iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 23/06/2026

and of course I'm so behind 😭

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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 · 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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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 · 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 · 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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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 24/09/2025

When you’re on your fourth merged PR for the week

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 09/08/2025

philosophical question, what would you consider the dim size of a matryoshka embedding?

matryoshka embedding with multiple dimensions after truncation

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 09/08/2025

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?

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 04/08/2025

Trick question, it will never scale perfectly. This is how they tricked us into AWS lambda mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/ke...

Which do you prefer, a program that provides 100 transactions per second on a single CPU but doesn’t scale or 10 transactions per second and scales perfectly?

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 23/07/2025

This was the phishing email I got, which had links to my actual Twitter settings. If you get something similar, don't click!

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 07/07/2025

Yes! vickiboykis.com/2024/01/15/w...

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 05/05/2025

👑🐐 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389...

tzury 5 hours ago | prev | next [–]

I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2].

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 20/03/2025

Docker is doing local LLMs 👀 www.youtube.com/live/mk_2MIW...

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/03/2025

can’t even let the old neurons rot for 20 min on insta

Instagram ad that says “replace doomscrolling with Python micro learning”

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 27/02/2025

Ah yeah. In that case I'd probably structure it mostly something like this (depending on the language,what my users expect) docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/... There's a top-level project (not sure I'd always use "packages", but bird-feeder could be the app and seeds the API/SDK)

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 27/02/2025

is this for the search UI or the results? I find it to be pretty good, one of the only good interfaces for industrial RAG...so far. The cited sources really are what do it for me.

how does an autoencoder work, perplexity

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 26/02/2025

Just rereading some recsys papers from 2022, could be blanket-applied to LLM evaluation today ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/i...

Current offline evaluation methodologies evolved from experimental practice in Machine Learning (ML) and Information Retrieval (IR). However, evaluating recommender systems involves added complexities that challenge the simplifications upon which the ML and IR evaluation methodologies were developed. In particular, the ground truth for evaluating recommendations-required for meaningful experimentation-is difficult to obtain at scale in any controlled environment. This is because the source of ground truth information is people end-users in large numbers, who cannot be bypassed or proxied in any meaningful way, since the
"truth" being sought is precisely the individual and subjective inclinations and preferences of those people.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 07/02/2025

damn this is super slick

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 21/01/2025

How do we think they picked these?

Perplexity welcome screen with floating queries like “why are flamingoes pink” and “the history of pizza”

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 13/01/2025

Non è possibile fuori dall'italia :/

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 11/01/2025

Found this absolute gem of a texbook on NLP recently, with context from the last few years web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

Screenshot of linked page with a table of contents of an NLP textbook, Speech and Language Processing

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 07/01/2025

Programming for about ten years

What made programming finally "click" for you?

Hey guys, what was the one thing you learned that made programming finally "click" for you? I'm struggling right now and looking for ideas to improve and become a better programmer.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 06/01/2025

Getting cleaner and cleaner, unfortunately still doesn't do present tense well :\

TUI tool to generate commit messages using ollama

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 06/01/2025

Vibe check is ok on smaller diffs, falls apart on larger ones but the goal is to also make this into a runnable more scientific test suite for this kind of stuff.

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 06/01/2025

Making some progress here, small pretty runnable that generates potential commit messages for you using various models via the ollama APi

Output from a Go make run command that generates commit messages from an LLM

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 04/01/2025

What I'm wondering is, how do I know that the places suggested by Gemini/ChatGPT are real places? With Perplexity it's easy because I have the links.

perplexity search results for new york attractions

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 04/01/2025

Does it depend on the model? Haven't been able to trigger it

what are some fun places to visit in new york in gemini

what are some fun places to visit in new york in openai

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 03/01/2025

Very very spicy, a comedy of mistaken identity errors since his name is Simone and hers is Andrea

Come hai detto che ti chiami by Alessandra Pasqui

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 30/12/2024

I feel like I could do a whole book of these

Tuxedo Winnie The Pooh meme, top panel says "making the prompt longer", bottom panel says "in-context learning"

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 29/12/2024

👀 You Can Just Do Things (tm) Jetstream edition: consuming the jetstream, returning the most recent 10 links people have posted about and linking to the github repo

screenshot of app with the 10 latest bluesky github links including the post, link, and github metadata for each link

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 29/12/2024

Have been using Mistral:latest for a long time both as a llamafile and via ollama, still works really well for me. (Have also been trying out all of these variations for vibe checks recently)