The great A/B/C/D divide
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
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
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
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
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
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...