![\"Pebble](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20260416144452-Image.jpeg\")
\n![\"Animated](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/royale.gif\")
\n\nNote: The site has had major changes and may look incorrect unless you clear your cache.
\n
So I have a major update, and I'd like to write a brief changelog talking about what's changed.
\nA post can now be a \"reblog\" of another post. Reblogs get all the same metadata that regular posts get, and reblogs can be chained. This means, in theory, I could reblog nex3's reblog and I could show the original post, nex3's response, and then my own response. I really can't think of any other features this design could have. It's got basically everything I could ever want.
\nThis feature is technically fake. It works similarly to the type of reblogs you see on nex3's site. In her blog, a reblog is a shortcode which renders into a template, and a pile of metadata which is used in that template. She also has a helper function which will fetch the data for her. I don't.1
\nHowever, my version of this feature has a ton of really cool stuff going for it! I have a special markdown-compatible syntax which my blog will see and turn into a reblog. In a blog post, it looks something like this:
\n{\n title: Post title\n url: https://link.to/post/\n date: 1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z\n author:\n displayName: Author Name\n username: handle\n avatar: https://link.to/profile-pic.jpg\n}\n:::\nPost **content** of reblog post.\n:::\nMy blog has a dedicated preprocessing step that parses every single blog post with a simple (and probably poorly programmed) parser I wrote that scans for any reblogs, extracts them out of a blog post, and attaches them to that post's metadata under the reblogs section. the content is treated like regular markdown, which is really nice. If you're interested in reading the source code for this feature, perhaps so you can implement something like it on your own blog, you can find the parser and the post component on Github.
I'm incredibly proud of how I implemented reblogs. As far as I can tell, it's completely unique in the world of blogs. However, please steal it if you're interested! This feature is just one part of my crusade to reinvent a fourth website piecemeal and from first principles.2
\nTo keep posts from taking up too much space in the main timeline, they'd get trimmed down to a certain length. Before, this would be handled on build by deleting the rest of the post after a certain point on the timeline pages and inserting a \"read more\" link afterwards. Now, this is all handled client-side, so you can get the full experience without ever leaving the timeline. I don't really know how I feel about it being a bit more social media-esque, but this does fix almost every bug the previous read more system had, and there were many. I had multiple occasions where I'd upload a blog post only to find that the read more mangled it somehow. Never again.
\nThis feature was directly inspired by cohost, and to make the cohost resemblence even greater, the version 2 of read more is a near-blatant copy of the cohost button.3
\n_config.ts. Split some of its functionality into a new plugins.ts. This is part of an effort to genericize the blog's internals into an easy to use template. (ref)As per usual, if you notice any issues with the site, please feel free to email me or file an issue on github!
\nI'd like to build this helper function down the line! It seems really cool! However it's not a priority right now. ↩
\nI have a lot of opinions on this post actually but I'll save that for another time. ↩
\nI didn't steal cohost's implementation. I mean, I probably would if I could, but the site code is hard to understand. ↩
\nThis is technically a downgrade. The regular plugin has fewer features than the Rehype plugin. It currently can't highlight inline code, at least until I get to building that, and it has worse performance than the Rehype plugin due to a difference in how Lume handles processing vs post-processing plugins. However, the regular plugin could, down the line, get turned into something anyone could use in their site. ↩
\nhaving to constantly yell at myself \"out of scope! out of scope!\" when noticing a bug on my site while working on a feature
","tags":["meta"],"date_published":"2026-08-09T22:52:56.878Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260809-okay-posts-are-final/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260809-okay-posts-are-final/","title":"Okay! Posts are finally fixed","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"turns out an earlier update also broke some urls. i try really hard to ensure all urls follow a consistent pattern and are permanent, so whoops. sorry. if you had noticed that comments weren't working, this was the cause. they should be fixed, and links for my last one or two posts might be broken as they get updated to the correct permalink. i wrote a shitty script to do some blog post url \"regression testing\" so hopefully this should never happen again in the future. thanks for putting up with these issues as i make behind the scenes improvements!
","tags":["meta"],"date_published":"2026-08-09T05:13:43.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260720-hey-yall-i-fucked-up/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260720-hey-yall-i-fucked-up/","title":"hey yall i fucked up the rss feeds","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i've been working on moving some improvements from other branches to the main branch (because these other branches are so massive in their feature updates that some improvements depend on me self-hosting the site, which i'd like to do at some point, but i don't want that to be the thing that keeps any of my other site improvements from shipping).
\napparently i broke the rss feeds, which spammed y'all's rss feeds with duplicate dead links, which i never noticed even though i follow my own feeds for exactly this reason 😭😭😭
\nanyways this is fixed now and rss feeds should be normal again. as i continue moving over improvements, i'll keep a closer eye on rss. thanks so much for AminurAlan for reporting the issue. i was able to fix this before i even started coffee.
\nalso, and really feeling this because i guess enough people follow the site that some of them will even report issues, thanks again to everyone who follows the site. i really appreciate all of you. if there's any other issues yall notice, please report them on the github or email me at evie@ewie.online.
","tags":["meta"],"date_published":"2026-07-20T17:05:51.133Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260618-i-would-be-willing-t/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260618-i-would-be-willing-t/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i would be willing to bet money that the most wholesome community, like, period, no competition, is the sudoku community on youtube. i watch cracking the cryptic videos to fall asleep and as far as i can tell there's literally not a spot of negativity or toxicity. people are just talking about sudoku.
","tags":["sudoku"],"date_published":"2026-06-18T19:47:42.635Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260507-you-ever-think-about/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260507-you-ever-think-about/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"you ever think about the fact that there are people today who have lived their whole lives never knowing anything besides star fox 64 remakes
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2026-05-07T00:21:31.374Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260427-thinking-about-the-s/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260427-thinking-about-the-s/","title":"thinking about the “‘scuse me” speech bubble in the great ace attorney","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2026-04-27T16:25:24.659Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260416-royale-a-casio-ae-12/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260416-royale-a-casio-ae-12/","title":"Royale: A Casio AE-1200-a-like written in Zig","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"\n
It's finally out! This watch face is my first time developing for the Pebble (or any embedded system for that matter), and went from concept to product in 12 days for the Pebble Spring 2026 Developer Contest. It's written entirely in the Zig programming language, which was a joy to work with except when the Pebble SDK gave me trouble. It features no AI code. All the bad code came straight from my own brain.
\nhttps://apps.repebble.com/ae80da4fd2d54efc9e907b11
\nI would appreciate it if y'all gave it a like on the Pebble app store! I don't actually own a Pebble Time 2, which is the watch I'm developing for, so every like increases the odds that I win a free watch. Then I'll have something to actually test on, which would be nice!
\nAnyways there's not really much else to say here. It's just an announcement post. If you're interested in the story behind it, I have \"liveblogged\" it on the rebble discord, although I don't think the story is super interesting. Mostly a series of ping ponging between \"wow it works I'm a genius\" and \"wow this doesn't work I'm stupid\".
