Tootfinder

Sources: the White House is preparing an executive order formally instructing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI tools (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/09/trump-white-house-anthropic-executive-order

Scoop: White House readies executive order to weed out Anthropic
The move would escalate the administration's fight with Anthropic and formalize a broader push to remove Claude.

there seems to be some ongoing feud between @… and the @… people https://

The Verification Theater: When Formal Methods Create False Assurance in Cryptographic Libraries
Formal verification of cryptographic implementations is frequently presented as providing "the highest level of assurance" against implementation defects. We examine this claim through a case study of Cryspen's libcrux and hpke-rs, two cryptographic libraries that are marketed as formally verified and high-assurance. We examine five vulnerabilities across these libraries. The first, a platform-dependent cryptographic output failure in SHA-3 intrinsics discovered by an independent researcher in…

The annual meeting of the nation’s governors that has long served as a rare bipartisan gathering is unraveling
after Donald Trump excluded Democratic governors from White House events.
The National Governors Association said it will no longer hold a formal meeting with Trump when governors are scheduled to convene in Washington later this month,
after the White House planned to invite only Republican governors.
On Tuesday, 18 Democratic governors also announced they …

Governors won't hold Trump meeting after White House only invited Republicans
The National Governors Association is not going to hold a formal meeting with President Donald Trump. This decision comes after the White House planned to invite only Republican governors to the event. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, shared this in a letter to fellow governors on Monday. The NGA's mission is to represent all 55 governors, so the association will no longer facilitate the event. The NGA is scheduled to meet in Washington from February 19th to 21st. Representatives fo…

Welfarist Formulations for Diverse Similarity Search
Siddharth Barman, Nirjhar Das, Shivam Gupta, Kirankumar Shiragur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08742
arXiv:2602.08742v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in addition to the relevance (similarity) of the returned neighbors, diversity among the neighbors is a central requirement. In this paper, we develop principled welfare-based formulations in NNS for realizing diversity across attributes. Our formulations are based on welfare functions -- from mathematical economics -- that satisfy central diversity (fairness) and relevance (economic efficiency) axioms. With a particular focus on Nash social welfare, we note that our welfare-based formulations provide objective functions that adaptively balance relevance and diversity in a query-dependent manner. Notably, such a balance was not present in the prior constraint-based approach, which forced a fixed level of diversity and optimized for relevance. In addition, our formulation provides a parametric way to control the trade-off between relevance and diversity, providing practitioners with flexibility to tailor search results to task-specific requirements. We develop efficient nearest neighbor algorithms with provable guarantees for the welfare-based objectives. Notably, our algorithm can be applied on top of any standard ANN method (i.e., use standard ANN method as a subroutine) to efficiently find neighbors that approximately maximize our welfare-based objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is practical and substantially improves diversity while maintaining high relevance of the retrieved neighbors.
toXiv_bot_toot

Har gått runt idag och ältat denna formulering i Slottners replik i DN:

"AI speglar i många fall mänskliga beteenden och präglas därför av de värderingar och den kultur som råder i miljön där den tränas, utvecklas och används. Om andra länder är snabbare kommer offentlig sektor vara fast med AI-teknik som inte är anpassad efter vår syn på samhället.”

Jag kan bara tolka det som att Slottner säger att “AI" tränas så att den har en syn på samhället som speglar miljön de…

No high fructose corn syrup.
Just regular corn syrup plus a bit of extra sucrose. Gotta love sketchy marketing.
(A previous formulation had the first two ingredients corn syrup and fructose... I wonder if they got sued or something and changed it to spike with sucrose instead?)

„Wirtschaftsministerin Reiche und die Rechenfehler“
Ich formuliere es anders: Reiche lügt ganz bewusst, um Ihre rückwärtsgewandte Fossilagenda durchzudrücken.
https://www.golem.de/news/scheiternde-energiewende-wirtsch…

Scheiternde Energiewende: Wirtschaftsministerin Reiche und die Rechenfehler - Golem.de
Mit falschen Zahlen, falschen Zusammenhängen und ganz eigenem Realismus erklärt Katherina Reiche ihren politischen Kurs. Zeit, genauer hinzuschauen.

Ed Martin, outspoken Justice Department lawyer, is formally accused of ethical violations (Katelyn Polantz/CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/10/politics/ed-martin-bar-discipline-complaint
http://www.memeorandum.com/260310/p41#a260310p41

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 10
How informal is your prose? Is there a limit to informality?
I think that, even where you don't have a first-person narrator, prose in fiction should express the personality of the point of view character -- be similar to but just a little more formal than their normal way of speaking.
To preserve the plausibility that they might have writt…

The effort from House Democratsto pass a war powers resolution by unanimous consent was squashed today
as the pro forma speaker, Republican Chris Smith, refused to recognize Democrats.
It was always a tall order, given that pushback from even a single member would require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
While it’s largely a symbolic move,
top Democrats in both chambers have vowed to hold votes again when Congress returns from recess next week.