We're still in the steam-powered days of machine learning

November 26, 2019

The reveal of the ridiculous Cybertruck design last week made me curious about the history of cars. If you look at pictures of cars from the early days (as...

Tablets at the table

$ · November 22, 2019

A recent trend I’ve seen at restaurants over the last five years or so is kids glued to screens sitting next to family members who are talking to each other...

What's up with Russia's internet

November 19, 2019

There are several ways the internet as we know it today could end.It could end with an established capitalist panopticon that monitors what we’re doing and...

The price of good journalism

$ · November 15, 2019

Earlier this week, American journalists put together and circulated a spreadsheet of media salaries in Google Sheets. This kind of thing is becoming a lot...

Open thread: Is whistleblowing ever ok?

November 13, 2019

Yesterday’s post about Snowden seemed be controversial (although I didn’t intend for it to be.) So now I’m curious: if you take him as a personality out of...

Edward Snowden and our great cross-hatch

November 12, 2019

A couple of housekeeping items before today’s post: Thank you to Ben for this beautiful logo! Do you like it? I really do. I think it embodies the spirit of...

The highest-interest bank account

$ · November 8, 2019

When the Iron Curtain came down on the Soviet Union after World War II and all capitalist influences were kicked out, it was a travesty for the population....

Die Gedanken sind frei

November 4, 2019

In the late 1700s, a student folk song floating around in Germany was finally written down and put to music. It was called “Die Gedanken sind frei,”...

Eric Schmidt and the great revolving door

November 1, 2019

Last year, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, gave an interview to Tyler Cowen, who runs the long-standing contrarian economics blog Marginal...

I spent $1 billion and all I got was a Rubik's cube

October 29, 2019

Art: David HinnebuschLast week, I saw this tweet come across my timeline: OpenAI @OpenAIWe've trained an AI system to solve the Rubik's Cube with a human-...

Imgur is bad now

$ · October 25, 2019

Every night in the seven minutes between when I go to sleep and the baby wakes up for the first time, I scroll through the Imgur app to wind down. Silly...

Open thread: Using Big Tech tools

October 23, 2019

Howdy everyone! It’s been a while since I did one of these. The last one about good recommenders ended up being a great discussion, so please chime in. I got...

Our bosses live in our phones

October 22, 2019

For a couple years now, I’ve been trying to figure out who owns my phone. Not physically. I know for sure that I overpaid Apple for the privilege of...

The beautiful grind

$ · October 18, 2019

I’m coming up on being halfway done with my second maternity leave (😩), and since I spend all day on maternity leave, I also spend a lot of time thinking...

Neural nets are just people all the way down

October 16, 2019

When I was in seventh grade, we had to take a class called home ec. Everyone brushed it off as a super easy class. “All you have to do is cook and sew,”...

The curse of being Big on the Internet

October 11, 2019

I first came across Siraj Raval around 2016, when a data scientist friend sent me his video. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and I had to agree that it was....

Backing up our lives on Dropbox

October 10, 2019

Vicki B🎃ykis @vboykis"Dropbox brings your files together, in one central place. They’re easy to find and safely synced across all your devices." Natalia...

How much I make running a paid newsletter

October 7, 2019

Social media platforms are becoming bigger than ever (Facebook claims 2.4 billion monthly active users),but it’s harder to find any real people on there....

How do you like THAT, Elon Musk?

October 3, 2019

(Vicki’s note: 👋 Hello new followers who came from the Stack Overflow Newsletter and Elezea! I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia and this newsletter is...

The death of the last comment section on the internet

September 30, 2019

Vicki’s note: This is a post by request from Rian, who runs the Elezea newsletter, which you should definitely check out. As always, please send me requests...

Greta on mute

$ · September 26, 2019

Like a lot of people, I’ve been following Greta Thunberg over the past couple of months. As the press hype around her has grown to a fervor pitch, I’ve been...

Logs were our lifeblood. Now they're our liability.

September 23, 2019

In the beginning, writes Jay Kreps, co-founder of Confluent and co-creator of Kafka, there was the log. which WeWork, now imploding, still does not needA log...

Sorry, I won't hire you

September 19, 2019

I saw this Twitter thread a couple days ago (thanks, Stas!), and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: Toxic @toxicIf I see palantir on a resume, I trash...

Silicon Valley runs on Saudi

September 16, 2019

Vicki’s Note: I actually wrote this before I even went on maternity leave and originally had this scheduled to go out on Tuesday, but due to recent events in...

Was the meeting worth it?

