Hacker News: ethmarks

New comment by ethmarks in "Can't Stop the Signal. Poison It"

ethmarks — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:14:04 +0000

> i wouldn't expect css gaussian blur of all things to cause slowdowns in some browsers

Gaussian blurs are extremely performance intensive. They need to be calculated for every individual pixel, and the per-pixel computation involves averaging the colors of dozens or hundreds of adjacent pixels. This site applies it to the entire

, which spans the entire screen's width and height on mobile, which means that it has several million pixels. That's fine if the browser only has to calculate it once, but when you're scrolling the browser has to perform those calculations for every single pixel on every single frame.

Apparently Chromium and Safari downscale the sampled texture which makes it less accurate but more performant, but Firefox doesn't do that because it prioritizes accuracy over performance, which explains why it only stutters on Firefox.

New comment by ethmarks in "Can't Stop the Signal. Poison It"

ethmarks — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:14:43 +0000

I'm pretty sure that's because the entire

of the site has an 8px Gaussian blur on it:

  .site-main[data-astro-cid-bpoqdqeq] { 
    backdrop-filter:blur(8px); 
  }

Why, exactly? The page looks visually identical when I disable that rule, but the performance skyrockets. I realize that it's probably vibecoded, but come on.

New comment by ethmarks in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

ethmarks — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:59:26 +0000

> they accept money and direct deposit still with no KYC. But to get the money out? Oh no! We need a picture of your face!

Unauthorized deposits aren't nearly as much of a concern as unauthorized withdrawals, right? I'd imagine that there are far fewer malicious actors that try to deposit money into random bank accounts than there are ones that try to withdraw money from random bank accounts.

> And there’s no option for going in person.

Won't an in-person bank also take pictures of you via security cameras? I don't really understand your objection here, could you elaborate?

New comment by ethmarks in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

ethmarks — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:28:13 +0000

> when they bought the successful ads company

Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?

New comment by ethmarks in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

ethmarks — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:01:32 +0000

Does the pitch describe the distance between the edges of the pixels or between the centers?

New comment by ethmarks in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

ethmarks — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:50:04 +0000

> the size of the rust binary

The `render` binary weighed 4.0 MB on disk when I compiled it a few minutes ago. Not sure if that's what you were looking for, but just in case it is, there you go.

Here's the logs, if you want: https://gist.github.com/ethmarks/8df92a68c3076ea2f4a5aedba9f...

New comment by ethmarks in "CJIT: C, Just in Time"

ethmarks — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:18:16 +0000

The source for the site is here: https://github.com/dyne/cjit/tree/main/docs. It's a VitePress site with a custom theme. Glancing through the code, I don't see any obvious signs of LLM coding. It also definitely wasn't created with Codex specifically, because according to the commit history, the first version of the site was in late 2024, months before Codex even released.

New comment by ethmarks in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

ethmarks — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:18:24 +0000

I don't think that complaining about things necessitates believing that you're entitled to them. I agree that complaining about things you received for free is in rather poor taste, but I don't think that it's morally wrong in the way that you seem to think it is. If an article you read for free had a pop-up ad on it, you have not been wronged in any way and do not have grounds to sue them, but you should be permitted to voice your complaint, so long as it's of the form "I don't like this" and not "look what they subjected me to, those monsters".

New comment by ethmarks in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

ethmarks — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:35:31 +0000

Pardon my ignorance, but why does the "447 TB/cm^2" density value use square centimeters instead of a volume unit? Does the information capacity of this material really scale in proportion to area? How? Or is it just a typo?

New comment by ethmarks in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

ethmarks — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:49:24 +0000

The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.

It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.

I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.

New comment by ethmarks in "Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury"

ethmarks — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:11:01 +0000

Kurzgesagt didn't invent the concept of disassembling Mercury to build a Dyson swarm. Stuart Armstrong proposed it in a lecture in 2012[0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo?si=3jwmhoB7zx6rclhb

New comment by ethmarks in "Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury"

ethmarks — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:02:01 +0000

There are other substances that can be used for reactor coolant. Molten salt reactors are actually substantially more efficient than water-cooled reactors because they have a higher operating temperature. You can also use liquid metal as coolant, such as lead or bismuth.

New comment by ethmarks in "Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury"

ethmarks — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:58:01 +0000

Could you elaborate? Why would being deep in the gravity well be a non-starter? I thought Mercury's proximity to Sol was a huge advantage because of the ample solar power which would make planet-side manufacturing easier.

New comment by ethmarks in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

ethmarks — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:31:33 +0000

They asked if the astronauts "want to risk it", not if it was actually safe. Those are very different questions. The astronauts are, in fact, the world's leading experts on whether or not they personally want to risk it, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think that they could answer that question.

It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.

New comment by ethmarks in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

ethmarks — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:39:12 +0000

The semantics that make sense to me is that "DDoS" describes the symptom/effect irrespective of intent, and "DDoS attack" describes the malicious crime. But the terms are frequently used interchangeably.

New comment by ethmarks in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

ethmarks — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:48:44 +0000

Project Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should totally read/watch it.

New comment by ethmarks in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

ethmarks — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:26:37 +0000

Firstly, since this argument is about semantic pedantry anyways, it's just denial-of-service, not distributed denial-of-service. AI scraper requests come from centralized servers, not a botnet.

Secondly, denial-of-service implies intentionality and malice that I don't think is present from AI scrapers. They cause huge problems, but only as a negligent byproduct of other goals. I think that the tragedy of the commons framing is more accurate.

EDIT: my first point was arguably incorrect because some scrapers do use decentralized infrastructure and my second point was clearly incorrect because "denial-of-service" describes the effect, not the intention. I retract both points and apologize.

New comment by ethmarks in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

ethmarks — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:11:31 +0000

Unintentional denial-of-service attacks from AI scrapers are definitely a problem, I just don't know if "theft" is the right way to classify them. They shouldn't get lumped in with intellectual property concerns, which are a different matter. AI scrapers are a tragedy of the commons problem kind of like Kessler syndrome: a few bad actors can ruin low Earth orbit for everyone via space pollution, which is definitely a problem, but saying that they "stole" LEO from humanity doesn't feel like the right terminology. Maybe the problem with AI scrapers could be better described as "bandwidth pollution" or "network overfishing" or something.

New comment by ethmarks in "2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews"

ethmarks — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:29:28 +0000

In a similar vein, I want a text editor where pasting from an external source isn't allowed. If you try, it should instantly remove the pasted text. Copy-pasting from inside the document would still be allowed (it could detect this by keeping track of every string in the document that has been selected by the cursor and allowing pastes that match one of those strings).

It wouldn't work in every use case (what if you need to include a verbatim quote and don't want to make typos by manually typing it?), but it'd be useful when everything in the document should be your words and you want to remove the temptation to use LLMs.

New comment by ethmarks in "Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” [video]"

ethmarks — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:09:46 +0000

Which is especially odd because the author (Sam Hughes) lives in the UK and wrote the original in UK English, but apparently wrote the rewrite in US English. For example, a chapter in the original was titled "Case Colourless Green", but in the US edition of the rewrite that chapter is "Case Colorless Green" (without the 'u'). So Hughes, a native UK English speaker, wrote the rewrite in a non-native (to him) dialect, then had it (lazily) translated into his native dialect.