Tootfinder

Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right
We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the…

Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right | David Boles, Blogs
We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness int…

@… That's awesome! It went down about 100K per minute, give or take. Got in 20 minutes later after going through by key bindings. Played for 6 - 7 hours with a quick dinner in between, 3 - 4 of which with friends. And we're already playing our next bunch of rounds today. Really enjoying the game, it's chaotically fun, and team coordination matters a l…

Strategic Incentivization for Locally Differentially Private Federated Learning
Yashwant Krishna Pagoti, Arunesh Sinha, Shamik Sural
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07138 https://

Strategic Incentivization for Locally Differentially Private Federated Learning
In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients jointly train a machine learning model by sharing gradient information, instead of raw data, with a server over multiple rounds. To address the possibility of information leakage in spite of sharing only the gradients, Local Differential Privacy (LDP) is often used. In LDP, clients add a selective amount of noise to the gradients before sending the same to the server. Although such noise addition protects the privacy of clients, it leads to a degrada…

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan says the startup raised two undisclosed rounds: $55M at a $350M valuation in 2024 and $150M at a $1.2B valuation earlier in 2025 (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/373783/polyma

CaRT: Teaching LLM Agents to Know When They Know Enough
Grace Liu, Yuxiao Qu, Jeff Schneider, Aarti Singh, Aviral Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08517 https://

CaRT: Teaching LLM Agents to Know When They Know Enough
Many tasks require learned models to strategically gather relevant information over multiple rounds of interaction before actually acting on a task. Strategic information gathering requires models to know not only how to effectively acquire information, but also when to stop gathering information and make a decision, in order to avoid overthinking or getting derailed when acting. In this paper, we formalize this problem and introduce Counterfactuals and Reasoning for Termination (CaRT), an appr…

Beyond Canonical Rounds: Communication Abstractions for Optimal Byzantine Resilience
Hagit Attiya, Itay Flam, Jennifer L. Welch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04310 https://

Beyond Canonical Rounds: Communication Abstractions for Optimal Byzantine Resilience
We study communication abstractions for asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance with optimal failure resilience, where $n > 3f$. Two classic patterns -- canonical asynchronous rounds and communication-closed layers -- have long been considered as general frameworks for designing distributed algorithms, making asynchronous executions appear synchronous and enabling modular reasoning. We show that these patterns are inherently limited in the critical resilience regime $3f < n \le 5f$. Several ke…

Kernel, which helps AI agents access the internet more efficiently via Chrome, raised $22M in seed and Series A led by Accel (Lucinda Shen/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/2025/10/09/accel-22-million-kernel-ai-agents

Exclusive: Accel strikes $22M deal to help AI agents access browsers
It's leading Kernel's seed and Series A rounds.

@… Correct. After several rounds of hosting provider acquisitions and migrations, my original cheap Linux mail host is now godaddy repackaged MS365 and I want to leave. I've been on it for a year or so now and hate it but I've been too busy to put in the time to migrate.

Single-Shot Universality in Quantum LDPC Codes via Code-Switching
Shi Jie Samuel Tan, Yifan Hong, Ting-Chun Lin, Michael J. Gullans, Min-Hsiu Hsieh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08552

Single-Shot Universality in Quantum LDPC Codes via Code-Switching
Code-switching is a powerful technique in quantum error correction that allows one to leverage the complementary strengths of different codes to achieve fault-tolerant universal quantum computation. However, existing code-switching protocols that encapsulate recent generalized lattice surgery approaches often either require many rounds of measurements to ensure fault-tolerance or suffer from low code rates. We present a single-shot, universal protocol that uses code-switching between high-rate …

BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic Bridges with Large Committees
Sergio Demian Lerner, Ariel Futoransky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06468 https://

BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic Bridges with Large Committees
We present BATTLE for Bitcoin, a DoS-resilient dispute layer that secures optimistic bridges between Bitcoin and rollups or sidechains. Our design adapts the BATTLE tournament protocol to Bitcoin's UTXO model using BitVM-style FLEX components and garbled circuits with on-demand L1 security bonds. Disputes are resolved in logarithmic rounds while recycling rewards, keeping the honest asserter's minimum initial capital constant even under many permissionless challengers. The construction is fully…

Fairness in Repeated Matching: A Maximin Perspective
Eugene Lim, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04624 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0…

