Moria

From It is link winter on X:

The truth on X is what random people commentate, polarize, interpret, and summarize from source material that is intentionally lost by a black box algorithm. There is no depth to anything on X because context with links is heavily penalized.

Getting off Twitter was one of the best decisions I made in the past year. My life has become much calmer.

I recently registered on Bluesky, and after a few minutes I couldn’t understand why I’d want to spend time there. It’s interesting how your perspective changes once you step away. You start to see it differently — as a giant arena where everyone is shouting, countless things are happening, yet nothing meaningful ever really occurs.

Found a wonderful website and a book — Motion Mountain. The book explores the many wonders of everyday life:

Using hundreds of stories, pictures, films, tables and puzzles, five volumes tell about sport, raindrops and animal life (mechanics, gravity and heat), about moving empty space and the sky at night (relativity and the structure of the universe), about lightning, lasers and nerves (electricity, optics, the brain, language and truth), and about colours, pleasure and the stars (quantum physics, nuclear physics and radioactivity). A sixth volume tells about the search for a final, unified theory of physics.

Surprisingly, I’ve stumbled upon it by accident and have never seen it recommended anywhere on the mainstream internet.

Also from the website:

Truthfulness — combined with politeness — make the world a better place.

Geometry for FLPE 2.24

Solving this exercise via force components is straightforward, leading to the answer $x$. However, I struggled with solving it using the principle of virtual work.

The hardest part of this exercise was calculating how the weight moves when we displace the cart. For simplicity, I reflected the diagram horizontally, aligning the movement with the standard x-axis.

One important point is that we cannot simply multiply the displacement by $^$, as this does not account for the fact that the weight moves along a circular path due to the rope.

I arrived at the following diagram, and the solution became clear from its geometry. In this diagram, the card moves to the right and $AB = x$.

We can approximate the path of the weight by a straight line, as the angle of the rope will be small. Thus, we obtain:

${\displaystyle \mathrm{\angle }ACB=90^{\circ }⟹AC=AB\cdot \cos 30^{\circ }=\mathrm{\Delta }x\cdot \cos 30^{\circ }}$

Finally, we arrive at the correct answer:

${\displaystyle \mathrm{\angle }AOC=90^{\circ }⟹OC=AC\cdot \sin 30^{\circ }=\mathrm{\Delta }x\cdot \cos 30^{\circ }\cdot \sin 30^{\circ }}$

I would be interested in solving this analytically by equating the equation for a circle with that of the plane to find the coordinates of the point. Ultimately, for the principle of virtual work, we only need to determine $\frac{\delta y}{\delta x}$.

If anyone stumbles upon this post and finds such a solution, please feel free to send a copy to $@$.

Eiermann Desk

Last year I was looking for a new desk. My main requirement was that it should be lower than 70 cm. Most desks today are 75 cm high, which is too tall for most people. I also wanted to avoid the Silicon Valley vibe that is so ubiquitous in modern workspaces.

Eventually, I found the table I loved — the Eiermann 1. The original table frame was designed in 1953, either for Eiermann’s own office or for his students; history differs on this point. The crossbar, made in one piece, is placed diagonally between the sides. This reduced construction achieves the perfect balance between material and stability. The tabletop lies flat on the frame. Less is not possible.

It’s been almost a year and it still brings me joy every time I sit at it.

It’s been almost two months since I bought Feynman’s exercises. I didn’t expect physics to capture my attention this much. I’ve finished six chapters and created 200 new Mochi cards since then.

The exercises turned out to be the key to understanding. There were many times when I read a chapter, thought I understood it, but then found myself lost when trying to solve a practical problem. There must be a reason for this phenomenon. My guess is that it’s easy to confuse familiarity with understanding. Reading gives you the sense of the tools you can use, but it doesn’t teach you how to use them.

Doing exercises highlighted how much I’ve forgotten from mathematics. As a refresher, I skimmed through Lang’s Basic Mathematics. I started going through Spivak’s Calculus, which has even more exercises than the Feynman’s books.

This experience makes me wonder how it’s possible to cover everything in university. Sometimes I spend days thinking about a single problem. I don’t know if you can afford that when you have other subjects to study.

Turkey ’24

We just returned from Turkey, where we spent a week on a sailing boat and added the first 175 miles to our logbooks.

This might be the best vacation I’ve ever had. I’ve been thinking about what made it so, and the answer seems to be that sailing is wonderfully unpredictable. With few specific arrangements beyond where you’ll dock, it felt more like an adventure than a traditional vacation. The best trips I’ve taken have been like this.

