Build yourself flowers

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 myself giving a version of this talk with MacWhisper, and transcribed it with Whisper locally. This part took 45 minutes (the total time of my practice run.) Then, I ran it through Gemini Flash 2.5 running in Pi to break into paragraphs. I also had Gemini break up my slide deck from a PDF I generated from Google Slides, into individual images to insert into the blog post and optimize the image format to webp for blog rendering. This part took about 10 minutes. Then I went through the text paragraph by paragraph manually to make corrections, remove redundant phrasing and pauses, and added clarifications to make it more legible than a talk. This part took 3 hours. Before all that, I generated the content for this talk. This part took 13 years. I’m Vicki, and I build machine…