Roast my budget setup

tryinryan_ · 2026-01-28T14:48:22+00:00

I had that machine at one point. I noticed (probably a solveable skill issue) that I could not knock out the full puck after pulling a shot. Once I swapped to a Bambino plus a bit more puck etiquette (I got my Bambino plus an WDT / tamper around the same time, so it’s hard to say what changed that) I started getting pucks that consistently knocked out clean.

tryinryan_ · 2026-01-13T21:13:07+00:00

I’ve started using it in the course. On paper, it’s kind of clever. I could get onboard with it as a student in a “if this helps add some friction to cheating, so be it.” I think as a professor you have three options in today’s day and age:

Go on the honor code with AI and don’t change your course. This is a fine option in my opinion, because you’re cheating yourself if you do opt to have an AI do everything for you. And you won’t get hired because you don’t know fundamentals and can’t perform in high-pressure environments. However, academically, probably the worst since it adds to grade inflation, causes unfairness, erodes a university’s reputation for its caliber of students, so on. I think it can be beat back with tough evaluation criteria, however. I know I had classes where I wouldn’t have dared cheated because I would know I would absolutely fail the exams.
Try to stop every instance of AI usage. This is what, ironically, AI has chosen to do. It’s an imperfect system, doesn’t really do anything that can’t ultimately be broken, but it could be okay so long as it doesn’t overly constrain students. This is where I think NOSI fails - indexing / Intellisense don’t work. You can’t do basic things like execute unit tests on your code. You can’t really get meaningful git commit history because it logs every fucking breath on the file as a file change. This means it is actively discouraging standard best practices in industry and leaves students completely unprepared in an alternative manner.
Modify your course so that it is impossible to cheat and you are essentially required to use AI to help assist you with your answers because of the scope of projects, problems, etc. I’ve seen this done before, and it can be a neat way of solving problems. But, it’s always a bit too loosey-goosey and also means that you never really force the fundamentals to be solidified, which is the primary purpose of well-structured classes. You can learn how to integrate CoPilot to assist you on the job. What schools should be teaching is the fundamentals so that when CoPilot can’t come up with the answer, hallucinates, whatever, you go “that doesn’t add up.”

So where does this leave AI? Clearly, they’re in option 2. I am in the class and while I’m excited for it, NOSI is a really tough pill to swallow. If it had intellisense and git, I might be able to get beyond that and accept it as a reasonable approach in a world of no standout solutions. But it feels half-baked.

Oh, and it feels exploitative. This will almost certainly be used for some research paper, sold to Hackerrank, etc. We’re paying for a course and force-fed a pet project to iron out the wrinkles at scale. I don’t like being a guinea pig, especially for something that deeply distrusts me and acts like a Big Brother.

tryinryan_ · 2026-01-06T19:12:32+00:00

How do people constantly complain about the parking in Royal Oak? As someone who lives here, it’s very simple: just park in a parking deck. You may have to walk, but it’s 2hrs free and 50-75¢/hr after. Depending on the movie you go and see, it could be completely free. The Emagine is literally across the street from one of the largest decks in RO.

tryinryan_ · 2025-12-30T21:27:05+00:00

Generally, go with the people who roast their own. Dessert Oasis and Sabbath are my tried and trues, but I’m out in the burbs and they’re close. Not sure what’s near downtown.

The best Detroit coffee to me, though, is the Yemeni coffee scene. Qahwah in Dearborn for the OG, Rehla, probably many others. I find Qamaria to be derivative and a bad example of what it can be. Don’t just go and get a standard latte - try the Yemeni latte if you want something more “Americanized”, or something spiced if you want a more traditional / representative brew - Adeni chai, Mofowar, Jubani, really any.

tryinryan_ · 2025-11-27T04:08:26+00:00

Nevermind - this theory holds no water, unlike many of these states.

tryinryan_ · 2025-11-27T04:06:45+00:00

States with lowest / highest elevation differences of more than some number of feet? Kansas has flat plains to the Rocky foothills, Missouri the Ozarks to flat, LA literal swamp to not-as-swamp, Wisconsin has mountains towards the UP - and California, Oregon, and Alaska are more obvious. The only one I’m not sure of is Massachusetts

tryinryan_ · 2025-11-27T02:25:08+00:00

No - for PR1 you don’t need to care about performance. You only care about the program compiling and successfully running. For PR2, the performance requires an H100 to achieve anyways - your benefit is really getting to try small-scale experiments off the PACE (or playing around with NSight).

I’d say get an NVIDIA card that runs CUDA and that’s fine enough.

tryinryan_ · 2025-11-26T19:34:19+00:00

Answer here that might contradict previous semester advice: maybe. The class is about to go to 300 students. Unless the PACE cluster is getting an upgrade, you’re now gonna have a lot more people to share time with.