","tags":["programming","zig","pebble"],"date_published":"2026-04-16T14:47:38.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260413-a-gif-of-a-pebble-wa/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260413-a-gif-of-a-pebble-wa/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/pebble-face-beta.gif\")
i've been working on a pebble watch face for a bit and i wanted to share it cos i'm proud of it! i'm at the hardest part now, time zones, but once i finish that i'm kinda home free.
\nany thoughts? there's a lot of parts i want to change once it's finished and i can give myself permission to increase scope.
","tags":["pebble","programming"],"date_published":"2026-04-13T13:31:08.966Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260407-5-white-dudes-on-a-c/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260407-5-white-dudes-on-a-c/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"5](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20260407023653-Pasted%20image%2020260406213604.jpeg\")
I don't know what sort of feeling this thumbnail is giving me, but I really need to unsubscribe from Scott the Woz
","date_published":"2026-04-07T02:39:39.075Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260302-some-links-you-might/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260302-some-links-you-might/","title":"Some links you might like 10","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"I wish I had a better process for doing these link roundups. I usually have to scrounge for my links in the moment instead of slowly building this throughout the week, and I don't leave my thoughts as I'm reading them, so I end up needing to reread the articles to share them. I don't know what I should do about this. My hotly anticipated[citation needed] reblog feature might mean that the move is to share interesting posts as I find them, but I'll have to experiment.
\nFor now, here's some links.
\n\n\nI'm seething with rage towards Microsoft and its utter incompetence and maliciousness. Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.
\n
A quote I have heard from somewhere--I do not remember the source--is \"While 2026 will not be the year of the Linux desktop, the 2020s will be the decade of the Linux desktop.\" Linux has slowly been getting more and more \"okay\" and Windows has become more and more dogshit. One day we can only hope that the world will reach a point where there is a viable alternative to being treated like total garbage available for most people.
\n\n\n\"The bride is a graduate of Prairie Dog Tech, where she received her degree in underwater basket weaving. Her other pursuits of study were familiar bird calls, Egyptian folk dancing and men.\"
\n
\n--1952 April Fools' Day article announcing \"Chlorophyll I.S. Green Marries Ima Violet Cloud in April 1 Rites\" (The Rock Island Argus, 4/1/1952)
Davis' new blog \"I Might as Well Explain the Joke\" is truly great. An all-timer blog worth following. Add it to your RSS feed!
\n\n\nI was planning on doing this as an Aftermath piece, but then I looked at the prices of spinning disk drives, which are now twice what I paid for them--just like SSDs, and just like RAM, just like GPUs before them.
\n
I'm sharing this because, like the author, I love the computer but hate the environment around the computer.
\n\n\nI'd put it forth that the term doesn't just sound dorky, and it's not just hard to explain (given that first you have to explain what a metroidvania is -- itself a fraught bit of terminology). I'd say it's all but useless, too.
\n
This is possibly one of my favorite blog posts of 2025 and I cannot believe I haven't shared it yet.
\nIf you recognize this name, it's because he translated Mother 3. He's got a whole
\nbunch of blog posts that talk about video game translation, an this one just so happened to be the most recent one.
Obsidian is good normal software, and it's wild to celebrate my 5 year anniversary with it. It has yet to get worse over time. I joined before there was a mobile app, sync, or anything like that, and I've since bought every single service they've offered when it came out. I'm still on the classic $5/month 50gb sync plan. It's pretty good! One day I'll write about how I use it but it's not really anything crazy.
","tags":["obsidian","anniversary"],"date_published":"2026-03-02T01:49:48.389Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260220-vulture-fund/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260220-vulture-fund/","title":"Vulture Fund","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Weyland Operation: Transaction – Liability
\nPlay cost: 7 – Influence cost: 2
\nGain 14 credits and take 1 bad publicity.
\n“The boss likes to swoop in at just the last second. You should consider yourself lucky.”
\n4 stars
\nI don't think there's much to say actually. I think this card wants be run as a 1 or 2-of in a decent number of non-bad publicity focused decks, and that means it's a pretty good card. Lots of money y'all. If you want more opinions on bad publicity, please read Veronica's piece on this card and Editorial Division.
","tags":["netrunner","vantage point","card reviews"],"date_published":"2026-02-20T03:22:52.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260218-let-them-dream/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260218-let-them-dream/","title":"Let Them Dream","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Neutral Agenda: Initiative
\nAdvancement cost: 4 – Points: 2 – Influence cost: 1
\nWhen you score this agenda, you may search HQ, R&D, or Archives for 1 agenda and reveal it. (Shuffle R&D after searching it.) Add that agenda to HQ or the bottom of R&D.
\nWhile this agenda is in the Runner’s score area, it is worth 1 less agenda point.
\n3 stars
\nBefore I talk about Let Them Dream, I need to talk about 5/3s. The job of the 5/3 agenda is to win you the game in 3 agendas, and decks that run 5/3s usually want to score out with any combination of two 2-pointers and one 3-pointer. But the 5/3 has one major vice: they kinda suck. They're so much harder to score out than 4/2s (or 3/2s!), and their payoff usually isn't even worth the work! This is especially true because corps vastly prefer to score out 5/3s as the game-winning agenda, so any \"on score\" text is irrelevant. If the corp got to choose, they would dedicate the entire power budget of a 5/3 towards hurting the Runner, and none of it on helping the corp. This is incredibly obvious when you see what 5/3s corps run, and why they run them. For example, Send a Message and Next Big Thing give the corp tempo for having an agenda scored or stolen, while SDS Drone Deployment and Méliès City Luxury Line hurt the runner's tempo in the worst case and can deny a steal in the best case, but the best thing a 5/3 could do is to guarantee the runner needs to steal more agendas than you need to score. This is what Global Food Initiative did. It did so well at this job that it was used in 99% of competitive decks when it was put on the restricted list 2 years after its release.
\nLet Them Dream may have the same incredibly powerful effect as Global Food Initiative but, as a 4/2 that costs one neutral influence, it’s having to compete for deck slots with 3/2s that are easier to score and strong 4/2s that have a bigger impact on the board. Does this mean it’s bad actually? Hell no! Being worth only 1 point on steal is still too powerful. I can see it being used in maybe some slower glacier decks, and definitely in some decks that only run 1 and 2 point agendas (Thule), but I don’t see Let Them Dream being anywhere near as dominant as its predecessor.
","tags":["netrunner","vantage point","card reviews"],"date_published":"2026-02-18T23:32:00.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260218-melies-city-luxury-l/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260218-melies-city-luxury-l/","title":"Méliès City Luxury Line","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"HB Agenda: Expansion
\nAdvancement cost: 5 – Points: 3
\nAs an additional cost to steal this agenda, the runner must spend click.
\nWhen you score this agenda, gain click.
\n“Welcome aboard, Moonsilver Class members. Our express stops today are at New Lovell, Heinlein, and Imamura Station.”
