iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/09/2026

feels like I’m the only one pacing tbh and that’s only because I’m getting docker build errors

Reposted by Vicki

Jakob @jakobjarecki.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A booming voice yelling at me "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SAVE DOCUMENTS WITH A LEADING !. ALL OF THEM EVENTUALLY HAVE IT AND OT SORTS NOTHING, YOU FOOL".

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 16/09/2026

Startup idea: small personalized models that are fine tuned on the trauma of your past production incidents

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 07/09/2026

Area woman continuously working in recsys more and more convinced that most ML problems are recsys problems

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 05/09/2026

It’s pretty wild how cleanly the labs have been able to spin basic security incompetence into positive marketing

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 02/09/2026

New post: we need to be deleting more code. vickiboykis.com/2026/09/01/b...

Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 02/08/2026

Blog posts we used to have: “how I reduced latency across several hundred machines by 200 ms by removing two O(n)^2 hot paths” Blog posts we have now: “Here’s how to get the most out of /ultrathink in the latest release of Claudex 3.0.5”

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 29/07/2026

Curious about people’s ML dependency management strategies in the face of supply chain risks. Often pinning dependencies particularly in the torch/HuggingFace ecosystem is the only way to create reproducible training and inference code but that means dependabot isn’t happy.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 16/07/2026

There are like only three design patterns you need to use 80% to make stuff good and fast and elegant Make it a lookup (hashmap) Split it up into smaller pieces (sharding) Combine it into one large piece (map reduce)

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 14/07/2026

Eye bleach: an actual architecture and engineering blog post lobste.rs/s/ko1ji1/lob...

lobste.rs

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

87 comments

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 09/07/2026

Looking to read an in-depth examination of the project history and code evolution of Bun in Zig, along with a technical evaluation of its current Rust re-implementation. I want to check out links to PRs, sidebars on Zig and Rust, the works. Who’s doing this?

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 01/07/2026

Recommended reading if you feel you’ve lost your way , or if you’re having more fun than ever

Code that fits in your head by Mark Seamann

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 25/06/2026

traces are just logs right

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 23/06/2026

Everyone working on recsys/embeddings/information retrieval/search is sleeping on this newsletter if you're not subscribed. I can't believe I didn't mention it before but it just summarizes the best content in the field every week recsys.substack.com

recsys.substack.com

Top Information Retrieval Papers of the Week | Sumit | Substack

A weekly curated newsletter about the latest research papers in the Information Retrieval domain, including Recommender Systems, Search, Retrieval, and Ranking. Click to read Top Information Retrieval...

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/06/2026

the actual most revolutionary thing the ai labs have actually done is make it look like it's insanely easy to duct tape together python microservices with all their concurrency issues and trained models with all their transformers issues and have them run as one api call

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 15/06/2026

new post: how I develop recently using local models. the tooling is now good enough to do agentic workflows and everyone should give them a try! vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/r...

vickiboykis.com

Running local models is good now

Local agentic coding has gotten great over the past few months

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 11/06/2026

The machine learning circle of life

1. This is too big, we need to compress it
2. We compressed it but now it's too small, we need it to generalize
3. It generalizes but it takes too long, we need to make it faster
4. We made it faster but now we have a distributed systems problem, we need to coordinate it
5. We've coordinated it but now we've created a monolith
6. This is too big, we need to compress it

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 11/06/2026

this is so cool, continuing my local experiments and using pi and lm studio and gemma to introspect how i use agents locally. On the left, you can literally see the streaming tokens and the context window filling up.

screenshot of lm studio and pi running in a ghostty terminal

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 10/06/2026

every day we get closer to looping back around to small purpose-built specialized models

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 06/06/2026

Running a local model and harness (Pi + GGUF via LM Studio) and I can see everything it's doing, which is dope.

chat logs from lm studio showing model processing status

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Reposted by Vicki

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

It’s not “do good work and be successful.” It’s doing good work, talking about the work, figuring out how to get your work to the right people, accepting that good work is slower than bad work and finding a path through that anyways

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 30/05/2026

Very strongly recommend breaking out of the token discourse and touching grass from time to time to maintain a grip on reality

What Is Art For?
BOWIE'S BOOKSHELF
THE HUNDRED BOOKS THAT CHANGED DAVID BOWIE'S LIFE
JOHN O'CONNELL
The Beauty of Everyday Things
Soetsu Yanagi
THE POCKET POETS SERIES
LUNCH POEMS
by
Frank O'Hara
SECOND EDITION
DICTIONARY OF SUBJECTS AND SYMBOLS IN ART
JAMES HALL Introduction by Kenneth Clark
ABER NINETEEN

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 24/05/2026

doing an online search and coming across a quora answer that is not only written by a real human but by Adam D'Angelo is a jump scare coming from the dead internet www.quora.com/How-can-I-ge...

