Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

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.

It became a hidden project in our task-tracking system called Monsters Under the Bed, and whenever we’d have a few minutes, we’d open the Monsters, contemplate one of them, and find a novel way to kill it.

“This work in the alpha phase would have been really hard to parallelize. You can’t hire a bunch of engineers to make that go faster […]. Hiring a bunch of people would have made it harder to be nimble and change the direction of that foundation,” he says.

Most importantly: how is this wall of text more maintainable than a class name like “primary”?

Do I need another wall for the white button?

You could use a collection of utility classes for that, but I find creating a group class is just more practical.

In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.

Design leaders need more than just design skills. Understanding business and strategy is one the most impactful things designers can learn to lead teams and attain meaningful results.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.

But these new generative tools help you with the first half of the process, taking you from nearly zero to a lot of initial ideas.

Like that first solution with the diluted potions, designer Wyatt Cheng says “we weren’t totally thrilled with this solution as we were putting it in, but we did it anyway. We knew that even though this might not be a solution that we’re willing it was something that was going to teach us a lot more about the problem”.

This is vague, but important. You should be deliberate about absolutely everything in your design. This means whitespace, alignment, size, spacing, colour, shadows. Everything. If I point at a random part of your design and you don’t have an explanation for why it looks that way, you’re not finished.

“I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” Garland says. “They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.”

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it”.

Given this crucial aspect of scientific production—that early exploration is indispensable but typically has little impact on the wider scientific community—an excessive reliance on citations in the evaluation of scientists effectively punishes the exploration of new ideas.

For the vast majority of our species’ history, those were the two principal categories of human relations: kin and gods. Those we know who know us, grounded in mutual social interaction, and those we know who don’t know us, grounded in our imaginative powers.

But now consider a third category: people we don’t know and who somehow know us. They pop up in mentions, comments, and replies; on subreddits, message boards, or dating apps.

Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”

It is impossible to test against all the version combinations of all components in the library. Is Button v3.4 compatible with Accordion 1.2 and Modal 5.3? Library maintainers can’t guarantee quality, which means when issues arise consuming teams and maintainers have go on an easter egg hunt to pin down where compatibility problems are occurring.

A focus on building the solution “right” means you do not let debt you take on stay around for long. You keep it visible and eradicate it fast as you deliver new features. And you do this because you recognize the longer the debt lives on, the more the interest hurts.

Splitting Product Discovery and Delivery across two teams is a form of a functional silo.

Instead of thinking of the daily stand-up as a ritual for the people, think of it as a ritual where the Work Items Attend (e.g., User Stories in an Agile context) and the people attend only to speak for the work items… since obviously the work items can’t actually talk.

Discovery work often results in killing ideas. At the end of every test you’ve got a decision to make: build it, kill it, or keep learning. Yes, what I’m really saying here is discovery work can and should result in killing ideas. Not everything goes forward.

After all that work, after establishing all that shared understanding I feel like we pull all the leaves off the tree and load them into a leaf bag–then cut down the tree.

That’s what a flat backlog is to me. A bag of context-free mulch.

The idea is to test as many solutions as possible during discovery and discard all the wrong ones during this phase; this way, only the right solutions are developed during delivery.

Playing a videogame for someone is a far more elaborate skill than just playing to win.

You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for: Structure Instances Purpose.

When the return sweep does not reach the beginning of the new line (undershoots), it is followed by a small leftward saccade to move back towards the beginning of the line. This is described as a corrective saccade.