Hi! This is the newsletter for posts that I post on my website, things that used to go into my NormCore Tech newsletter, updates on my work on Viberary, and general news/updates from me. I write about topics related to: machine learning recommender systems and information retrieval tech and society Welcome to The Stream!| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more...| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading every day, mostly because the comment sections were so full of smart people in tech. At the time I was working as a data analyst, mostly with SQL and Excel. I understood that I wo...| Normcore Tech
I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review. Evaluating LLMs Like many of us in tech, I spent a large portion of 2024 thinking about and working with LLMs, but I was lucky enough to do it for work. I spent the year designing, building, open-sourcing, (and naming! 🐊) an application to evaluate LLMs, Lumigator. In support of that work, I did open-source work in the LLM ecosystem and learned a ton of stuff along the way. Just ...| Normcore Tech
There is a lot of debate in the software community around whether LLMs can replace developers. Part of the reason is the way we formulate the problem of what it means to write software. In industry, we still give outsize cultural deference to software developers as lone wizards who come into the room, put on their hoodie, crank up the techno, and write the application on their own. When we sit down at our keyboard, we assume that we sit down alone, with our precious treasure trove of programm...| Normcore Tech
We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to solve math theorems. A recent experiment particularly piqued my interest. Researchers used OpenAI’s new 4o model to solve multiplication problems by using the prompt: Calculatetheproductofxandy.Pleaseprovidethefinalanswerintheformat: FinalAnswer:[result] These models are generally trained for natural language tasks, particularly text co...| Normcore Tech
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 the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared the cache, so to speak, and landowners continued to pay taxes on these dead souls. Alexandr Pushkin, the greatest living Russian-language author at t...| Normcore Tech
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 recording from PyCon Italia. The post is long, but the TL;DR is that in working with LLMs over the past year, I’ve found that there are several important things to building a good product and getting value out of LLMs. They mostly involve good old traditional machine learning and engineering skil...| Normcore Tech
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 learn new paradigms. Some also call these preconceived notions, user mental models, or affordances. I like to call it the user-site contract. For years, we have been conditioned to navigate sites along several axes as content consumers: along search and recommendations, and along e-commerce a...| Normcore Tech
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 fall of old companies. Broadcast-based centralized social media, which steadily served as a newsfeed and realtime search for a small, vocal minority, is basically dead, or on its last legs. Search, namely Google, is basically a useless pile of ads and SEO gamification at this point and a stopping ...| Normcore Tech
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, I've written: A long post on GGUF A short post on perception in groups of humans Shared some of my work on LLM evals And shared that I was keynoting at PyCon Italia Do people prefer getting these in one-offs as separate emails? A bunch all at once? Are long technical posts as emails okay? Let m...| Normcore Tech
Image with some help from Dingboard Original 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 with LLMs recently, neural architectures have changed some of those assumptions. To be clear, most of machine learning in production is still not related to large language models or generative AI, and even deep learning projects, of which LLMs are a small subset, make up no more than 10% of the m...| Normcore Tech
[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 bear with me as I deal with the vagaries of Gmail via Buttondown. And, happy holidays!] This year, I managed to read more than last year, but I was still pretty caught up in technical learning and unfortunately didn't reach the fiction-non fiction balance I wanted (I always try to read more fictio...| Normcore Tech
Blog post here I 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 specifically, when might we use this pattern? The TL;DR is that we use this pattern to hedge between the differences in typechecking enforced by mypy and typechecking as it happens at runtime, particularly when we have large sets of custom classes that depend on each other and could result in circular depe...| Normcore Tech
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 economy internet. It included articles about Kafka and multi-armed bandits and neural nets from a human perspective. In the post-ZIRP, social media apocalyptic collapse economy, I've been feeling a little lost in how to consolidate my online presence and where to share, and also wanted the ability t...| Normcore Tech
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 quantizing and pruning, going faster, getting smaller, they will change education, they will write our poetry, they will outlive us all and overthrow humanity and build a happy fruitful LLM robot society, generating art and text, a society where humans exist solely to bring them cyberdrinks with s...| Normcore Tech