Text of Adam D'Angelos' quora answer on how to get good at addressing edge cases in programming

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 21/05/2026

Something happens to my brain after agentic coding that I can’t describe. It’s like cognitive offloading which folks have already written about, but even more. It feels like I can’t think through problems anymore. Like a fog. Using agentic but losing my hard-won agency.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/05/2026

New post: Tagging my blog with BERTopic and LLMs. I suspect as token costs increase, we'll see more blended traditional ML/LLM systems. And, in general, they work really well! vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/t...

vickiboykis.com

Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs

LLMs mean you still need a human in the loop, but in a different part

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 12/05/2026

i miss simclusters so much

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 11/05/2026

Legitimately feels like an unquantifiable vibe shift the last few weeks where the pendulum is swinging back to reasonable takes and people experimenting with model choice 🙏

Top HN headlines over the past 24 with reasonable takes like “Local AI needs to be the norm” and “I’m going back to writing code by hand”

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 09/05/2026

Anyone running a bot that summarizes their discords over a given time? Is this something that’s possible with the API?

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 05/05/2026

I find that I can’t concretely commit to an implementation until I touch the code a bit and one thing that it has gotten easier than ever to do is to get to a draft PR where you share your proposed approach and easier see the trade offs of certain design decisions

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 01/05/2026

this tab ordering tells me everything I need to know about GitHub’s actual product priorities for the next year

GitHub new tab screenshot where agents is ahead of pull requests

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Reposted by Vicki

Gunnar Morling @gunnarmorling.dev · 30/04/2026

Yes, I think my current work on the Hardwood Parquet file parser is a good example: while I can implement it without a lot of dependencies (I decided to ship my own AWS API request signer), hundreds of hours (of LLM usage) went into the project, ensuring correctness, great performance, etc.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 30/04/2026

I don’t buy the idea that libraries will go away since everyone can just write their own now. Maybe for small internal company use-cases. But libraries are not just code, they’re time invested in edge cases, they’re hundreds of hours of human eyes. I don’t want to replace that.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 28/04/2026

Just once I wanna see a research paper say, the tokens we pretrained on were not high-quality or diverse, they were absolute trash we scraped from AMA subreddit longtail submissions combined with everyone's public Venmo transaction messages

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antirez @antirez.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

DeepSeek v4 Flash with *local inference* after 24h of playing with that: even with the 2 bit selective quantization GGUF, iti is the FIRST time I feel I have a frontier model running on my computer. This is *crazy*, and probably a much stronger change in the landscape than PRO.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

One of my favorite pieces that Vicki has written. Art, embeddings, Go, information retrieval, data, humanities, small and local models, atproto, building expertise, flowers 🌷, and where AI fits into all of this.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 24/04/2026

Easy ways to reduce your token spend. No one will do these three weird tricks to write less code because they’re so boring: 1. Talk to other people in your org to get better requirements 2. Have humans write good documentation 3. Make your internal search tool better

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 23/04/2026

What I most desire doesn’t exist on the market yet: a coding agent model, but it’s only been trained on code reviews by Eastern Europeans.

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Reposted by Vicki

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

now public and quite a bit more polished: a fully local browser-based code review UI. Review your (or your agent's) diff before inflicting it on the world. σκέψις: viewing, perception by the senses. Examination, speculation, consideration.

github.com

GitHub - oxidecomputer/skepsis: Local web UI for code review

Local web UI for code review. Contribute to oxidecomputer/skepsis development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 23/04/2026

periodic reminder that if you don’t use your own model artifacts they will at some point either be deprecated or experience model drift. that’s still the case if you use your own models but you get to control that change

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 21/04/2026

Last week, I gave a keynote at appliedml.us/2026/ on machine learning and engineering. Like a lot of us, I've had questions and anxiety around software development today. The talk covers why good engineering is still important (and 🌷). vickiboykis.com/2026/04/20/b...

vickiboykis.com

Build yourself flowers

Living and working in a world of generated code.

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Reposted by Vicki

Andrew Schechtman-Rook @andrewrook.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Great post, perfectly encapsulates something I don't see enough people taking about: these models are just not great at considering the ergonomics of the software they're writing

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 14/04/2026

Why does it always feel easier to catch up with any given slack than any given discord?

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