[Enginerd]’s chonky key handle is a beautiful use of 3D printing that helps people help themselves. The large wings, indented faces, and beefed-up grip make a typical house key much easier for someone with arthritis or difficulty gripping those brass slivers. Bright filaments in different colors can also help someone with vision limitations. The thing that will not improve is the space in your pocket or purse.

The design only requires a tiny bit of plastic, prints without supports, and what sets it apart from similar models is that you do not need any double-sided tape or bolts, only a keyring, so someone may have to assemble it for the user. The author is clever enough to use an uncut blank in the project photo so that no one will be decoding and copying their house key. We would wager they have read Hackaday if they are so prepared.

Some of the people who purchased early consumer 3D printers already need these kinds of builds, and there is no shortage of intelligent people creating remarkable open-source designs.

hackaday.com/2026/04/09/one-go…

Los cuartos de final de esta nueva edición de la Champions en el 2026 comenzaron, en cierto modo, con sorpresas.

No por los resultados en si mismos ya que el Bayern Munich y el Arsenal son firmes candidatos a quedarse con la Orejona, sino por la condición en que obtuvieron esta ventaja. Como visitantes. Que no es decir poco.

deporshow.blogspot.com/2026/04…

AUTOFINANZIAMENTO PER LE CASSE!

Dogana Occupata - via Alessandro Volta, 22
(venerdì, 10 aprile 21:00)

Venerdì 10/04 @ CKC DOGANA OCCUPATA - Via Alessandro Volta 22

AUTOFINANZIAMENTO PER LE CASSE!

Tekno, distro e bancarelle per finire il sound system della collettiva.
Supported by KTN.

RDR e CHILLOUT

Apertura porte ore 21:00
Ingresso a offerta libera (consigliata 3€) - Entrano tuttə

NO MACHI
NO FASCI
NO SBIRRI

Rispetta lo spazio, te stessə e lə altrə, lascia a casa il cane, no camper.

puntello.org/event/autofinanzi…

BI SPRING II

SOS Fornace - Rho, via Risorgimento 18
(sabato, 11 aprile 18:30)

⏰ Sabato abbiamo il piacere di ospitare nuovamente il Mulino di Bi così da sostenerne i progetti e in particolare il suo rifugio antispecista: porte di Fornace aperte dalle 18:30 per il ricco programma di BI SPRING VOL. 2 con cena, baratto, mostra, chiacchierata collettiva, concerti e DJ set.

Ci sarà anche la possibilità di donare beni di prima necessità per le persone migranti che arrivano a Trieste in transito dalla rotta balcanica.

puntello.org/event/bi-spring-i…

Jamboree - Dancehall Dub Reggae Yard!

Eterotopia - Spazio Pubblico Autogestito - via Risorgimento 21, San Giuliano Milanese - Via Risorgimento 21, San Giuliano Milanese
(sabato, 11 aprile 21:00)

JAMBOREE
#dancehall#reggae#dub yard

@radio_clandestina on
ETEROTOPIA #soundsystem

Via Risorgimento 21
San Giuliano Milanese

In flyer un tavolo di eterotopia, pasticciato male, fotato peggio,

non “specchio, servo delle mie brame”

puntello.org/event/jamboree-da…

🇵🇸 Presidio a Empoli. Stop War fermiamo la guerra

Empoli piazza della Vittoria - Piazza della Vittoria
(venerdì, 10 aprile 18:30)

🚩 È giunta l'ora di deporre i re e di fermare la guerra!

#Empoli presidio Venerdì 10 Aprile ore 18.30; piazza della Vittoria StopWar 🇵🇸 🇨🇺

Qui l'appello dell'@arciempolesevaldelsaaps

La furia imperialista statunitense e israeliana stanno portando il mondo sull’orlo di una nuova guerra mondiale. Il “pericolo scampato” nella notte tra martedì e mercoledì non è una garanzia di pace. Mentre a #Gaza prosegue il genocidio e la Cisgiordania è in fiamme, Israele approva la pena di morte per i prigionieri palestinesi e continua a bombardare e a uccidere in #Libano. Nel frattempo gli Stati Uniti prima iniziano una guerra contro l’Iran senza nemmeno bisogno di un pretesto e poi minacciano di spazzare via una intera civiltà o di riportarla all’età della pietra, mentre portano milioni di persone allo stremo inasprendo l’embargo criminale contro Cuba.

Sullo sfondo le nostre istituzioni, da quelle europee a quelle nazionali, rimangono inerti e in silenzio.

Venerdì 10 aprile scendiamo in piazza per rivendicare lo stop agli attacchi israeliani a Gaza, nei Territori Occupati e in Libano e la liberazione di Cuba dal bloqueo. Chiediamo che l’Italia e l’Europa prendano le distanze dalle continue violazioni del diritto da parte di Stati Uniti e Israele. Pretendiamo giustizia e libertà per i popoli, che sia garantita autodeterminazione e democrazia fuori da imperialismo e colonialismo!

