Seattle
Seattle enacts year-long ban on new AI datacenters
Seattle has passed a year-long moratorium on the construction of new datacenters. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the temporary ban on Tuesday. A major tech hub whose metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills. According to Seattle's mayor, Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a "good use of urban land", and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits.
Two freak plays in one MLB night leaves announcers, fans stunned
Edward Cabrera's strikeout prop is the play as struggling Phillies face surging Cubs today Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 3 pick hinges on Jaden McDaniels calling out Denver's entire defense Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Longtime NASCAR crew chief tells wild story about one of the sport's biggest characters WNBA finally embraces Caitlin Clark's stardom with unprecedented national TV schedule Why are the Mets so bad? Flyers mascot Gritty pens letter to fans ahead of first playoff game... eight years after he debuted Hasan Piker justifies'social murder' of CEO Fox News celebrates'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' Trump says there's'no time frame' to secure Iran deal Iranian activist praises Trump's intervention after female protesters saved from execution Steve Hilton praised for'offering solutions' in CA gubernatorial debate Middle East tensions escalate over US blockade, Iran's actions We had a homer land on top of the foul pole, and a line drive land in a pitcher's shirt Jo Adell just pulled off something you may NEVER see again -- robbing THREE home runs in a single game vs the Mariners. Is this the greatest defensive performance in MLB history? Ricky Cobb reacts like only the Super 70s Sports Guy can .... All eyes are on today's NFL Draft, but I doubt it'll produce anything like what Major League Baseball gave us Wednesday night.
Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys
Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys Interviews with current and former Palantir employees, along with internal Slack messages obtained by WIRED, suggest a workforce in turmoil. It took just a few months of President Donald Trump's second term for Palantir employees to question their company's commitments to civil liberties . Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump's immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, "Are you tracking Palantir's descent into fascism?" "That was their greeting," the other former employee says.
Nearly Isometric Embedding by Relaxation
James McQueen, Marina Meila, Dominique Joncas
Many manifold learning algorithms aim to create embeddings with low or no distortion (isometric). If the data has intrinsic dimension d, it is often impossible to obtain an isometric embedding in ddimensions, but possible in s > ddimensions. Yet, most geometry preserving algorithms cannot do the latter. This paper proposes an embedding algorithm to overcome this. The algorithm accepts as input, besides the dimension d, an embedding dimension s d.
From Ground Truth to Measurement: A Statistical Framework for Human Labeling
Chew, Robert, Eckman, Stephanie, Kern, Christoph, Kreuter, Frauke
Supervised machine learning assumes that labeled data provide accurate measurements of the concepts models are meant to learn. Yet in practice, human labeling introduces systematic variation arising from ambiguous items, divergent interpretations, and simple mistakes. Machine learning research commonly treats all disagreement as noise, which obscures these distinctions and limits our understanding of what models actually learn. This paper reframes annotation as a measurement process and introduces a statistical framework for decomposing labeling outcomes into interpretable sources of variation: instance difficulty, annotator bias, situational noise, and relational alignment. The framework extends classical measurement-error models to accommodate both shared and individualized notions of truth, reflecting traditional and human label variation interpretations of error, and provides a diagnostic for assessing which regime better characterizes a given task. Applying the proposed model to a multi-annotator natural language inference dataset, we find empirical evidence for all four theorized components and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We conclude with implications for data-centric machine learning and outline how this approach can guide the development of a more systematic science of labeling.
Privacy-Accuracy Trade-offs in High-Dimensional LASSO under Perturbation Mechanisms
Sakata, Ayaka, Tanzawa, Haruka
We study privacy-preserving sparse linear regression in the high-dimensional regime, focusing on the LASSO estimator. We analyze two widely used mechanisms for differential privacy: output perturbation, which injects noise into the estimator, and objective perturbation, which adds a random linear term to the loss function. Using approximate message passing (AMP), we characterize the typical behavior of these estimators under random design and privacy noise. To quantify privacy, we adopt typical-case measures, including the on-average KL divergence, which admits a hypothesis-testing interpretation in terms of distinguishability between neighboring datasets. Our analysis reveals that sparsity plays a central role in shaping the privacy-accuracy trade-off: stronger regularization can improve privacy by stabilizing the estimator against single-point data changes. We further show that the two mechanisms exhibit qualitatively different behaviors. In particular, for objective perturbation, increasing the noise level can have non-monotonic effects, and excessive noise may destabilize the estimator, leading to increased sensitivity to data perturbations. Our results demonstrate that AMP provides a powerful framework for analyzing privacy-accuracy trade-offs in high-dimensional sparse models.
Exploiting Tradeoffs for Exact Recovery in Heterogeneous Stochastic Block Models
Amin Jalali, Qiyang Han, Ioana Dumitriu, Maryam Fazel
The Stochastic Block Model (SBM) is a widely used random graph model for networks with communities. Despite the recent burst of interest in community detection under the SBM from statistical and computational points of view, there are still gaps in understanding the fundamental limits of recovery. In this paper, we consider the SBM in its full generality, where there is no restriction on the number and sizes of communities or how they grow with the number of nodes, as well as on the connectivity probabilities inside or across communities. For such stochastic block models, we provide guarantees for exact recovery via a semidefinite program as well as upper and lower bounds on SBM parameters for exact recoverability. Our results exploit the tradeoffs among the various parameters of heterogenous SBM and provide recovery guarantees for many new interesting SBM configurations.
Designing smoothing functions for improved worst-case competitive ratio in online optimization
Online optimization covers problems such as online resource allocation, online bipartite matching, adwords (a central problem in e-commerce and advertising), and adwords with separable concave returns. We analyze the worst case competitive ratio of two primal-dual algorithms for a class of online convex (conic) optimization problems that contains the previous examples as special cases defined on the positive orthant.