Tootfinder

Bad news about Zoose.
He collapsed shortly before Christmas, and he’s been in and out of the vet school since then. They have no idea why he collapsed (and he’s not done it again since); but on top of a slightly enlarged pulmonary artery, and unknown markings on his spleen and liver, he has a number of growths in his lung that are almost certainly cancer. He’s started to cough. 1/2

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/upshot/spelling-bee-words-2025.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BFA.S5O6.e-hzn2hkZUEL&smid=url-share

The Hardest and Easiest Spelling Bee Words of 2025
A quick look at the attainability of getting the top 10 toughest words. No reason to dillydally.

TFW you're spelunking through generated HTML/CSS trying figure out where the unwanted white space is coming from…

the creature's body is buttoned up like a jacket and if u unbutton the third one from the top u can watch its anxious prunelike heart writhe in place without spilling everything it needs to live out on the floor

Here's hoping.
https://ground.news/article/cnns-tapper-forces-scott-bessent-to-admit-trump-admin-is-unsure-how-to-fund-snap-benefits

The world of Ghost of Yōtei is even more gorgeous than that of Ghost of Tsushima, and the way the world reacts even more impressive: Leaves shuffling, trails in the snow, the sound of hoofbeats on icy lakes. It's a dream just to walk around the world.
The image is a screen grab that to be honest looks drab compared to the scene on an HDR 65" TV.

Replying to someone to check if a term in their message was just a typo, and spelling the word typo as "type", then correcting that typo to "typ0", and so on. 🤦‍♂️
Anyway, how's your day going?
#life #irony #typos #greetings