How I search in 2024
We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding edge of LLMs.On the one hand, we have the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We've been put in the vibe space
Jakob’s Law of UX goes something like this. I, as a user online, spend my time on many sites. As such, when I come to your site, I am already used to the way the other sites work, and I don’t want to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don't worry about LLMs
Happy Monday from Florence, where I gave a keynote at PyCon Italia on Saturday. The conference was wonderful and the city is wonderful. I wrote up my talk notes here. I’ve also included the video...
View ArticleDead Internet Souls
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The rise of the non-expert expert
Art: Profit I, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it was like to write code 20, 30 years ago. At the time, one of my favorite tech writers, Ellen Ullman, was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
You're a sky full of stars
Art: Starry Night, Edvard Munch, 1922Vicki’s Note: I guest-wrote a piece for Leon’s newsletter last week on what AI truly means. Go read it!It was sometime in the middle of 2013 that I hit rock bottom....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The great A/B/C/D divide
Art: Argument over a Card Game, Jan SteenWhat do you see when you power on your doom brick for the first time in the morning?For me, it’s first and foremost, Twitter, starting with my @ replies. Then,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ad block and you don't stop
Art: Advertisement for Pope Manufacturing Co., "We are Having a Heavenly Time" Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, 1890Something I worry about a lot is that I don’t understand how the internet works. And by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The rules of the game
Playing Chess, Wilhelm KotarbinskiMy husband and I have finally started watching Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, making us officially the last people on the face of this earth to do so. It’s amazing what a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My Hero's Journey to Peloton
Le cirque: Acrobate à la bicyclette, Bernard Buffet 1955Early last year, the face of an extremely terrified woman looked at me through the small window of the YouTube app on my phone. “Help me,” she...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A winter's tale for the end of the year
Winter Forest, Ivan ShishkinSome time ago, on a dark snowy winter’s night, in a land far from here, four Councilors to the Emperor stood together huddled in the cold at the foot of an immense mountain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Containerized
Vanity Box, Kasimir MalevichHappy New Year, Normcore Readers! Here’s to a happier, and most important, healthier 2021. “That’s it”, my husband said, as I unpacked a box of kipple from Amazon, to reveal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The blank slate in your hands
A couple of housekeeping things: I’ve been pretty busy lately! I gave a keynote at RStudio’s 2021 Conference. You can find all the slides here and it’ll be up on RStudio shortly!Vicki Boykis...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Diamond hands, when memes became power ✋💎🤚
Detail from Mary I by Hans Eworth, 1520A few months ago, my corner of the internet was completely fixated on Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the small yard services company in my home city of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The last miles and miles of the vaccine
The Doctor’s Waiting Room, Makovsky, 1870Hey, your friendly neighborhood COVID CEO here, popping in with the latest news from my board room. Almost five years ago, I wrote about how tech, as an...
View ArticleThe luxury of length
Hi Friends,It’s been a while since my last post, almost a month, as the dashboard shows. But it’s not like I haven’t been thinking about it.I’ve been meaning to write a good long post for the past...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scaling Normcore way down
Goodbye on the Mersey, James Tissot, 1881Hello friends!As you might have guessed from my four-month absence, I can no longer continue writing Normcore on a regular basis. A confluence of things has led...
View ArticleClik here to view.
With the Feed as my witness
Pigeons, Maria Primachenko, 1968Hello friends old and new, it’s been a while. Last year, I stopped writing Normcore Tech, a weekly newsletter about tech and the humanity in tech, because I was going up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Duo, the Push, and the Bandits
The Little Owl, Albrecht Durer 1508Some people say that Duo, the light-green mascot of Duolingo, an app that helps you learn different languages by prodding you to practice, lives in a tree, much like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What we talk about when we talk about The Algo
Dynamo Machine, Natalia GoncharovaQuick programming notes: I wrapped up my previous gig a few weeks ago and I’m psyched to be starting as Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Duo. As always, Normcore...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The art of the long goodbye
Quick programming notes: NormConf is a real, free conference and it is happening on December 15. See you there! Second, I recently had the distinct privilege of being interviewed by Peter Wang about a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where do we go from here
Manley Beach Summer is Here, Ethel CarrickHello friends, it’s been a long while since we’ve had a Normcore Tech. Quite honestly, I’ve been feeling a little lost social media-wise since Twitter 1.0...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What are embeddings?
Kandinsky, Circles in a Circle, 1923Hello friends, it’s been a while since we’ve had a Normcore Tech. This has become my signature first line every time I release a newsletter, so sorry in advance, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Naming things
"The beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names. " - Confucius.As a writer, I've always been fascinated with names. How people get their names, what they mean, whether they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What we don't talk about when we talk about building AI apps
Every day I open my LinkedIn and Twitter (and Mastodon and Bluesky and Threads....) and am innundated with the same messages: LLMs are sent to us from above, they make everyone's life easier, we are...
View ArticleHello it's Normcore again
Hello friends,You're receiving this because you at some point signed up for Normcore Tech. Normcore Tech was a ZIRP (zero-interest rate phenomenon) Substack, fueled by the optimism of the creator...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why if TYPE_CHECKING in Python?
Blog post hereI saw this tweet over the weekend and wanted to dive into the fundamental question behind this: Given this potential error, why do we use conditional imports at all, or, more...
View ArticleMy favorite books of 2023
[Vicki's note: a bunch of people have reported this email going to spam and links also as spam. I'm working on resolving this by routing through my own domain name and turning off link tracking, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What's new with machine learning in production
Image with some help from DingboardOriginal post here.In 2023, I wrote two pieces on machine learning engineering for The Pragmatic Programmer. (Part 1 and Part 2). However, since I started working...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Redis is forked
Hey friends. I need to do a better job keeping this newsletter up to date instead of posting random links on five million social platforms, each of which now have three users each. Since my last email,...
View Article