🪙 Worth on the Web
Manuel Moreale in a post titled "Ad Blockers didn’t help kill the open web":
I agree that the web platform failed at figuring out a way to deal with monetisation. Everything ultimately falls back on Ads because it’s the only idea that “works”. But to me, the issue is that we have an overabundance of content, and most content is not worth paying for. Most content is not worth anything.
This post is worth nothing. Before the web, nobody was going to pay anything to read something like this. At best, I could write it and send it to a newspaper as an opinion piece, and maybe they’d be interested in publishing it. But for some reason, the web has morphed our perception of content to the point where everything needs to generate money because everything is considered valuable.
Sorry, I can't just read, "This post is worth nothing," in a blog post and not refute it.
Yes, the web has morphed our perception, but I disagree that, "everything needs to generate money because everything is considered valuable." The web hasn't made everyone consider everything valuable, it's pushed people to monetize. The pressure isn't to create valuable content, it's to create content that sells. Many things that sell have little or no value. Many things with immense value are things you can't put a price tag on (although some people will try).
Manuel's post has value. I value reading other people's viewpoints. I value people taking the time to articulate and share their thoughts. I value the exchange of ideas and the opportunity to learn something new. And I am not alone.
Yes, most people won't pay for a blog post like the one Manuel wrote, but I'll bet there are a handful of people who would (the main problems there are awareness and payment infrastructure, but those are rabbit holes for another day). People not paying doesn't mean something is worthless. In fact, what makes many blog posts worthwhile is the fact that they're free in almost every sense of the word: free to read, free to share, and (practically) free to write. Manuel acknowledges the near-zero cost to run a blog, but, again, that doesn't make the posts on a given blog worthless.
In the same post, Manuel opens with this:
In the spirit of the open web, I’m writing this post to disagree with something someone else has posted on their own site. Specifically, a post titled “Ad Blockers helped kill the open web” by Christian Heilmann.
Even now, 37 years after it was created, I'm still in awe of the power of the web. Christian wrote a thing and shared it with the world. Manuel read that, wrote about it, and shared it with the world. I read that, wrote this, and now you're reading it. You're thinking about what they wrote and what I'm writing.
Who knows what might happen next? Maybe you'll write your own post. Maybe you'll share this post or one of the posts linked above with someone. Maybe you'll subscribe to one of our feeds. Maybe you'll learn a new word or a new way to use some punctuation. Maybe you'll view source and learn something new about CSS. Maybe you'll start your own blog.
The possibilities, both in number and in potential value, are endless. The connections between everyone involved are precious. Our ability to learn from each other without ever meeting is sublime. The fact that I have access, via the web, to Manuel and Christian and the thousands of others who's words I've read, voices I've heard, and videos I've watched is a gift so astonishing and profound I don't know that words alone can convey how powerful it is or how deeply I feel about it.
But I do have the words to articulate one important thing very clearly:
Manuel, your post is worth something. A whole lot, in fact. Thank you for writing it and sharing it.
Treasure
As you can tell from the titles on this blog, I like emoji. In addition to putting emoji in my post titles, I also add an emoji to each item on my todo list.
Recently, I added a financial task to my todo list, pulled up the emoji picker, and typed money. I figured I'd probably use the sack of money emoji (💰) or maybe the stack of dollar bills (💵), but one of the results was something I hadn't seen before: the new treasure chest emoji added in Unicode 17.0 (which, naturally, is the emoji I used in this post's title).
I squinted at it for a moment, frowned, and sighed.
My partner, sitting next to me on the couch, asked what was wrong. I told her that the new treasure chest emoji was appropriate, conceptually, for the todo, but I wasn't sure about how the emoji itself looked. Apple's 2026 version of this emoji contains what looks, to me, like pepperoni pizza. I know those are supposed to be gems—probably rubies—nestled among gold coins, but it looks like a gooey glob of pepperoni pizza to me (and there's already an emoji for that! 🍕). The pizza factor only increases the smaller the treasure chest emoji gets.
After I explained all that to my partner she gave me a confused look, cocked her head, and pointed out—quite correctly—that pizza is one of our greatest treasures, so what's the problem?
I used the treasure chest emoji.
🦋 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.
📚 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).