\n5 stars
\nScoring PD is still back baybee! Ikawah Project has been a staple card in scoring PD for about as long as I can find decks of it. (Here's examples from 2021, 2023, and 2024. I have no idea what was going on in 2022.) The only card that's as much of a staple in these decks as Ikawah Project is Global Food Initiative (which might be relevant to my next card review). This might be bringing back enough old tools for scoring PD to make it a top deck in the Vantage Point meta. I know that I'm certainly gonna be playing it.
","tags":["netrunner","vantage point","card reviews"],"date_published":"2026-02-18T15:15:03.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260215-i-survived-being-the/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260215-i-survived-being-the/","title":"I survived being the #1 post on Lobste.rs","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"\nHey y'all. This is gonna be a short one. My post about Arborium ended up doing severals. By this I mean it was briefly the number 1 post on Lobste.rs, which is an invite-only diet orange site. Thankfully, I've only received a small amount of harassment from this. Anyways Netrunner card reviews coming soon.
","tags":["blogging about blogging","meta"],"date_published":"2026-02-15T22:19:13.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260214-btw-this-site-does-h/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260214-btw-this-site-does-h/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"btw this site does have an rss feed it's at https://ewie.online/feed/feed.xml or https://ewie.online/feed/feed.json my feed page is meant to teach people how to get into rss and i haven't got around to it yet cos it's a hobby site ;-;
","tags":["blogging about blogging"],"date_published":"2026-02-14T22:53:13.359Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260214-arborium-is-ai-slopw/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260214-arborium-is-ai-slopw/","title":"Arborium is AI slopware and should not be trusted","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"It would be an understatement to say that I am mildly interested in syntax highlighting.1 While I have yet to write a full-fledged parser myself, my blog's2 syntax highlighting plugin is custom-built. Under the hood it uses the Lezer3 parsing and highlighting system, which is inspired by the gold standard of syntax highlighting used in all modern code editors except Visual Studio Code: tree-sitter. I think Lezer is a great tool and it's especially great in the use case of syntax highlighting on the web,4 but I've still kept my eye out for the chance to use tree-sitter instead.
\nLast weekend while scrolling through some quieter feeds in my RSS reader, I came across an article which might be the something better I was looking for.
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20260214060035-IMG_0467.jpeg\")
\n fasterthanli.me\n \n Introducing arborium, a tree-sitter distribution
\nAbout two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
\nArborium is a high-performance syntax highlighting tool powered by tree-sitter created by Amos Wenger. Amos (also known as fasterthanlime) is a long-time open source developer who I greatly respected. I learned Rust from their Advent of Code article series, and I appreciate their commitment to correctness and speed. I was especially excited to learn about Arborium because it was designed to work on the web using Javascript. I could use this!
\nI started writing code to integrate it into my site immediately and had a plugin ready within an hour or so. Here’s the relevant code (edited for clarity):
\ncodeElements.forEach(async (element: Element) => {\n\tconst programmingLanguage = detectLanguage(element);\n\t// highlight is the all-in-one function from arborium that does all the real work\n\tconst highlightedText = await highlight(programmingLanguage, element.textContent);\n\telement.innerHTML = highlightedText;\n});\nI tried building the site and...
\n![\"Terminal](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/546851520-86b75c9a-439a-453b-85a3-8b475c4f390d.png\")
Ouch... It didn’t work, but this is a simple problem. window is a global object that can be accessed anywhere in the browser because only the browser has a window. It doesn’t exist if you’re running Javascript code outside of the browser like with Deno.5 And if you try to use window then you’re advised to replace it.
![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/Pasted%20image%2020260210125418.png\")
I read through Arborium’s Javascript source code and found out that, as part of setup, highlight directly calls some code that tries to access window. No worries, there’s a more direct way of highlighting code that circumvents highlight’s setup phase. I’ll do that instead
codeElements.forEach(async (element: Element) => {\n\tconst programmingLanguage = detectLanguage(element);\n\t// const highlighted = await highlight(lang, element.textContent);\n\t\n\t// loadGrammar tells Arborium to load the language you want to use.\n\tconst languageGrammar = await loadGrammar(programmingLanguage);\n\tconst highlightedText = languageGrammar.highlight(element.textContent);\n\telement.innerHTML = highlightedText;\n});\nAnd then I build my site again, and...
\n![\"Terminal](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/547181602-013f2819-3fc0-4137-9a72-89fec5775d0b.png\")
Ough... It didn’t work. I looked into it and this might be a Deno issue, which is less well-supported than the more commonly used Node. Arborium also appears to be doing some hacky dynamic code importing that isn’t playing nice with the way Deno expects imports to work. I haven’t tested this in Node, so maybe it works better there. Regardless, I’ve read enough of the source code to have learned that Arborium has some completely undocumented6 configuration options that would let me replace its dynamic code importing code with my own, so I guess I can do that.
\ncodeElements.forEach(async (element: Element) => {\n\tconst programmingLanguage = detectLanguage(element);\n\t\n\t// loadGrammar tells Arborium to load the language you want to use.\n\tconst languageGrammar = await loadGrammar(programmingLanguage, {\n\t\tresolveJs: ({ programmingLanguage}: ResolveArgs) => (\n\t\t\t// Deno-specific dynamic imports to make the dang thing work \n\t\t\timport(`npm:@arborium/${programmingLanguage}`)\n\t\t)\n\t});\n\t\n\tconst highlightedText = languageGrammar.highlight(element.textContent);\n\telement.innerHTML = highlightedText;\n});\nThat should be everything. In theory, I’ve worked around all these tiny little bugs and now I’m on the easy street of straightforward code that just works.
\nIt should work. I should be done.
\n![\"Terminal](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/SCR-20260209-jzvk.png\")
I’m back at the first bug.
\nSo here I’m stuck. I try to work around the code that uses window and I run into issues with imports, then I try to work around imports and I run back into issues with window. There’s only one option left, and that’s to file some issues on the GitHub code repository for Arborium and wait for Amos to fix them.
I file two issues, one at Sunday night and the other on Monday morning. About an hour after the second issue, Amos responds saying they've got a completed pull request7 that fixes all the problems I was running into. This seems like a quick turnaround for some environment-specific bugs, but they're also a pretty good developer who’s been working on this for much longer than I have. Perhaps their experience meant they could quickly clock what the problem was and fix it, but I then open the PR and find my greatest fears realized.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/SCR-20260212-ioit.png\")
You see, this whole time I’ve been misleading you. While I was trying to debug all these simple yet awkward bugs, a sort of dread was building up in the back of my mind. I was starting to get this feeling that Arborium might be almost completely written by AI.
\nTo demonstrate what I mean by getting a feeling, let’s look at the Arborium website. It’s a nice-looking website, but if you look a little closer you’ll notice some inconsistencies: Arborium’s copy has a few, but not many, AI tells;8 some incorrect or outdated links; all code blocks except the “hero image” code block lack highlighting, which means they’re not formatted in a way that Arborium would recognize (something I would avoid if I were trying to show off my syntax highlighting tool); and, most importantly, there’s a complete lack of documentation. You’re given steps on how to use Arborium in simple use cases, but you’re completely fucked the moment you step outside the golden path, leaving you with no recourse except to read the source code. As you saw earlier, this is what happened to me.