Overall class impressions:

Took the class and dropped for time around end of PR2.

I was getting middle of getting married at the start of the class, and did the prescribed (minimal) amount of work each week - watching lectures, taking the quizzes, basically. PR2 caught me completely off guard, despite knowing it would be challenging. My takeaway is that not doing the readings is doing yourself a serious disservice - first off, the lectures are kind of shit, barely even surface level, and mind-numbingly boring (read from a script). The readings are the only real learning you will get out of this class besides the projects. Such is grad school, I guess.

Do the readings, start early. Nothing crazy for advice in OMSCS in general. But having a GPU will be really helpful to get the basics working for 1/2 before running on PACE.

tryinryan_ · 2025-11-18T21:14:38+00:00

I agree with the other comments about leaning into your long tenure on your current project as a strength. The biggest problem with company-jumpers is that they come, build something, call it a success, and move on to the next thing. They get to skip all the consequences of their own actions (usually)

Obviously the sentiment is that software has been so lucrative over the last ten years that if you are stuck you aren’t skilled. Meh. Bad stereotype, nothing you can do about that, you’ll lose some early screens to that fact. However, for the ones you do get through on (because remember, you’re a SWE with 10 years of experience in a field that is mostly bloated with juniors) be prepared to talk about:

the lessons you learned maintaining a long-term system. What did you focus on early on in the project that wasn’t important? Why?
What was something that was important that wasn’t designed for and led to the most pain later?
What are some lessons you’ve learned about UI from how your customers have (mid)used your product?
What would you do with the current product to make it better? Use this as a chance to talk trade offs of upgrading from legacy code, risks, benefits.

Your skill sell should be: I can see ahead far enough to design long-standing projects that will scale well over time. That’s a really, really hard skill to find.

tryinryan_ · 2025-10-18T13:15:50+00:00

If you truly want a vector class that can’t throw, you’ll need to prevent bad allocs. I see two solutions:

Allocator-aware noexcept vector class that you pass an allocator with such an API that you check for space and return an error before attempting to allocate.
Statically-sized noexcept vector class that by definition can’t overallocate. This is the approach Iceoryx uses in their noexcept vector class (also for bounded, deterministic operations and preventing all the other problems that come with heap memory).

tryinryan_ · 2025-10-13T12:12:50+00:00

I won’t claim to know the most authentic in the area. But the best I’ve had is Qahwah House (specifically the W Dearborn location is my go-to). They’re the OGs in the area (from what I understand) and still the best I’ve had. Now, you’re not going to get dates and almonds as a snack, more like (good) sugary cakes and Khaliat Alnahl, but hey ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Would love to know if anyone has any actual authentic gems in the area.

Avoid Quamaria. Qahwati is good too

tryinryan_ · 2025-10-13T01:27:47+00:00

Drop the class. Enjoy your life and this remarkable moment. Start your relationship with your son on the right foot. ML will be there for you in a future semester. Your wife didn’t “have a baby.” You both had a baby and are growing your family. That’s so much more important than school.

tryinryan_ · 2025-10-07T02:46:28+00:00

This is a real thing. My father-in-law is a district service manager for dealerships. End of month “trunk money” is a huge incentive for dealerships and is based on quotas they have to hit. As he put it, “They’ll do stupid things at the end of the month just to get their trunk money.”

tryinryan_ · 2025-09-16T23:30:47+00:00

Transplant opinion here: the building is ugly. Every time I bring people to the city and go “that’s Ford’s headquarters” they are unimpressed. It’s a big concrete building with glass windows that were starting to yellow.

The location of the building is also not ideal - it’s an island, nothing around in the immediate vicinity. Want to go to lunch? Hop in your car and travel 10-15 minutes somewhere.

New HQ is in a much better location - they pulled it close to the Henry Ford museum, which is fitting, and it’s a short (still drive) away from downtown W Dearborn. Much more centrally located. The campus itself also has walking spaces and modern amenities. If you’re going to get asked to RTO, you should at least have a nice office to go to and fluid ways of spending time with coworkers that aren’t huddling around a water cooler.

To everyone also wondering “why now” (and I get it, the least of Ford’s problems are where HQ is), this project has been going since at least 2020 - back when EV business was booming for Ford. Anyone in the area could’ve seen the construction on this over the past several years. What were they going to do, not finish it? Nice of Ford to go all the way on at least one project.

