Why are we using LLMs as calculators?

November 11, 2024

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...

Dead Internet Souls

September 19, 2024

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...

Don't worry about LLMs

May 27, 2024

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...

We've been put in the vibe space

May 6, 2024

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...

How I search in 2024

April 25, 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...

Redis is forked

April 16, 2024

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...

What's new with machine learning in production

January 18, 2024

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...

My favorite books of 2023

December 27, 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...

Why if TYPE_CHECKING in Python?

December 12, 2023

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...

Hello it's Normcore again

December 5, 2023

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)...

What we don't talk about when we talk about building AI apps

July 18, 2023

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,...

Naming things

July 11, 2023

"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...

What are embeddings?

June 7, 2023

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...

Where do we go from here

February 27, 2023

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...

The art of the long goodbye

November 7, 2022

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...

What we talk about when we talk about The Algo

August 8, 2022

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...

Duo, the Push, and the Bandits

May 23, 2022

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...

With the Feed as my witness

March 20, 2022

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...

Scaling Normcore way down

July 11, 2021

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...

The luxury of length

March 14, 2021

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...

The last miles and miles of the vaccine

February 11, 2021

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...

Diamond hands, when memes became power ✋💎🤚

February 4, 2021

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...

The blank slate in your hands

January 27, 2021

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...

Containerized

January 12, 2021

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...

A winter's tale for the end of the year

December 21, 2020

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...

My Hero's Journey to Peloton

December 16, 2020

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...

The rules of the game

December 1, 2020

Playing Chess, Wilhelm Kotarbinski My husband and I have finally started watching Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, making us officially the last people on the face...

Ad block and you don't stop

November 23, 2020

Art: Advertisement for Pope Manufacturing Co., "We are Having a Heavenly Time" Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, 1890 Something I worry about a lot is that I don’t...

The great A/B/C/D divide

November 12, 2020

Art: Argument over a Card Game, Jan Steen What do you see when you power on your doom brick for the first time in the morning? For me, it’s first and...

You're a sky full of stars

November 1, 2020

Art: Starry Night, Edvard Munch, 1922 Vicki’s Note: I guest-wrote a piece for Leon’s newsletter last week on what AI truly means. Go read it! It was sometime...

The rise of the non-expert expert

October 20, 2020

Art: Profit I, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982 I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it was like to write code 20, 30 years ago. At the time, one of my...

The satisfaction of the hand-off

October 8, 2020

Hi, friends! Sorry for the brief absence. I’ve been off putting together some other things. Last week, I taught an introduction to Python for WSDS. And this...

The person on the other side of the crowd

September 22, 2020

Art: Chaos nr. 2, Hilma af Klint, 1096Over the weekend, I was catching up on the piece in New York Magazine by model and actress Emily Ratajkowski, about how...

The chaos of complexity

September 12, 2020

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

September 2, 2020

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

August 29, 2020

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

August 27, 2020

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

August 21, 2020

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)

August 16, 2020

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

August 14, 2020

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

August 5, 2020

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?

August 2, 2020

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

July 26, 2020

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

July 24, 2020

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

July 17, 2020

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

July 10, 2020

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

June 29, 2020

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

June 18, 2020

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

June 14, 2020

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

June 11, 2020

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...