Recently 003

I’m still working through the exercises to the Feynman’s Lectures. There are 36 of them to the Chapter 4! Doing exercises turned out to be the best way to understand something. I want to move forward faster with lectures and I have to stop myself constantly. It’s easy to fool yourself and think you understand the material after reading a lecture, only I open a new exercise and realize that there are gaps.

Mochi helps a lot. It’s surprising that this isn’t taught in schools and universities. Spaced repetition might be the only reliable and proven way to enhance memory. As Michael Nilsen says, “Anki makes memory a choice, rather than a haphazard event, to be left to chance.” It feels like superpower.

Movies watched

• First Man. Damien Chazelle brought depth to the story and focused on personal drama, stepping away from all the stories surrounding a well-known person.
• Oppenheimer. I rewatched it again with subtitles this time. It was better. Still, this movie lacks complexity and depth.
• Flow. An indie animation without any dialogues and with interesting style (probably shaped by its budget).
• The Wild Robot. As someone on Letterboxd put it, “the best Pixar cartoon was made by Dreamworks”. It’s an overstatement, but it’s a good cartoon.

Reading

Finished reading Bullshit Jobs. It resonated with my thoughts that many modern jobs are mind-numbing, and many more make the world a worse place. Still, it was quite repetitive and could’ve been half its size.

Dropped The Invention of Science after a few chapters. This turned out not to be a history of inventions, but more a philosophical work on how that was happening — how people talked and thought about it. It might be good, but it wasn’t what I expected.

Currently reading The Life of Isaac Newton, which has been good so far.

The easiest way to solve 2.19 (Plank Weight Trough)

A plank of weight W and length $R$ lies in a smooth circular trough of radius $R$. At one end of the plank is a weight $W/2$. Calculate the angle $\theta$ at which the plank lies when it is in equilibrium.

There are already a few solutions at the Feynman’s Lectures website, but my solution is simpler.

Since the plank is in equilibrium, it must be at its lowest possible position. This means the center of mass of the plank lies directly below the center of the trough.

We can calculate the center of mass $c$ given the length of the plank $L = R$:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle c}& {\displaystyle =\frac{1}{1.5W}(\frac{WL}{2}+\frac{WL}{2})}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\frac{L}{1.5}=\frac{\sqrt{3}R}{1.5}=\frac{2R}{\sqrt{3}}}\end{array}}$

Since $c$ forms the hypotenuse from the left point of contact to the vertical line beneath the trough center, we have:

${\displaystyle \cos \theta =\frac{R}{c}=\frac{R\sqrt{3}}{2R}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}}$

This gives $= 30^{}$

Solving 2.17 and 2.18 Using the Principle of Virtual Work

It is possible to solve 2.17 and 2.18 using torques, but since the chapter was about using the virtual work principle, let’s use it.

Let’s consider the ladder from the exercise 2.18 (2.17 uses similar approach) rotating clockwise due to the reactive force of the wall.

Let’s imagine a ladder rotating clockwise under the influence of the reaction force of the wall. As the ladder rotates by a small angle $\delta \theta$ radians, it displaces a distance $s = r$ (by the definition of a radian).

For a small angle $\theta$, it is possible to approximate that any point on ladder moves in a straight line, not in a circular path (see figure below).

This linear movement allows us to compute displacement of each point on the ladder as the following:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle \mathrm{\Delta }x}& {\displaystyle =s\sin \theta =\delta \theta \cdot r\cdot \sin \theta }\\ {\displaystyle \mathrm{\Delta }y}& {\displaystyle =s\cos \theta =\delta \theta \cdot r\cdot \cos \theta }\end{array}}$

Now we can calculate the work done by a reactive force of the wall $T$:

${\displaystyle W_T=T(\delta \theta \cdot L\cdot \sin \theta )}$

Changes in potential energies of the weight $W$ and the ladder $\omega$ are:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle E_W}& {\displaystyle =(\delta \theta \cdot 0.75L\cdot \cos \theta )\cdot W}\\ {\displaystyle E_{\omega }}& {\displaystyle =(\delta \theta \cdot 0.5L\cdot \cos \theta )\cdot \omega }\end{array}}$

Equating the work done by $T$ to the total change in potential energy yields:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle T(\delta \theta \cdot L\cdot \sin \theta )}& {\displaystyle =(\delta \theta \cdot 0.5L\cdot \cos \theta )\cdot \omega }\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle +(\delta \theta \cdot 0.75L\cdot \cos \theta )\cdot W}\end{array}}$

${\displaystyle T=\mathrm{ctg}\theta (0.5\omega +0.75W)}$

Feynman’s Lectures Exercises 2.16

I spent more time on this exercise than needed because I didn’t notice that the masses are equal. Otherwise, the application of the virtual work principle is straightforward.