@nokingsitaly

lapunta.org/event/presidio-a-e…

Large language models (LLMs) aren’t actually giant computer brains. Instead, they are effectively massive vector spaces in which the probabilities of tokens occurring in a specific order is encoded. Billions of parameters, times N bits per parameter, equals N-billion bits of storage required for a full model. Since increasing the number of parameters makes the models appear smarter, most effort on reducing the storage they require has been on reducing the size of the parameters themselves.

Vector quantization (VQ) is a new method that can compress the vectors calculated during inference to take up less space without significant loss of data. Google’s recently published pre-print paper on TurboQuant covers an LLM-oriented VQ algorithm that’s claimed to provide up to a 6x compression level with no negative impact on inference times.

The tokens aren’t directly encoded in the vector space, but their associated key value is, which along with the single token per inference process creates the need for a key-value (KV) cache, the size of which scales with the size of the model. Thus by compressing the KV cache using VQ, it will reduce its size and correspondingly speed up look-ups due to the smaller size in memory. One catch here is that VQ is due to the nature of quantization some accuracy will be lost. The trick here is thus to apply VQ in such a way that it does not affect this accuracy in a noticeable manner.

Other aspects that had to be taken into account by the TurboQuant algorithm was fast computation to keep up with real-time requirements, along with compatibility with so-called ‘AI accelerator’ hardware.

Key-Value Cache

A basic way to look at the KV cache in LLMs is that it caches the results of previous inference cycles. An in-depth explanation can for example be found in this article by Sebastian Raschka. In the case of generating a phrase of three words starting with the word ‘Time’, we can see the following repeated computations:
Repeated computations in an LLM without KV cache. (Credit: Sebastian Raschka)
Considering that inference is rather expensive computation-wise, you really want to cache these calculated values. This provides a massive boost in performance and much lower CPU load, but because there’s no such thing as a free lunch the catch here is a rapidly increasing memory usage.

Correspondingly, we now have a big in-memory cache to manage, along with memory management routines to make sure that the KV cache doesn’t exceed its allocated memory pool:
KV cache schematic with memory pool management. (Credit: NVIDIA)
As covered in a December 2025 NVIDIA Developer article, KV cache optimization has been a topic for a while, with the article in question covering NVFP4. This is a VQ approach that reduces the precision of the KV cache from 16-bit floating point to 4-bit (FP4). Meanwhile production systems already employ 8-bit quantization, also using a floating point format (FP8).

An additional cost here is that FP4 has to be dequantized back to FP8, which would seem to be an implementation detail in the current version. Compared to FP8 quantization, FP4 reduces latency by up to 3 times and halves the required memory required, while accuracy is negatively impacted by ‘less than’ 1% compared to FP8 due to quantization error.

Accuracy here is important as it factors into the next auto-complete step when the LLM’s probability vector space is once again rummaged through for the next statistically most likely follow-up token. KV cache VQ compression is thus always a trade-off between memory use and accuracy. In short, the same issues apply as with all implementations of quantization-based compression, including the tragic absence of any free lunch.

Turbo Quantization

So what magic did Google’s intrepid engineers pull off to improve on NVIDIA’s NVFP4 approach? The key is in how the quantization is performed, as it isn’t simple a matter of truncating or throwing away data, rounding up to the nearest available value. Instead a series of steps are applied that seek to minimize the quantization error, which in the case of TurboQuant is (confusingly) an algorithm called PolarQuant followed by the QJL (quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) algorithm.

Annoyingly for the non-mathematically gifted/educated among us, Google didn’t simply provide a straightforward visualization like that for NVFP4 that’s understandable even for us software developers and other casuals. For NVIDIA’s format we can see that it takes the form of a single sign bit, two exponents and one mantissa (E2M1), as well as a shared FP8 scale per block of 16 values.

One step where TurboQuant appears to be differ is in the PolarQuant algorithm, that applies a polar coordinates transformation to the vectors, following which a typical normalization can apparently be skipped.
Overview of recursive polar transformation procedure. (Credit: Insu Han et al., 2026)
This polar transformation is preceded by the application of a random projection matrix as a type of preconditioning that will affect later normal distribution, with proof and the full algorithm provided in the PolarQuant arXiv paper for those who desire more detail.

Of note is that PolarQuant employs the Johson-Lindenstrauss lemma, which Google researchers used as the basis for a JL-based transform called QJL. From reading the blog post it’s not immediately clear whether QJL is directly integrated into PolarQuant or an additional step, due to the muddled messaging on Google’s end. From the benchmarking results it does appear that QJL is an additional step.

What we know is that the final format that TurboQuant ends up with is three-bit value, which would logically be 1 bit smaller than NVFP4, or an approximate 25% smaller KV cache for the same amount of data.

Judging On Merits

Comparison and benchmark data in the Google blog post and associated papers do not provide direct comparisons with NVFP4, and the few numbers that are thrown out are rather inconsistent, or unspecified. Take the claim of ‘at least 6x smaller memory size’, for example. The blog text does not clearly specify what this is relative to, while it then tosses out a 4-bit TurboQuant number of 8x performance increase compared to FP32.

