So the collective trauma reaction against the Church, so deep for those of us coming from the tradition of the European Left, alienates us from those indigenous comrades of ours who refused to let their identities be erased. It alienates us from Black and Latin American comrades who, in some cases, have subverted that same religion from a tool of oppression to a tool of resistance.
It also alienates us from our pagan, Jewish, and even Christian ancestors. Rather than a rejection of the genocides, crusades, and pogroms carried out to solidify the hegemony of the Church, a chauvinistic atheism affirms it under another name. Likewise it affirms the patriarchs who burned witches and destroyed midwifery to shift power over to male doctors.
The "Enlightenment" paradigm of "Reason," that led through secularism to the anti-religious antagonism of Bill Maher and the New Atheists, is laced with an Islamophobia and anti-Semitism rooted in the same church they claim to reject. And anyone who has been paying attention can see that it opens the door to the far right anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that also grows from that same root...
Republicans, Braced for Losses, Push More Voting Restrictions in Congress
Legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote was only the beginning
as the G.O.P. presses to sharply limit voting in line with Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud
MAGA rep Bryan Steil’s "Make Elections Great Again "bill would ban universal voting by mail
and prohibit the counting of ballots received after Election Day.
It would ban ranked-choice v…
Recent polling shows the majority disapprove of how ICE operates.
But to truly stop the damage requires going further
– it means eradicating the security logic that ever made people think that arming a secret police on an ethnic cleansing mission could ever make them safe.
Formed in 2003, during the embarrassing and disastrous national excesses of the post-9/11 era
– when the nation launched two ill-fated forever wars, and demonized Muslim immigrants
– ICE’s ma…
PCIe update: I'm now able to parse incoming InitFC1-* DLLPs and store away the credit counts in a register (which I don't actually use for anything yet), and emit a singular InitFC1-P DLLP of my own
Next step will be writing the rest of the setup logic so I can actually fully bring up VC0, then start sending UpdateFC idle DLLPs at regular intervals to keep the link alive when I'm not sending traffic.
WBD's board unanimously rejects Paramount's amended $108.4B acquisition offer, saying the bid still has "significant" risks compared to Netflix's $83B offer (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/deal
Posted a PR, https://github.com/picolibc/picolibc/pull/1138, to finally delete the original newlib stdio code from picolibc. It's well past time; that code is missing a bunch of functionality and fails a lot of tests.
WBD's board unanimously rejects Paramount's amended $108.4B acquisition bid, saying that it still has "significant" risks compared to Netflix's $83B offer (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/deal
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 $\delta = 3.5$.
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Managing Side Effects: A #JavaScript #EffectSystem in 30 Lines or Less
https://