The work is done by the gravitation force and the force accelerates the entire system, that is $M = m_1 + m_2 = 2m$.

Let’s use the positive sign the direction of gravity acting on $m_2$.

The work can be calculate as:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle W}& {\displaystyle =F\mathrm{\Delta }s}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =Ma\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }s}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =Ma\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =2m\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2}\end{array}}$

This work is equal to the change of the potential energy in the system as follows:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle \mathrm{\Delta }{E}_k}& {\displaystyle =m_2\cdot g\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2-m_1\cdot g\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_1}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =m\cdot g\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2-m\cdot g\cdot \mathrm{\Delta }{y}_1}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =m\cdot g\cdot (\mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2-\mathrm{\Delta }{y}_1)}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =m\cdot g\cdot (\mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2-\mathrm{\Delta }{y}_2\cdot \sin \frac{\pi }{4})}\end{array}}$

Thus, we get:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle a}& {\displaystyle =g\frac{m-m\cdot \sin \frac{\pi }{4}}{2m}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =g\frac{(1-\sin \frac{\pi }{4})\cdot m}{2m}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =g\frac{1-\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}}{2}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\frac{1}{2}(1-\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}})g}\end{array}}$

Feynman’s Lectures Exercises 2.14 and 2.15

If the weights $W_1$ and $W_2$ move the distance $s$ along the plane to the left, their corresponding difference in height are:

${\displaystyle \mathrm{\Delta }{h}_1=s\cdot \sin \theta ,\mathrm{\Delta }{h}_2=-s\cdot \sin \theta }$

Then, the difference in potential energy of the system is:

${\displaystyle \mathrm{\Delta }{E}_p=\mathrm{\Delta }{h}_1{W}_1-\mathrm{\Delta }{h}_2{W}_2}$

By the definition of work:

${\displaystyle F\cdot s=\mathrm{\Delta }{E}_p}$

Then:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle F}& {\displaystyle =\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }{E}_p}{s}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\sin \theta \cdot m_1\cdot g-\sin \theta \cdot m_2\cdot g}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\sin \theta \cdot g\cdot (m_1-m_2)}\end{array}}$

For the acceleration along the plane, using $a =$ and the total mass $m = m_1 + m_2$, the acceleration is:

${\displaystyle a=\sin \theta \cdot g\cdot \frac{m_1-m_2}{m_1+m_2}}$

For the motion over distance $D$, starting from rest:

${\displaystyle D=\frac{a{t}^2}{2}}$

Thus:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle t^2}& {\displaystyle =\frac{2D}{a}}\\ {\displaystyle t}& {\displaystyle =\sqrt{\frac{2D}{a}}}\end{array}}$

The speed at time $t$ is given by:

${\displaystyle \begin{array}{rl}{\displaystyle v}& {\displaystyle =at}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =a\cdot \sqrt{\frac{2D}{a}}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\sqrt{2Da}}\\ {\displaystyle }& {\displaystyle =\sqrt{2D\cdot \sin \theta \cdot g\cdot \frac{m_1-m_2}{m_1+m_2}}}\end{array}}$

For Exercise 2.15, the acceleration is given by:

${\displaystyle a=\frac{1}{2}\cdot g\cdot (\sin \theta -\sin \varphi )}$

Substituting this into the expression for speed, we get:

${\displaystyle v=\sqrt{g\cdot D\cdot (\sin \theta -\sin \varphi )}}$

I finally bought the Feynman Lectures on Physics, something I wanted to do for a very long time. Ever since reading You’re Surely Joking Mr. Feynman. After watching some of his interviews on YouTube and going through a few chapters online, I realized there’s something special about how Feynman explains things. He doesn’t just teach formulas — he teaches understanding. Once you grasp that, you realize what true understanding is. Here are a few quotes from the introduction to the New Millennium edition:

It was like going to church. The lectures were a transformational experience, the experience of a lifetime, probably the most important thing I got from Caltech. I was a biology major but Feynman’s lectures stand out as a high point in my undergraduate experience … though I must admit I couldn’t do the homework at the time and I hardly turned any of it in. I was among the least promising of students in this course, and I never missed a lecture. … I remember and can still feel Feynman’s joy of discovery. … His lectures had an … emotional impact that was probably lost in the printed Lectures.