\nThis all added up to this strong AI “vibe”, but I wasn’t looking for it at the time. I had heard some time ago that Amos was dabbling with AI, so I didn’t come in expecting pristine, exclusively human-written code. But, I also did not expect the rot to go this deep. I suspect that the Arborium website and codebase are primarily AI; although I doubt either Amos or I have any way of confirming or denying the percentage of code that’s AI-generated.
\nThis, along with some recent drama I learned about, led me to pass on using Arborium. Even with the bug fixes, I would rather go back to my Lezer integration.
\nThis was not happening entirely in isolation. As I am wont to do, I was bitching about being unable to make Arborium work to my friend Damien. He said that he was unsurprised by the use of AI in Arborium ever since a month ago, when Amos accused zkat (the maker of the miette error-handling Rust library) of “witch hunting” after zkat added Amos to a list called “open slopware”, which I have heard was meant to list software and developers that use AI. Perhaps in part due to Amos’ comments (I am not entirely aware of the timetable), “open slopware” got a lot of backlash, which led to zkat receiving a deluge of harassment, which resulted in her announcing her leave from the open source community the day after Amos’ accusation. At the same time, Amos ripped miette out from all of their open source projects and vibe coded a replacement.
\nThis drama is not the most relevant to Arborium as a project, and I’m not too bothered by Amos replacing a dependency for personal reasons,9 but I find it to be a bit childish to make AI write a replacement for a significant dependency for all your open source projects in such a short period of time. At least treat the process of replacing this dependency with the gravitas it deserves to ensure that the end user of the library doesn’t have a degraded experience from your drama.
\nWhile returning to Lezer took no effort, I could apply the lessons I learned from integrating Arborium to improve my Lezer plugin.10 Doing this saved about 100 lines of code and greatly simplified the logic. Arborium still had some features that my own plugin lacked, like using custom HTML tags to mark up the code to reduce file sizes, but it would be trivial to implement them myself.
\nI have come away from this with a newfound appreciation for Lezer. While it has some issues, it also has real documentation, a similar level of power to tree-sitter (with minimal concessions made for the limitations of the web), and is easy to work with. The most complicated code that I needed to make Lezer work is still simple enough to be embedded in a blog post. (It was, in fact, embedded in Joel Gustafson's Syntax Highlighting on the Web.) The only trade-off I’m making is an increased difficulty in using off-the-shelf coding themes, but my blog uses a custom-built coding theme, so that’s not a problem for now. It was also recommended by the Xi-Editor guy, if that’s worth anything.
\nOut of an abundance of caution, I have reached out to the developer of Lezer, Marijn Haverbeke, on whether they used AI in their code. Here is their response:
\n\n\nNo, I don’t use language models and I’ve been updating my contribution guides to forbid slop code in pull requests.
\n
Even though I have moved away from Arborium due to my own personal distaste of AI-“enhanced” development, this is not something a developer with weaker moral convictions would care about. Amos fixed the bugs! They even implemented manually importing programming language grammars, something that I off-handedly mentioned that I would appreciate. If you didn’t care about any of the other drama, this sounds unambiguously good. I thought it would be prudent to see for myself before publishing this blog post, so I updated all my code to match what was described in the PR:
\n// Deno has its own method for reading files, but it’s what the PR said to use.\nimport { readFile } from \"node:fs/promises\";\nimport * as htmlGrammar from \"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@arborium/html@2.13.0\";\nimport * as cssGrammar from \"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@arborium/css@2.13.0\";\n\nconst programmingLanguages: Record<string, unknown> = {\n\thtml: htmlGrammar,\n\tcss: cssGrammar,\n};\n\n// The PR said to import the wasm from the node modules folder, which Deno lacks.\n// I had to download it myself from jsdelivr.\nconst wasmFiles: Record<string, unknown> = {\n\thtml: await readFile(\"./helpers/arborium/html_grammar_bg.wasm\"),\n\tcss: await readFile(\"./helpers/arborium/css_grammar_bg.wasm\"),\n};\n\ncodeElements.forEach(async (element: Element) => {\n\tconst programmingLanguage = language(element);\n\n\tconst languageGrammar = await registerGrammar(\n\t programmingLanguages[programmingLanguage],\n\t wasmFiles[programmingLanguage] as any, // this was the only way I could make it work\n\t);\n\tconst highlightedText = await languageGrammar.highlight(element.textContent);\n\telement.innerHTML = highlightedText;\n});\nThis is so much more complicated and hacky than my updated Lezer plugin. Even if it works, I would not want to use this and it would feel too brittle to not feel like my blog would break at any moment, but I’m trying to roughly match what the pull request says to do. I build, and...
\n![\"Failed](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/SCR-20260211-kxtt.png\")
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
\nSyntax highlighting is just highlighting parts of code to make it more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read. In other words, it’s when the code has pretty colors attached to it. ↩
\nWhich is built with Lume! A really great static site generator inspired by 11ty that manages to balance power with ease of use. I don’t think any other static site generator would be simple enough and well documented enough for me to build my own plugins like this. ↩
\nLezer is also what powers Codemirror. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a code editor that runs in the browser. You’ve probably seen it before, since it’s used in everything from Chrome DevTools to the Obsidian note-taking app. ↩
\nIn Lezer’s own words, “Unfortunately, tree-sitter is written in C, which is still awkward to run in the browser (and CodeMirror targets non-WASM browsers). It also generates very hefty grammar files because it makes the size/speed trade-off in a different way than a web system would.” ↩
\nThis also applies to other non-browser Javascript runtimes, like Bun and Node. ↩
\nThis does not count as documentation. ![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/SCR-20260210-lxpl.png\")
↩
A way for a developer to notify other developers that they have completed a feature. ↩
\nWhat I've noticed is its use of the royal \"we\" and also some catchphrases like \"that one's hard\" and some other common AI marketing-esque phrases. I don't really see any of these used on other syntax highlighting websites in the same way that Arborium uses them. ↩
\nIt could be argued that this blog post is a lengthy justification for removing Arborium from my site for personal reasons. ↩
\nI also turned it from a Rehype plugin to a regular Lume plugin! This is not faster since Lume renders posts concurrently, so maybe I shouldn't do it, but it does feels simpler and it should take less work to bring it up to feature parity. ↩
\ndamn season 3 of dungeons and daddies was really good. i have issues with it that i'll get into later but damn what a finale (2 months late but still)
","tags":["dungeons and daddies","nonsense"],"date_published":"2026-02-03T22:15:59.199Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260115-quote-back-href-http/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20260115-quote-back-href-http/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"To give a way to automate adding a section to a personal website which links to the websites of your friends and allies, and which does so via the medium of 83x11 badges. Ideally you'd have a list of websites in whatever tooling you use to generate your site, and when you push the button it goes off and finds the buttons and downloads them, and then it puts them in a nice little display, each pointing to the canonical url for that site with the proper alt text.
