costic.dev

Looking at how Tesla and Comma curate driving datasets

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s remarkably difficult to wrap your head around the sheer scale of modern data systems. Of course, given access to so much data, the question quickly becomes how you can glean insights from it. I was recently watching Ashok’s talk at Scaled ML 2026 and Mitchell Goff’s talk at COMMA CON 2025 where they present how these two very different companies (despite being planted in the same domain) ingest driving data and determine what segments would best serve in training their models.

re-{memory, finding, discovering} and Bullet in the Brain

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There was a piece by Edward Hirsch in the NYT today that immediately took me back to Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”¹. Hirsch’s piece was a really great, grounded reflection on sight (literally), perspective, and abstraction/performance – what we take for granted, and what we have to learn to appreciate.

I could see what was going on, not perfectly, but enough to take in the spectacle. And then my eyesight blurred, not because I was losing my vision, but because I was seeing something that I had missed. I was crying from the intense, fleeting, overwhelming joy of it all.

It’s easy to forget why we do things. You might not notice the slippage, but one day you look down and the ground has given way. This is not irrevocable. It is up to you conjure it again, remake these foundations. The two greatest things one can do (continously) is to remember and invent.

Searching for iconography by improving semantic search in art archives

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was sitting in one of my seminars this week when I had an urge to find the manga panel from Jujutsu Kaisen where Kenjaku’s monster is overlayed with him wondering “what form that would take”¹. I promise this was after some tangential association. It was one of those odd feelings where you can acknowledge how insignificant it is (certainly not a need) but simultaneously cannot move forward without it quenched. Being in class, I wanted to find it quickly. The mind is quite miraculous and I instantly thought back to late 2024 where I came across the panelsdesu on Twitter that allows you to semantic search manga panels. It didn’t really help, unfortunately, but I did start to think about how cool that project was, especially since he was running inference locally on an 4070 or something (I love hosting my own projects).

Gymflation

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays, I go to the gym mostly to stay healthy and support my triathlon training pursuits, but there was a time where I was more firmly embedded in that culture. It feels resoundingly more pervasive, but I wonder how that extends beyond the United States; I can’t forget walking around in Palermo at night and coming across what would otherwise look like a normal storefront (on the street, familiar glass windows, small footprint) if not for the gym equipment within. The equipment, however, looked a little dilapidated and very heterogenous–the plates had little cohesion and were also on the smaller side. I don’t intend this as a slight–everyone inside seemed to be having a fun time, and it’s still a regret of mine that I didn’t bang on the window and ask to join for a set (my Italian, much less Sicilian, is poor)–but that gym culture seemed dramatically different than U.S. gym culture. Of course, n=1, so I don’t mean to extrapolate. A discussion for a later date.

Accepted into HotNets!

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A paper I contributed to, “Mitigating Inter-datacenter Incast with a Proxy”, was accepted into HotNets! The Princeton community has always been great, and Maria’s NetSyn lab is no exception. As was also the impetus for this site’s creation, her networking seminar was the first place I heard the murmurs of what morphed into “Capo”. Situating ourselves in the inter-DC context, we observed incast patterns resulting into downstream network congestion because of TCP CCAs and inherent network asymmetry. A huge thank you to Ann, who first worked on this idea and shared it with me way back when, Hongyu, Maria, and the Microsoft team - it’s such a fun problem, and I had a great time working on it with everyone.

I don't hate it

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The end of Absalom, Absalom! crowned my labored effort through what I consider to be the hardest Faulkner work; I read it for a class and found Faulkner’s use of language by far the most discursive, bendy, and infinitely unfurling. It, naturally, resolves (or at least, acknowledges) the inter-generational tension spanning past and present while tacitly accepting the impossibility of knowing much of anything (the mystery remains so, conjecture unable to illuminate the shadows cast by the procession of time). Most of all, the end–with the last glimpse of Quentin’s resolve before the events of The Sound and the Fury–is beautiful. I could stretch back further and further until I end up on the other side of the book– for example, how Quentin and Shreve stretch beyond the confines of the present and blend with and interpose on Henry and Bon’s procession¹– but I’ll focus firmly on the objective end, the last blotches of ink, the thinning leaves a reminder that prose is terminable. Shreve asks Quentin one final question²:

Hop Along

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I appreciate the last bouts of warm weather, I’m reflecting on what turned out to be an eventful summer. Toward the end of July, my girlfriend and I met up in New Jersey (me from Boston and her from D.C.) to spend the weekend at the beach, etc, but also go to the Make the World Better Concert in Philadelphia at FDR Park. My favorite band, Hop Along, was playing and I just couldn’t forgive myself if I passed up the opportunity; regardless, the effort was justified by making a whole nice weekend out of it.

Perseus and Andromeda

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Florence and had the fortune of visiting Gli Uffizi today. The sheer breadth of history compressed within the comparatively small, maginificently ornate building spills over into an infinite pool of observations, associations, and recapitulations that I can ladle from. Acknowledging that much of what I formulate has likely been said in some form, and rejecting the temptation to be overly discursive, I prepare a glass for my parched, slightly sticky throat (it’s hot here) with one deft motion: Perseus and Andromeda.

Meandering through D.C. and directional meaning

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fra Carnevale, The Annunciation (1445/1450) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Why is Mary always on the right of the canvas? We often trace meaning left to right, ordained by the directionality of Western language. If we transpose the reading of the page onto our reading of the canvas, maybe the tradition within the lineage of Annunciation paintings makes sense.