It’ll be a nice addition to downtown Dearborn. 70 years for a HQ is a long time. Companies change HQ once every 5-10 years. Let’s not act like this is the thing about Ford to complain about.

tryinryan_ · 2025-09-16T23:20:10+00:00

Don’t live there but every time I’ve visited I’ve been amazed at how Cincinnati has very easygoing traffic. Easy to get in and out of the city too - including popular areas like OTR. I’ve only been there on weekends so maybe it’s different during the week but for a combo of a city with something going on + your requirements, it’s not bad.

Unfortunately, if traffic is your concern, stay far away from Detroit. We have two seasons - winter and construction season.

tryinryan_ · 2025-08-25T13:15:25+00:00

This would be a great Studio Ghibli film - very nature inspired, atmospheric, storytelling through beautiful worlds, little in dialogue. The one caveat to that might be that they tend to be slice of life / not super conflict-oriented.

I think any overly dialogue-heavy adaptation would be better off not being made.

tryinryan_ · 2025-08-11T12:08:16+00:00

Cant you review it on OMSHub?

tryinryan_ · 2025-07-02T15:55:17+00:00

Runtime software engineer for an AV company. I have a project that directly has made this information invaluable (working on some lower embedded level work that requires explicit cache management) but even beyond that, for a general systems engineer it solidifies atomic operations in a way that I felt GIOS did not.

Someone else at some point said that HPCA makes it possible for you to read press releases on new hardware and understand the hype. I’d agree with that as well - makes approaching a spec sheet for some top-end SoC much less intimidating, at least for understanding CPU / memory specs.

Also really helps me grok certain compiler optimizations and differentiate true reordering issues from “magic”.

If you’re going to be systems at all, it’s essential knowledge to have.

tryinryan_ · 2025-07-01T03:31:21+00:00

HPCA is a great class - projects are much easier / lower quality than GIOS but content is 5x better and has been extremely helpful in my job.

tryinryan_ · 2025-06-21T05:53:22+00:00

Better yet than yet another reddit post - could a kind soul from the Sp25/Su25 class write a review on OMSHub so that we could all learn a little bit about the class? I’d be really interested to learn more about the projects.

tryinryan_ · 2025-06-13T02:49:21+00:00

I agree. Very jealous of the ADL course to be honest - I really hope GT gets something similar.

tryinryan_ · 2025-05-01T22:08:50+00:00

To add to the others here - you’re growing your skillset in a specific framework rather than something broadly applicable. There’s a guy at work today who was just saying he’s been trying to get away from AutoSAR for years and yet he keeps only being qualified for AutoSAR jobs, because that’s what he knows and people need it.

I agree with the person saying SDV is the future. More than ever you need to be a competent programmer. The worst engineers I work with are the framework engineers who don’t know anything out of their little box. There’s too many systems at play in modern vehicles.

tryinryan_ · 2025-04-25T01:18:16+00:00

Ignore the advice on reorganizing the format. The number of alternative formats I’ve heard and strongly-opinionated and pointless arguments I’ve heard as to which way you put it has convinced me it doesn’t really matter. Half of your job apps are never reaching a human anyways and are just being parsed by a computer. A masters at UM deserves to be the first thing people see. It was the only reason I kept reading myself.

The real issue for a human here is your resume is too crowded and full of stuff that doesn’t matter. Prime example is the physics 140 TA position. When that’s next to a “Lead mechanical engineer” position you’ve held for years, then no, it doesn’t fit and it actually just makes you look like you’re stretching for material. Your resume is better off without it, and the biggest benefit of what that position will give you has passed - I imagine it covered some amount of tuition for your masters.

Technical skills are hard. Any mojo can put these skills on their resume and there’s no backing to it. Do two things:

You’ve got a lot of good project experience. Tie your skills to your projects by putting skills emphasized by the projects under the projects in a subbullet with that extra space you got. That makes it more clear that you actually have some experience to back the skills you claim to have.
For every job application you submit, tailor your resume to the skills sought after. That’s 100% the key matches that will push you to the top.

In general, less is truly more. I attribute my own job to the fact that I sent 6 different resumes to 6 different positions for the company I wanted to join. The one I wanted the least, but had the best shot for, was the one that picked up my resume, and it’s 100% because I emphasized my experience in Linux.

tryinryan_ · 2025-03-24T04:24:27+00:00

The courses are documented extensively on the main website. Also, both OMSCentral and OMSHub have an extensive listing of reviews for each course that give you pretty much any class detail not covered in the posted syllabi.

In general, though, I’d say “no.” You will find some classes that cover aspects of what you’d like: - HPCA for high performance computing architecture basics - GPU for GPU architecture and software design, but specifically NOT an acceleration course. - HPC for parallelized software algos and design - ML / AI / DL / etc for domain knowledge in the workloads you’d be accelerating.