Fairness in Repeated Matching: A Maximin Perspective
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least advantaged agent at the end of all rounds (optimal) or at the end of every individual round (anytime optimal). We investigate the computational challenges associated with finding (anytime) optimal outcomes and demonstrate that these problems are generally computa…

The 🇧🇪 Belgian postal service claims to be the first emission-free postal service in a European capital. All deliveries in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels capital region are now made on foot, by bike (some with e-trailer) or in an electric van.
https://

bpost makes Brussels the first European capital with emission-free daily postal deliveries
On October 1st, 2025, bpost completed the transition to zero-emission last-mile delivery for its regular letter and parcel rounds across the 19 municipalities of Brussels. The Belgian capital, the capital of Europe, is now the first major European metropolis where daily delivery rounds by postmen and postwomen are emission free.

Beyond Static Knowledge Messengers: Towards Adaptive, Fair, and Scalable Federated Learning for Medical AI
Jahidul Arafat, Fariha Tasmin, Sanjaya Poudel, Ahsan Habib Tareq, Iftekhar Haider
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06259

Beyond Static Knowledge Messengers: Towards Adaptive, Fair, and Scalable Federated Learning for Medical AI
Medical AI faces challenges in privacy-preserving collaborative learning while ensuring fairness across heterogeneous healthcare institutions. Current federated learning approaches suffer from static architectures, slow convergence (45-73 rounds), fairness gaps marginalizing smaller institutions, and scalability constraints (15-client limit). We propose Adaptive Fair Federated Learning (AFFL) through three innovations: (1) Adaptive Knowledge Messengers dynamically scaling capacity based on hete…

Greece to send €200 million arms package to Ukraine, including M110A2 howitzers and DPICM rounds: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/04/greece-to-send-million-arms.html

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Grizzly Bear:
🎵 Speak in Rounds
#GrizzlyBear
https://grizzlybearbrooklyn.bandcamp.com/track/speak-in-rounds
https://open.spotify.com/track/5ovGdvOGaSjuYiSLX0nIaY

We've made mezcal Negronis at home a couple of times now and they are v. good. Tonight I'm adding some chile, the extra heat is nice but not sure Aberdeen is ready for it. The salt is nice too, rounds it out.

PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/startup-down-rounds-are-at…

Startup down rounds are at a 10 year high, according to PitchBook data
PitchBook data revealed that 15.9% of venture-backed deals in 2025 to date have been down rounds, marking a decade high.

McDonald's hit by penny shortage, rounds cash transactions to a nickel
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/10/31/mcdonalds-penny-shortage-rounding-cash-transactions/87008678007/

Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling
Faeze Moradi Kalarde, Ben Liang, Min Dong, Yahia A. Eldemerdash Ahmed, Ho Ting Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03860

Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling
In Federated Learning (FL) with over-the-air aggregation, the quality of the signal received at the server critically depends on the receive scaling factors. While a larger scaling factor can reduce the effective noise power and improve training performance, it also compromises the privacy of devices by reducing uncertainty. In this work, we aim to adaptively design the receive scaling factors across training rounds to balance the trade-off between training convergence and privacy in an FL syst…

A year and a half ago, I was let go by my previous employer. They did a half a dozen rounds of layoffs over the course of 2 years or so. The previous Christmas, six packs of these were the Christmas present to employees. They worked with a local microbrewery to commission a line of beer to celebrate their successes. This has been sitting in my fridge since then. I don't drink that much and I didn't feel like dumping it out. It's been waiting for me to make a recipe that calls for beer.

Today, three #Hamas terrorists were arrested during a weapons handover in Berlin!
Police found a Glock pistol, an AK-47 assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. It is assumed that they were acquired to be used later in attacks on #Jewish and Israeli institutions.

Zugriff bei Waffenübergabe – mutmaßliche Hamas-Mitglieder in Berlin festgenommen
In Berlin sind drei mutmaßliche Hamas-Mitglieder wegen Terrorverdachts festgenommen worden. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen sollen sie in Deutschland Waffen für Anschläge auf jüdische und israelische Einrichtungen beschafft haben.

Apparently this thread is doing the rounds again. My notifications just prompted me to re-read it, and…yeah, I still stand by it. https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/113603661215753448

Shenzhen-based humanoid startup X Square Robot raised ~$100M led by Alibaba, bringing total funding to ~$280M, and released a foundation model for embodied AI (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/08/alibaba-leads-100-mil…

Alibaba leads $100 million investment in Chinese humanoid robot startup
Capital is rushing into humanoids — X Square Robot has completed eight fundraising rounds in less than two years since the startup was founded.

