vicki @vboykis Twitter profile | Pikagi

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vicki

@vboykis

52,560

Followers

1,151

Following

4,079

Media

37,180

Statuses

Born: USSR. Raised: USA. ML Eng @mozillaai Ex: @duosec @Tumblr , @automattic Nights: 👦 & 👧 working on some ✨ new vectors ✨

Philadelphia

https://t.co/nMFBuQbC6v

Joined January 2009

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@vboykis

vicki

11 months

Ok, so LLMs are a Thing. How do they work? Embeddings. WTF are embeddings? I spent a year doing a deep dive. But when I was researching, I couldn't find anything that explained them in business, engineering, AND math contexts. So I wrote a thing.🚀

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What are embeddings?

A deep-dive into machine learning embeddings.

vickiboykis.com

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Last Seen Profiles

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Women: I can change him Him:

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

It's only called a Neural Network if it comes from the Neuralè region of France. Otherwise you have to call it a logistic regression.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Ten years ago, I didn't know what unit tests, version control, or continuous integration were. Today, my code fails at each of these steps at least once a day. Follow your dreams.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Me at career day in middle school, brightly: Okay, kids. I'm a 'machine learning engineer', which is just a fancy word for - Kid in the back: Yeah, we know what you do. PyTorch or Tensorflow? Me: Well, I, uh, don't do deep learn- Kids: BOOOO GO HOME I BET YOU ONLY USE ONE CORE

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Intro to machine learning books make so much sense after you have at least five years of experience in machine learning.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Hottest programming skills in 2018: 5. Fixing git merge conflicts 4. Correctly mapping ports in Docker containers to host machines 3. Getting info from AWS documentation 2. Pulling summary stats from a data stream 1. Turning any of the above into a conference talk about AI

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

A senior developer is someone who fluently hates more than one programming language.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

ML textbooks have titles like “A Gentle Introduction to Linear Algebra for Data Analysis” and then the first sentence hits you out the gate with, “Assume the inverse covariance matrix theta we were imagining in our head before you picked up the book is transposed to reveal— ”

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Sorting Hat: Merge sort. Harry Potter: Er, excuse me? Sorting Hat: The white board, do a merge sort. Harry Potter: But I thought Hogwarts was a mag- Dumbledore: My dear boy, castle rent is much too expensive. We've pivoted to SaaS products. The hat does our interviews now.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 months

LLMs are so weird because one side is people with five PhDs who have been studying neuron activations for the past three decades and on the other side is someone called leetm5n with an anime avatar just casually releasing increasingly better performing fine tunes of mistral

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Name a more iconic trio, I'll wait.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

CDC says you can use log4j again.

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@vboykis

vicki

10 months

hundred startups just tanked

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It's a heartfelt romance about two data scientists who have never met, but leave each other carefully-commented notes in a shared codebase, falling in love in the process. It's called "The Jupyter Notebook." Producer: Get out.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Somewhere in the multiverse, this HN exists.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It's an ensemble sitcom about a lovable, goofball DevOps team that works for a startup in New York and investigates outages. It's called Brooklyn Five-Nines. Producer: Get out.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Hey, I’m trying to improve this unsupervised model to correctly label users. Looking for an intern to improve it. Here’s a picture of the current clusters. If anyone has ideas, feel free to respond to this tweet with a gist of your implementation. Winner gets a lollipop.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

If you use your default system Python, don’t worry about what’s in the vaccine.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Here is a way to think about what actually happens when we type inside the ChatGPT textbox. Wonderful paper.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Unreal. This thing has gone too far.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 months

He train on test or what?

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

New blog post: For the past couple years, I've been telling people who ask me for advice not to go into data science. Here's why: The data science job market is way oversaturated. Here's what they should do instead.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

By age 30 you should have a group of friends that talk you out of distributed systems

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

One of my greatest weird little joys in life is stripping the UTM parameters in links before I send them to other people.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Some MIT faculty have put together a course called "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education." Having looked it over a bit, it looks fantastic and will benefit data science people from non-dev backgrounds fill in a lot of gaps, too.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

missing.csail.mit.edu

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

I was worried ChatGPT would make me obsolete and then I tried it and it almost got the syntax I wanted, I just had to prompt it seventeen more times, now I’m pair programming with someone with no long-term memory and network timeouts every day, this thing is truly revolutionary

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

If the machine is the one that’s learning why am I so tired

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Ten years ago I was working with malformed data solely in spreadsheets. After ten years of hard work learning engineering and statistics, I finally am blessed to be working with malformed data in queues, matrices, containers, and serialized formats.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Every NPR podcast: Host 1: I'm Natasha Gutierrez-Levine. Host 2: And I'm Kevyn Smith-Witherington Jones. Host 1: And today we're exploring Borks, the biodegradable sporks handmade in Vermont. *olive oil sizzles on a pan* *warm guitar riff* Host 2: *nonchalantly* Stay with us.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

*cries in Slavic*

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

👑🐐👑

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Suppose you have to choose between a black box AI surgeon that runs on TensorFlow 1.0 on an EC2 instance that hasn't been upgraded to Python 3 but has a 80% cure rate and a black box AI surgeon with an 80% cure rate that runs on Excel vlookups. Do you want to live on this planet?

