All posts tagged: Technique

How to make a mint julep worthy of the Kentucky Derby — stirring technique is crucial

How to make a mint julep worthy of the Kentucky Derby — stirring technique is crucial

Published by Daniella Wilson

Sign up to IndyEat’s free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releases Get our food and drink newsletter for free Get our food and drink newsletter for free Kentucky Derby weekend is a spectacle of tradition, where thundering hooves, elaborate hats and the refreshing chill of a mint julep converge. As America’s most famous horse race unfolds at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, the sheer scale of mint julep consumption is staggering. More than 125,000 of these iconic cocktails are consumed annually during the two-day festival. This monumental feat requires an estimated 10,000 bottles of Kentucky bourbon, 2,250 pounds of freshly harvested mint, and a colossal 475,000 pounds of ice, according to the event’s website. Yet, enjoying this classic American libation doesn’t necessitate a trip to the track; its simple elegance, a mix of sugar, water, fresh mint, crushed ice, and bourbon, makes it easily replicable at home. While mint juleps have been a fixture at the Kentucky Derby since its inception in the late 19th century, their status as the race’s signature …

Meta’s new structured prompting technique makes LLMs significantly better at code review — boosting accuracy to 93% in some cases

Meta’s new structured prompting technique makes LLMs significantly better at code review — boosting accuracy to 93% in some cases

Published by skeptic

Deploying AI agents for repository-scale tasks like bug detection, patch verification, and code review requires overcoming significant technical hurdles. One major bottleneck: the need to set up dynamic execution sandboxes for every repository, which are expensive and computationally heavy.  Using large language model (LLM) reasoning instead of executing the code is rising in popularity to bypass this overhead, yet it frequently leads to unsupported guesses and hallucinations.  To improve execution-free reasoning, researchers at Meta introduce “semi-formal reasoning,” a structured prompting technique. This method requires the AI agent to fill out a logical certificate by explicitly stating premises, tracing concrete execution paths, and deriving formal conclusions before providing an answer.  The structured format forces the agent to systematically gather evidence and follow function calls before drawing conclusions. This increases the accuracy of LLMs in coding tasks and significantly reduces errors in fault localization and codebase question-answering.  For developers using LLMs in code review tasks, semi-formal reasoning enables highly reliable, execution-free semantic code analysis while drastically reducing the infrastructure costs of AI coding systems. Agentic code reasoning …

Calm Doesn’t Always Need a Technique

Calm Doesn’t Always Need a Technique

Published by Jenni Sidey

A few years ago, I recall my daughter being quite hesitant to go down a long slide in the neighborhood playground. She would often look down at me from up on the top of the slide, as if seeking reassurance that all would be well, and that I was down there waiting to catch her if she came down too fast. I didn’t even have to say anything; just a simple smile and a nod would suffice for her to trade her worried expression for one of unadulterated joy. Down she would whoosh, her momentary fear completely forgotten. What struck me, even then, was how little explanation she seemed to need. She didn’t require a strategy, instructions, or reassurance that her fear was “normal.” What she seemed to need most was a simple cue from me that this was not something worth worrying about. When I think back at this, it makes me increasingly curious about a growing trend in the way we approach children’s emotions: our impulse to teach them techniques—structured, named strategies for …

New KV cache compaction technique cuts LLM memory 50x without accuracy loss

New KV cache compaction technique cuts LLM memory 50x without accuracy loss

Published by skeptic

Enterprise AI applications that handle large documents or long-horizon tasks face a severe memory bottleneck. As the context grows longer, so does the KV cache, the area where the model’s working memory is stored. A new technique developed by researchers at MIT addresses this challenge with a fast compression method for the KV cache. The technique, called Attention Matching, manages to compact the context by up to 50x with very little loss in quality. While it is not the only memory compaction technique available, Attention Matching stands out for its execution speed and impressive information-preserving capabilities. The memory bottleneck of the KV cache Large language models generate their responses sequentially, one token at a time. To avoid recalculating the entire conversation history from scratch for every predicted word, the model stores a mathematical representation of every previous token it has processed, also known as the key and value pairs. This critical working memory is known as the KV cache. The KV cache scales with conversation length because the model is forced to retain these keys …

Black Forest Labs’ new Self-Flow technique makes training multimodal AI models 2.8x more efficient

Black Forest Labs’ new Self-Flow technique makes training multimodal AI models 2.8x more efficient

Published by skeptic

To create coherent images or videos, generative AI diffusion models like Stable Diffusion or FLUX have typically relied on external “teachers”—frozen encoders like CLIP or DINOv2—to provide the semantic understanding they couldn’t learn on their own. But this reliance has come at a cost: a “bottleneck” where scaling up the model no longer yields better results because the external teacher has hit its limit. Today, German AI startup Black Forest Labs (maker of the FLUX series of AI image models) has announced a potential end to this era of academic borrowing with the release of Self-Flow, a self-supervised flow matching framework that allows models to learn representation and generation simultaneously. By integrating a novel Dual-Timestep Scheduling mechanism, Black Forest Labs has demonstrated that a single model can achieve state-of-the-art results across images, video, and audio without any external supervision. The technology: breaking the “semantic gap” The fundamental problem with traditional generative training is that it’s a “denoising” task. The model is shown noise and asked to find an image; it has very little incentive to …

