McMaster is a U.S. supply company with more than 700,000 products, from nails to air pumps. It might be the best example I’ve seen of how to present information to an audience.

It’d be interesting to go over the details here.

Their catalog is excellent. Each entry has both an image and text, making it easy to understand what’s inside. It strikes the perfect balance between being granular and general.

It gets even better when you click a link. Each category has an image and a short description—no fluff, just clear, concise information.

Then come the filters. Each filter has a small image, so I don’t have to waste time deciphering what OD or ID mean.

Different options are presented in a dense table, but it’s easy to navigate.

This is what most websites should aim for. People don’t need excessive white space, pop-ups, or email sign-up prompts. They need a functional website where they can quickly find and order what they need.

Apparently, Moria loves dishwashers. She climbs onto the countertop and just lies there. To distract her, I’ve started playing dishwasher sounds on Spotify. Spotify Wrapped is going to be hilarious.

Designed a logo and made it use P3 gamut following this guide. Makes a huge difference on displays that support it.

:root {
    --bright-green: rgb(0, 255, 0);
}

@supports (color: color(display-p3 1 1 1)) {
    :root {
        --bright-green: color(display-p3 0 1 0);
    }
}

From Incentives as selection effects:

“Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” We take that Charlie Munger quote as a truism; I think it is true but misleading. We naturally parse it as: When I apply a new incentive to a target population, that same population changes their behavior.

But in my experience, that is not what happens. Instead: When you apply a new incentive, you select for a new population that prefers the incentive.

From Nobody Cares:

The one place in the world you get this vibe is probably Japan. Most people just really care. Patrick McKenzie refers to this as the will to have nice things. Japan has it, and the US mostly does not.

The will to have nice things perfectly captures why I resent some countries and adore others.

Finished reading The Life of Isaac Newton. It was dry to my taste, but still okay. It’s hard to read any history after experiencing David McCullough’s books.

I’m not sure many people appreciate how different the world was before and after Newton. His contributions weren’t the only ones that mattered, but they were profoundly significant. He used prisms to demonstrate that white light is composed of all the colors of the spectrum. He invented calculus (independently, though simultaneously, with Leibniz). He formulated the laws of motion. He discovered universal gravitation—an idea that sounds absurd at first: everything attracts everything else! Before him, the cosmos seemed governed by mysteries or divine intervention; after him, it was ruled by discoverable, mathematical laws. He also helped formalize the scientific method.

One thing the book does well is showing what a complicated person Newton was. He was smart, but also combative, suspicious, and vindictive. I would even go further and call his personality unpleasant. His obsession with quarrels was at odds with his intellect.

This contrast between his achievements and his difficult personality makes reading his biography challenging but also more interesting. The challenging part comes from my brain’s desire to have a coherent picture of someone, but life is not like that.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Moria