I found MAKE celebrating Palmer Luckey to be disgusting, and I let them know it.
I never thought I would see MAKE celebrating evil people like him.
Feel free to let dale@make.co know if you're not a fan of this sort of thing.
https://makethings.make.co/p/what-a-luckey-man

What a Luckey Man
A controversial but intriguing maker is making the podcast rounds; Maker Faires are happening all around the world

Tribal radio stations say the Trump administration has not said when or how much they will get of the $9.4M that Senator Rounds negotiated in a handshake deal (Jennifer Shutt/North Dakota Monitor)
https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/08/27/repub/tribal-radio-stations-wait-on-9m-pledged-in-congressional-handshake-deal/
http://mediagazer.com/250828/p14#a250828p14

Fantasy football targets and fades: Navigating the draft's first eight rounds https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6549091/2025/08/13/fantasy-football-draft-targets-fades-nabers/

NegotiationGym: Self-Optimizing Agents in a Multi-Agent Social Simulation Environment
Shashank Mangla, Chris Hokamp, Jack Boylan, Demian Gholipour Ghalandari, Yuuv Jauhari, Lauren Cassidy, Oisin Duffy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04368

NegotiationGym: Self-Optimizing Agents in a Multi-Agent Social Simulation Environment
We design and implement NegotiationGym, an API and user interface for configuring and running multi-agent social simulations focused upon negotiation and cooperation. The NegotiationGym codebase offers a user-friendly, configuration-driven API that enables easy design and customization of simulation scenarios. Agent-level utility functions encode optimization criteria for each agent, and agents can self-optimize by conducting multiple interaction rounds with other agents, observing outcomes, an…

PoS-CoPOR: Proof-of-Stake Consensus Protocol with Native Onion Routing Providing Scalability and DoS-Resistance
Ivan Homoliak, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Marek Tama\v{s}kovi\v{c}, Timotej Ponek, Luk\'a\v{s} Hellebrandt, Kamil Malinka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04619

PoS-CoPOR: Proof-of-Stake Consensus Protocol with Native Onion Routing Providing Scalability and DoS-Resistance
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and compromise liveness. In this work, we present PoS-CoPOR, a single-chain PoS consensus protocol that mitigates this vulnerability by integrating a native onion routing mechanism into the consensus protocol itself. PoS-CoPOR combines stake-weighted probabilistic …

Not one, not a single one, of the invoices for our summer school was just paid by the uni's finance admin. All without exception led to further inquiries and additional rounds back-and-forth before being cleared. Including the one asking for reimbursement for a jigsaw puzzle (priced 10 Euro 💰) which we did as a group activity (but needed checking whether it may have been a gift, and for whom?! #academicChatter #bigSigh #whatIsMyTimeWorth

Unfortunately, standards work may be a function of who has the biggest platform for social media polls (that maybe pre-judge the outcome).
I’m hoping those who work in or near #accessibility can offer some feedback to more fundamental, not pre-judged, questions here:

Bias Mitigation for AI-Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Review and Taxonomy
Theodor Stoecker, Samed Bayer, Ingo Weber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00109

Bias Mitigation for AI-Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Review and Taxonomy
Recommender systems continually retrain on user reactions to their own predictions, creating AI feedback loops that amplify biases and diminish fairness over time. Despite this well-known risk, most bias mitigation techniques are tested only on static splits, so their long-term fairness across multiple retraining rounds remains unclear. We therefore present a systematic literature review of bias mitigation methods that explicitly consider AI feedback loops and are validated in multi-round simul…

Optimally building spanning graphs in semirandom graph processes
Michael Anastos, Maur\'icio Collares, Joshua Erde, Mihyun Kang, Dominik Schmid, Gregory B. Sorkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26028

Optimally building spanning graphs in semirandom graph processes
The semirandom graph process constructs a graph $G$ in a series of rounds, starting with the empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a player is offered a vertex $v$ chosen uniformly at random, and chooses an edge on $v$ to add to $G$. The player's aim is to make $G$ satisfy some property as quickly as possible. Our interest is in the property that $G$ contain a given $n$-vertex graph $H$ with maximum degree $Δ$. In 2021, Ben-Eliezer, Gishboliner, Hefetz and Krivelevich showed that there i…