How Vulnerable Are Computers to an 80-Year-Old Spy Technique? Congress Wants Answers

How Vulnerable Are Computers to an 80-Year-Old Spy Technique? Congress Wants Answers

Published by skeptic

Computers leak secrets. Not just through invasive ad tracking, data-stealing malware, and your ill-advised oversharing on social media, but through physics. The movements of a hard drive’s components, keystrokes on a keyboard, even the electric charge in a semiconductor’s wires produce radio waves, sound, and vibrations that transmit in all directions and can—when picked up by someone with sufficiently sensitive equipment and enough spycraft to decipher those signals—reveal your private data and activities. This category of spying techniques, originally codenamed TEMPEST by the National Security Agency but now encompassed in the more general term “side-channel attacks,” has been a known problem in computer security for close to eight decades, and it’s one that the United States government carefully considers in securing its own classified information. Now a pair of US lawmakers are launching an investigation into how vulnerable the rest of us are to TEMPEST-style surveillance—and whether the US government needs to push device manufacturers to do more to protect Americans. On Wednesday, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Shontel Brown released a letter they sent …

Princess Diana’s ‘normal’ parenting technique that connects her and Kate Middleton

Princess Diana’s ‘normal’ parenting technique that connects her and Kate Middleton

Published by Daniella Wilson

While The Princess of Wales sadly never met Princess Diana, she shares a heartwarming connection with her late mother-in-law through the way she is raising her royal children. Kate and William’s three children – Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis – might have grown up in the spotlight, but their parents have tried to keep a semblance of normalcy in their childhood – a goal that Diana shared for her own sons growing up in the public eye.  The late Diana’s former chef, Darren McGrady, revealed in an exclusive interview with Coffee Friend that the royal had a sweet Saturday night routine to make her sons, William and Harry, experience as ‘normal’ a childhood as possible.  Diana’s ‘normal’ parenting technique “On a Saturday night, you’d see Diana sitting down in front of the TV eating dinner with her boys, it just made everything so normal,” the chef said. © WireImagePrincess Diana with her sons, Harry and William, in 1995 “Nanny always suggested that the boys have roasted chicken, green vegetables and healthy food, but …

What is Bonesmashing? Inside the Extreme Looksmaxxer Technique

What is Bonesmashing? Inside the Extreme Looksmaxxer Technique

Published by Jenni Sidey

When you’re a teenager, your parents like taking stuff away from you: videogames, sleepover privileges, the car keys. When Braden Peters, who you know as Clavicular, was a teenager, his mom took away his hammer. She wanted young Clav to stop bonesmashing—that is, tapping his face repeatedly with a hammer to change his face shape. Now 20, Clavicular, the most famous looksmaxxer in the world, continues to bonesmash. And as looksmaxxing goes from edgelord forum fodder to dinner table conversation, its most notorious face-shaping technique has found the spotlight too. Bonesmashing was invented by looksmaxxers, a mostly-male Internet subculture of extreme aesthetic self-improvement. Looksmaxxing was developed in the early 2010s on openly misogynistic forums like PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism. As an ideology, it places appearances above all, believing that how you look determines who you date, how much money you make, and everything else in life. In the 2020s, looksmaxxing exploded in popularity on TikTok, buoyed by personalities like Clavicular who introduced many of its extreme procedures to the masses. Looksmaxxing techniques generally fall into …

Child psychologist advises what parents can learn from Prince William’s ‘powerful’ listening technique

Child psychologist advises what parents can learn from Prince William’s ‘powerful’ listening technique

Published by Daniella Wilson

Prince William offered a rare insight into his relationship with his three children during an interview about his own mental health and revealed he encourages open communication with the young royals at home. The 43-year-old Prince of Wales was answering questions about regulating emotions when the topic of parenting arose, following which he revealed he prioritised speaking candidly about feelings with Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, ten, and Prince Louis, seven.   During his chat on a panel for Greg James’s Radio 1’s Life Hacks, William explained that his children came to him with all of their problems. He said: “I get all the details, which I love. It’s amazing. Being able to understand it, have time with it, decipher it, sometimes.  “You feel a sense that you need to fix it for everyone and that I find quite difficult. I have to remind myself that you don’t need to fix everything, but you need to listen, and it’s important to be ok with those feelings and comments.”​ Following his revelations, HCPC-registered Senior Education and …

‘Totalitarian’ Technologies and the Transformation of the Political World: A Radical Cold War Critique

‘Totalitarian’ Technologies and the Transformation of the Political World: A Radical Cold War Critique

Published by Jenni Sidey

“The world in which we live today and which surrounds us, is a technological one,” wrote Günther Anders in 1979. The Cold War world, just as much as our own, was a world fundamentally shaped by technology. Technology’s promise included the automation of work, the possibility of abundance, the discovery of new cures for diseases, and the extension of life. These more hopeful claims sat alongside technological fears of the apocalyptic madness of the atom bomb, the dehumanizing effects of machine dominance, or the intrusion of mass media into every corner of the individual’s life. Such hopes and fears might also be held simultaneously: technology, it has so often been said, is merely a tool, a neutral instrument whose effects are the result of its operators. A major group of political theorists in the Cold War period rejected the neutrality thesis, instead asserting that the character of modern technology was essentially totalitarian. These thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Max Horkheimer, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, and Günther Anders, were …