dwarez

Machine learning systems, from the metal up

Notes for people who like opening the black box.

Low-level ML explanations, implementation notes, debugging stories, and the occasional sharp edge worth remembering.

What Kimi K3 asks of the hardware

Reading the Kimi K3 announcement from the systems side. How linear attention changes the KV-cache budget, what 896 experts mean for the interconnect, and why the model ships in MXFP4.

GGUF quantization, bit by bit

Q8_0 to IQ1_S and everything in between. Block layouts, scale hierarchies, codebooks, the importance matrix, and the mixed recipes used by llama.cpp, Unsloth, and DwarfStar.

GRPO is mostly a systems problem

The GRPO config is small. The hard part is keeping rollout workers, trainers, rewards, and policy versions in the same story.

Move Fast or Die Slow

Today’s article steps back from our usual technical deep-dives to examine the strategic importance of ML optimization.

The Operating Room Setup

Undoubtedly, one of the most critical aspects of machine learning is understanding the theory—without grasping how machines learn, you’ll never excel as an ML Surgeon!

A quick incision: ten minutes to RAG

In under 10 minutes, you’ll discover what RAG is, how to build a prototype for it in Python, and—most importantly—the true weight of the infamous Mr. Fat Raccoon.

Hello CUDA: A Surgical Dissection

CUDA enables developers to harness NVIDIA GPUs for general-purpose tasks. This article guides you to a "Hello, World!" program as a starting point.