\nv buckenham\nThe 88x31 button spec\ngood news! the well-known/button spec already exists, just in a different form. you can find it here: https://codeberg.org/LunarEclipse/well-known-button. i know about this because beeps uses it, and because it's currently (partially) implemented on the 3.0-ish1 branch of my site.
there is a practical difference between v's spec and the well known spec, which is the well known spec uses json while v's spec uses meta tags. i have no idea if that makes a real difference though, lol.
\n2.5? ↩
\nAnother year has come and gone, as they say. In this time of reflection, I'd like to look back at 2025, and note what I did, what I liked, and what I'd like to improve on.
\nUnfortunately, I spend a lot of time on my website talking about making and maintaining the website. Trust me when I say that I make it look much more difficult to run a website compared to how it actually is. Even still, the website has shown a lot of positive growth this year! Not in the numbers sense, mind you. I don't track analytics. But in the past year, I've shipped Evie On-Line 2.0, which was the huge redesign I did a while back, I've added comments, and I've tried to streamline posting. This has somewhat worked out, and I've had spurts of more semi-active posting on here. Generally, I think that the biggest thing holding me back from shitposting on my own site is this faux air of prestige. I feel like I can't flood people's (RSS) feeds with my own garbage because it drowns out the quality posts and because it'll bother people. Outside of that, the site lacks real shares, and I'd like to better unify the design system and write more about the actual systems behind the site. This site has a bunch of interesting tech powering it! ...Not that it really warrants it.
\nOutside of that, There's the annoying conversation about hosting and morals. The code for Evie On-Line is currently hosted on Github, and the site itself, image hosting, and comments are all run through Cloudflare. Cloudflare is not great morals-wise, and I would like to self-host more of it and move away from Cloudflare whenever possible (not even mentioning that I've been paying for a cheap VPS for about 9 months now despite not even using it). I don't know if I'll ever truly be free, but there's a lot of improvements I can make right now without too much stress.
\nI also still have a massive todo list of minor improvements to make to the site that I've been (very) slowly working my way through. Thanks to Sage and Beeps for their feedback! I'm sorry I haven't made as much progress in that list as I would've liked. I started with the hardest task first...
\nTo turn all this into a list of deliverables for 2026, it would be:
\nThat's right it's website stuff round 2. Last year I didn't post enough. This hasn't been due to an increase in touching grass. I've been on the socials more than ever and I should be on them less! The problem is that I haven't been writing enough. I haven't done enough shitposting OR effortposting. I have so many thoughts about dumb shit and I've let them all stay bottled up. This year I hope to change that. I plan to talk more about dumb manga I'm reading, whatever games I'm playing, any miscellaneous thoughts I'm having, etc. I think a big motivator for this for me is the fact that I have no record of what I have enjoyed this year that I could use for a year end list. There is no \"Of the Year 2025\" for me, and I want to have one for 2026.
\n2025 was a year of big changes for me. I got my name legally changed, moved in with my girlfriend, got bottom surgery, and many other things. This year I'm hoping to mellow out a bit and try to build up some savings. I want 2026 to be the Year of Maintenance. Nothing new, just polishing up my life and trying to do what I can to make my life the best version of what it can be with the position I am in.
","tags":["look back","2025"],"date_published":"2026-01-01T17:10:35.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251221-holyyyyy-shit-matpat/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251221-holyyyyy-shit-matpat/","title":"holyyyyy shit matpat looks rough","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"Matpat](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20251221022446-IMG_0329.jpeg\")
he looks exactly like if you put matpat from 2013 through a snapchat age filter
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-12-21T02:32:42.650Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251217-down-bad-implies-the/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251217-down-bad-implies-the/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"down bad implies the existence of up good
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-12-17T22:04:43.623Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251214-was-scrolling-throug/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251214-was-scrolling-throug/","title":"was scrolling through mangadex when i saw this","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"Manga](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20251214190352-IMG_0293.jpeg\")
what the fuck is reverse chastity? what did they mean by this??? (i know what they meant they meant the guy gets laid a lot)
","tags":["nonsense","manga"],"date_published":"2025-12-14T19:07:50.425Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251130-got-a-switch-2/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251130-got-a-switch-2/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"got a switch 2 :)
","tags":["nonsense","personal"],"date_published":"2025-11-30T20:46:59.495Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251129-i-wonder-if-there-s/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251129-i-wonder-if-there-s/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i wonder if there's any way to convert like an ESL (the epaper price tags) into a sort of TRMNL type device, cos there's gotta be a ton you could get for cheap from liquidation sales or anything like that. idk just thinking
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-11-29T18:59:35.445Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251115-listening-to-the-new/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251115-listening-to-the-new/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"listening to the newest mountain goats and got jumpscared by sudden lin manuel miranda
","date_published":"2025-11-15T20:19:02.346Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251023-corsair/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251023-corsair/","title":"Corsair","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Anarch Program: Icebreaker – Fracter
\nInstall cost: 3 – Strength: 0 – Memory cost: 1 – Influence cost: 2
\nInterface → 1 credit: Break 1 barrier subroutine.
\n1 credit: The barrier you are encountering gets -3 strength for the remainder of this encounter. Spend credits only from stealth cards to use this ability.
\nThere have been many golden ages of piracy, each occurring on stranger and stormier waters.
\n4 stars
\nWhile this can be an interesting breaker that requires support to function, I’m moreso eyeing it as a way to enable ice destruction. Barriers are the most high value targets for Arruaceiras Crew, and Corsair can destroy a Pharos using 3 stealth credits and the tag + 2 credits ability on Crew. Logjam can be even cheaper. All of this depends on the set printing enough stealth support to make that package worth it, since I don’t think just Trickster Taka will be good enough to make you run this breaker. I’m not worrying about this. Stealth as a keyword is a tightly coupled bundle of setups and payoffs. Like similar synergy packages, you choose a suboptimal way of building your deck and building your rig for the payoff of getting to use good stealth cards. Obviously, Corsair is total garbage if Vantage Point stealth decks will only get to use the Ashes stealth cards, and I think the review would be uninteresting if I said, “I don’t see any stealth support from the first card spoiled for the set. 0 stars.”
\nOn the other hand… Imagine the future where Corsair gets no support and Shaper tries to treat it like a classic Shaper HyperMantle-esque 1 breaker suite with importing Taka and using Chromatophores and Pelangi to try to make everything a Barrier. It’d be so funny.
","tags":["netrunner","vantage point","card reviews"],"date_published":"2025-10-23T01:16:49.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251022-we-re-back-to-netrun/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251022-we-re-back-to-netrun/","title":"We’re back to Netrunner scoops season with Vantage Point!","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Welcome back to Netrunner scoops season! This one is gonna start low and slow, since Vantage Point isn't going to be out until Q1 2026. As per usual, I will be trying to review as many cards as I can until the set finally comes out. Here's hoping I can review them all.
