Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

Instead, consider a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking. This is the current length of a long human lifespan, taking us beyond the ego boundary of our own mortality, so we begin to imagine futures that we can influence but not participate in ourselves.

Can stories reproduce? Well, yeah, not spontaneously, obviously—they tend to need people as vectors; we are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes—but they can, and they do.

It’s not that you can’t do something it’s that unless you have literally done everything, you’re choosing not to because the price is too high. Stop lying to yourself.

The key is that the “green path” isn’t set out as a predictable trajectory. It is hacked out of the jungle as you go. You know you are going, are confident you can get there, but aren’t sure of exactly what issues will be encountered along the way.

When we lock ourselves into planning to build a set of features (ehem, Roadmaps), we rarely stop to question if those features are the right things to build to reach our goals.

[…] Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn’t receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her behavior. If no reasonable people give feedback, only the unreasonable people are left. From Alice’s perspective, the only people who disagree with her are jerks.

Bruce Leslie: […] he said in most traditional kind of set up superhero comic books, you have to think of the hero as the antagonist and the villain is the protagonist because it‘s the hero who‘s trying to defend the status quo while the villains trying to come in and rock the boat so to speak.

When society cannot enforce prosocial human behavior, the antisocial primate may come back into power. And thus the troll is created.

Melanie Mitchell: And this is something that comes up again and again in natural language processing systems, is that they don’t have the kind of knowledge about the world that we humans have and so they make mistakes.

Roman Mars: So if you ever see someone wandering around Stratford, carrying a pug and looking confused at their phone, don’t worry. They’re probably just chasing a ghost geotag on the hunt for the most Instagrammable wall in the world.

By using testing to avoid design by committee and focus stakeholders on the right assessment criteria, it almost guarantees a better design in the end.

This kind of invisible, hidden labor, outsourced or crowdsourced, hidden behind interfaces and camouflaged within algorithmic processes is now commonplace, particularly in the process of tagging and labeling thousands of hours of digital archives for the sake of feeding the neural networks.

Because the format of job stories includes contextual details, they are portable. In other words, a job story should make sense without having to know the larger JTBD landscape or job map. As a result, job stories have a more “plug-and-play” versatility that is often required for Agile designs and development teams.

Product managers should have an equivalent peer for engineering. Product managers should be accountable for the prioritization of work. Engineering managers should be accountable for the engineers’ execution, which includes being able to negotiate speed and quality tradeoffs with the product manager.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.

If you’re struggling to come out with something new […], change the way you’re doing things and you’ll end up with a different result. Not only that, but have the courage to do so. I say courage, not confidence. Confidence comes from doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. It takes courage to change that.

We had this realization that basically, we had added a dimension, so the simplest strategy was take out a dimension, but take out different dimensions in some way.

Howard Scott Warshaw: E.T. commits the ultimate video game sin: to disorient the user. And you have to understand the difference between frustration and disorientation, right? Frustration in a video game is essential. Right? A video game must frustrate a user, but you should never disorient them.

Howard Scott Warshaw: I thought, you know, what I need to do is turn sleep into an asset. I would work until I ran into a problem. And then I would go to sleep.

But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

The wider trend is known as the “privatisation of auditory space”, says Dr Tom Rice, a lecturer in sonic anthropology at Exeter University. “It’s often said in sound studies that we don’t have earlids. We don’t have any control over what drips into our ears and collects in them. Earphones are the closest we have to that.”

Whether or not you immediately know its history, run away from any typeface that purports to represent an entire culture.

There’s this idea that output randomness essentially becomes input randomness for the next turn, because you’ll be dealing with the consequences of whatever just happened.

Modern society loves multi-tasking. The myth of multi-tasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. […] The reason is simple. You can’t be great at one task if you’re constantly dividing your time ten different ways.

When you don’t want to do something, you often build it up in your mind to be worse than it really is. But once you get started, you get to realistically appraise how long and hard the task is going to be.

A design manager’s energy is better spent overseeing the decisions behind the work setup and managing the teams themselves, unblocking members and bridging gaps across teams, not managing or owning the design output and strategy.