Research, stories, and insights on AI and Data Engineering.
Deep dives into neural networks, NLP, and AI systems
Pipelines, warehouses, GPU-accelerated query engines, and big-data systems
Illustrated novels that teach the modern AI stack as story, with audio narration in English and Hindi
With gratitude to every unsung hero across AI and Data — the engineers, researchers, and builders whose quiet work makes all of this real.
— P.S.
What is an LLM, intuitively?
Tokens & embeddings — text becomes math.
Vector spaces, similarity, and the moment they named the model.
Self-attention, and a stranger at the library.
Their toy model says a sentence neither of them was ready for.
Layers, residual streams — and the secret hours.
ArrowMetal is now on Apache Arrow's Powered By page and on Apache DataFusion's integrations list. What the two listings mean, and what the listed thing does as of 0.5.0, with one real run on each side.
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ArrowMetal is now on Apache Arrow's Powered By page and on Apache DataFusion's integrations list. What the two listings mean, and what the listed thing does as of 0.5.0, with one real run on each side.
Polars 2.0.0 shipped on 6 October and runs its group-bys, joins and sorts faster than 1.44. Two days later ArrowMetal's MetalEngine was re-measured against it on an Apple M4 Max: the GPU default takes 52 of 107 queries at 50 million rows, each 1.35x to 7.94x faster than the faster Polars 2.0 engine, and hands 12 back that it used to take. What Polars 2.0 changed, and how a crossover table answers it.
Apache DataFusion runs any physical optimizer rule you register. ArrowMetal 0.4.0 ships one for the Apple silicon GPU: the SQL is unchanged, the answers are DataFusion's, and full sorts of 250,000 to 50 million rows run 6.9x to 28.8x faster on an M4 Max. What it takes, what it leaves, and why.
SQL cannot say 'the customer threatens to cancel'. sqljev adds jev(), jev_prob() and jev_choice() to SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift and DuckDB, and answers them with Laya, an open-weight decision model that runs on your hardware, returns calibrated probabilities instead of text, and can be fine-tuned on your own tables. 140,000 decisions in 271 seconds on one laptop GPU; re-running all 13 queries, 0.9 seconds. Apache 2.0, version 0.1.0.
Most of an agent's LLM calls are not writing anything. They are decisions: which tool, which skill, which parameters, made thousands of times a day by a model paid in seconds and tokens. pankhllm sits where your app already calls an LLM, learns those decisions from its own traffic, and starts making them in 0.2 ms on a CPU with a 262 KB model. What it is not sure about still goes to your LLM. On the same 14 questions: a 12B planner 1,743 ms, Laya 49 ms, pankhllm's own model 4 ms, all 14 correct. Here is what it is, what it is not, and where it stops.
Every GPU data library benchmarks itself at 50 million rows. Your dataframe has 80,000. On an Apple M4 Max, summing 1,000 integers takes the GPU 112 microseconds and Polars less than one: the GPU is more than 100 times behind. I built one of these libraries, so I measured the row count where the GPU overtakes the fastest CPU code for 111 operations: the median needs 10,000,000 rows against a multi-core library, about a million against one core, and sixteen never get there. So ArrowMetal 0.2.0 refuses the GPU below the line, byte-identical, and around that router it grew GPU readers for CSV, JSON, nested Parquet, Delta Lake and Iceberg, a Polars engine and a DuckDB optimizer extension.
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