Although with some more digging and poking of the available data it might be possible to glean some actual performance information from the provided files, it’s rather vexing how vague Google’s messaging is kept. Not to mention the lack of direct benchmarking against what would be the biggest competitors in the space.

It is definitely true that VQ is a thing for LLM KV cache compression, as we have seen, and NVIDIA ‘accelerator cards’ provide hardware acceleration for this feature, so this is the reality that TurboQuant would have to compete with. Based on the few clear facts that we do have it doesn’t appear that it’s quite the revolution that the hype machine has made it out to be, with it likely being just a bump over NVFP4 that NVIDIA is likely to trump again with its next quantized format.

It will of course be most interesting to see how this will play out once TurboQuant makes its way out of the laboratory into the wider world and we start seeing independent benchmarking performed.

hackaday.com/2026/04/09/turboq…

Biscotti increspati con un ripieno cremoso al limone (lemon crinkle).

blog.giallozafferano.it/lacuci…

Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.

It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

We normally write in the third person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.

In a related story, the trackers for the same program in Australia were saved from the scrapheap.

youtube.com/embed/-DR20rDr6yA?…

hackaday.com/2026/04/09/the-br…

La riapertura della frana di Petacciato con i conseguenti disagi sociali, economici e ambientali, insieme con tutti gli episodi estremi che si sono verificati negli ultimi anni, stanno facendo tornare a galla la vera e necessaria opera di cui ha veramente bisogno il nostro paese: la messa in sicurezza del territorio italiano dal rischio idrogeologico.

I dati scientifici e i report redatti da Ispra avevano già dipinto una situazione problematica: il 94,5% dei Comuni italiani è a rischio frane, alluvioni o erosione costiera. Una superficie complessiva che è aumentata del 15% circa tra il 2021 e il 2024 (ultimi dati disponibili), con circa 8 milioni di abitanti che vivono in zone ad alta pericolosità per frane e inondazioni. Per quanto riguarda l’erosione costiera, il 18% del litorale è a rischio. Sardegna, Basilicata, Puglia, Lazio e Campania sono le Regioni direttamente coinvolte.

Intanto, i danni economici causati dal dissesto idrogeologico a partire dal 2010 sono triplicati, raggiungendo la cifra di circa 3 miliardi di euro all’anno.

Sono dati preoccupanti. E ciò che preoccupa di più (e lo stesso dicasi per il contrasto ai cambiamenti climatici) è l’assoluta mancanza di una strategia per invertire la rotta e mettere in sicurezza il paese.

Anni fa parlavo della necessità di analizzare la questione da un punto di vista complessivo. Ciò che succede a terra è diretta conseguenza di ciò che avviene in atmosfera. Riduciamo le emissioni di gas climalteranti, e occupiamoci anche di ciò che sta succedendo a terra dove, oltre alla situazione descritta sopra, abbiamo un consumo di suolo che non si ferma e una perdita di biodiversità.

La crisi del Medio Oriente inoltre ha confermato, se ancora ce ne fosse bisogno, l’incapacità di chi ci governa nel costruire un valido percorso di dismissioni dalle fonti fossili a favore delle rinnovabili. La crisi sta colpendo in maniera diversa la società: i più ricchi continuano imperterriti nel loro processo di arricchimento che aumenta in maniera esponenziale come le (loro) emissioni di gas climalteranti, mentre le realtà più povere stanno aumentando di numero e stanno subendo le conseguenze peggiori.

Qualcuno potrebbe obiettare che si debbano trovare i fondi per una transizione energetica seria e in linea con gli obiettivi internazionali, così come gli interventi di messa in sicurezza del territorio necessitano di fondi ingenti. Noi lo diciamo da sempre: Tax the Rich. Lo prevede all’art.53 la nostra Costituzione dove si esplicita il principio di progressività.

Va cambiato però il sistema tributario. Non possiamo continuare a proteggere chi ha di più e magari aiutarlo ulteriormente, come sta avvenendo.

In un’altra situazione di emergenza, quella del Covid, scrivevamo: “Bene che i miliardari diano il loro contributo in un momento di crisi. Perché non renderlo un appuntamento fisso? Magari annuale? Le loro “donazioni” potrebbero persino essere basate su una percentuale del loro reddito. Potrebbero persino essere chiamate “tasse”. Ecco, quelle tasse dovrebbero coprire i costi per una transizione ecologica, unita alla messa in sicurezza del territorio, che ormai non è più rinviabile.

Se è giusto che ognuno si assuma le proprie responsabilità nei confronti delle generazioni future è altrettanto giusto che chi ha di più paghi di più! Roba da farci un Ministero. Non con un dormiente come Pichetto Fratin, magari. Per non parlare di quello dei Trasporti.

L'articolo Petacciato: la terra frana. E anche il nostro futuro proviene da Possibile.