Working with Golang more at WattOur

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At WattOur, we’ve been building a lot of data processing infra (focusing on PJM but making it extensible enough to include other ISOs in the near future). Our tech stack was quite fragmented– we started with a lot of Python apps, a familiar base, and have been slowly migrating more and more to Golang. It’s been really great so far–a low bar, given anything not Python would ascend to that category. We’ve been enjoying the simplicity and utility Go offers. I wanted to write about a few challenges we’ve faced to (1) document these difficulties, acknowledging that there’s probably a more elegant solution out there, (2) set a baseline as we invest more into the Go ecosystem, and (3) perhaps field some advice.

Expressions: Apprehending the Modern

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been having a bit too much fun writing in a style inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses (and Faulkner, in a derivative sense). Modern, post-modern–more reflection is needed to refine my literary anchoring. Most of all, I’ve been having fun. I’ve always loved reading in this style (starting with Faulkner and, more recently, Joyce) but don’t think I’ve ever pointedly applied force to try to emulate the style. I think now of Tobias Woolf’s Old School. At one point, the main character sits in front of his typewriter and transcribes a story by Hemingway verbatim just to feel greatness–but, anyway, it’s a nuanced recollection hazed by memory.

Vignettes: A spring's memory

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just now, I rediscovered a memory.

This encounter is beckoned by chance–“the encounter of an external causality and an internal finality”–and defies the rigidity of predetermination, remaining in virtue of itself an active, unbounded process. The ignition of involuntary memory inundates the brain with its surging excess, but is also a reminder of its latent presence: it is something to be seized, actively, just as it exists in passive appreciation.

Vignettes: Running

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I ran outside for the first time in a while. This past summer, when I stopped being able to feel the sun beaming down on my chest and when the wind began to wrap around my body and felt more like a clash rather than a lingering kiss, I relegated myself to the treadmill. I preferred it that way, I told myself. And it was nice, but you hop on and time dilates, stretches out and expands while simultaneously compressing its intensity. It’s controlled: there’s no wind to mess up my hair or elicit tears from my eyes.

Reflections: On Love, Valentine's Day, Symbols, and D.H. Lawrence's Virile Rhetoric

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When you walk into a pharmacy in February (and even before then), you’ll be inundated with a breadth of red paraphernalia (my favorite are the cheap, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate). The same decorations diffuse elsewhere, and I slowly notice more and more accumulate as we near its nexus. Like most events, Valentine’s Day is a day of ceremonies and symbols, but it is also a chance to reflect on who (and what) is dear to you – and what it means to love.

Reflections: building a Unix shell in C

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m taking an OS class this semester and, although it doesn’t cover the most interesting OS (Windows), it is quite a nice excuse to finally get around to reading OSTEP. Our first assignment was to build a pretty basic Unix shell in C. Of course, since it’s a school assignment, I won’t post or directly reflect upon the actual code, but I did want to explore some of the ideas I was encouraged to pursue in the toils of my labor.

Notes: AccelNet

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft’s AccelNet has been one of my favorite papers. This might be because I spent so much time with it before giving a class presentation, but it also checks all the boxes: unique insight cuts through cost/perf gradient (check), perf gains (check), hyperscale/industry (big check).

It describes their process in pushing down VM networking overhead to the HW–offloading per-VM software switching (VFP) to a bump-in-the-wire FPGA (Azure SmartNIC). Previously, host-based SDN technologies were responsible for “all virtual networking features” and as that complexity swells so does the number of CPU cycles.

Reading Journal #00

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I rarely read one book, start to finish, at a time. Is it emblematic of my perpetual bout with focus? A lazy solution to an optimization problem where I cannot greedily commit to a single item and instead choose all? By reflex, I always tend to consider my time something to be optimized, but it’s reductive to refer to reading as a “problem” because, obviously, it encapsulates so much more. Reading being such an intimate, lonesome activity makes it delicate and difficult to demarcate and ponder; ultimately, I enjoy what I read, regardless of how I actually go about it, or else I wouldn’t read. The very quality of its existence is reassuring.

Notes on my favorite things

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

prelude

While I want to keep the list of some of my favorites concise and perusable, I also want to share some of my perspective on the things I hold dear to me. It’s to express (without an audience in mind), to share (now there’s the audience), and to start conversation. It’s always interesting to observe how different people hold onto different things.

Additionally, there might be spoilers for some of the items below, particularly with quotes from books.

Musings: The Case for Validating Inputs in Software-Defined WANs

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This was a really interesting paper from HotNets ‘24 because it flips (as I understand it) traditional perspective on its head by validating SDN inputs rather than their outputs. They challenge the assumption typically embedded in the process of validating outputs: the correctness of inputs. This is motivated by reports that find “over one third” of major outages (I presume at Google) were because of incorrect inputs to the SDN controller.

favorites

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

no strict order with more details here

literature

The Professor’s House, Willa Cather
Ulysses, James Joyce
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Mad Love, Andre Breton
“Ascent of Mont Ventoux”, Petrarch
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

art

Virgin Annunciate, Antonello da Messina
Hendrick Goltzius’ engravings
Young Mother Sewing, Mary Cassatt
Girls Under Trees, August Macke