$ · September 13, 2019

Earlier this week, the baby slept for four hours in a row, and I started getting crazy ideas, like taking a 10-minute shower and starting to work on some...

Between sales and execution culture

September 10, 2019

Vicki’s Note: This is the third part in a series on data science and consulting, a topic near and dear to my heart, since I work in consulting and do data...

Books I'm reading lately

$ · September 6, 2019

I’m not sure how, but I’m still managing to do some reading. Must be all those late-night feeding sessions where I blearily stare at my phone screen for 20...

Le Tweet, C'est Moi

September 3, 2019

On Friday, hackers took over Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account and tweeted racial slurs for about fifteen minutes until Twitter finally shut them down. The...

Thread: WeWork, dongles, and Demo Day

August 30, 2019

There is so much Normcore-y stuff going on lately that I couldn’t decide on a single topic for this week. Consider this is an open invite to discuss any of...

No photos please

$ · August 28, 2019

Lately, my Facebook feed is a ghost town. I don’t mean that no one posts on it anymore, just that when I scroll through it, I get no information from it....

Measuring unhappiness

August 26, 2019

Note: This is the second part of however many I feel like in a series about data science consulting. Check out the first part, on selling data science, here....

All my dongles

August 22, 2019

Ever since I got the iPhone 8 last year, I’ve had a dongle problem. The dongle is the stupidest decision Apple has made in the last five years (other than...

Baby-friendly ho$pital$

August 19, 2019

Author’s note: This newsletter takes a while to get to the tech tie-in, but I promise it’s there. This is an issue that’s super important to me these days....

Thread: Favorite business fiction

August 16, 2019

I wrote earlier this week that I didn’t see the need for most business books (although I got quite a few managers emailing me, letting me know that they DO...

I'd do anything for tech, but I won't do that

$ · August 14, 2019

I came across this (well-aged) tweet a couple days ago and it really resonated with me, because I find myself doing a lot of these things also:🖖Jochen Mader...

Do we need tech management books?

August 12, 2019

Several months ago, everyone on my Twitter feed started talking about An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson, an engineering...

The Trelloing of marriage

$ · August 9, 2019

A couple months ago, Austen, who runs YC Combinator company Lambda School, which provides a free tech bootcamp education until you get a job (and then you...

Selling data science

August 6, 2019

In one of my last newsletters, I linked to a Reddit thread, “How does data science work in the consulting space?” and said that if there was enough interest,...

Thread: Which companies do you trust?

August 2, 2019

On Monday, I wrote about how most company decision-making processes, particularly those that generate the algorithms that shape our online lives, are...

Selling Apple to babies

July 31, 2019

A couple years ago when my husband and I were staring new parenthood dead in the face at 3:45 a.m., we resolved not to read any baby books, so as to not go...

I wanna be in the black box where it happens

July 29, 2019

In the popular Hamilton musical, a singing Aaron Burr, left out of negotiations on the Compromise of 1790, laments in “The Room Where it Happens,”No one else...

Twitter still works, in spite of Twitter

July 26, 2019

This week, Twitter rolled out a website redesign that’s apparently been a year in the making. It features ginormous buttons, frenzied efforts to get you to...

The deep thoughts of Cal Newport

July 23, 2019

A couple years ago, I started hearing more and more about Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown who wrote a book called “Deep Work”. In the book, he says...

Normcore maternity 🐣

July 22, 2019

Like I wrote on Twitter this weekend, I had a baby boy! Vicki Boykis @vboykisSome personal news: I had a baby this weekend! 👶 Everyone is healthy, we are...

Are there ANY good recommenders?

July 18, 2019

This week, I got an excellent question from a reader (keep them coming!). Paul writes, Following up on your two posts about recsys I can imagine that you...

Housekeeping: The survey results!

July 16, 2019

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey! It’s been immensely helpful, and in the spirit of Radical Transparency, here are the results (sorry about the...

Big Recsys Redux: Recs at Netflix

July 15, 2019

I wrote about recommender systems last week, but there is so much discussion around their effects right now in the mainstream tech press that they deserve a...

The Phoenix Project

July 11, 2019

I read tech/management books much in the same way that other people (also me) read gossip magazines or watch CNN: to try and understand the ridiculousness of...

Housekeeping: Help improve Normcore Tech!

July 9, 2019

Hey readers! Two quick things today. 1. Reader Survey I’ve been at this newsletter game a little over a month now, and would like some feedback on how I’m...

The reign of Big Recsys

July 8, 2019

If you’ve ever used YouTube’s autoplay feature, Amazon’s “More Like This”, anything on Netflix, or used Facebook’s News Feed, you’ve used one of the most...