum-limited resolutions in a Rydberg atom array
Yao-Wen Zhang, De-Sheng Xiang, Ren Liao, Hao-Xiang Liu, Biao Xu, Peng Zhou, Yijia Zhou, Kuan Zhang, Lin Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05413 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05413 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05413
arXiv:2512.05413v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Microwave (MW) field sensing is foundational to modern technology, yet its evolution, reliant on classical antennas, is constrained by fundamental physical limits on field, temporal, and spatial resolutions. Here, we demonstrate an MW electrometry that simultaneously surpasses these constraints by using individual Rydberg atoms in an optical tweezer array as coherent sensors. This approach achieves a field sensitivity within 13% of the standard quantum limit, a response time that exceeds the Chu limit by more than 11 orders of magnitude, and in-situ near-field mapping with {\lambda}/3000 spatial resolution. This work establishes Rydberg-atom arrays as a powerful platform that unites quantum-limited sensitivity, nanosecond-scale response time, and sub-micrometer resolution, opening new avenues in quantum metrology and precision electromagnetic field imaging.
toXiv_bot_toot

Robust forecast aggregation via additional queries
Rafael Frongillo, Mary Monroe, Eric Neyman, Bo Waggoner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05271
arXiv:2512.05271v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of robust forecast aggregation: combining expert forecasts with provable accuracy guarantees compared to the best possible aggregation of the underlying information. Prior work shows strong impossibility results, e.g. that even under natural assumptions, no aggregation of the experts' individual forecasts can outperform simply following a random expert (Neyman and Roughgarden, 2022).
In this paper, we introduce a more general framework that allows the principal to elicit richer information from experts through structured queries. Our framework ensures that experts will truthfully report their underlying beliefs, and also enables us to define notions of complexity over the difficulty of asking these queries. Under a general model of independent but overlapping expert signals, we show that optimal aggregation is achievable in the worst case with each complexity measure bounded above by the number of agents $n$. We further establish tight tradeoffs between accuracy and query complexity: aggregation error decreases linearly with the number of queries, and vanishes when the "order of reasoning" and number of agents relevant to a query is $\omega(\sqrt{n})$. These results demonstrate that modest extensions to the space of expert queries dramatically strengthen the power of robust forecast aggregation. We therefore expect that our new query framework will open up a fruitful line of research in this area.
toXiv_bot_toot

Good Morning #Canada
Yesterday my wife and I had to pay for a small renovation which necessitated some budget shuffling. Needless to say we didn't make the list of the Richest Canadians. The McLeans and Canadian Business 2025 ranking saw lots of new names, which is surprising because $4.8B only earns you a spot at #40. Tech, primarily AI and data centre related, and cryptocurrency pushed some fortunes upwards, while the usual group of staid family wealth looked on with disdain. The saying "the rich gets richer" holds true as the combined net worth of the 10 wealthiest people on the list is $310 billion, a nearly 20% increase over 2024. It's difficult to read the individual summaries and not be disappointed at the level of wealth disparity with the bottom 50% of Canadians. IMO Governments avoid higher taxes on the wealthy because they believe Capitalism drives the economy, not the people who work for capitalists.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Capitalism #TaxTheRich
The Rich List - Macleans.ca
https://macleans.ca/longforms/the-rich-list/