Three stories today that sum up #Trump and #maga :
US immigration agents detain two-year-old Minnesota girl: ‘depravity beyond words’

Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

RE: https://zirk.us/@ChrisMayLA6/116279696642883858
When is the world going to realise that the US isn’t at war just with Iran… It’s at war with the whole world.
What did you think “America first” meant?
They’re playing a zero-sum game so appeaseme…

Uber agrees to acquire SpotHero for an undisclosed sum, to offer parking reservation for events and at venues and airports; SpotHero was last valued at $290M (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/uber-acquiring-spothero.html

Uber acquiring parking app SpotHero as it moves beyond ride-hailing and food delivery
Uber said it plans to offer a parking reservation experience powered by SpotHero for events and at venues and airports.

High-Dimensional Robust Mean Estimation with Untrusted Batches
Maryam Aliakbarpour, Vladimir Braverman, Yuhan Liu, Junze Yin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20698 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20698 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20698
arXiv:2602.20698v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study high-dimensional mean estimation in a collaborative setting where data is contributed by $N$ users in batches of size $n$. In this environment, a learner seeks to recover the mean $\mu$ of a true distribution $P$ from a collection of sources that are both statistically heterogeneous and potentially malicious. We formalize this challenge through a double corruption landscape: an $\varepsilon$-fraction of users are entirely adversarial, while the remaining ``good'' users provide data from distributions that are related to $P$, but deviate by a proximity parameter $\alpha$.
Unlike existing work on the untrusted batch model, which typically measures this deviation via total variation distance in discrete settings, we address the continuous, high-dimensional regime under two natural variants for deviation: (1) good batches are drawn from distributions with a mean-shift of $\sqrt{\alpha}$, or (2) an $\alpha$-fraction of samples within each good batch are adversarially corrupted. In particular, the second model presents significant new challenges: in high dimensions, unlike discrete settings, even a small fraction of sample-level corruption can shift empirical means and covariances arbitrarily.
We provide two Sum-of-Squares (SoS) based algorithms to navigate this tiered corruption. Our algorithms achieve the minimax-optimal error rate $O(\sqrt{\varepsilon/n} \sqrt{d/nN} \sqrt{\alpha})$, demonstrating that while heterogeneity $\alpha$ represents an inherent statistical difficulty, the influence of adversarial users is suppressed by a factor of $1/\sqrt{n}$ due to the internal averaging afforded by the batch structure.
toXiv_bot_toot

There are some eye-poppers in there…
From FT: "Tuesday marked the first anniversary of the start of Trump’s second term in office. From “Taco” to the “Donroe doctrine”, these 12 charts sum up a year of Trump 2.0."
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle

What happened when USAID was cut:
An American-made hunger crisis. A worsening cholera epidemic. Last sum... | TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@propublica/video/7609068647587384589?_r=1&_t=ZN-9470mdnryq6

Watch Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants fight perfectly sum up disaster season https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/watch-dallas-cowboys-giants-fight-perfectly-sum-up-disaster-season

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum to help it develop a system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/cloudflare-ai-human-native-acquisition.html…

@… You seem to apply a strict definition of "safe"/"secure" meaning nothing counts below absolute perfection, which is more of an argument about linguistic/semantics of the wording used, rather than the technical benefits of the language.
Rust has features that broadly improve quality and reliability too, eg. sum types help catch mistakes in sta…

Donald Trump has bragged about building a political war chest exceeding $1.5 billion
— a staggering sum that he can wield at his whim to shape November’s midterms and the 2028 race to succeed him.
Trump’s stockpile
— which dwarfs any amounts raised by his predecessors in their second terms
— is not easy to precisely calculate
given that much of it is being collected by groups that aren’t required to file regular financial disclosures.
Current and former st…

"I've been using OmniOutliner for 20 years, and it's truly the best (and most trusted) system I've found to stop trying to use my brain as a filing cabinet."
— Phil Alden Robinson, Director and Screenwriter (whose films include Field of Dreams, Sneakers, and The Sum of All Fears)
https://en.w…

RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/115861173721374216
Hey, this is a great idea! While we're at it, we should send lump sum payments to everyone who lives in the US, too. We could call it.. Universal Bribery Income or something. This "UB…

I tried to stay calm, but then copilot made me lose my shit
#genAIgoingGreat

Copilot Messes Up Big Time · Technical inconsistencies blog
Today, I asked a simple question to Microsoft Copilot in Excel: In Sheet1, add a table that looks into the other sheets and then, per week number, sum the total hours marked Internal for Alice, Bob, and Charlie. For Alice, week number is in column A, Internal hours are marked in column C as internal hours, and column D for the amount. For Bob, week number is in column A, Internal hours are marked in column C as INTERNAL, and column D for the amount. > For Charlie, week number is in co…

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, aiming to create a new system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/cloudflare-ai-human-native-acquisition.html

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native
The internet infrastructure company wants AI developers to pay creators for content they use in their models.