Since “Antichrist” is making the rounds I’m re-upping this one. https://mastodon.social/@Wraithe/112856690052486258

Multiomics Tissue Segmentation via Spatially-Informed Nested Biclustering Methods
Francesco Denti, Cecilia Balocchi, Vanna Denti, Giulia Capitoli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02482

Multiomics Tissue Segmentation via Spatially-Informed Nested Biclustering Methods
Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionisation Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) is a powerful technique for spatially resolved molecular profiling and cancer biomarker discovery. Recent advances, including a novel multiomics workflow, enable multiple rounds of MSI on the same tissue section, extracting diverse molecular classes, e.g., lipids, peptides, and N-glycans, while preserving spatial resolution. This innovation is particularly valuable for studies with limited tissue sample availability, su…

Adaptive Divide and Conquer with Two Rounds of Communication
Niladri Kal, Botond Szab\'o, Rajarshi Guhaniyogi, Natesh Pillai, Debdeep Pati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17073 h…

Adaptive Divide and Conquer with Two Rounds of Communication
We introduce a two-round adaptive communication strategy that enables rate-optimal estimation in the white noise model without requiring prior knowledge of the underlying smoothness. In the first round, local machines send summary statistics using $(\log_2(n))^2$ bits to enable the central machine to select the tuning parameters of the procedure. In the second round, another set of statistics are transmitted using optimal number of bits, enabling the central machine to aggregate and produce a f…

Is a race or a lottery a good way to allocate subsidies, or are there better alternatives?
Yesterday, a new round of subsidies for electric heavy-duty vehicles opened in the Netherlands – and was immediately oversubscribed, just like the previous rounds.
https://www.rvo.nl/subsidies-financiering/

Let’s not pretend this is all new. People have written funny/cryptic message on ammo for thousands of years, and the meanings are often inside jokes.
“But the British museum has sling shot, the actual projectiles used in slings and slingshots, that have funny little messages carved into them. Messages like ‘Catch!’ But, you know, the messages are written in Ancient Greek because they were carved 300 or so years before Jesus was born.”

Writing funny stuff on ammo is over 2000 years old
Do you have that buddy who scratches messages into his M4 rounds? Or maybe you're the sailor who Sharpies "This one's for you" onto JDAMs destined for a

A US journalist friend mentioned the #artillery incident to me yesterday.
I can’t find anything at all about it in Australian media. Nothing. I’m a little shocked, to say the least. What else are we just not getting?
#Free NYT

Military Fired Artillery Over California Freeway on Saturday
Rounds were fired on Friday across Interstate 5 as part of a test for Saturday’s event in Southern California. The state shut a section of the freeway.

Europe boosts artillery ammunition production sixfold in 2 years, NATO chief says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/28/europe-boosts-artillery-ammunition-production.html

Tribal radio stations say the Trump administration has not said when or how much they will get of the $9.4M that Senator Rounds negotiated in a handshake deal (Jennifer Shutt/North Dakota Monitor)
https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/08

A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction
Zhe Yang, Yichang Zhang, Yudong Wang, Ziyao Xu, Junyang Lin, Zhifang Sui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16456 https:…

A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. However, the mechanisms underlying how and why accuracy evolves during this iterative process remain unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain the performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. Through mathematical der…

FPF Releases Issue Brief on New CCPA Regulations for Automated Decisionmaking Technology, Risk Assessments, and Cybersecurity Audits
https://fpf.org/blog/fpf-releases-issue-brief-on-new-cc…

‘Eight Rounds After I Was on the Ground’: Texas Cops at the Wrong Home Opened Fire on Man Even After He Surrendered
https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/09/25/xas-cops-at-the-wrong-home-opened-fire/

Efficient and Secure Sleepy Model for BFT Consensus
Pengkun Ren, Hai Dong, Zahir Tari, Pengcheng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03145 https://arxiv.org/p…

Efficient and Secure Sleepy Model for BFT Consensus
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols for dynamically available systems face a critical challenge: balancing latency and security in fluctuating node participation. Existing solutions often require multiple rounds of voting per decision, leading to high latency or limited resilience to adversarial behavior. This paper presents a BFT protocol integrating a pre-commit mechanism with publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) into message transmission. By binding users' identities to t…

