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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

All it does is make the pupil smaller? Sure that will improve sharpness, but less light will reach the retina.

Indeed. You could make it brighter, which would shrink your pupils and make things easier to read. With this revolutionary medicine, you shrink your pupils, and then you need to make it brighter so you can still read. Is that it?

I can see the marketing now: "Bottled Squintz®", when normal squinting is too much strain or annoyance.

When in a pinch, one can make a tiny pinhole with their fingers for a similar effect.

It comes with the same downside: reading in low light is difficult.

For pinhole intraocular lenses these are implanted in just one eye for the same reason.

I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time.

> I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time

The dosage instructions say to use it in both eyes

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/21...

Ah that's interesting then. My guess would be that it doesn't close the iris as much then. However the linked does show 16% reporting dim vision, so there's some further work needed there (pupil size varies across the population, and there's the usual variation in dose efficacy.)

The other downside is that generally people read by recognizing word shapes, and at least for me the necessary pinhole is too small to see bigger chunks of text at once.

That combined with: my presbyopia bothers me most when it's already dark. Bright light makes small text easier to read.

That's because bright light makes your pupil smaller, just like this medication.

It's plausible that making things sharper at the expense of making them appear dimmer would be a good trade for some people sometimes. And you don't have voluntary control over your pupil so this medication could help. But it seems like it would have very limited applicability.

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