The only TOR related service I still run is a snowflake proxy.
2026/02/07 12:39:38 Proxy starting
2026/02/07 12:39:41 NAT type: unrestricted
2026/02/07 13:39:43 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 31 completed successful connections. Traffic Relayed ↓ 42253 KB (11.74 KB/s), ∑ 4234 KB (1.18 KB/s).
I'll probably run a bridge or relay one day when I'll have another baremetal machine.
#tor

#Apple announced new #StudioDisplay monitors: 1700€ or 3500€ each.
Behold: they already include a stand this time. 🤣
I bought 2 27" 4K TFTs a couple of weeks ago. For 300€. In sum. Both.
I don't get Apple customers any more. 🤷

Sonnet 004 - IV
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dos…

I went to see my neighbor who is a bus driver.
He spent roughly an hour explaining which of his favorite Smetana/Janacek/Dvorak pieces are favorites of his passengers and how he doesn’t dare to play them the favorite opera pieces but he feels deprived of them so he has to listen while commuting to the work (on a bike of course).
This was more culture talk than with the sum of my tech friends in the last three years, particularly if you include the genAI crew.

Any pivot-table people out there? I've got this example pivot table I've been messing with and I can't figure out wth a value (23.53..%) comes from - it's a sum displayed as % difference to next field, so I'm reckoning it's (21-17)/17 - but I don't understand wth it's referencing the 17 field.
(

For £12m, you could buy a seven-bedroom mansion in Hampstead, north London,
or a Bugatti La Voiture Noire, one of the world’s most coveted sports cars, with a few hundred thousand quid to spare.
Or you could blow it all on a Pokémon card
https://www.t…

Zendesk agrees to acquire Forethought, which makes AI-powered customer support software, for an undisclosed sum; Forethought has raised $115M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/11/zendesk-acquires-agentic-customer-service-s…

Zendesk acquires agentic customer service startup Forethought | TechCrunch
Forethought was years ahead of its time and the 2018 winner of TechCrunch Battlefield.

The Sum of All Ears
#SoSoMovies
#HashTagGames

Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

Incremental (k, z)-Clustering on Graphs
Emilio Cruciani, Sebastian Forster, Antonis Skarlatos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08542 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08542 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08542
arXiv:2602.08542v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Given a weighted undirected graph, a number of clusters $k$, and an exponent $z$, the goal in the $(k, z)$-clustering problem on graphs is to select $k$ vertices as centers that minimize the sum of the distances raised to the power $z$ of each vertex to its closest center. In the dynamic setting, the graph is subject to adversarial edge updates, and the goal is to maintain explicitly an exact $(k, z)$-clustering solution in the induced shortest-path metric.
While efficient dynamic $k$-center approximation algorithms on graphs exist [Cruciani et al. SODA 2024], to the best of our knowledge, no prior work provides similar results for the dynamic $(k,z)$-clustering problem. As the main result of this paper, we develop a randomized incremental $(k, z)$-clustering algorithm that maintains with high probability a constant-factor approximation in a graph undergoing edge insertions with a total update time of $\tilde O(k m^{1 o(1)} k^{1 \frac{1}{\lambda}} m)$, where $\lambda \geq 1$ is an arbitrary fixed constant. Our incremental algorithm consists of two stages. In the first stage, we maintain a constant-factor bicriteria approximate solution of size $\tilde{O}(k)$ with a total update time of $m^{1 o(1)}$ over all adversarial edge insertions. This first stage is an intricate adaptation of the bicriteria approximation algorithm by Mettu and Plaxton [Machine Learning 2004] to incremental graphs. One of our key technical results is that the radii in their algorithm can be assumed to be non-decreasing while the approximation ratio remains constant, a property that may be of independent interest.
In the second stage, we maintain a constant-factor approximate $(k,z)$-clustering solution on a dynamic weighted instance induced by the bicriteria approximate solution. For this subproblem, we employ a dynamic spanner algorithm together with a static $(k,z)$-clustering algorithm.
toXiv_bot_toot

Characterization of Some Graphs Realizing Regularity Bounds for Binomial Edge Ideals
Nursel Erey, Muhammed Ergen, Takayuki Hibi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06524 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06524 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06524
arXiv:2602.06524v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we characterize all graphs $G$ satisfying \[\operatorname{reg}(S/J_G)=\ell(G)=c(G)\] where $\ell(G)$ is the sum of the lengths of the longest induced paths in each connected component of $G$ and $c(G)$ is the number of the maximal cliques of $G$. We also characterize all connected graphs $G$ that satisfy \[\operatorname{reg}(S/J_G)=\ell(G)=|V(G)|-\omega(G) 1\] where $\omega(G)$ is the clique number of $G$. Moreover, we investigate the possible values of the regularity of $S/J_G$ within the intervals $[\ell(G), c(G)]$ and $[\ell(G), |V(G)|-\omega(G) 1]$.
toXiv_bot_toot

Anduril agrees to acquire missile defense modeling company ExoAnalytic for an undisclosed sum and says the deal will grow its space unit staff from 120 to ~250 (Sana Pashankar/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work.
Today we have more information than any civilization in history.
But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private …

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind his back, and he worked

Nike quietly sold its digital products subsidiary RTFKT on December 16 for an undisclosed sum, roughly one year after Nike shuttered the NFT unit (Matthew Kish/Oregonian)
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/01/n…

Nike sells RTFKT: Digital products subsidiary quietly offloaded in December
The sale comes as CEO Elliott Hill refocuses Nike on sports and questions persist about Converse’s future after a 30% sales drop.