New Parallel and Streaming Algorithms for Directed Densest Subgraph
Slobodan Mitrovi\'c, Theodore Pan, Mahdi Qaempanah, Mohammad Amin Raeisi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21729

New Parallel and Streaming Algorithms for Directed Densest Subgraph
Finding dense subgraphs is a fundamental problem with applications to community detection, clustering, and data mining. Our work focuses on finding approximate densest subgraphs in directed graphs in computational models for processing massive data. We consider two such models: Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) and semi-streaming. We show how to find a $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\log n})$ MPC rounds with sublinear memory per machine. This improves the state-of-the-ar…

Human-Centered Evaluation of RAG outputs: a framework and questionnaire for human-AI collaboration
Aline Mangold, Kiran Hoffmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26205 https://…

Human-Centered Evaluation of RAG outputs: a framework and questionnaire for human-AI collaboration
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, yet systematic, human-centered evaluation of their outputs remains underexplored. Building on Gienapp's utility-dimension framework, we designed a human-centred questionnaire that assesses RAG outputs across 12 dimensions. We iteratively refined the questionnaire through several rounds of ratings on a set of query-output pairs and semantic discussions. Ultimately, we incorporated feedback from bo…

An interview with CEO Amjad Masad on Replit's slow growth, leaving the professional developer market to focus on non-technical white-collar workers, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/after-…

After nine years of grinding, Replit finally found its market. Can it keep it? | TechCrunch
While AI coding startups like Cursor raise brow-raising rounds on barely three years of existence, Replit's path to a $3 billion valuation has been anything but swift.

Evaluating the Limits of QAOA Parameter Transfer at High-Rounds on Sparse Ising Models With Geometrically Local Cubic Terms
Elijah Pelofske, Marek Rams, Andreas B\"artschi, Piotr Czarnik, Paolo Braccia, Lukasz Cincio, Stephan Eidenbenz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13528

Evaluating the Limits of QAOA Parameter Transfer at High-Rounds on Sparse Ising Models With Geometrically Local Cubic Terms
The emergent practical applicability of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for approximate combinatorial optimization is a subject of considerable interest. One of the primary limitations of QAOA is the task of finding a set of good parameters. Parameter transfer is a phenomenon where QAOA angles trained on problem instances that are self-similar tend to perform well for other problem instances from that similar class. This suggests a potentially highly efficient and scalable…

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #EarlierWithJoolsHolland
Igor Stravinsky, Antal Doršti & Detroit Symphony Orchestra:
🎵 The Rite of Spring (Augurs of Spring...Spring Rounds)
#IgorStravinsky #AntalDoráti #DetroitSymphonyOrchestra
Please 🔁 BOOST to share what you like
- your followers don't see if you ⭐ favourite a post

Fantasy football 2025: Jaydon Blue, Tory Horton, Shedeur Sanders among later-round rookies to draft https://www.nfl.com/news/fantasy-football-2025-jaydon-blue-tory-horton-shedeur-sanders-among-later-round-rookies-to-draft

Odontoceti: Ultra-Fast DAG Consensus with Two Round Commitment
Preston Vander Vos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01216 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01216

Odontoceti: Ultra-Fast DAG Consensus with Two Round Commitment
Users of blockchains value scalability, expecting fast confirmations and immediate transaction processing. Odontoceti, the latest in DAG-based consensus, addresses these concerns by prioritizing low latency and high throughput, making a strategic trade-off in security by operating with a 20% fault tolerance instead of the established 33% level. It is the first DAG-based protocol to achieve commitment in just two communication rounds, delivering median latency of 300 milliseconds while processin…

The best picks for each draft slot in Rounds 1 and 2 in 10-team leagues https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/id/46021173/2025-fantasy-football-draft-best-picks-draft-slot-10-team

Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate
Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Haibin Zhang, Licheng Wang, Cong Zuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11035 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate
Multi-agent debate (MAD) is an emerging approach to improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing MAD methods rely on multiple rounds of interaction among agents to reach consensus, and the final output is selected by majority voting in the last round. However, this consensus-based design faces several limitations. First, multiple rounds of communication increases token overhead and limits scalability. Second, due to the inherent conformity of LLMs, agents that …

Finite-Size Security Bounds in Semi-Quantum Key Distribution: Spectral, Operator-Theoretic, and Entropic Perspectives
Zahidur Rezwan Ratul
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25078 https…