The book is beautiful. I don’t choose books solely on looks, but when there are different options, it’s better to go for the one you like. I’ve noticed that this works for anything — if I like something that’s part of an activity, I’m more likely to engage with it. So, in that sense, it is rational to choose a book by its cover. One sad thing is the lettering from the original edition has been lost in the New Millennium version:

Almost all other popular physics books look very average. Compare another popular textbook with the austere design of Feynman’s lectures:

My plan is to work through all three volumes over the winter and solve all the exercises from the companion workbook. I will buy a refresher for math once I hit a wall. There are a few books I have in mind: Spivak’s Calculus and The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics. Both are as beautifully designed as Feynman’s lectures.

Made a few changes to the site, and now I can have posts without titles. It gives a sense of freedom, similar to what you might have unconsciously experienced on Twitter. Having a title adds a layer of seriousness to a post.

The Archive layout has changed to accommodate missing titles — now the dates link to posts, and the dates are in ISO format set in tabular figures for proper alignment.

With each iteration, it’s becoming more brutalist, and I like it.

Finally watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a TV series produced in the 1980s. I don’t think there are many people like Carl Sagan. The show he created is so delicate, with many complex emotions. It’s captivating, fun, sad, and melancholic. The original music was composed by Vangelis, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be better.

We’re now rewatching the sequel by one of his students — Neil deGrasse Tyson. While it covers similar topics and has better graphics, it feels a little shallower.

THE GAP by Ira Glass

Feynman on Playing

A few hours after I wrote the last post, I remembered one chapter from Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman:

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate — two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?” I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”

“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing” — working, really — with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Typeface Updates 003

Typeface design has turned out to be an activity that’s easy to start but very hard to master. It’s relatively straightforward to get to know your tools and learn how to draw basic glyphs. The hardest part is making the entire text look good. You run into problems when you like a glyph on its own, but it catches your eye when it’s part of the text. As Matthew Carter said, “Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.”

The biggest challenge with personal projects like this is the lack of restrictions. When you have a list of requirements, it provides the necessary constraints that shape your work. Without them, you tend to stagger from one idea to another, with no clear goal to measure your progress against. As a result, the design changes frequently.

But this lack of restrictions also has its advantages, as it creates a lot of room for experimentation. You get to understand why some typefaces have a curved leg on an ‘R’ and others are straight by just trying it yourself. You might copy an element from a typeface you like and discover why it works. You end up learning more in a given time by trying different things.

However, it’s hard not to hit a wall when you don’t have a specific goal. Knowing that making it good will take more time than just learning how to do it adds another layer of frustration. Even though there was never any particular goal to start with and it was always about learning, It feels like a failure not to see your projects “finished”.

Note to self: Never set goals like “designing a typeface for your site.” It’s too concrete, too result-oriented. It undermines the playful aspect of the process. Instead, focus on the journey.

I don’t want this to become a project I feel obligated to finish; I want it to remain a toy.

Optimistic Pessimism

Even though I often feel pessimistic about what happens around me, I’m in love with life.

I notice how beautiful the light looks as it filters through the summer leaves.

I listen to a piece of beautiful music that turns everything inside me upside down.

I watch a movie and think, “Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly what I wanted to say!”

I go to the gym and train so hard I can barely stand, wondering what more I am capable of.

I feel the sun warming my skin as I cycle through the morning mountains.

I see a beautiful scene of an old couple sitting together on the street. Though I’m too afraid to take a photo, I still enjoy the moment.

Despite everything that’s fucked up in today’s world, I still love being part of it.

Friends

Friendship is much simpler when you’re a kid. You can simply approach someone and ask them to be your friend. You can visit your grandmother for the summer, come back, and pick up conversations as if nothing happened. Children’s friendships are about living in the moment and enjoying each other’s company.

As we grow up, friendships become more complicated. If you haven’t been in touch with someone, you might feel guilty—even when there wasn’t anything specific to discuss.

I realized that’s okay. Friendship isn’t supposed to be complicated. You can enjoy time together whenever you want without needing to be in touch constantly. This time together doesn’t have to be planned in advance. Meaningful friendships arise naturally anyway.