Neighborhood-Aware Graph Labeling Problem
Mohammad Shahverdikondori, Sepehr Elahi, Patrick Thiran, Negar Kiyavash
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08098 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08098 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08098
arXiv:2602.08098v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Motivated by optimization oracles in bandits with network interference, we study the Neighborhood-Aware Graph Labeling (NAGL) problem. Given a graph $G = (V,E)$, a label set of size $L$, and local reward functions $f_v$ accessed via evaluation oracles, the objective is to assign labels to maximize $\sum_{v \in V} f_v(x_{N[v]})$, where each term depends on the closed neighborhood of $v$. Two vertices co-occur in some neighborhood term exactly when their distance in $G$ is at most $2$, so the dependency graph is the squared graph $G^2$ and $\mathrm{tw}(G^2)$ governs exact algorithms and matching fine-grained lower bounds. Accordingly, we show that this dependence is inherent: NAGL is NP-hard even on star graphs with binary labels and, assuming SETH, admits no $(L-\varepsilon)^{\mathrm{tw}(G^2)}\cdot n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm for any $\varepsilon>0$. We match this with an exact dynamic program on a tree decomposition of $G^2$ running in $O\!\left(n\cdot \mathrm{tw}(G^2)\cdot L^{\mathrm{tw}(G^2) 1}\right)$ time. For approximation, unless $\mathsf{P}=\mathsf{NP}$, for every $\varepsilon>0$ there is no polynomial-time $n^{1-\varepsilon}$-approximation on general graphs even under the promise $\mathrm{OPT}>0$; without the promise $\mathrm{OPT}>0$, no finite multiplicative approximation ratio is possible. In the nonnegative-reward regime, we give polynomial-time approximation algorithms for NAGL in two settings: (i) given a proper $q$-coloring of $G^2$, we obtain a $1/q$-approximation; and (ii) on planar graphs of bounded maximum degree, we develop a Baker-type polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), which becomes an efficient PTAS (EPTAS) when $L$ is constant.
toXiv_bot_toot

Accenture agrees to acquire UK AI startup Faculty, which works with the UK government, for an undisclosed sum; Faculty CEO Marc Warner will become Accenture CTO (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #EssentialClassics
Claudio Monteverdi, The Sixteen & Harry Christophers:
🎵 Laetatus sum
#ClaudioMonteverdi #TheSixteen #HarryChristophers
Please 🔁 BOOST to share what you like
- your followers don't see if you ⭐ favourite a post

Replaced article(s) found for cs.DS. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/new
[1/1]:
- Language Generation in the Limit: Noise, Loss, and Feedback
Yannan Bai, Debmalya Panigrahi, Ian Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15319 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/114896208560390692
- Online Firefighting on Cactus Graphs
Max Hugen, Bob Krekelberg, Alison Hsiang-Hsuan Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22277 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115286656155128312
- Improved Extended Regular Expression Matching
Philip Bille, Inge Li G{\o}rtz, Rikke Schjeldrup Jessen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09311 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115365884736976741
- Robust Algorithms for Finding Cliques in Random Intersection Graphs via Sum-of-Squares
Andreas G\"obel, Janosch Ruff, Leon Schiller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20376 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115614988823215273
- Analysis of Shuffling Beyond Pure Local Differential Privacy
Shun Takagi, Seng Pei Liew
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19154 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115971701218309765
- Exact (n 2) Comparison Complexity for the N-Repeated Element Problem
Andrew Au
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21202 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115982906572495225
- A Multi-Token Coordinate Descent Method for Semi-Decentralized Vertical Federated Learning
Pedro Valdeira, Yuejie Chi, Cl\'audia Soares, Jo\~ao Xavier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09977
- Optimal Sequential Flows
Hugo Gimbert, Corto Mascle, Patrick Totzke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13806 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mathOC_bot/115575399809016779
toXiv_bot_toot

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ThisClassicalLife
Tomšs Luis de Victoria, The Sixteen & Harry Christophers:
🎵 Laetatus Sum
#TomásLuisdeVictoria #TheSixteen #HarryChristophers

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ThroughTheNight
Claudio Monteverdi, Gabriele Palomba, La Venexiana & Gabriele Palomba:
🎵 Nigra sum, sed formosa
#ClaudioMonteverdi #GabrielePalomba #LaVenexiana