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wcunning

2,122 karma · joined August 5, 2012

Embedded systems, signal processing and control systems.
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wcunning··on Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's degree.
wcunning··on DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi
The bandwidth is low, but the latency requirements are stringent since PTP does a wire delay calculation with multiple back-and-forth messages. If that gets affected by, for instance, jumbo frames being on, your bound on the clock value is much worse than if you have a relatively uncongested link.
wcunning··on DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi
That's been a big deal in industrial automation spaces. To have safety critical distributed applications, you need a way to say that a message is stale or something you can't respond to since the state of world might have changed since the data was acquired. As a result, there is a heavy need for some bound on time accuracy from wireless nodes, even if it's a bad bound (several ms instead of single digit us or similar), that still lets you do safety case decomposition.

This is one of the core pieces of tech in automotive for distributed safety cases, think sensors on different time scales with sync'd local clocks allowing for timestamping for staleness/aliveness.

wcunning··on The housing theory of everything (2021)
I actually think this one is pretty accurate for commercial real estate in particular. I’m in Metro Detroit and either a building is a totally dilapidated wreck in an area that has theft problems, or it’s going for $1~3 per square foot per month on triple net terms (leasee must do all upkeep, pay utilities, etc), which comes out to $100000/year in rent before utilities and such for an empty concrete shell. Worse than that, none of the places anyone lives are anywhere near anything available, so I can’t rent something for a nice big woodshop. At the same time, I can’t build a decent thing as a “garage” on my 2.1 acres due to zoning in my municipality from 25 years after my house was built. At the same time, there’s a bunch of buildings sitting empty with no rent paid. This means that landlord cost structure for light industrial is completely different than you seem to suppose or there would be competition and prices would come down…
wcunning··on TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users
It also passed a Democrat controlled Senate and was signed by a Democrat president, who then elected to not even attempt to enforce the law today, his one day to do so. Either of those could have blocked it. It's at the very least bipartisan and the talk at the time of passage was that the Dems could deliver on Rep promises. Neither side seems to want to be the ones holding the unpopular bag.
wcunning··on TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users
The Onion Router was invented by the Navy to make ship location tracking hard with visibility of some of the network, so it's classified at times. More importantly, just because you have satellites doesn't mean that it's easy to pick all of that out all the time or to be entirely certain of which ship/which mission, etc. Making it harder is better even if it can't be made impossible outside of subs.
wcunning··on Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel
From Fabricated Knowledge[0]: "Meet Greg. He’s the former CFO and EVP of operations at Boeing. He’s been on the board since 2017 and was an interim CEO at Boeing during 2020. He also sits on the American Airlines board and is Chairman there. He sits on the Sierra Nevada Space Corporation board as well.

He has almost no semiconductor experience and could probably be directly involved with the Boeing fiasco. He’s been on the board for the entire Intel disaster and, at one point, was interim CEO of Boeing, so he's likely not the most focused member."

[0] - https://open.substack.com/pub/mule/p/the-death-of-intel-when...

wcunning··on Emacs arbitrary code execution and how to avoid it
I'm obligated by tenants of my faith to point out that the best protection for this exploit is use of Vi(m) or NeoVim. You may throw tomatoes as soon as I duck behind this fence, thank you.
wcunning··on GM Under CEO Mary Barra Is an Undeniably Soulless and Dishonest Company
I spent quite a while interviewing and looking for opportunities before I got one in July, which let me duck out right before the ugly three rounds of layoffs since August. The wild thing is the swing back and forth -- GM stood up a huge software organization in Tel Aviv, Israel only a few years ago (somewhere around 2018) which had responsibility for many devops projects, the UltraCruise software that was announced, but never made onto a program, all after GM acquired Cruise the autonomy company. That entire development actually caused a huge braindrain out of GM and the Detroit area of roboticists, computer vision experts, etc. When that didn't work out, long after the company should have pulled the plug, they hired Mike Abbott from Apple, who brought in many other Apple people, all to... surprise pull the plug on CarPlay. That group took about 2 years to gut the Tel Aviv office and many jobs in Detroit, as well as Phoenix and Austin (IT hubs for the company) and start a whole new incredibly expensive office in Mountain View, where they're paying about triple for the same role as was being done in Detroit or Austin or Tel Aviv. In the process, the company managed to alienate many of the best performers and lose anyone who could get out, while missing on several major deliverables, like the stop-ship and massive updates to the Blazer EV after the Ars Technica article on it. Hilariously, that entire open source ecosystem that debuted on the Blazer EV is no longer really internally prioritized, since the first layoff in August lost all of the FOSS maintainers employed at the company and most of the software architects responsible for its integration into future generation vehicles. Honestly, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys...
wcunning··on Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic
That’s honestly one of the hardest things in engineering — identifying not just a customer to drive requirements, but a knowledgeable customer who can drive good requirements that work for a broader user base and can drive further expansion. Anthropic seems ideal for that, plus they act as a service/API provider on AWS.
wcunning··on AI Flame Graphs
The problem is that CUDA already does that, and they're not incentivized to really improve from that baseline, given the capability and ease of use of the ROCM or Intel solutions.
wcunning··on AI Flame Graphs
The issue there is that that info is what Nvidia chooses to port out from the on-chip execution. Most of what we can do for observation is in the kernel driver space and not really on-chip or even low level transit to the chip. One of the other commenters pointed out that you can get huge benefits from avoiding busy waiting on the returned data from the chip, which makes total sense, but also increases latency, which didn't work for my near-realtime use case when I was investigating. Other than those types of low hanging fruit where you can accept a little latency for better power state management, it's hard to find low level optimizations specifically for Nvidia through the closed source parts of the CUDA stack or through the driver transit to chip when those are intentionally hidden.