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Dream data science/engineering conference agenda

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

This is really weird and surreal time for happy personal news, but today is my first day as a machine learning engineer @automattic ! 👋🎉 💻

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@vboykis

vicki

4 months

This is actually not dumb! One of the first things I learned year 1 on the job was that executives are often busy and consume content very differently from the rest of us at work, usually via email on the phone. (BlackBerry at the time 🫠

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

December 31 Resolutions: 1. Well-named Jupyter notebooks that run in order 2. No random temporary S3 buckets 3. Clean commit messages 4. Small p-values, good A/B tests, no peeking 5. Lots of READMEs January 16: 1. This model runs. Please, please, don't ask me how it works.

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@vboykis

vicki

19 days

An absolutely fantastic way to increase this is to start a blog. Almost all the cool fun stuff in my professional life for me has come from doing stuff then blogging about it.

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A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route...

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz

@EmilybyNight

Emily

20 days

"The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated."

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Hope everyone is enjoying their week-long stint as a data scientist, the most glamorous tech job of the last 10 years, supposed to be spent analyzing sophisticated models, but really spent mostly monitoring those few stray batch import jobs that haven't finished yet.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Some personal news: I had a baby this weekend! 👶 Everyone is healthy, we are thrilled, and big sister is thrilled. ❤️ So I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone on Twitter either at 2:37 am or next year.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Me at the beginning of the decade versus me at the end

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Inject it into my veins

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Me, standing outside Geoffrey Hinton’s office, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, shouting at passers-by: IT’S ALL A SCAM. THERE IS NO AI. NEURAL NETS ARE JUST MATRIX OPERATIONS. *sobbing softly as guards approach* they’re just matrix operations.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

This is the most terrifying page I’ve read all week. From Creativity, Inc. by Pixar’s Ed Catmull.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

DALL-E this and Stable Diffusion that, but we still can't copy and paste text directly from PDFs and keep the formatting.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

Being vaccinated doesn't mean you can stop writing unit tests

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Hot data science trends: 2011 T-tests on laptops 2012 Hadoop 2013 Bayesian inference 2016 Spark 2017 Deep learning 2019 Reinforcement learning 2022 Robot war 2023 Cloud computing outlawed 2024 Computers outlawed 2025 T-tests on pen and paper

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It's a reality competition show featuring two groups people that can't stop talking about what they do: gym rats and data scientists. We pit them against each other in feats of strength. It's called "CrossFit Validation" Producer: Get out.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

I am much less worried about sentient AIs than the fact that we are surrounded and influenced by machine learning systems and are not taught how to reason through how they work.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

In order to encourage social distancing, it is now mandated that every matrix is a sparse matrix.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

GitHub just wrote an article about how they had to write their own search engine (in Rust, for performance reasons) and a new probabilistic data structure to reduce indexing time because ES and Lucene were blockers for them but sure big data is over 😅

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

Gonna start a conference called #NormIPS that’s just presentations of middlebrow ML topics. “how to structure Python packages 2022”, “how many k-folds is too many”, “how to make the browser pop-up come up when the notebook is done running”, “putting features in Postgres”, etc.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

Big shoutout to this book. I’ve already recommended it to a lot of people looking for either an intro or refresh to linear algebra and am psyched to recommend it in an official capacity.

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@thomasnield76

Thomas Nield

2 years

The paperback for my @OReillyMedia book "Essential Math for Data Science" is now available! Thanks to the hard-working folks at O’Reilly for helping make this book as great as possible for readers. It is going to fill a much-needed gap.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

How it started. How it’s going.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It’s a gripping action thriller about a detective who switches from Java to Python, hoping to catch a criminal developer, who then switches from Python to Java. Both have extreme syntax difficulties. It’s called Brace/Off. Producer: Get out.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Marginalia, the indie search engine that surfaced non-commercial content first, is currently on the front page of HN and handling the traffic load with one $5k commodity server with 128GB RAM/24 cores at 85% utilization with a single Java app

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

LogJ 2Log2J: 2 Log 2 Furious Log3J: Tokyo Drift Log4J Log5: The Fate of J

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Job Req: ------ Years of Experience: 37 PhD: Required Languages: Python, R, Scala, Fortran, and Cantonese Experience with: Machine Learning, DevOps, Agile, Marie Kondo Method Someone who is good at recruiting, help me find a data scientist, my company is dying.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

I'm an introvert, so I'm not having as hard of a time as the poor extroverts, but something that I really miss is ambiently being around people. I sometimes like being in cafes, in workspaces, surrounded by conversation and the pulse of busy-ness, feeling like a part of humanity.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

And the second part. Tfw maternity leave saves the day.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Fifty billion years ago in March, before 2020 really hit the ground running, I started working on a fun proof-of-concept ML project to really explain all the things that need to happen for machine learning to work in the wild. I finally wrote it all up.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

When you go to a dude's website and it's just plain HTML, not even any CSS, and links to posts like "Some thoughts on prime numbers" and "Efficiently checking tries for fun and profit" and a picture of him in a sweater at a party from 2014, watch the fuck out. This guy codes.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

