Hacker News: evnp

New comment by evnp in "AI Is Making Us Dumber – Unless We Fight Back"

evnp — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:50:26 +0000

On mobile I see the blog momentarily, then the whole thing redirects to a sketchy looking url a la rm358.com, with a fulscreen video takeover. Fyi to author, I'd like to read but it's currently unusable

New comment by evnp in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

evnp — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 04:35:10 +0000

To each their own. Writing models in vim with the full power of git managing history, variations, experiments just feels so much better than spending my time in someone else's (often bloated) proprietary GUI.

I use https://replicad.xyz by the way, in Typescript. No affiliation, just a happily productive user of a fantastic MIT-licensed project. I don't use LLMs at all, for better or worse.

Ps. Replicad does make you write code to draw a helix, but it's just sketchHelix(pitch, height, radius)

New comment by evnp in "Commit description as a thinking tool"

evnp — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:00:25 +0000

> When the AI doesn’t know the ‘why’ part, it comes up with its own reasoning. I find that dangerous. When we read that later, it may not make sense, because the real reason was completely different.

Even more dangerous: when the text _does_ make sense, despite being detached from reality.

New comment by evnp in "It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis"

evnp — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 03:41:19 +0000

The second half of this post chronicles the author's Herculean efforts to make everything work well in the cases you describe.

> One of the big things that blocked this shipping for so long was not having an escape hatch of some kind to allow clients that disable WebAssembly by policy to get through the gate. [...] This combination of factors means that there would need to be another implementation of the proof of work code in JavaScript that would actually execute the number crunching.

New comment by evnp in "Ending my elixir exploratory writing"

evnp — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:02:18 +0000

> It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!

Want to clarify for others reading that the author of _Elixir_ isn't stopping, just the author of this post. José has been shockingly responsive on recent issue/pr threads I've posted on Elixir-related repos recently, often same day. They also don't seem to use any bot-based code review, which is incredibly refreshing in contrast to many other repos[1] in 2026 (Sorry for the callout, it's just such a good example). Elixir projects have been a joy as a fairly new contributor, compared to other ecosystems.

[1] https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/pull/13188

New comment by evnp in "Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful"

evnp — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:26:35 +0000

Be proud of the theme. It emanates unflashy nostalgia to me, like a mysterious text-adventure game you discover as a kid. I'm all for putting weight in accessibility as a goal, but never as the all-over riding goal, and always with the greater purpose of the work in mind. It brings to mind an a11y evaluation a recent company I was a part of had done by a 3rd party, where one of the resulting "guidelines" was to darken borders around all our inputs and buttons for better contrast. These had the effect of decimating the visual texture and readability of each page, as you were caught up in a sea of near-black borders on light background. But the design team felt it was a worthy tradeoff, can't say no to accessibility. In other words, for a personal blog, I'd say do what brings you joy first and foremost. It's hard enough doing work you end up feeling proud of.

On shieldfont, I feel like many posts in this thread are glossing over the point that most scraping operations are operating at scale, and all we have to do is make a piece of content (or many pieces) too expensive to scrape _at that scale_. It's not really about whether AI scrapers could or could not mimic a screen reader well enough in an individual case.

So, require an expensive-enough computation to access the true text, similar to the anti-DDOS measures that gate many full webpages today (admittedly, I'm not well-versed in how these affect scrapers). As annoying as these pages may be - or extra button clicks to "reveal" true text to a screen reader - this seems like a very pro-human space to explore, since it's one mechanism that can affect bots greatly and us individual viewers relatively little.

New comment by evnp in "Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful"

evnp — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:54:50 +0000

Isn't this the same sort of cost CloudFlare and anime catgirls are making us pay daily? Only enough to deter bots, or "a few seconds processing."

I take your point that one extra click/interaction required for screen readers only is objectively more friction, but it's only by exploring these technologies instead of dismissing them that we'll arrive at UX solutions truly work for people of all stripes (and ideally, not for bots, scrapers, and the like). I think if you're applying a tool like this you already have very different priorities than fueling Google.

New comment by evnp in "Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful"

evnp — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:47:46 +0000

Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise:

> Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exactly that. Screen review and touch exploration are untested. ShieldFont hides shielded passages from accessibility tools by default with aria-hidden="true", because a decoy read aloud is fluent, grammatical, wrong English, and that is worse than silence.

> The real words remain sealed in the same page, and a visible notice above the block carries the control that uncovers them. It is on by default and reachable by mouse, keyboard and screen reader alike. Pressing it sets the reader’s browser to solving a compute-heavy puzzle: JavaScript and a few seconds of processing, more than most mass scrapers are willing to spend. That puts the words within reach of a screen reader, a translator and copy/paste.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Also just aside, love this TUI-esque blog design and color palette (maybe a bearblog theme? still worth an upvote)

New comment by evnp in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

evnp — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:30:20 +0000

Thanks for putting this together, incredible resource.

Wanted to suggest &udm=14 added to Google search URLs to omit the AI overview and other frills. Personally, I use Chrome's search engine settings to add that param automatically when searching from the browser url bar. I also came across this: https://udm14.com/

New comment by evnp in "Annoying and alarming things about OpenCode"

evnp — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:12:08 +0000

"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."

George Orwell, 1984

New comment by evnp in "Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other"

evnp — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:27:18 +0000

Love this idea and your creation of it. Unfortunately do think the parent's concerns are valid - at this moment on your site at least one person has set their name to something offensive so it shows up perpetually (under the street light). Anonymity+connectivity persists in bringing out the worst of our impulses, I guess...

Do you think names are really necessary? Or could they take some other form than text, perhaps unicode chars chosen from a selection of abstract shapes? The wonderful https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.

New comment by evnp in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

evnp — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:40:23 +0000

Any chance you'd be interested in sharing the story?

New comment by evnp in "Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall"

evnp — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:27:40 +0000

There it is. Thanks!

New comment by evnp in "Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall"

evnp — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:02:32 +0000

Is there an xyz's law for this yet? Will add - lines of code (as long as you don't believe code is the product/output).

New comment by evnp in "AI will never be ethical or safe"

evnp — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:06:45 +0000

The point is that safety depends on context and intent being known - with unknown context or intent, dangerous situations will appear _some_ of the time, thus the system as a whole can "never" be fully safe.

There is no contradiction here.

New comment by evnp in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

evnp — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:26:17 +0000

Great list, thanks. Seconding Exhalation, that story in particular but also the whole collection. Guess I'm checking out Egan next.

New comment by evnp in "I used AI. It worked. I hated it"

evnp — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:38:35 +0000

I'm legitimately curious - could you elaborate on the difference? Speaking as someone who has always preferred the commit-by-commit focus of a rebase instead of all-at-once merge conflict resolution, auditing all the changes together later doesn't sound more appealing than doing things incrementally.

New comment by evnp in "The wonder of modern drywall"

evnp — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:42:09 +0000

We had our circa-1915 house checked for asbestos before lifting it. The inspector laughed after taking a chip out of the plaster because you could clearly see horse hair protruding from every side of the chip. This is apparently unlikely to overlap with asbestos, though it comes instead with a minor (?) anthrax risk. I'll take that over the dust from drywall sanding every time though.

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:51:50 +0000

My issue is remembering that the square brackets come first, not the parentheses. I do like asciidoc's method: https://example.com for bare link, or https://example.com[pretty text] if alternate text is desired

Edit: It took me a re-read to fully understand your comment, I can see how square brackets might be an incremental addition. This may also help remember the syntax, thanks!

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:48:51 +0000

I like this, thank you.