I broke CUDA matrix multiplication on purpose, fixed one bottleneck at a time, and measured which optimizations actually moved performance. CUDA optimization advice is everywhere: use shared memory, improve occupancy, coalesce memory, unroll loops, reduce synchronization, avoid bank conflicts. All of that advice can be true, but it is not equally important at every stage. […]
Tested on: RTX 5060 · PyTorch 2.7 · CUDA 13.1 · Windows 11 You moved your model to GPU. You watched nvidia-smi climb toward 100%. You assumed you were done. You probably aren’t. GPU utilization is a coarse, 100ms-sampled metric. A GPU can report 80% utilization while spending most of that time idle between kernels, […]
JAX and NumPy are close enough on the surface that the comparison is easy to get wrong. You can write familiar-looking array code in both. You can broadcast, reduce, reshape, and compose vectorized operations in both. If you only look at syntax, JAX can seem like a newer and faster NumPy. That is not the […]
CUDA Memory Management Mistakes That Quietly Kill Training Throughput Most CUDA performance advice is presented as if every mistake cuts throughput in half. That is not what real profiling looks like. I benchmarked three common GPU-side mistakes on an RTX 5060 using PyTorch and Nsight Systems: Only one of these produced a large win in […]
Lock the Promise: Discover why your PPO agent’s impressive performance might be a fragile illusion of reward design. We show how small, seemingly innocuous changes to the reward function can dramatically alter both the learning curve and the final policy’s quality. Tight Premise: Using a standard MuJoCo benchmark, we test PPO’s sensitivity by implementing three […]
Introduction The landscape of modern machine learning education is dominated by Python. Its vast ecosystem of libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn provides powerful abstractions that allow developers to build complex models with remarkable speed. While this is invaluable for productivity, it can also create a “black box” effect, where the fundamental mechanics of an […]
How Does an AI Learn to Make Smart Choices? Have you ever taught a pet a new trick? Imagine you’re training your dog to roll over. You give the command, and the dog, a bit confused at first, might just sit or lie down. You offer no treat. Then, it shuffles and accidentally rolls onto […]
Introduction: The Cheating Machines Picture this: You’ve just built the perfect AI agent to play a boat racing game. Your reward function is crystal clear finish the race as quickly as possible, with bonus points for hitting green power-up blocks along the way. You sit back, confident that your digital racer will soon be breaking […]