Finite-Size Security Bounds in Semi-Quantum Key Distribution: Spectral, Operator-Theoretic, and Entropic Perspectives
We study Semi-Quantum Key Distribution (SQKD) with a focus on finite-size security bounds, developed through three complementary perspectives. (i) Spectral disturbance: wrong-basis Lüders updates produce closed-form spectra and purity loss, which serve as basis-independent indicators of disturbance. (ii) Operator-theoretic reduction: in Z/Z-sifted rounds, intercept-resend attacks can be represented as an effective depolarizing channel, characterized by a fidelity-QBER relation. (iii) Entropic …

Jointly Computation- and Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning
Xiaoxing Ren, Nicola Bastianello, Karl H. Johansson, Thomas Parisini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15509 https…

Jointly Computation- and Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning
We address distributed learning problems over undirected networks. Specifically, we focus on designing a novel ADMM-based algorithm that is jointly computation- and communication-efficient. Our design guarantees computational efficiency by allowing agents to use stochastic gradients during local training. Moreover, communication efficiency is achieved as follows: i) the agents perform multiple training epochs between communication rounds, and ii) compressed transmissions are used. We prove exac…

Distributed Sparsest Cut via Eigenvalue Estimation
Yannic Maus, Tijn de Vos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19898 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19898

Distributed Sparsest Cut via Eigenvalue Estimation
We give new, improved bounds for approximating the sparsest cut value or in other words the conductance $ϕ$ of a graph in the CONGEST model. As our main result, we present an algorithm running in $O(\log^2 n/ϕ)$ rounds in which every vertex outputs a value $\tilde ϕ$ satisfying $ϕ\le \tilde ϕ\le \sqrt{2.01ϕ}$. In most regimes, our algorithm improves significantly over the previously fastest algorithm for the problem [Chen, Meierhans, Probst Gutenberg, Saranurak; SODA 25]. Additionally, ou…

Salt Lake City-based Filevine, which offers tools to help manage legal workflows, raised $400M from Insight Partners, Accel, Halo Fund, and others in two rounds (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/09/23/filevine-raises-400m-le…

Filevine raises $400M for its legal case management platform - SiliconANGLE
Filevine raises $400M for its legal case management platform - SiliconANGLE

Causal Analysis of Health, Education, and Economic Well-Being in India -- Evidence from the Young Lives Survey
Anushka De, Diganta Mukherjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21370 htt…

Causal Analysis of Health, Education, and Economic Well-Being in India -- Evidence from the Young Lives Survey
This study investigates the dynamic and potentially causal relationships among childhood health, education, and long-term economic well-being in India using longitudinal data from the Young Lives Survey. While prior research often examines these domains in isolation, we adopt an integrated empirical framework combining panel data methods, instrumental variable regression, and causal graph analysis to disentangle their interdependencies. Our analysis spans five survey rounds covering two cohorts…

Seneca, which is developing autonomous firefighting drones, raised $60M in seed and Series A rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital (Christopher Marquis/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/…

How Seneca’s Firefighting Drones Signal A New Era Of Climate Adaptation
Seneca’s firefighting drones show how adaptation tech is shaping a resilience economy amid rising climate risks and billion-dollar wildfire disasters.

To whom did my vote go?
Andrew Conway, Michelle Blom, Alexander Ek, Peter Stuckey, Vanessa Teague, Damjan Vukcevic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13370 https://

To whom did my vote go?
Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences among candidates. The system is complex and it is not always obvious how an individual's vote contributes to candidates' tallies across rounds of tabulation. This short paper presents a demonstration system that allows voters to enter an example vote in a past Australian STV election, and see: (i)~how that vote would have been transfer…

NFL Draft 2026 rankings: Arch Manning, Caleb Downs in top 5 of Dane Brugler's initial board https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6549329/2025/08/21/nfl-draft-2026-rankings-arch-manning-caleb-downs/

VCs court top AI startups with preempted rounds and perks like private jets; PitchBook: US AI startups raised $200B in 2025, with 41% going to just 10 companies (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Who gets hit first and who recovers last? Evidence from Indian Coastal Flood Shock
Jheelum Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08856 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Who gets hit first and who recovers last? Evidence from Indian Coastal Flood Shock
Catastrophic floods directly risk 1.8 billion lives worldwide, most of whom are from East and South Asia. How do extreme floods reshape paid labor outcomes? To answer this, I focus on a 1-in-100 year flood event in India. I first combine Sentinel-1 SAR with JRC Global Surface Water dataset to generate flood map. Using information from this map in various rounds of periodic labor force surveys, I estimate gender-specific dynamic effects of the flood shock. Key results show that men experienced s…