A while ago, I read a paper on dissecting the Nvidia architecture using very specifically tuned microbenchmarking to understand things like cache structure on chip and the like [0]. Unfortunately, no one has done this for seriously in use, recent architectures, so it's hard to use this info today. Similarly, there isn't an eBPF VM running on the chip to summarize all of this and the Nvidia tools aren't intended to make this kind of info easy to get, probably specifically because of this paper...

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826

wcunning··on AI Flame Graphs
I actually looked at this in detail about a year ago for some automated driving compute work at my previous job, and I found that the detailed info you'd want from Nvidia was just 100% unavailable. There's pretty good proxies in some of the data you can get out of Nvidia tools, and there's some extra info you can glean from some of the function call stack in the open source Nvidia driver shim layer (because the actual main components are still binary blob, even with the "open source" driver), but over all you still can't get much useful info out.

Now that Brendan works for Intel, he can get a lot of this info from the much more open source Intel GPU driver, but that's only so useful since everyone is either Nvidia or AMD still. The more hopeful sign is that a lot of the major customers of Nvidia are going to start demanding this sort of access and there's a real chance that AMD's more accessible driver starts documenting what to actually look at, which will create the market competition to fill this space. In the meantime, take a look at the flamegraph capabilities in PyTorch and similar frameworks, up an abstraction level and eek what performance you can.

wcunning··on Welcome to the Era of the $20k Family Car Insurance Bill
I have two vehicles, my girlfriend has another one, and despite living in one of the higher insurance premium areas in one of the highest insurance premium states in the country (Oakland County, Michigan), our total bill with full coverage and relatively low deductibles is around $7k/yr. A family with 4 cars total (two driving age kids, two parents with cars to drive to different jobs) should not be massively more expensive, likely only $3~4k more than my bill, making it about half of the headline number. To do worse than that, you'd have to live in the worst part of inner city Detroit with the highest insurance rates and have full coverage or massively more expensive vehicles... I don't think the math checks out, really.

I do know people who have very very high bills, but they have one of 1) very high end cars (911 GT3 RS, Bentley, etc.) 2) something rare insured at full value of its rare nature or 3) actively stating to the insurer that it's a track car being raced on the weekends. All of those happen around me, but those aren't the modal case.

wcunning··on Waymo and Hyundai enter multi-year, strategic partnership
This is an interesting move given Hyundai's position in funding Motional, who didn't seem totally incapable of creating AV tech. Does anyone know what their future looks like after this partnership?
wcunning··on How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works
I generally agree with this, as a small-L libertarian. However, the results of the Philips Respironics problems killing people and badly damaging lungs would indicate that we need some amount of better tracking and observation of things like this. See this old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39223982
wcunning··on The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
That's a fine interpretation, but the observable evidence lately would indicate otherwise. The two terms to look into are "institutions as platforms" from Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute [0], describing congressional representatives who spend more staff budget on comms than policy and more of their time on cable news hits than on committee meetings. The second is "public choice theory" economics which is the branch of economics describing why policy doesn't align with stated goals on a regular basis. Robin Hanson had a good substack on the second one just today, in fact [1].

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/01/30/800922222/when-institutions-a... [1] - https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-big-econ-error

