The site is leaving the dark

The site is leaving the dark.

Not for fashion. The old one was a dark developer-tool template — near-black background, a blue accent, a faint grid, glass header. Competent, and indistinguishable from a hundred other crypto pages. Worse than that: it read like a chronicle of something that had already ended.

Three things were quietly wrong with it. Body text sat at 72% opacity, captions at 45%, and the data rows were dimmed until you hovered them — the verifiable layer, the entire reason the site exists, was the faintest thing on the page. Small monospaced type had taken over: there was more of it than prose, which made every caption read like a terminal log or legal fine print. And the hierarchy was upside down — the largest thing on the page was the question, the second largest number was "1", the single vote in the referendum, and the findings came third.

The counters had the same problem. Four of the six measured damage: rejections, flags. A study that only counts what was done to it is not a study, it is a complaint.

The new direction is an instrument panel. BYKO has described itself as a measuring instrument from the beginning, so the page is now built like one: light, in print, with parameters, tolerances and provenance. Readings carry the resolution they were measured at. Every figure says where it came from — blue means read live from the chain and you can verify it yourself; plain means counted by hand from the log and you are taking my word for it. The colour is no longer decoration; it tells you which numbers are checkable without me.

One section is inverted against the rest: invoices settled in BYKO. It is the only part of the instrument that points forward instead of recording the past, so it looks different on purpose.

The numbers have not changed. $123.29 spent, 99.5 hours logged, $0 paid for legitimacy, three institutions petitioned, one holder who is not me. Same proofs, same transaction hashes, same public repository — every edit is still a commit. Only the reading of them got easier.

The typefaces are self-hosted rather than loaded from Google's servers, for the same reason the analytics went cookieless last week: a study about legitimacy should not quietly hand its readers' addresses to a third party.