"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 like them or not. When I was twelve, I bought a baby name book and spent hours poring through the various sections trying to decide on names for characters in short stories I was working on. Is this florist more of a Veronica or a Jane? What signal would it give the reader that the main charact...| Normcore Tech
Kandinsky, Circles in a Circle, 1923 Hello 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 also hi again and hope you’re doing well. Last time we chatted, I was feeling lost on social media. The time before that, I was running a conference. And now, I am coming to your inbox because I’ve been working on something even bigger and more ridiculous. Bigger than reverse engineeri...| Normcore Tech
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 number of different topics in machine learning. Third, if you have been impacted by recent industry layoffs, there is a whole thread of job openings here (many data-oriented but also lots of dev openings) for as long as Twitter still exists. The Farewell, Harriet Backer 1878 A few years ag...| Normcore Tech
Dynamo Machine, Natalia Goncharova Quick 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 updates continue to remain sporadic and highly dependent on my ability to complete an entire eight-hour sleep cycle. And, another very exciting announcement: NormConf is happening online in December! What started out as a joke tweet has now become a legitimate conference on normcore topics in da...| Normcore Tech
The Little Owl, Albrecht Durer 1508 Some 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 a real spectacled owl. Then, there are those that whisper that Duo lives among us and watches us, wearing a backpack carrying all of our sins. I personally believe that Duo mostly exists as a collection of bytes that originates in the shadowlands beyond the Gates of Hell. The distributed spirit...| Normcore Tech
Pigeons, Maria Primachenko, 1968 Hello 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 alearning curveat work and needed all my meager mental energy on matrix operations. I’ve recently had some thoughts that I need to organize longform, which means it’s time to bring the gang back together for at least one more Normcore. If you would like to help people in Ukraine, pleas...| Normcore Tech
Goodbye on the Mersey, James Tissot, 1881 Hello 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 to this. First, I recently started a new position at work and am extremely (and very, very happily) busy onboarding (Tumblr is still awesome! If you don’t believe come, come sign up or dust off that alt account :) and I foresee work taking up a ton of my mental space into the near future. S...| Normcore Tech
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 month, actually. One about how all of our legal systems are now partially controlled by if statements in software more than the actual legal systems themselves. It was going to be a great post that involved a Russian-speaking AI voice assistant, Zuck’s emails, Twitter blocking me access t...| Normcore Tech
The Doctor’s Waiting Room, Makovsky, 1870 Hey, 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 industry, doesn’t work on the hard problems, but instead builds snack-delivery startups. I wondered, Why is it that we are so focused on “fixing the way we snack?” (or the way we get fresh flowers delivered, or the way we do laundry?) Why can’t we instead pool our energy and resources and ...| Normcore Tech
Detail from Mary I by Hans Eworth, 1520 A 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 Philadelphia, where the Trump campaign accidentally booked a press event (instead of the actual Four Seasons downtown.) In the midst of the noise of all the memes and roasts going around on Twitter at the time, one struck out to me: I had no idea what this was referencing, but it seemed really insid...| Normcore Tech
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 @vboykis Huge thank you to @rstudio for asking me to keynote #rstudioglobal this year! Hope all the organizers are getting some rest - what a wonderful online conference. Here are my slides and notes on building your own online garden. docs.google.comRStudio Global 2021 TalkYour Public Garden Vic...| Normcore Tech
Vanity Box, Kasimir Malevich Happy 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 yet another set of clear plastic containers. “You’re on alert. All future container purchases have to go through me.” I looked guiltily at the pile of containers already on our kitchen table. It was true, what he said, that I had too many containers. But I couldn’t stop. I ...| Normcore Tech
Winter Forest, Ivan Shishkin Some 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 at the far northern reaches of the Empire. These were wise men and women, each learned in their respective fields of study. They lived in fine wood-paneled scholars’ chambers near the Emperor’s headquarters. they had fresh fruit from the southern shores of the Empire delivered to th...| Normcore Tech
Le cirque: Acrobate à la bicyclette, Bernard Buffet 1955 Early last year, the face of an extremely terrified woman looked at me through the small window of...| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
A couple days ago, I was perusing the excellent Data Engineering Weekly newsletter (which I highly recommend subscribing to if you’re in the industry), when...| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023). It’s extremely well-thought out,...| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
Manley Beach Summer is Here, Ethel Carrick Hello friends, it’s been a long while since we’ve had a Normcore Tech. Quite honestly, I’ve been feeling a little...| newsletter.vickiboykis.com