“Give me six hours to run a deep learning model and I will spend the first four tuning Kubernetes.” – Abraham Lincoln

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

Don't touch that, that's my emotional support Sublime Text tab for making sure copy/paste gets formatted in plain text

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

Have to install Python on a new machine, goodbye forever

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Neural nets when you ask them to explain even a single output

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Marked safe from thought leadership

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

You do realize that if AI autocompletes your code, that means you have more free time for meetings, right

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@vboykis

vicki

2 months

i'm just a girl standing in front of the ml research community please begging everyone to type their python method inputs and outputs especially if they are tensors or weird nested dicts of lists of dicts

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

The more programming languages I learn, the fewer strong opinions I have about any one language other than just as a tool to get something done.

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@vboykis

vicki

7 years

As a data person, here's my understanding of the front-end development landscape at the moment:

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

Yeah, of course, I work 90 hours a week, but 60 of those are writing my own CSV parser

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

Tired of the fight between R and Python? There's another way.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

My developer path: Learning how to work with dirty data in Excel @ 19 Learning how to work with dirty data in Access @ 24 Learning how to work with dirty data in pandas @ 25 Learning how to work with dirty data in scikit @ 28 Learning how to work with dirty data in Airflow @ 33

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It's a musical comedy about an overeager team of data scientists that does way too many tests on bad data. It's called "Gimme Gimme Gimme a NaN after Midnight." Producer: Get out. Me: *over my shoulder* The team calls themselves A/B/B/A.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

Producer: Pitch me. Me: It’s a high-stakes Korean thriller where you watch people under enormous stress kill Linux processes. It’s called Pid Game. Producer: Get out.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Checking out Effective Python by @haxor . I’m a big fan of the book so far because it takes all the Pythonic best practices you hear about in conferences and on StackOverflow and contenxtualizes and organizes them. Thanks to the publisher for sending this over.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

I love how the LinkedIn crowd is like, “Get fifteen hours of sleep, create space for your meditation. Truly focus on your success.” Buddy, just now as I was trying to eat a piece of toast for 2 minutes, the toddler found me and bit me. LMK how that fits into The Strategy.

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@vboykis

vicki

7 years

I couldn't find a comprehensive guide for how to go from #Python scripts to a packaged project, so I wrote one. 🐍

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

They don’t tell you this in the paper (well they do but you have to read it like 15 times)

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

The hardest problem in machine learning is getting off your chair to do the 2-factor auth confirm when your phone is two rooms away.

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Throwing "idempotent" into all my documentation and watching people bow to my unyielding technical acumen.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

Spotify Wrapped, but for my command line history

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@vboykis

vicki

6 years

CTO: We’re thinking of replacing our on-perm server with a distributed system in the cloud. What kinds of considerations would help us make that decision? Me:

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

🎉🚨This is real. 🚨🎉 #NormConf is happening. December 15. Online. Free. A day of normcore data takes. It’s gonna be great. Registration is open.

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@vboykis

vicki

11 months

When there is a Lewis Carroll quote on the first page of a textbook, you know you are about to have your mind blown wide open

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@vboykis

vicki

2 months

2013 — 2023: you were hired to do machine learning but do data engineering 2023 — : you were hired to do machine learning but do web dev

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

Ok I’m only 14 pages into Thinking in Systems but I’m going to have to go all in on recommending on it.

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

My working theory is that 10% of any data science/adjacent job is actual machine learning. Unless your title is "Machine Learning Engineer", in which case it can be as much as 20%.

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@vboykis

vicki

6 months

that’s really what it says

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

The NLP My kids community at 5 am 🤝 Attention is all you need

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

Smoothly segues into the iq bell curve meme.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 months

Everything in ML and engineering is borderline ridiculous and you need to have a sense of humor about the work or ngmi

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

When you split up sentences into smaller strings but in the process make your text sound like a made-up Elvish language, that's tolkienization.

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@vboykis

vicki

3 years

Every data science article on Medium is like “How every day I deploy a million-feature deep learning model at scale to millions of users. This is Real machine learning.” Meanwhile I spent a good half hour today figuring out why sbt wouldn’t build and it was because of a typo.

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@vboykis

vicki

4 years

2019: + Had my second baby + Read 103 books + Started a newsletter that now has 250+ paid and 3k free subscribers + Changed 1k + diapers + Cancelled a load balancer that was costing me $50/month in AWS 2020 Resolutions: + Sleep more than 5 hours at a time

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@vboykis

vicki

1 year

Getting marginally depressed thinking about all those brilliant Joel on Software essays, the level of craftsmanship in the software, those gorgeous offices, the whole of Stack Overflow’s contributions to humanity and for what? To end up as training data for ChatGPT.

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@vboykis

vicki

2 years

And these DataFrames…are they in the RAM with us now?

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@vboykis

vicki

5 years

VC: Ok, whatchu got? Me: Imagine WeWork, but with clean and stocked bathrooms. VC: That's just WeWork. Me: No it's not. VC: We won't fund it. Me: The bathrooms will be cleaned with AI. VC: Here's $30 million.

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