Vicki Boykis

Where they publish

• Site vickiboykis.com Her blog and essays on ML engineering, embeddings, recsys and reading.

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  Recent

  • Bad code is kudzu 1 Sept 2026 Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overt…
  • Write for people 12 Aug 2026 Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we ar…
  • Running local models is good now 15 Jun 2026 I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B…

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  • We should be more tired than the model 28 May 2026 Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but non…
  • Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs 18 May 2026 I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs. You can see the tags in the sidebar to the right (or in the footer on mobile). I’ve done this before in 2023, with GGUF Mistral using llama-cpp, b…
  • Build yourself flowers 20 Apr 2026 This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded my…
  • Mechanical sympathy 13 Apr 2026 Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design.…
  • On Programming Joy and Octocat 6 Apr 2026 While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility, I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be. Not the internet people talk about from the 90s, but the internet that we used to have even 1…
  • NASA Elements of Engineering Excellence 5 Apr 2026 I stumbled across this report from NASA, “Elements of Engineering Excellence”, published in 2012, The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC Engineering in 2006 who as…
  • Antidote 4 Mar 2026 If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days. The world is telling you that your thinking process is…
  • Querying 3 billion vectors 21 Feb 2026 Recently, I got nerd-sniped by this exchange between Jeff Dean and someone trying to query 3 billion vectors. I was curious to see if I could implement the optimal map-reduce solution he alludes to in his reply. A vecto…
  • 2025 in review 22 Dec 2025 Jeune fille lisant une lettre à la bougie, Jean-Baptiste Santerre, 1700 Machine learning engineers spend their lives alternating between two states: staring at tqdm progress bars during model training and staring at err…
  • I want to see the claw 20 Oct 2025 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 has been long and hard and has involved lots of YAML). I have s…
  • Walking around the app 9 Sept 2025 There is a very vigorous debate happening online right now around what shape evaluation for LLM-based products should take. I don’t want to rehash all of it, other than saying that if you are building any applications w…
  • How big are our embeddings now and why? 1 Sept 2025 A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more dimensions during training would create diminishing returns for…
  • Enabling Hugo static site search with Lunr.js 8 Aug 2025 There comes a time in every woman’s life when she only wants one thing: for her mininmal static site to finally have some of the same features that dynamic blogging platforms do, namely search. So now I’ve i…
  • My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs 16 Jul 2025 One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023). It’s extremely well-thought out, unintrusive, and makes me a more effective developer. Most import…
  • 20 years of YC 17 Mar 2025 I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’…
  • You can just hack on ATProto 23 Jan 2025 Icon by iconixar Since I signed up for Bluesky last year, I’ve been wanting to make something using the AT Protocol that the platform is built on top of. I finally had a chance to do it over the holiday break and…
  • How FastAPI path operations work 14 Jan 2025 If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI. There are a lot of features that make FastAPI easy to get started with. There are also a lot of nuances t…

  Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.

• GitHub github.com/veekaybee Her code, including Viberary and the embeddings text.

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  Recent

  • veekaybee — About 25 Jun 2026
  • favorite_essays — Updating list of favorite internet essays 7 Mar 2026
  • what_are_embeddings — A deep dive into embeddings starting from fundamentals 17 Jan 2026

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  • claude-code-docker — Lightweight Docker for Claude Code 22 Jun 2025
  • gitfeed — Feed of posts from Bluesky that have a GitHub link 15 Mar 2025
  • ml-garden — Personal Learning Mind Map 10 Dec 2024
  • blusky — Playing with Python Bluesky SDK 18 Nov 2024
  • viberary — Good books, good vibes 6 Jan 2024
  • viberary_model — ONNX Model for Viberary 29 Oct 2023
  • venti 22 May 2023
  • spark-calc — Spark memory settings calculator 4 May 2023

  Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.