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20251020031817-Image.jpeg\")
\nNull Signal Games\n@netrunner.nullsignal.games\n\nLink to post\nBreaking news from #NetrunnerWorlds25 in Edinburgh, the next #Netrunner set has been revealed!
\n![](\"https://nullsignal.games/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/OWL_N10_Illustration.png\")
\nnullsignal.games\nAnnouncing Vantage Point - Null Signal Games
\nAnnouncing Vantage Point, the next expansion compatible with Netrunner from Null Signal Games.
\nHowever, there is a catch this year. This will be my first set of card reviews since I've started volunteering at Null Signal Games. While it is very exciting for me to help work at the organization that makes my favorite card game, this still carries some risks. Not to get too inside baseball, but I will make sure to try to alleviate some concerns about compromising the quality of my card reviews.
\nTo clarify how much I would know, I am in the web dev team and not in the development team (confusing, I know). This means I don't make the cards, and I don't playtest the cards. I have seen all the cards (sans art) one time a number of months ago, but I've had no experience with how they will actually play or anything of the sort. Also, my memory is really bad. In other words, I know very little, verging on nothing, and my reviews will still fare about as well as the average person.
\nMy reviews are still my pure first impressions, which will be proven wrong as soon as the set comes out and I will continue to regret my bad reviews as much as I regret having rated Trick Shot at 2 stars.
\nHope y'all are as excited for the new set as I am. God I'm so excited to get out of Sable meta.
","tags":["netrunner","vantage point"],"date_published":"2025-10-22T21:01:16.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251020-idk-why-last-week-s/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251020-idk-why-last-week-s/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"idk why last week's link roundup broke and is rounding up again
","date_published":"2025-10-20T11:13:35.811Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251020-uhhh-no-link-roundup/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251020-uhhh-no-link-roundup/","title":"Uhhh. No link roundup this week. Turns out I actually ran out of links","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"there's links somewhere, but I don't have any stockpiled lol.
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-10-20T02:49:39.738Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251013-some-links-you-might/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251013-some-links-you-might/","title":"Some links you might like 9","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Alternate title: I was sent to another world and all I got for it was these 5 links?!
\nI am not a game dev person, but my own experiences with trying to find a job in the tech job market are pretty similar. (It never worked out. I work in education now.) You put in a lot of work only for the companies you're trying to get a job from to not even give you the courtesy of sending you a rejection email. It feels like what's going on is that companies are, in a way, dropping the pretenses. If you want to read another story about the hellscape that is the game dev job market, there’s more where that came from.
\n\n\nYou are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots.
\n
So true dude. Programming does suck. It's also great but you really have to build on top of the culmination of some really bad decisions.
\nNormally, sharing an article by someone who works at not one but two AI companies should be signal enough that I have been replaced by a doppelgänger and should be killed on sight, but there’s something here I want to dig into more. What I find most interesting is the comparison between Vercel and Cloudflare’s backgrounds. My site is hosted on Cloudflare—it is significantly cheaper to use than Vercel—but I used to use Vercel in the past. From my own experiences, the assertions made in the article are true, but I disagree with the conclusion that these two monoliths need to prove that you should stick with them. Consolidation on this level is itself a red flag, and is maybe a sign to reduce your dependency on one of two giant companies. I'm slowly working out what it'd take to make the move away from hosting my site on Cloudflare, and while I'd recommend hosting your own site on Cloudflare if you're starting out, it's always good to learn how to move away from depending on the kindness of a large company offering a free tier.
\n\n\nThe thesis of this video is that, fundamentally, Netrunner has this problem where it is, by default, this flat game state. Where, without card effects, the Corp always loses.
\n
This is a talk explaining what the concept of a \"flat game state\" is in the game of Netrunner, and what that entails in its card design and interplay. This is a video that's opened my mind to new ways of looking at board interaction in Netrunner, and is the motivating force for some new posts that are in the works on game design in Netrunner. Good game!
\nI wanted to end things off with another dunk on AI. Sure it's so easy and everyone is doing it, but there's some really incredible writers dusting off their keyboards to sit down and complain.
","tags":["links","link roundup"],"date_published":"2025-10-13T02:16:49.000Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251012-shiren-poses-triumph/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251012-shiren-poses-triumph/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"Shiren](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20251012191550-2025101214120300-2CBF7B427C577E819A526545E059C21F.jpeg\")
rolled credits on Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. incredible game. i know the postgame is the \"real\" game, but i'd argue that serpentcoil island on its own was worth almost all the price tag. it was such a journey to finally beat. transmutation pots are unrivaled.
","date_published":"2025-10-12T19:35:11.480Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251009-annoying-all-my-frie/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251009-annoying-all-my-frie/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"annoying all my friends by saying \"wow this is a really cool period piece!\" whenever they show me a movie made before 1980
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-10-09T22:55:11.885Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251002-i-miss-cohost/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20251002-i-miss-cohost/","title":"i miss cohost 🥺","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"","date_published":"2025-10-02T11:45:55.211Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250926-some-links-you-might/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250926-some-links-you-might/","title":"Some links you might like 8","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"I always feel really bad when I procrastinate on the weekly link roundups. They’re relatively easy to put together and yet I still struggle to get one out each week. I’ll continue to try to get at least one roundup a week out, but I’ll likely continue to fail.
\nI am an occasional watcher of Noodle's second channel, and recently he's been ranting about how color is kind of one of the hardest problems. Not just for computers, just in general. This video specifically focuses on how it is impossible to watch the original version of the movie The Matrix, and the wild thing is, this might be one of the best case scenarios for a movie. Movie rereleases change things all the time. Every accessible release of the original Star Wars trilogy no longer resembles the movie people saw in the theaters.1 Same goes for the recent releases of James Cameron movies. Unless (and sometimes even if) you want to turn to piracy, it feels like movies as a concept is gnawed by slow fire.
\n\n\nThe simultaneous cultivation and rejection of smut has resulted in a phenomenon one might call “wholesome horny” games. Fields Of Mistria, Spirit Swap, and Date Everything! are all examples. None of these games have sex scenes, but feature attractive characters and innuendos aplenty. They feel ready-made for other people to make smut about them, but are ultimately skittish about being erotic themselves, beyond a little cleavage, a shirt tight across muscles, or a wink to the audience. Even more than games like Hades or Baldur’s Gate 3, which do feature sex, they retreat into a strangely sexless horny zone. Sure, you’ll find hot people here, but for erotica, apply elsewhere.
\n
With the advent of Hades II, I was reminded of this article along with Melos Han-Tani's Treatmills article. I could've put either of them in the roundup, but I picked this one because, as an ace person, I find it really interesting. The modern world's specific flavor of puritanism is a weird special interest of mine. I have further thoughts on this and some weird things about the vibes of the MBMBaM and Dropout fandom that will maybe get expanded into a full blog post down the line. Who knows.
\n\n\nYou may be planting a potted fig tree from a nursery. I see this so often: Someone has brought me in for a consult, and they proudly show off their little fig tree, set to grow upright and stately like a maple. Sometimes, they have even staked up any spreading limbs, to make the growth even more vertical.
