Vicki
@vickiboykis.com
Founding list[float] engineer. Recsys. Personalization. Infra. Systems. Normcore code. Nutella. Vectors. Words. Vibes. Bad puns (soon).
https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/
https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/
Pinned
Vicki
@vickiboykis.com
· Jan 24
You can just hack on ATProto
Building a lightweight Go app on the Jetstream
vickiboykis.com
ATProto makes programming fun again. Here's a side project I did over the holidays, a small app that surfaces the 10 latest links to GitHub repos from the network. I learned a ton, including Go, Javascript, and a lot about websockets
vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/y...
vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/y...
Reposted by Vicki
"It has, with generative code, become harder and harder to strive towards the lions because the models produce code that is, quite literally, mid" - beautiful post by @vickiboykis.com
newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
I want to see the claw
I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people (even if the journey...
newsletter.vickiboykis.com
October 25, 2025 at 8:21 PM
"It has, with generative code, become harder and harder to strive towards the lions because the models produce code that is, quite literally, mid" - beautiful post by @vickiboykis.com
newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
Reposted by Vicki
Absolutely wonderful from @vickiboykis.com - newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
I want to see the claw
I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people (even if the journey...
newsletter.vickiboykis.com
October 22, 2025 at 11:19 AM
Absolutely wonderful from @vickiboykis.com - newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
daily reminder that BERT still exists and is v good
September 25, 2025 at 10:19 PM
daily reminder that BERT still exists and is v good
When you’re on your fourth merged PR for the week
September 24, 2025 at 12:26 PM
When you’re on your fourth merged PR for the week
something I’ve been thinking about is that all our content retrieval systems are biased towards recency rather than quality which makes it extremely hard to discover old good books, movies, blog posts, etc
September 19, 2025 at 6:24 PM
something I’ve been thinking about is that all our content retrieval systems are biased towards recency rather than quality which makes it extremely hard to discover old good books, movies, blog posts, etc
agents, but only for closing the tabs they know I’m not going to look at ever again
September 19, 2025 at 12:10 PM
agents, but only for closing the tabs they know I’m not going to look at ever again
my version of “phone” versus “big computer” tasks are vscode codebases and JetBrains codebases
September 15, 2025 at 6:35 PM
my version of “phone” versus “big computer” tasks are vscode codebases and JetBrains codebases
Reposted by Vicki
I love the framing of your app as your neighborhood. There’s a sense of shared responsibility that fosters joyful experiences.
September 10, 2025 at 3:50 PM
I love the framing of your app as your neighborhood. There’s a sense of shared responsibility that fosters joyful experiences.
Reposted by Vicki
i was just using a site to buy tickets and it pops up a modal saying "do you want texts?" and when I select "no", it asks me for my phone number anyway and doesn't let me continue unless I provide it
nobody's walkin' around that app, and I still haven't bought those tickets
nobody's walkin' around that app, and I still haven't bought those tickets
September 10, 2025 at 3:25 PM
i was just using a site to buy tickets and it pops up a modal saying "do you want texts?" and when I select "no", it asks me for my phone number anyway and doesn't let me continue unless I provide it
nobody's walkin' around that app, and I still haven't bought those tickets
nobody's walkin' around that app, and I still haven't bought those tickets
One of my core engineering beliefs is that if you are building something you should always be holistically looking at it
vickiboykis.com/2025/09/09/w...
vickiboykis.com/2025/09/09/w...
Walking around the app
You gotta check stuff out
vickiboykis.com
September 10, 2025 at 1:26 PM
One of my core engineering beliefs is that if you are building something you should always be holistically looking at it
vickiboykis.com/2025/09/09/w...
vickiboykis.com/2025/09/09/w...
i wanted to understand the current landscape better, so i did a deep dive on current embedding sizes and architectures vickiboykis.com/2025/09/01/h...
September 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
i wanted to understand the current landscape better, so i did a deep dive on current embedding sizes and architectures vickiboykis.com/2025/09/01/h...
nothing more freeing than pushing absolutely terrible nondescript commit messages to a private repo only you are in
August 30, 2025 at 9:14 PM
nothing more freeing than pushing absolutely terrible nondescript commit messages to a private repo only you are in
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as, is the machine learning or am I? For most engineering problems, I’d prefer me to be learning, for stuff like boilerplate, the machine. but it’s a question I’m constantly asking myself throughout a session.
i rely on llms daily but using them well requires constantly staying in an extremely unnatural mind state, constantly adversarial. i’m not sure this scales very well and i hope we’ll figure out something more sustainable
August 10, 2025 at 5:14 PM
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as, is the machine learning or am I? For most engineering problems, I’d prefer me to be learning, for stuff like boilerplate, the machine. but it’s a question I’m constantly asking myself throughout a session.
added lunr.js to my Hugo blog this weekend to do post search, the part that took the longest was creating the correct search index
vickiboykis.com/2025/08/08/e...
vickiboykis.com/2025/08/08/e...
Enabling Hugo static site search with Lunr.js
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she only wants one thing: for her lovely and mininmal static site to finally have some of the same features that dynamic blogging platforms do, namely sea...
vickiboykis.com
August 9, 2025 at 8:42 PM
added lunr.js to my Hugo blog this weekend to do post search, the part that took the longest was creating the correct search index
vickiboykis.com/2025/08/08/e...
vickiboykis.com/2025/08/08/e...
thinking i need to update this part of the embeddings paper, this was the case when i wrote it but likely no longer true - is everyone using 768 (min) now?
August 9, 2025 at 2:28 PM
thinking i need to update this part of the embeddings paper, this was the case when i wrote it but likely no longer true - is everyone using 768 (min) now?
i bet it feels so good for mypy when you get the types right the first time
August 7, 2025 at 2:42 PM
i bet it feels so good for mypy when you get the types right the first time
Have become fairly allergic to any content that
✅ now
✅ includes
✅ emoji lists
✅ now
✅ includes
✅ emoji lists
August 5, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Have become fairly allergic to any content that
✅ now
✅ includes
✅ emoji lists
✅ now
✅ includes
✅ emoji lists
Trick question, it will never scale perfectly. This is how they tricked us into AWS lambda
mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/ke...
mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/ke...
August 4, 2025 at 10:35 PM
Trick question, it will never scale perfectly. This is how they tricked us into AWS lambda
mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/ke...
mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/ke...
i feel like, even though there is a LOT of good content out there, there still is not a good holistic overview of concurrency in python
August 3, 2025 at 3:10 PM
i feel like, even though there is a LOT of good content out there, there still is not a good holistic overview of concurrency in python
👀
🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.
August 2, 2025 at 5:08 PM
👀
Reposted by Vicki
The reverse of the bitter lesson is when you spend a month trying to solve a problem with deep learning and then solve it in a day with feature engineering and XGBoost. Let's call it the nauseatingly sweet lesson.
July 19, 2025 at 11:58 AM
The reverse of the bitter lesson is when you spend a month trying to solve a problem with deep learning and then solve it in a day with feature engineering and XGBoost. Let's call it the nauseatingly sweet lesson.
Reposted by Vicki
If not honmoon why honmoon shaped?
July 28, 2025 at 6:38 PM
If not honmoon why honmoon shaped?