🦋 More Sites Like This, Please
Karina's personal website, How soon is now?, is one of the most emotional and human sites I've ever seen.
This website was created out of nostalgia for the simpler, more personal era of the internet, or "old web", contrasting the corporate hellscape of social media platforms. While I keep this site for myself, I hope you find something of interest here. ♡
Oh, there's something of interest there alright. I implore you to not stop at the front page. Look around. Every page is unique, no two are alike, yet they all fit together perfectly.
Bravo!
☺️ Kindness: A Difficult Default
Robin Rendle in a short post about the importance of being kind and being cool:
Kindness is easy to quantify. Kindness will make you do things that’s bad for business but great for customers that will eventually make it great for your business again. At this one company many years ago I remember arguing that we should add unsubscribe links to our emails and someone said “nah, that’s bad for us and this number will go down.” Well, that ain’t kind! That’s super shitty and eventually decisions like that will make you lose trust with folks. People are highly sensitive to scummy behavior from ten thousand miles away and it’s the best way to differentiate yourself with someone else.
Exactly.
Being kind has served me incredibly well, and I've been privileged to be on the receiving end of the kindness of others countless times.
It's important to keep in mind, especially during times like these, that most people are kind. In fact, I think kindness is our general default. That default can and does change, though, with enough external influence or pressure.
I try my best to make sure that default doesn't change for me, and I love meeting and working with people who have managed to keep their kindness intact. I respect the hell out of anyone who manages to keep kindness as their default; it can be a very difficult thing to do.
🏰 How to LinkedIn
I clearly need to up my LinkedIn game. Mark Tyson at Tom's Hardware:
Tmuxvim thought it would be fun to time-warp messaging spam by putting a prompt injection string in their About Me section of the site. In place of the usual LinkedIn About section, where one might discuss your work-related activities and achievements, Tmuxvim added an ‘admin’ prompt. The idea was that this would be interpreted and obeyed by the AIs that scan these sections of the site to try and tailor spam to the user.
[...]
Below a message heading from a recruiter offering opportunities related to an AI company tacking financial crime, with a $1B valuation, we see the text body began “My Lord Arthur.” Then, it went on to say:
“Ic eom fram TopTech Ventures, and ic spræce be hean and cræftigan werode be wyrco wundorcræft mid gleawum searwum, be syndon on soore weorce brüce tõ feohtenne wio facen and pāra rica beorges weardunga. Hie næfre lange gefylledon micelne hord goldes fram mægenfulum freondum and mundborum.”
Slow clap.
See also: Tmuxvim's original tweet about this on XCancel.
What the web can take from you
taken. shares the things it learns about you just by visiting:
Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much.
Most of them know more.
None of them told you.
The information is presented with some amount of dramatic flair, but things have gotten so out of hand it feels like a little dramatic flair is warranted.
For people in tech—especially those who work on the web—most of this probably won't be a surprise, but even then it's a good reminder of the current state of things and how much work we have to do to make the web a better place.
*️⃣ Galvanized
On June 30th, 2025, I started working at Stainless as a part-time contractor. A couple months later, on August 21st, I joined the team full-time.
Today, on May 18th, Stainless announced they've been acquired by Anthropic. See also: Anthropic's announcement.
Given how I feel about generative AI, I declined the opportunity to join Anthropic. I wish all of my former colleagues the very best regardless of where they landed, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their new adventures and endeavors.
Stainless was a truly great place to work. Alex Rattray was the best founder anyone could ask for, and he assembled an incredible team. Everyone there—every single person—was incredibly capable and incredibly kind. I'm honored, humbled, and privileged to have been a small part of that team and the work we did.
As for what's next for me, I'm looking forward to taking a break. We've been renting and moving around for many, many years, but early this year we finally bought our we're-going-to-be-here-for-decades house. I'm really looking forward to taking some time to make it our home. As I arrange furniture and turn screws I'll have a background process running to figure out what's next career-wise.
I'm also looking forward to blogging more. With my newly refined blogging setup, its lower friction authoring process, and more free time, expect the frequency of my posts to increase.
My sincere and heartfelt thanks go out to Alex and every member of the Stainless team. It was a lot of fun to work on a small team at a startup for a little while, and I'm sure it's quite possible some of us will work together again in the future.
🔣 My Favorite Regular Expressions Tool: regex101
Whenever I need to do anything non-trivial with text I'm so grateful regex101 exists. It's the best tool I've found for creating, understanding, and debugging regular expressions by a mile.