\nSure enough, it will be beautiful, but other things besides figs make better shade trees. Within a few years, no ground-walking creature is going to be able to reach any of the fruit. There are better ways to feed the birds.
\n
Just a guide on growing figs in the Pacific Northwest. Please read it.
\nLiquid Glass—Apple's new design system that is currently used in all their major operating systems—is just okay. At its best, it's stunningly beautiful. It its worst, it's unreadable. In both outcomes, it calls too much attention to itself. There has been a number of thinkpieces on Liquid Glass. Perhaps give this one a shot.
\nCSS is probably my favorite programming language, so this is a fun read just for more ideas to steal on how to handle CSS stuff. Note: Most interactivity on the web should be JavaScript. Just for accessibility reasons. Theres a lot of nuances to this though.
\nFans responded to this with the Despecialized Edition, which also has its own problems. ↩
\nI figured I should write some of these to kinda show in open that I actually write a decent amount of code for this site.
\nIf you look at the timestamp on each post, it now says how long ago it's been since the post went up as opposed to the absolute time it came out. This is helpful for a couple reasons, but a big one is that all my timestamps are in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which meant you could not get a sense for what time I was uploading posts anyways. I'd fire something off at dinner and then it'd seem like I was doing crazed 1am posting.
\nYou can now see old cohost posts reuploaded to my blog at the #cohost archive tag. I am missing most of my posts because I have to import these by hand. Any posts that rebugged other posts or my own posts are not uploaded (see: Stuff I still need to do).
\n![\"25.10](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250917160906-Screenshot%202025-09-17%20at%2010.55.12%E2%80%AFAM.jpeg\")
i have no opinions on everything else
","tags":["netrunner","nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-09-17T16:10:44.347Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250914-silksong-be-like/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250914-silksong-be-like/","title":"Silksong be like","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"![\"Hornet](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/silksong-be-like.gif\")
i looked into how much the \"mr. beast feastables\" chocolate bar is and they're literally 50¢ an ounce greater than the adjacent snickers bar. that's wild
","tags":["mr. beast"],"date_published":"2025-09-04T22:51:38.295Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250902-made-some-pretty-sub/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250902-made-some-pretty-sub/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"made some pretty substantial edits to my previous post, specifically the parts on why i found gerard's post misleading, and being more clear about the subject of that post's (not david gerard) financial stake in ai
","tags":["meta","blogging about blogging"],"date_published":"2025-09-02T01:25:52.872Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250901-i-feel-really-bad-fo/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250901-i-feel-really-bad-fo/","title":"I feel really bad for saying this, but you kind of missed with this one David Gerard","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Hey David Gerard, long time follower second time caller. (Here's the first time.)
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250901060838-Image.jpeg\")
So I recently saw a post of yours—attached below—about a post from a lead developer of the \"Julia language\" trying out Claude Code (which I will call \"Clode\" for the rest of the post for no particular reason except it saves me keystrokes and is funny) and finding it \"not very good\".
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250901015851-Image.jpeg\")
\n David Gerard\n @davidgerard@circumstances.run\n \n Link to post\nthe extremely bottlenecked project lead for the Julia language tries out Claude Code. you'll be shocked to hear it's not very good.
\nhttps://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-use-of-claude-code-in-sciml-repos/131009/8
\n\"Claude can only solve simple problems that a first year undergrad can do, it can’t do anything more, it’s pretty bad.\"
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250901021140-Image.jpeg\")
\n discourse.julialang.org\n \n The use of Claude Code in SciML repos
\nSo it’s pretty public that for about a month now I’ve had 32 processes setup on one of the 64 core 128gb RAM servers to just ssh in, tmux to a window, and tell it to slam on some things non-stop. And it has been really successful!.. with the right definition of success. Let me explain. I think the first will answer the others. Basically, Claude is really not smart at all. There is no extensive algorithm implementation that has come from AI. I know some GSoCers and SciML Small Grants applicants...
\nI came into the post imagining from your description, perhaps, an overworked lead developer for the Julia programming language. Lead developers of open source projects are famously overworked and under-appreciated. In my mind, this lead developer, swamped with issues and feeling the crunch, opts to try using Clode to see if it lives up to the hype and if it could make his life easier. This developer finds it to be less than useless, and then writes a scathing critique of it on the Julia language forums. In my opinion, this is how the post is framed. However, it is not that.
\nThe forum post is actually from Chris Rackauckas, a lead developer of SciML, which is an organization that's all about scientific machine learning.1 While he seems to be part of the Github organization for the Julia language, he has only made 9 commits to the language itself, 6 of which were for the README. Since this Rakauckas is a lead developer of an organization that focuses on machine learning, it's unsurprising that he would be at least a bit AI curious.2 In the forum post, Rackauckas states that, while he finds Clode useless for anything advanced, he still felt as though there was a niche that could save him time.
\n\n\nSo from this one principle arose:
\nThis claude thing is pretty dumb, but I had a ton of issues open that require a brainless solution.
\n
Rackauckas continues on to say that Clode allows him to no longer have to spend 12 hours each week working on trivial Github issues. He solves this now by throwing \"32 instances of claude at the problem for 8 hours.\"
\n\n\nI have had to spend like 4am-10am every morning Sunday through Saturday for the last 10 years on this stuff before the day gets started just to keep up on the \"simple stuff\" for the hundreds of repos I maintain. And this neverending chunk of \"meh\" stuff is exactly what it seems fit to do. So now I just let the 32 bots run wild on it and get straight to the real work, and it's a gamechanger.
\n
I was planning on ending this post by saying that, despite everything, I didn't consider this post a win for AI boosters. I initially considered it to still have enough caveats to maybe not be an entirely positive spin for the groups of people who are personally or financially invested in the success of AI, but that was before I found Rackauckas' blog. As of time of writing, his most recent blog post is titled A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers, written about a month after the forum post. In the blog post, he promotes the idea that you can treat AI as a cheap army of junior developers,3 he claims that expert programmers are the only people who should be vibe coding, that he pays for a $200/month Clode Max subscription, and that in one month he used enough tokens for $5,200 of compute. On top of all this, I was able to find out that he has a major role at two different AI companies. We are no longer talking about just some lead developer on an open source project. This guy is someone whose behavior can be explained through the lens of financial motivation. Boosting AI and keeping the bubble going means he will continue to get paid. Which perhaps matters since I still have no idea how he's paying for the 64-core 128gb RAM servers4 he is running all his instances of Clode off of. At this point, the only possible dunk on AI remaining is the potential own-goal of only saying that AI could save him 12 hours a week of trivial work, given how much financial stake he has in the success of AI.
\nDespite everything, there yet remains some hope. Rackauckas has submitted his own post to the Orange Site,5 and the reception seems to be... mixed. Negative comments include \"this appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article\" from polotics, \"this may be the most 2025 blog post ever written\" from ppqqrr, and \"I've got a TONNE of low-hanging fruit that I can't give to an intern, but could easily sick a tool as capable as an intern on. This was not that.\" from jpollock While the comments section of an Orange Site post doesn't make for the most interesting reading, it still would've made for a more factual basis for a post than what you've written.