So stop overanalyzing. Don’t worry if you haven’t been in touch for a while. It’s normal to drift apart, and it doesn’t make you a bad person. The next time you’re in a place where an old friend lives, send them a message and ask to meet up. Think about how you want to spend time together and do something you used to enjoy. If they were a good friend before, that’s reason enough to enjoy their company again.

Don’t overthink it and enjoy what you have.

Sometimes YouTube can surprise you by recommending a video that exists simply because someone out there wanted to create it. Recently, it showed me a video from the Gawx channel. Great work deserves to be shared through word of mouth, so here are a couple that I liked.

Teenage Engineering introduced new version of their EP-1320 and created a gorgeous landing for this (captured screenshot). This is the kind of skeuomorphism I haven’t seen for a while. When I was a kid, it was a popular style for online games because of how immersive it was. I’m glad to see it coming back.

A movie about cooking that is also not about cooking at all.

Punch-Drunk Love

This is my second time watching Punch Drunk Love, and what a nice movie it is. While There Will Be Blood remains the most epic, beautiful, and comprehensive movie Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Elswit created, Punch Drunk Love is the most original.

The main thing that I noticed during this rewatch are the colors. They are the main theme in this movie. They establish the emotions of the scenes. Even if you don’t pay attention to them, you feel them. Blue follows Barry everywhere — symbolizing his loneliness and detachment. Red represents everything good that he finds along the way; it’s happiness.

Everything plays so nicely together in this movie. It’s funny and sad sometimes. It can be brutal but also tender. The beautiful work of Robert Elswit is hard to describe, I want to watch this movie again and again just to experience every scene one more time.

Blog Roll: Ludicity

I found a blog that is excellent at expressing my thoughts. It’s also a good litmus test as his style and ideas seem to be quite polarizing for some reason.

Here’s a few posts that I liked.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again:

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. […] Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your IT department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business?

I will remember this year as a time when so many companies threw out all the product work practices they cared for before and started adding AI features that either barely work or nobody asked for.

I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again

The secret is that there’s no secret for doing things correctly. You have to hire the correct people, motivate them to continue working even when there’s no clear risk of being fired, make them feel valued and appreciated, not waste their time, ensure they’ve got the space to do work the right way, only accept the right work, and then just leave them the hell alone. If they have brains, they’ll figure everything else out themselves.

It’s remarkable how many things would be fixed if companies hired smart people.

Usually, you can often pinpoint the exact moment when a company’s culture begins to decline – it typically follows a hiring frenzy where the quality of new hires drops, and these less qualified individuals start hiring others, creating a vicious cycle.

Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes And I Am Not Laughing:

It has become exceedingly clear to me that the average company is not a suitable environment for someone that cares about the craft of programming. To make things worse, once your standards are high for yourself, I’m guessing that only the top 1% of companies in terms of workplace culture is not a personal offense.

I wouldn’t be surprised if finding a genuinely fulfilling job has about the same hit rate as starting a bootstrapped business from scratch.

At this point, it does feel like building your own company and cutting all the bullshit might be the only option for someone who cares about their craft.

King Creosote

I found King Creosote randomly through some recommendation on YouTube or Spotify — I don’t remember. Diamond Mine is now the first album I bought in a very long time. Then, I found this tender documentary about life in Scotland and loved it.

These albums are so good at grounding you. You might sit in a train or walk through a busy street, and you start forgetting that you’re part of this crowd. You feel as if you’re a bystander, noticing all the small details in people and things around you — everything that makes them special.

Good Interfaces

It would be interesting to define what a good interface is. We can start with something simple: A good interface is one that requires minimal cognitive and physical effort to accomplish a task.

This definition is not ideal. In most cases, an interface performs many different tasks. You might want to create, move, and delete things. Now, let’s create the next version: A good interface is one that requires minimal cognitive and physical effort to accomplish the tasks it is supposed to perform.

This has its own problems. Some tasks are performed more often and some less. For example, in a banking app, people send money more frequently than they buy stocks. This leads us to the next definition: A good interface is one that requires minimal cognitive and physical effort to accomplish the tasks it is supposed to perform, weighted by how often each task is performed.

Good designers know this and optimize the same function without consciously thinking about it.

There are a few interesting corollaries that follow from this definition.

“Clean” interface is not an optimal interface. There is a huge tendency today towards clean interfaces. What designers understand by a clean interface is hiding all important elements behind context menus and reducing information density by increasing white space around elements. However, it’s easy to see how this leads to worse interfaces. It takes more cognitive effort to understand and remember the path to a certain action. It also takes more time to go through this path as it requires more clicks.