I made heavy use of it when rewriting this site's CMS again, and a couple of times it was the only thing keeping my brain from leaking out of my ears.
🛳️ A Great Hantavirus Overview
Violet Blue has a great overview of the Hantavirus situation on Threat Model:
I devoted a significant space in this week’s pandemic roundup to the hantavirus outbreak. That’s because I’m not seeing a well-rounded update putting the whole picture in focus – and I’m seeing a wild amount of misinformation get reported by every kind of news outlet. Even contradicting headlines from mainstream outlets: for instance, Forbes ran a headline yesterday saying there were no positive cases in the US, coming up in searches right next to headlines about the positive case in Nebraska. It’s like having newsgathering whiplash. It’s all the more important that I take the time to check sources and claims, compare reports, and look at timelines. That way I can give you an accurate snapshot – and know for myself what the hell is going on.
Violet's coverage of the ongoing pandemic, and other threats to health and tech, have been an invaluable resource for a long time, and she makes it all available for free thanks to her paid supporters, including yours truly. If you find her work valuable, consider becoming a paid member.
Note that I'm not affiliated with Violet Blue other than being a member of her Patreon. This isn't a paid endorsement or anything like that (which you won't find on this site in any form), I just want to see people doing public good get compensated for it.
📚 Jenny Volvovski
Jenny Volvovski designs incredible book covers. Delightful and inspiring.
See also: Also, her design studio where she does more great work.
🚀 2026 Relaunch
Last year I wrote a content management system from scratch just for this site. It was a lot of fun, and it gave me the opportunity to do things exactly the way I wanted to do them, which was liberating.
When I wrote that CMS, one of my primary goals was simplicity. I mostly succeeded, but the siren song of complexity, feature creep, and wouldn't-it-be-cool-if is hard to ignore. Thus, complexity crept in and introduced a little too much friction in the authoring process.
Don't get me wrong; that CMS served me well and gave me the chance to explore some new and interesting ideas. Some things, however, just don't pan out the way I expected.
I thought about trying to extract the complexity from that CMS, but after a half-hearted attempt to do so I realized it would be better to start from scratch again. (Well, mostly from scratch. I copied and pasted a lot of good stuff from the old one.)
So, welcome to the 2026 relaunch of my site! (If you're reading this in a feed reader, check it out in your web browser to see the visual changes!)
What's different
This version of the CMS omits several things the old one had. Tags are completely gone, and posts no longer have unique colors or summaries. Instead, I'm only putting an emoji in the title and using that to derive a fun visual appearance for each post.
There's also no longer a distinction between link posts and regular posts. All posts are now just regular posts. I've gone through my previous posts and made adjustments to accommodate those changes as needed.
Another big change: there's not currently a light mode. I might implement one in the future, but for now I really like having a single visual appearance to focus on rather than one with dual modes.
All of those changes eliminate a lot of friction from the writing and publishing process, which is exactly what I wanted. I found it was sometimes a chore to post a quick link or thought, and that meant this site wasn't serving its purpose.
Now I have much less to think about when writing a post. The only requirements are a Markdown file with a title that contains an emoji. I don't have to think about what tags to use, I don't have choose a color, I don't have to decide between a link post or a regular post. I just create a Markdown file and write.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these changes. You can find the link to email me on my new about page.
Now, time to tackle that backlog of things I've been wanting to write about!
🦠 Ultrasound waves rupture COVID-19 and flu viruses without damaging cells
Maria Fernanda Ziegler:
The discovery surprised the researchers because it contradicts classical physics theories, as the wavelength of ultrasound is much longer than the size of the virus. In theory, this difference in size would prevent interaction.
"The phenomenon is entirely geometric. Spherical particles, such as many enveloped viruses, absorb ultrasound wave energy more effectively. It's that accumulation of energy inside the particle that causes changes in the structure of the viral envelope until it ruptures. Therefore, if viruses were triangular or square, they wouldn't undergo the same 'popcorn effect' of acoustic resonance," Bruno explains.
He also points out that since the process depends strictly on the shape of the viral particle and not on genetic mutations, variants such as those observed during the pandemic (omicron and delta, for example) do not affect the effectiveness of the technique.
That's cool as hell.
Hopefully this pans out into a workable treatment (which will probably be years from now, but I'll take what I can get at this point).