In today's podcast we deep dive into SpargeAttention2, an innovative trainable sparse attention method designed to substantially accelerate video diffusion models without sacrificing visual quality. This approach cleverly overcomes the failure cases of standard masking techniques by employing a hybrid Top-k and Top-p masker, which ensures robust and accurate token selection even under extreme sparsity conditions. To further preserve the original generation capabilities during training, it utilizes a unique velocity-level distillation loss that aligns the sparse model's outputs with those of a frozen full-attention teacher model. As a result of these architectural and training optimizations, SpargeAttention2 achieves an impressive 95% attention sparsity and a 16.2x speedup in attention runtime. Ultimately, this breakthrough translates to up to a 4.7x acceleration in end-to-end video generation, proving that high computational efficiency and top-tier performance can seamlessly coexist.

In today's podcast we deep dive into Claude Cowork and the transformative power of SKILL.md files, which act as custom onboarding documents and permanent recipes for your AI assistant. Instead of exhaustively repeating your instructions in every single chat, you can write these modular instruction files once to give Claude persistent memory of your coding styles, brand voice, and standard operating procedures. These files cleverly use a system of progressive disclosure, meaning a tiny YAML frontmatter section tells Claude the skill exists, but the full markdown instructions and any bundled reference scripts only load into the context window when specifically triggered by a matching task. You can even package these SKILL.md files into larger plugins that include specific slash commands and connections to external tools like HubSpot or Snowflake. Ultimately, by shifting from temporary prompts to these permanent, reusable assets, you effectively stop just talking to a chatbot and start managing a highly specialized, autonomous digital workforce.

In today's podcast we deep dive into Claude Cowork best practices, exploring how to shift your mindset from chatting with an AI to delegating tasks to a virtual employee by clearly defining outcomes, context, and constraints. We discuss the importance of establishing a structured file system with dedicated "inbox" and "output" folders to streamline automations like organizing downloads or synthesizing reports. You'll discover how to build reusable "Skills" that allow you to chain complex instructions for repetitive workflows without overloading your context window. We also highlight the power of "sub-agents" and parallel tasking, enabling you to run simultaneous research and document creation jobs just like a team of junior analysts. Finally, we cover advanced strategies for scheduling recurring browser tasks and using shortcuts to record your workflows, effectively turning Cowork into an autonomous operator for your daily grind.