wcunning··on Did you lose your AirPods?
Area Code 810 is the Thumb of Michigan, including some of central Michigan, so it's not all 8XX. Unsure how they draw the line, but 800 and 888 are the two that I see businesses use for toll free calling.
wcunning··on Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]
The funny thing is that they supposedly only made a couple million from this, total. I can't remember if that was an internal discussion from when I worked there a few months ago or a news article, but I'm pretty sure of it either way. That makes the whole stupid thing just dumb.
wcunning··on CrowdStrike accepting the PwnieAwards for "most epic fail" at defcon
Software (controls) engineers at VW during the emissions scandal went to jail, engineers at GM were held liable for the ignition switch issue (not mostly in software, but still). I expect we'll eventually see some engineers/low level managers thrown under the bus with Boeing. It definitely happens, but not as frequently as it could. That said, I definitely prefer Amazon's response to the AWS East 1 outage back in 2016 -- the engineer wasn't blamed, despite the relatively simple screw up, but the processes/procedures were fixed so that it didn't happen again in the last 8 years. Crowdstrike is a little bit gray on that regard -- people should have known how bad the practice of zero testing on config updates was, but then again, I've seen some investigating saying that the initial description wasn't fully accurate, so I'm waiting for the final community after action report before I really pass judgement.
wcunning··on Employers used return-to-office to make workers quit
Several things that aren't regularly talked about: to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards without massive losses in engine power (and resulting customer dissatisfaction), companies spend heavily on powertrain R&D to eke the remaining emissions improvements out (99.9% reduction to 99.99% reduction). To meet increasing safety standards, manufacturers have to have much more complicated base models than before, which drives up even the lowest car prices -- backup cameras, automatic emergency braking cameras and logic, immobilizer standards, etc. Then, for the products that everyone wants, some manufacturers aren't even making the new CAFE standards, so they buy "indulgences" (EV offset credits) from Tesla, which is literally a regulatory tax for the incorrect outcomes, but customers don't want GM and Ford EVs at the moment. Beyond that, some solutions to the above problems (hybrids) are simply insanely expensive (ballpark $20k extra manufacturing cost for a hybrid powertrain on some high end hybrid SUVs vs the identical engine without the electric components). All of that shifts parts of the curve to the right, some of it only shifts the high end, some of it shifts the entire curve.
wcunning··on Employers used return-to-office to make workers quit
1000% agreed -- I worked for Ford and GM and now work for a different vehicle software company, and the salary I made starting out + the employee discount meant that vehicles were affordable, but not fun to afford. Now, I can't upgrade my F150 to something with more towing capacity and couldn't even while working at GM with their employee discount and somewhat lower truck prices in general compared to the other Big Three. The problem is corporate culture related, but it's also contributed to by the safety regs requiring every car to have a bunch of driver assist things that drive up total cost even on low end cars, meaning that the mid and high end need to be super profitable for overall fleet profit to be acceptable.
wcunning··on Employers used return-to-office to make workers quit
They have a new performance rating system that says that 5% of every team should be ranked as "needs improvement" meaning an automatic PIP. When MSFT did this in the 2000's, it was a requirement to fire that group. Firings for performance do not entitle an employee to severance, but official "layoffs" generally do outside of bankruptcy. Net cost of this move is hidden in employees spending time updating resumes and doing job interviews, not in direct bottom line dollars from actually paying out severance.
wcunning··on Employers used return-to-office to make workers quit
The General Motors CFO basically said as much on an investor call in 2022 or 2023. That didn't get rid of enough people, so now they've implemented stack ranking because that worked so well at MSFT. That said, they get a "free" 5% workforce reduction every year that they want it, no severance, no buyout, just let go. There will be more of that coming, particularly in US automotive after the UAW deal and the current sad state of vehicle sales and the write downs on EVs.
wcunning··on Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate
None of that support staff is constitutionally allowed to make the call to respond to an imminent or ongoing attack. We need a commander in chief and we need to know who that person is -- which was the whole point of the Presidential Succession Act and the 25th amendment. This isn't even a Biden thing -- we had similar issues with Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan, and I'm sure that some administrations had similar issues that were never reported or written about afterwards.
wcunning··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2024)
Location: Detroit, MI

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Embedded systems, automotive, machine learning, signal processing, data science, real time computing, safety processes (MISRA, ISO26262, etc), MATLAB, FPGA.

Resume: LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/wcunning

Email: wdocunningham@gmail.com

Background: Masters in control theory and signal processing, working in the auto industry for the last 7 years, first on low level powertrain software then the last year or so on LIDAR/computer vision for autonomous vehicles. I've done the most work in C, but I'm now getting up to speed on python and the computer vision/numpy/data processing pipeline stack there for data quality/perception work, along with Linux desktop application architecting and development for AV utilities. Recently had to read the Linux kernel source and use the BCC tool suite to find a subtle issue in the network stack causing high latency on sensor data for AV, also coincidentally fixed most of the network timing infrastructure.

Currently doing full stack development on internal data collection and analysis tools, including new tooling for low level embedded system debugging in autonomous vehicles.

Primary skills include hard real time embedded systems, safety critical applications, firmware development, system integration and complex hardware/software interaction debugging, along with detailed data analysis problems.

Side interests include machining, 3D printing, embedded system development, coffee roasting and furniture making.

wcunning··on Tesla failing to deliver Semi-trucks on time to PepsiCo, Sysco, UPS, and Walmart
This is where it gets crazy though -- officially CA is requiring something like that starting in 2034, which would mean that the Port of LA/Long Beach would require like a second CA worth of electricity to charge trucks for the amount of traffic coming in and out. Everything I read about it basically claims that CA cannot actually function with this requirement, but I don't see the evidence of a future walkback...
wcunning··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
Up until the war on terror and the US no longer accepting that excuse. They do extensive KYC now.
wcunning··on FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal
I mean that you're not required to archive a transcript of every meeting if you weren't already planning on creating the transcript in the first place. Once it's created, agreed, I would expect it to become a business record akin to meeting minutes of board meetings.
wcunning··on FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal
But it also doesn't apply to voice calls or even multi-party meetings held over something like Teams despite the ability to record or even auto transcribe them.
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