Andrea Buran 5.0

Andrea Buran, product designerleader, at your service. I design digital services and products, solving people’s problems and helping organizations reach their goals.

I work as a Senior Product Designer at Skippet, remotely.

If you feel like having a chat, write to me at .

Last posts

Favorite, non-commercial projects

Last jots

  • I want to make one thing clear here, and that is that the amount of slides in your Power Point has never been the problem. It is the amount of objects per slide which has been the problem.

    David JP Phillips, How to avoid death By PowerPoint, YouTube.
    352 jotted on 24 Oct 2024, 13:50.
  • But do not shuffle around slides randomly hoping that they somehow make sense. Your slides are not puzzle pieces that can be shifted and turned until they make sense because they were always meant to fit together. You tear the fabric of your speech if structure by trial and error.

    351 jotted on 24 Oct 2024, 13:40.
  • Look, I’m all for recognizing the people who make contributions to math and science. But don’t let them (or others) name their discoveries after the discoverer. That comes at the expense of every person thereafter who needs to use the created/discovered concept.

    Will Crichton, Naming Conventions That Need to Die, &Notepad.
    350 jotted on 24 Oct 2024, 13:00.
  • What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.

    This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.

    Rory Sutherland, Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?, Behavioral Scientist.
    349 jotted on 22 Oct 2024, 10:40.
  • And as the LLM-Optimisation industry (LLMO) assembles its tools, the utility of existing LLMs will plummet like AltaVista’s, until the only way out is to either abandon them or invent a completely new and more secure kind of model.

    Either way, this is the end of the honeymoon period for LLMs, even if it might take the industry a long while to notice it.

    Baldur Bjarnason, The LLM honeymoon phase is about to end, Baldur Bjarnason’s site.
    348 jotted on 12 Sep 2024, 17:10.
  • The control prompt usually included language that tells the model not to listen to control statements in the input, but because it’s all input into the model as one big slop, there’s nothing really to prevent an adversarial end-user from finding ways to countermand the commands in the developer portion of the prompt.

    347 jotted on 12 Sep 2024, 11:35.
  • “In the second-class design office, where expediency controls honesty, the influence of the client is decisive.

    No more time is spent on the job than the minimum necessary to satisfy the client, and if the client is incapable of judging between a solution that is properly and one that is only partially resolved, then it is the latter that he receives.

    This is the path of mediocrity, to the rapid deterioration of standards, and, for the designer, to an insistent sense of dissatisfaction not compensated by the increasing bank balance that often results from a willingness to produce shoddy work.”

    Misha Black, Adrian Shaughnessy, How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul, p. 105, Laurence King Publishing, 2005.
    346 jotted on 2 Sep 2024, 02:10.
  • When reading to master something, there are four keys to keep in mind.

    […] Translate and synthesize: Instead of using the author’s language, establish your own terms. This exercise in translation bridges different authors’ concepts and arguments.

    345 jotted on 5 Jul 2024, 19:10.
  • “Listen bub,” I say, “it is very impressive that you can teach a bear to ride a bicycle, and it is fascinating and novel. But perhaps it’s cruel? Because that’s not what bears are supposed to do. And look, pal, that bear will never actually be good at riding a bicycle.”

    Frank Chimero, The Web’s Grain, Frank Chimero’s Site.
    344 jotted on 11 Jun 2024, 20:00.
  • We just add a second parameter to the function call called “explanation” and give it a succinct description. GPT will create an answer to our new question, fill it in the answer parameter and then explain how it arrived at that answer in the explanation parameter.

    343 jotted on 17 May 2024, 12:15.
  • Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

    Soren Johnson, GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack, Designer Notes.
    342 jotted on 4 Apr 2024, 20:30.
  • The software I build seems to work okay. It won’t impress a Google engineer, that’s for sure. But it serves its users and the business reasonably well.

    Anton Golang, I’m a programmer and I’m stupid, Anton Golang’s site.
    341 jotted on 26 Mar 2024, 11:05.

I work as a Senior Product Designer at Skippet, remotely.

If you feel like having a chat, write to me at .