\nThanks for reading,\nEvie Finch
\n(Pretend I have a really cool email signature here. Like the Paul Allen's business card of signatures. Trust me, it's really cool.)
\nSurprisingly—or unsurprisingly—enough, funded by Microsoft and the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative. ↩
\nSciML has got a .ai domain for gods' sake. ↩
\nWhich is a common talking point for AI boosters, who say, “Well it may not be the smartest, but it’s like a cheap version of paying for junior developers”, when they’re not saying that it’s a frighteningly smart super genius that will take over the world. ↩
\nI checked how much a comparable model of computer would cost to rent on Hetzner, and it was roughly €200/month. Perhaps he's getting access to these servers through one of the two different AI companies he's a major part of, through MIT since he instructs there, or maybe he's paying for it out of pocket. Who knows. ↩
\nI think submitting your own post is a bit of a HackerNews faux pas? Can anyone in the comments let me know if I'm right or not? ↩
\ni've been sick all day so i've mostly been sleeping but now i feel alright. huge win in evie town
","date_published":"2025-08-30T23:27:13.431Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250826-go-up-or-climb/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250826-go-up-or-climb/","title":"Go up or climb","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"Here's another piece where I'm publishing work I did years ago explaining entries on the Blaseball Iceberg, which I also made years ago. This one is way up near the top of the iceberg, so it's meant to be short and really simple to understand. This is good, because I'm not yet ready to explain eDensity.1
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250824065247-Image.jpeg\")
Since the start of season 2 of Blaseball,2 there has been a section of the website titled \"The Book of Blaseball\" (located under the book tab of the website, of course). Inside is what is supposedly the rules of the game, although they are heavily redacted. Of note is section 5b, which reads \"If a team wins three championships, they, and Blaseball, shall ascend.\" This was noticed by the Society for Internet Blaseball Research, who decided to tweet about this topic at the Blaseball commissioner, at the time Parker Macmillan III, on September 26th, 2020.
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/sibr-logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\n@blaseball hey so what does ascension mean exactly
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826044622-Image.png\")
\n BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER \n@blaseball \n\nwhat
\n\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250824075629-Image.jpeg\")
\n\n BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER \n@blaseball \n\nhuh
\nAfter some debate on whether or not Parker had ever actually read the Forbidden Book, he replied with, “uh they go up or climb”, following up with “or like they rise through the air. ‘we had ascended 3,000 ft’”.
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826055716-Image.jpeg\")
\nBLASEBALL NEWS NETWORK\n@BlaseballNews\n\nPARKER, HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK.
\n\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\nin fairness to parker, It is Forbidden
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\nyea
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826061050-Image.jpeg\")
\n📱New York Millennials📱\n@nymillenials\n\nYeah wait, you guys have read the book? You know that book is forbidden right?
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\n![\"Someone](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826061543-Image.jpeg\")
\n\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\nokay but that was pre-discipline era surely you peeked once we opened it
\n![](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826062236-Image.jpeg\")
\nPaula 🍳 📚Turnip\n@TurnipOnBlase\n\nparker has definitely read the book
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\na. The game of Blaseball should be played between two teams.
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\nI mean I’ve looked at it since
\n\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\nparker what do you think happens when a team, and Blaseball, ascends
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\nuh they go up or climb
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\nor like they rise through the air. \"we had ascended 3,000 ft\"
\nPaula Turnip—a fan-run twitter account roleplaying as a blaseball player—noticed a potential source for this particular definition, the Google definition for “ascend”.
\n\nPaula 🍳 📚Turnip\n@TurnipOnBlase\n\ndid you just google the definition of ascend?
\n\nBLASEBALL COMMISSIONER\n@blaseball\n\nno
\n\nPaula 🍳 📚Turnip\n@TurnipOnBlase\n\nso this is just a coincidence
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826063559-Image.jpeg\")
\n\nSociety for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮\n@SIBROfficial\n\noh I get it, the championship team becomes a credit union
\n\nPaula 🍳 📚Turnip\n@TurnipOnBlase\n\nthank you for figuring this one out sibr
\nThis joke eventually even got referenced on the Blaseball website itself. After the Baltimore Crabs had won their first championship and were set to Ascend, the Shelled One3 taunts them by saying:
\n![\"The](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/20250826065523-Image.jpeg\")
Part of my incentive for reuploading this is because the only source for any of this happening is the original Twitter thread. Twitter—currently X: The Everything App—is no longer indexed on Google or publicly accessible, and is no longer used by anyone who produced or was a fan of Blaseball. A number of former fans have since deleted their accounts in protest, disinterest, or due to general internet rot. Blaseball as a game is surprisingly well archived, in part due to the efforts of people at SIBR putting in the work to create persistent long-term archives of almost every part of Blaseball, including the game, the wiki, and many other parts of fan culture. However, a lot of Blaseball was the experience of being involved in the cultural event that was Blaseball, which has suffered a lot more rot. Part of my hope with this series was that I could help in archiving some of these piece of Blaseball history on a real website. If you would like to read the original twitter thread, you can read it at this link.
\nPlease ignore that this is actually below eDensity on the iceberg. ↩
\nIt started in season 2 due to an unfortunate accident. ↩
\nThe Shelled One was the bad guy for the Discipline era of Blaseball, which stretches from season 2 to season 10. This culminates in a big boss fight that happened on day X, which was at the end of the season. ↩
\nsure i do feel bad for failing blaugust but also surgery recovery has got hands
","tags":["nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-08-20T16:44:38.868Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250818-i-am-hoping-now-that/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250818-i-am-hoping-now-that/","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i am hoping now that increasing my transgenderism will make me better at netrunner. maybe one day good enough to make worlds
","tags":["netrunner","nonsense"],"date_published":"2025-08-18T03:48:55.584Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250816-my-review-of-bottom/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250816-my-review-of-bottom/","title":"my review of bottom surgery so far (the day after surgery i'm still in the hospital)","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i can't really feel shit down there, probably due to the packing and also probably due to the pain. the worst part is actually the catheter. it's really quite awful. also the food is kinda mid but better than i expected. it's like worse than a dennys but still close to dennys tier.
\ni still gotta do my link roundup for friday so maybe i'll get to it closer to dinner
","date_published":"2025-08-16T17:28:20.293Z"},{"id":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250816-btw/","url":"https://ewie.online/posts/20250816-btw/","title":"btw","authors":[{"name":"Evie Finch","url":"https://ewie.online"}],"content_html":"i got bottom surgery today sorry for the typos i'm very heavily medicated rn
","tags":["nonsense","i should use this as an opportunity to post all the dumbest shit i can think of"],"date_published":"2025-08-16T05:35:03.940Z"}]}![Blaseball Iceberg](\"https://cdn.ewie.online/Iceberg%28Iceberg%29.png\"){kind=link}