A Figma frame with all information hidden might look cleaner, but it’s not that useful.

One good example of trying to create a clean interface is JetBrains’ redesign of their IDE. They removed important elements from the interface used by thousands of engineers and needed to issue a statement to address the feedback they received.

The interface should feel snappy. Internet applications are already too slow. While we have improved how easy it is to build things, we have failed at optimizing for speed. The internet is stupid slow. Animations are great at helping people interact with computers and creating a “magic” feeling, but very often they stand in the way of these interactions. Imagine a web page that takes 500ms to load its resources such as HTML files, JavaScript, fonts, and images — it’s already too late to add a 300ms fading animation on top of that. Waiting for a whole second for an app to start being usable might be too much.

Good interface is not about trends. Another tendency today is chasing trends. Products change their appearance every few years, adding more useless noise to make designs “pop”. Often, designers make these changes only because they can — technologies provide too few constraints to prevent this.

A good interface is like a tool: functional, reliable, and not dependent on the whims of fashion. It minimizes cognitive and physical effort, prioritizes essential tasks, and remains functional and efficient regardless of changing trends.

Designers too often look for challenges in the wrong places instead of focusing on what truly matters — ease of use, efficiency, and functionality.

Universal Line Height

I’ve discovered a simple formula for a universal line height in CSS:

line-height: (1em + 1ex);

It’s surprising how well this works. This formula often results in a line height close to 1.5. For example, Helvetica Neue has 1000 units per em and an x-height of 500 units. So 1em + 1ex equals exactly 1.5em.

It’s especially useful in cases where people can choose fonts without being able to set the line height. For fonts with a smaller x-height, like Garamond, this will result in smaller line heights, and fonts with a larger x-height, like Inter, it’s the other way around.

Typeface Updates 002

After playing with the font for a while, I’ve started getting to know what I want. I want to bring back the nostalgic feeling of interfaces from the 90s — Verdana/Tahoma and Lucida Grande — they were highly legible and warm. Also, even though designing your own version of Helvetica is cool, it’s psychologically hard to do when you have so many open-source Helvetica descendants — Inter, Geist.

I redid most of the glyphs. Now counters are more open and letters have abrupt joints. The letters I and J have serifs and the letter M has two stories.

Interestingly, once you get spacing right, text starts looking legible even when letter forms are not perfect.

iOS 18 Preview

Yesterday, Apple showed the iOS 18 Preview and Apple Intelligence and it might be the worst release they made.

The entire update is about generative AI. Companies have been adding generative AI whenever it’s useful for the past few years. Apple was among few companies that didn’t and now they jumped on that bandwagon as well.

One would expect Apple to add AI features sparingly, where it feels right, where it doesn’t obstruct the user flow, where it’s invisible. They have not. Instead, they’ve released a bunch of unrefined features as if to show their relevance.

Some features — summaries, proofreading — are more or less valuable. While others — emoji generation, anyone? — are out of place.

Another problem with iOS 18 is that it looks like it was designed in a haste. Apple has been slowly losing its design edge for a few years, but this update feels even less polished. You get buttons that are not aligned, font colors that do not match, and patterns that do not work.

The entire update feels like there was no attention to details — neither to design nor feature choices.

Algorithmic Feeds

The algorithmic feed is among the worst inventions of the 21st century. The extent of damage it has caused is hard to measure, but you can probably feel it.

The main issue with generated feeds is that they need to rely on some metric to decide what content to show you. In most cases, this metric is engagement, which is pretty annoying. To be fair, any metric would be bad. It’s impossible to reduce what someone likes or dislikes into one number.

When a single number is used to track the quality of recommendations, it stops reflecting reality. Instead, people start to gamble it. As a result, you get clickbait tweets, posts, and video titles. Content quality deteriorates, yet you are more likely to engage with it.

The best solution I’ve found is to avoid any app or service with algorithmic feeds.

For example, I almost abandoned Twitter. There was a time when I could read what the people I followed wrote. Then, Twitter introduced algorithmic feeds and eventually removed third-party clients.

It’s not only about Twitter. Much worse happened to Instagram where you almost don’t see what your friends post. Meta knows better what you’ll engage with.

I would still love to use Twitter or Instagram. But it’s too much work — there are only a few people left there who I like following, the rest became victims of this race to the bottom — self-promotion at the expense of sincerity.

There’s an essay by Scott Alexander on the topic of competition and the incentives it creates. I want to finish this post with a quote from that post:

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”