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Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB
Cactus Compute releases Whistle, an on-device speech recognition model that fits in a single 16.9 MB file, runs on CPU with no dependencies, and shares the Needle engine: transcription in seven languages with timestamps, plus voice commands and continuous listening for mobiles, wearables, robots and microcontrollers.
4 min · 974 words
The Go team introduces experimental architecture-specific SIMD APIs in Go 1.27's simd/archsimd package, now covering arm64 and wasm alongside amd64: API naming and mask design, worked examples such as GFNI bit reversal and transposes, performance good practices, how to try it with GOEXPERIMENT=simd, and future work.
11 min · 2,476 words
One vector is too few. One per token is too many.
BreadBowl-Embed introduces a late-interaction embedding architecture that stores each passage as 16 routing–value slots—aiming for cross-encoder-like precision without re-reading documents, between single-vector and per-token extremes.
15 min · 3,524 words
Introducing wpd: Faster, safer WebP decoding
Halide Compression open-sources wpd, a Rust WebP decoder aiming to be faster and safer than libwebp — with strong multi-thread gains and a feature table targeting libwebp replacement.
2 min · 551 words
How Futhark’s compiler keeps sparse Jacobian graph-colouring work efficient on the CPU—why not every data-parallel kernel belongs on the GPU, and what that means for the language’s CPU backend.
7 min · 1,610 words
Deleting RAG from our web agent made it 2.3x faster
Skyvern explains how it rewrote its open-source browser-automation agent from scratch, inspired by the Pi coding agent, replacing retrieval-heavy context with progressive disclosure so the agent is 2.3x faster and scores 90.5% on the Odysseys web-agent benchmark.
5 min · 1,105 words
turbopuffer is pushing the frontier of search. To do that, we have to fundamentally redesign our storage architecture so the vector index is no longer primary.
6 min · 1,334 words
OxCaml - Stack Allocations and Locality
The motivation behind OxCaml is to make OCaml a great language for performance engineering, with the eventual goal being to upstream these language extensions to vanilla OCaml (OxCaml](https://oxcaml.org/)). OxCaml maintains backwards compatibility with OCaml, which implies that every OCaml program is a valid OxCaml program. The language extensions range from additions to the type system that rule out data races, to control over allocations that reduces garbage collection pressure, to management
7 min · 1,697 words
What Makes LLM Tokenization Slow?Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.
Andrew Healey dissects GPT-2’s reference BPE tokenizer, measures what makes tokenization slow, and shows concrete optimizations on the hot path of LLM products.
11 min · 2,547 words
PlanetScale Released Text Search and We Have a Lot to Say (Part I)
Two BM25 optimizations and benchmark configuration changes inspired by PlanetScale's TIN benchmarks make ParadeDB's text search faster without changing its document identifiers.
14 min · 3,188 words
Fernando Simões digs into when page tables stop being a rounding error: shared mappings across many processes, Linux kernel history from Arcangeli to Qi Zheng's empty-page-table fix, and the trade-offs of huge pages.
6 min · 1,309 words
Why we built the fastest robust TTS model
Gradium's latest streaming TTS hits ~50ms time-to-first-audio while improving naturalness and hard cases like phone numbers—freeing latency budget for LLM turns and barge-in in voice agents.
2 min · 431 words
zenkai: The App Launcher I Wrote Because I Wanted Something Fast and Beautiful
Dayvster builds zenkai, a Zig + Qt6 cross-platform app launcher with ~140ms startup (sometimes ~20ms), 65+ themes, Lua plugins, and a sandbox—written as a hobby performance deep dive.
2 min · 571 words
Cut your AI spend with AI Gateway's Auto Router
Cloudflare AI Gateway now features a model router that evaluates request complexity using an edge-deployed classifier to select the optimal model. By balancing expected output quality against token costs, organizations can dramatically cut AI spend while maintaining performance.
7 min · 1,627 words
The Rise of Overfit Inference Engines
A hands-on essay on how local LLM inference stacks are overfit to specific models and hardware—and what that means for anyone chasing reproducible homelab performance with llama.cpp and friends.
10 min · 2,324 words
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026 My last post](https://nnethercote.github.io/2026/07/31/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-july-2026.html) on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then. Overall progress The measurements for the period 2026-07-29 to 2026-09-28 can be seen here](https://perf.rust-lang.org/compare.html?start=1a833e16546c2eb012758ddd499964fd8afee29e&stat=wall-time&tab=compile&end=c1070d69382b8d2f2eb65119c738a77d9e324c9e&
5 min · 1,212 words
Garbage Collection: Generational? Incremental? Both!
The third Language Summit talk was brought by Mark Shannon, who is the author of the incremental garbage collector implementation shipped in Python 3.14 that was reverted back to the generational garbage collector from Python 3.13 after reports of “significant memory pressure” in production environments. The original goal of the new incremental garbage collector was to reduce maximum pause times by an order of magnitude for larger heaps.
5 min · 1,173 words
Nobody Is Listening on Port 8125
There's a Fedora box on my desk named `stick`. An app on it has been firing StatsD datagrams at `127.0.0.1:8125` ten times a second for about a week now, the way apps have done since Etsy taught everyone to in 2011.
10 min · 2,281 words
Arseny Kapoulkine revisits clustered LOD and meshoptimizer after NVIDIA’s vk_lod_clusters Zorah update—smaller, nicer hierarchical clustered LOD for path-traced scenes with billions of triangles.
33 min · 7,518 words
Edward Kmett's week-old Turbo Haskell Compiler (THC) JITs GHC Core onto Truffle/GraalVM, supports AOT Native Image, polyglot FFI, Loom green threads, and can compile pandoc, happy, alex, and GHC itself.
2 min · 506 words