Musings by S Akash

Attention Mechanisms That Actually Matter: From Multi-Head to PagedAttention

Mar 25, 2026
ML SystemsGPU Computing

A deep dive into four attention mechanisms that power modern LLMs, from the original transformer to the serving tricks that make inference feasible at scale.

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How Shazam Identifies a Song in 10 Seconds (The Math Is Beautiful)

Mar 24, 2026
Signal ProcessingEssay

A 20 year old paper turned an intractable search problem into a hash table lookup. Fourier transforms, constellation maps, and the most elegant algorithm I have ever encountered.

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Dyson Spheres and the Kardashev Scale: Engineering at the Scale of Stars

Mar 23, 2026
ScienceEssay

What it means to harness a star's full output, why Dyson Spheres are the defining structure of a Type II civilization, and where humanity sits on the Kardashev Scale right now.

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NVIDIA GPU Architectures: Ampere to Blackwell, Through a Kernel Developer's Eyes

Mar 22, 2026
GPU ComputingCUDA

Four generations of NVIDIA GPUs, from the perspective of someone who actually writes the kernels that run on them. What the specs mean when you are profiling at 2am.

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To Climb the Kardashev Scale, We Need AI That Thinks Like Terence Tao

Mar 21, 2026
EssayAITechnology

Why civilizational scale engineering challenges require not one brilliant mind but thousands working simultaneously, and why that means superhuman AI is not optional.

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I Built gpucheck Because GPU Kernel Testing Shouldn't Feel Like Guesswork

Mar 20, 2026
Open SourceGPU Computing

The story behind gpucheck, a pytest plugin for GPU kernels. 511 test configs, 8 real bugs found in Triton and PyTorch, and why the GPU community deserves better testing tools.

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