Towards Constant Time Multi-Call Rumor Spreading on Small-Set Expanders
Emilio Cruciani, Sebastian Forster, Tijn de Vos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18017 https://

Towards Constant Time Multi-Call Rumor Spreading on Small-Set Expanders
We study a multi-call variant of the classic PUSH&PULL rumor spreading process where nodes can contact $k$ of their neighbors instead of a single one during both PUSH and PULL operations. We show that rumor spreading can be made faster at the cost of an increased amount of communication between the nodes. As a motivating example, consider the process on a complete graph of $n$ nodes: while the standard PUSH&PULL protocol takes $Θ(\log n)$ rounds, we prove that our $k$-PUSH&PULL variant complet…

Bandits with Single-Peaked Preferences and Limited Resources
Gur Keinan, Rotem Torkan, Omer Ben-Porat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09425 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Bandits with Single-Peaked Preferences and Limited Resources
We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the optimal matching is NP-hard, making online learning computationally infeasible. To overcome this barrier, we focus on \emph{single-peaked preferences} -- a well-established structure in social choice theory, where users' preferences are unimodal with respect to…

PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization
Dawei Xiang, Wenyan Xu, Kexin Chu, Zixu Shen, Tianqi Ding, Wei Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12446 https:/…

PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization
The rapid advancement of generative AI has democratized access to powerful tools such as Text-to-Image models. However, to generate high-quality images, users must still craft detailed prompts specifying scene, style, and context-often through multiple rounds of refinement. We propose PromptSculptor, a novel multi-agent framework that automates this iterative prompt optimization process. Our system decomposes the task into four specialized agents that work collaboratively to transform a short, …

Jack Altman's Alt Capital raised $275M for a new fund to lead more Series A rounds at AI startups, a jump from the $150M fund it closed in February 2024 (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jack…

Fantasy football 2025: Jaydon Blue, Tory Horton, Shedeur Sanders among later-round rookies to draft https://www.nfl.com/news/fantasy-football-2025-jaydon-blue-tory-horton-shedeur-sanders-among-later-round-rookies-to-draft

DAG it off: Latency Prefers No Common Coins
Amores-Sesar Ignacio, Gr{\o}ndal Viktor, Holmg{\aa}rd Adam, Ottendal Mads
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14716 https://

DAG it off: Latency Prefers No Common Coins
We introduce Black Marlin, the first Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based Byzantine atomic broadcast protocol in a partially synchronous setting that successfully forgoes the reliable broadcast and common coin primitives. Black Marlin achieves the optimal latency of 3 rounds of communication (4.25 with Byzantine faults) while maintaining optimal communication and amortized communication complexities. We present a formal security analysis of the protocol, accompanied by empirical evidence that Bla…

Random Party Distillation on a Superconducting Processor
Alexander C. B. Greenwood, Jackson Russett, Hoi-Kwong Lo, Li Qian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09110 https://

Random Party Distillation on a Superconducting Processor
Random party distillation refers to the process by which Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs are randomly extracted from a single copy of a multipartite entangled state after multiple rounds of performing positive operator value measure operations. In this work, we propose a qubit-based implementation of a random party distillation protocol and demonstrate its efficacy on the superconducting hardware device, ibm_quebec. We demonstrate a 4-round implementation of the protocol, showing distillation rat…

Two for One, One for All: Deterministic LDC-based Robust Computation in Congested Clique
Keren Censor-Hillel, Orr Fischer, Ran Gelles, Pedro Soto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08740

Two for One, One for All: Deterministic LDC-based Robust Computation in Congested Clique
We design a deterministic compiler that makes any computation in the Congested Clique model robust to a constant fraction $α<1$ of adversarial crash faults. In particular, we show how a network of $n$ nodes can compute any circuit of depth $d$, width $ω$, and gate total fan $Δ$, in $d\cdot\lceil\fracω{n^2}+\fracΔ{n}\rceil\cdot 2^{O(\sqrt{\log{n}}\log\log{n})}$ rounds in such a faulty model. As a corollary, any $T$-round Congested Clique algorithm can be compiled into an algorithm that comp…