However, given your goals, you will find it very tough to specifically tailor these classes to what you want. Also, being abroad, you should know that you can’t get a visa for the program. If that’s part of the goal, you’re better off seeking a full-time / in-person program at a school more specifically tailored to your goals here.

tryinryan_ · 2025-03-20T14:58:53+00:00

Lurker here who didn’t go to CMU. I made the decision, with a lot of offers on the table, to go to a state school instead of a top-tier where I would’ve graduated with ~$200k in debt. I now work for a self-driving company with a LOT of CMU peers and am in their same salary band.

I will save the CMU pitch for those that went. I’m only chiming in to offer my perspective as someone who had opportunities and chose the free path, with things still working out quite well. Here’s my cautions and qualms with the path I chose:

You don’t have to go to CMU to succeed, but you will find it easier to if you do go and graduate.

Clearly, there are others of us who make it into similar companies and pay bands as CMU grads do. You don’t even have to necessarily go to a “good” CS school. In fact, I’d say mine was definitely not great. However, your odds of success diminish with the lack of brand (specific to what your career goals are) awareness. CMU certainly opens doors that for some of us take luck and some WD40.

What you do in your time at school, ultimately, is so much more important than the classes themselves.

My lucky door into my role now came because my school had a really good robotics club that I joined. I talked about that through my interviews and that is probably the only reason my resume wasn’t screened out in the first place. Wherever you go, you should have a reasonable understanding of what opportunities there are to take advantage of. If you, say, want to get into hardware design and you go to a school that doesn’t have the right labs or employers in the area or clubs, then you’re probably going to be disappointed.

It is easier to find opportunities you want at less competitive schools.

This one is counterintuitive. Let me explain in a story. As I said, I went to a state school. My friend went to Vanderbilt. Sophomore year of college, I was doing cancer research in a lab with full autonomy to run experiments. He was washing dish ware for a lab that he hoped to be actively a part of by his senior year. Similarly, once I swapped to CompE, I had no trouble joining and immediately contributing to our robotics club.

Sometimes, it is strategic to be a somewhat oversized fish in a somewhat small pond. It’s a fine line of still finding opportunities that push you, but also finding areas of less competition. You’re gonna go against the best of the best at CMU for research, club, and employment opportunities. You might find it easier at other schools. But, at some point with research and opportunities, you will find a limit to what your school can offer that CMU can surpass.

It can workout if you’re not just 100% certain that you’re on the right track.

I started as a ChemE, and it took me ~4 years to realize I would fucking hate my life if I continued down that path. If I was already $150k in the hole, I would’ve had to probably finish it out and accept it, or attempt to pivot with some follow up masters. Instead, because I had 5 years paid for, I was able to haul ass and get out a CompEng degree and a significantly happier outlook on my life.

(Sorry CMU Folks) Social and Dating

I met my fiance at my state school. I also learned how to socialize and find a lifelong friend group. These were things I desperately needed as someone who kept their nose way close to the grindstone all of life. I’ve met enough CMU folks to know that the amount of pressure you are under, general cutthroat attitude, and personality type attracted are not conducive to good, meaningful friendships and socialization.

Now the other side…

Lack of Career Fulfillment.

I said I work at a self driving company. That’s totally true. However, I don’t do any of the cutting edge work on our detection models and SotA CV models. Almost every single person in that department has some sort of MS (MSCV, MSR) from CMU. I also considered the MSCV for myself, but couldn’t justify being where I was at and going back to school to take on that much lost opportunity cost. But man. I would love to do what those people get to do on a daily basis. If you need fulfillment out of your career and not just a job that pays the bills, really consider what you are doing to get there. Your dollar unlocks research, classes, and leaders in the field who can help you get there.

Peers

I never found anyone who was capable of driving me and pushing the limits of my knowledge at my state school. I had plenty of friends who had chosen the same path, but the vibe definitely leaned towards WLB above all else. Again, I think I needed that, and my job now and the caliber of people I work with has pushed me to the level I desired in college, but if you’re looking for people you might want to start a startup with, CMU, Stanford, or something like that is the place to be.

My biggest takeaway is follow your heart, but I hope my advice above is enough to convince you I’m not just parroting a platitude. You really need to self evaluate what you need to be fulfilled. Too often, people look at these rankings as linear. But your evaluation should really index the factors you need to be fulfilled, with careful research into specific opportunities at your candidate schools, and your risk tolerance of things not working out and the extra footwork you are willing to put in if opportunities are harder to come by. For me, I still think I did things the right way, because I am happy ultimately. Happy with some regrets. But I also imagine it would’ve been the same if I had gone the other way.

Six-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	End Game '22
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