Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Fake things never turn out beautiful
Beauty can't be faked in the other direction either. It works as a very obvious scoreboard: a person who is healthy and takes care of themselves shows it right there, and you can't pretend. That makes beauty a stamp of authenticity.
General Matter's website is a case. A talented team slaved over it for a long time and argued back and forth, probably longer than they should have. The result is simple, and the mission and the manifesto on it are short. The billable hours and cumulative IQ points behind it are unfathomable, and the simplicity came out of that journey.
A site vibe coded in an afternoon with random words Claude wrote would not get the same result. Neither would a template.
Why are costly signals hard to fake?
The biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed the handicap principle in 1975: a signal is trustworthy when it is expensive enough that weak individuals cannot afford it. The peacock's tail is the standard example, since growing and carrying it costs energy and slows escape. A healthy male can pay that cost, and a sickly one cannot.
Why do simple designs take longest to make?
The French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote in 1657 that he had made a letter longer only because he lacked the time to make it shorter. Editors and designers describe the same effect: removing material requires deciding what matters, and each removal needs a reason. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in 1939 that perfection comes when there is nothing left to take away.
How fast do people judge a website's look?
In a 2006 study, Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues showed people web pages for as little as 50 milliseconds. Participants' ratings of visual appeal after that glimpse matched their ratings after longer viewing. The result suggests that first impressions of a page form almost instantly.
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