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.

Tutorial · LLMs · Programming · Performance · AI

Optimizing x264 Settings and Per-title Ladders

Jan Ozer shows how to tune x264 encodes and per-title bitrate ladders to cut bandwidth while improving quality—practical encoder settings and ladder design for H.264-heavy streaming workflows.

Tutorial · Performance · Tutorials · Programming

SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering

Chris Hanson compares SDF, MSDF, Slug, texture atlases, and Rive for GPU text: how signed-distance fields trade sharpness, memory, and shader cost when you draw outlines yourself.

Tutorial · Graphics · Programming · Hardware · Tutorials

Writing Rust code that's faster than state-of-the-art libraries by asking agents to make the code faster

Max Woolf shows how iterative agentic coding—prompting agents to repeatedly speed up Rust code—produced solutions faster than established libraries, with concrete methodology and caveats.

Tutorial · Rust · Programming · AI Agents · Performance

The query finished… Why is my Fabric SQL database still consuming CUs?

Two minutes of SQL database activity in Microsoft Fabric can mean ~17 minutes of compute billing. Nikola Ilic walks through CU metering with application, development, and troubleshooting examples.

Tutorial · Data Engineering · Databases · Cloud Infrastructure · Performance

When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader

Bruno Croci debugs a Voronoi Shadertoy stutter that only appeared on a Windows RTX 4070: ANGLE/FXC optimizations dropped `fract` for integer-looking inputs, and swapping a literal to `398.1` or using `x-floor(x)` restored smooth motion.

Tutorial · Programming · Hardware · Debugging · Performance

How sparse resources helped my GPU-driven renderer memory usage

A deep dive into using sparse/reserved GPU resources (D3D12-focused) to manage memory for GPU-driven renderer data structures like dynamic and bit arrays.

Tutorial · Programming · Hardware · Performance · Engineering

Writing Efficient C++ Code

A practical guide to writing C++ that actually uses the machine well—covering language and hardware basics, common pitfalls, and habits that keep hot paths fast without premature micro-optimization theater.

Tutorial · C++ · Programming · Performance · Systems Programming