The chaos of complexity
Art: Portrait of Marguerite Sleeping, Henri Matisse, 1920Since being promoted to CEO in March, I’ve made a lot of decisions with partially-complete...
The average opinion of 10k people in SF
Art: The Factory, Camille Pissaro, 1873A few months ago, I finally signed up for a paid Spotify subscription. I’d been quarantined with the kids for about...
Traffic lights on the internet
Art: Traffic Island on Boulevard Haussmann, Gustave Caillebotte, 1880I saw a tweet come up on my feed a couple days back celebrating the history of the first...
No one talks about Teams
Welcome aboard, new Normcore readers! As it says on the tin, this newsletter is all about the less-examined parts of tech written from the perspective of me,...
When the internet stopped in Belarus
Art: Embrace, Pablo Picasso, 1900We swim in the seas of the internet every single day. We use Google Drive, which is production, we order food, we channel...
The future of luxury is on-site(ish)
Art: Allegory of Touch, Jusepe di Reberta, 1630I’ve been reading a very good book lately, Ashley Mears’ “Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the...
Google and the Nothing
Art: Friendship, Pablo Picasso, 1908Vicki’s Note: I realize the irony of complaining about paywalls in a semi-paywalled newsletter, so as of today, I’m...
Pixie Hollow won't scale
For the past sixty-seven years, I have been watching “Tinker Bell”, a Disney CGI spin-off from Peter Pan created in 2008 as part of the Disney Fairies...
Are you as smart as a toddler?
Art: Forbidden Literature (The Use of the Word) Rene Magritte, 1936When my oldest turned two, we started letting her indulge in short stretches of screen-...
Manuscripts don't burn
Going to try something new for just today, don’t worry, the transcript is below the page scans :). Transcript I’ve been writing a lot more in notebooks...
From spyplanes to Facebook
Art: The Mechanics of Flying, Arshile GorkyVicki’s note: I’m turning paid subscriptions back on! I was really hesitant about it because I don’t think I can...
The data lake overfloweth
Art:The Second Skin, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1986A while ago, Tim created a Twitter bot called Your Old Tweets (sadly no longer in service due to...
Away we go
Art: Burning ship (the episode of the Russian-Turkish War), Ivan AivazovskyYou may have heard about a large-scale war between Journalist Twitter and VC...
The Silicon Uncanny Valley of Apps
Vicki’s note: I’m still figuring out my rhythm at work, and as such will be easing back into the newsletter. Expect upcoming posts to be shorter and the...
New job and Normcore pause
Hi Friends, I got a new job. I started as a machine learning engineer at Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com (and a lot of other products), and I...
Into the unknown
Art: A Walk at Sunset, Victor Borisov Musatov, 1903For the past three months, I’ve been doing a lot of walking. Usually, me and the two kids will take a...
You have reached the next level
Vicki’s note: This post is a little light this week because I had an in-depth machine learning post I’ve been wanting to get out the door since *checks...
Taking the shine off the Apple (and FB and Google)
Vicki’s Note: We’re really circling the drain of what’s left of America in 2020, aren’t we? I have nothing smart or relevant to contribute to the dialogue...
Trusting the robots in your life
A couple days ago, I was taking the kids to the park. Usually we try to go outside at least once a day during quarantine. To figure out what we need to wear,...
It's time to maintain
Art: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Tamakatzura Tamatori attacked by the octopusI’ve been trying to write this post about how difficult life has become now that all...