Earlier in July, Substack announced a $100M funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Substack has built an entirely new media ecosystem by enabling reporters and influencers to monetize their audience longing for long-term writing. People share links and discuss pieces from Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler, Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter, Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring and thousands of other blogs. Many of these projects have grown into mini-media companies with staff, essentially rebuilding the publications their founders once left.

Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platforms. In total, they boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Few things get people so worked up as Spotify’s payouts to artists. Every time this topic comes up on Twitter or Threads, you can be sure there will be hundreds of angry replies from people you can’t argue with.

So I wrote this post.

On Spotify, a single stream generates on average between $0.003 and $0.005 in royalties that get paid to the rights holders. Is that small?

The Network State is a concept popularized by the entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. These network states begin as highly-aligned online communities and graduate to diplomatic recognition by existing countries, rather than seizing territory by force.

You can read in his own words:

A key concept is to go cloud first, land last — but not land never — by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world.

I was a heavy user of Arc and abandoned it only after it was “sunset”. The app still works, of course, but I used to experience a few glitches and understood they would never be solved anymore. Still, I get their decision — Arc just wasn’t mainstream enough.

I understand it even better after using Dia. It has become my primary browser and I’d be extremely dissapointed if it went away, which is a very good PMF score.

The early reviews weren’t great. Arc has become popular because of its unique and polished UI, and then the Browser Company threw it all away and started from scratch. I get the frustration. But a niche browser never had the chance, while Dia might.

I have finished Apple in China by Patrick McGee, a fantastic book dissecting the history of manufacturing and breaking up some common myths around it.

There’s an uncanny quality about adversarial books and media stories like this. Patrick has talked to dozens of people who worked at Apple or their partners. But there’s always a bias in terms of who is willing to talk — mostly the people who didn’t leave the company on good terms. Jeff Williams, Apple’s former COO, isn’t joining that meeting invite. But the people who had issues with the management, disagreed with their “ignorant” strategies or believed they were wronged would. They might also use this as an opportunity to remake their story, so we have to trust the writer to build a complete picture from multiple sources. Throughout the book I was getting just a touch of that feeling, but I believe Patrick McGee did a very good job overall.

We know our devices are made in China. We saw the label on the back and maybe have heard about companies like Foxconn and workers operating these human “conveyor belts”. And while, admittedly, it is a part of the picture, Patrick argues that we’re missing the forest for the trees.

How many companies building cinema projectors do you know?

I bet you know at least one, and it’s called IMAX. You’ve heard the name when you watched “Dune“, “Avatar“, or something from Christopher Nolan. If you paid more to get an IMAX experience, they weren’t too shy to add a dedicated intro promoting themselves — quite obnoxious if you ask me.

Do you get how weird it is? I mean, do you know any other projectors? Yet IMAX has become entangled with the film industry and a sign of prestige. There are 1,772 IMAX theaters across 90 countries. A huge scandal played out when Tom Cruise couldn’t secure extended IMAX viewings for his previous Mission Impossible film.

Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company in his latest post on finally sunsetting Arc:

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is.

I used Arc since the beta and I loved it. Arc was the first credible and ambitious attempt to reinvent web browsing that was actually able to get some traction. Unfortunately, it didn’t get enough.

Get into the car, take out the phone, put in into a flimsy piece of plastic that is somehow attached to the vents, connect the charger. Navigate to your destination.

That was the life before CarPlay. Now 79% of buyers aren’t even going to look at a car that doesn’t have it.

Don’t get me wrong, CarPlay is ifinitely better than what we had before. Car manufacturers operate in a very different paradigm than smartphone manufacturers. They source individual blocks and parts years in advance, so in the end your car problaby has a dozen of small computers running different areas, and multimedia was never their strong suit.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re doing so through a web browser—one of the most critical pieces of software on your device. Browsers have morphed from just one of the apps into the backbone of modern computing. Web apps like Google Docs, Notion, Figma, and Slack have effectively turned them into operating systems in their own right, handling everything from work to creativity to communication. And yet, despite their importance, most browsers feel stuck in a time warp, unable to keep pace with this reality. A few years ago, I was optimistic about the future of browsing. Now? I’m not so sure.

Some of you might ask what I’m even talking about. 3 billion people use Chrome are are just fine with it. But in my view, browsers arestuck(I wrote that story 5 years ago). Most of them are still about browsing webpages, not apps, and Chrome, curiously, hasn’t evolved its “Chrome” (the part of the app around the content) much since its inception.

Back in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I had high hopes. New players like Mighty, Sidekick, and Arc emerged, promising to rethink what a browser could be. Mighty tried to offload rendering to the cloud for speed, Sidekick aimed to streamline workflows for busy executives, and Arc has become a beloved tool by many tech enthusiasts. Built by The Browser Company, Arc didn’t just tweak the edges of the browser experience; it tore up the blueprint and started over. It treated the web like a workspace, with a sidebar for pinned apps and persistent documents, Spaces that separated different contexts, and a UI that felt like it was designed for using the web apps, not just surfing the web. For me and many others, it was a breath of fresh air.

Meta recently fired 20 employees for leaking confidential information. The company has become notorious for employees spilling details from all-hands meetings—a problem Google also faces. Apple, by contrast, keeps a tighter lid on things, though it’s not immune: a year ago, a former iOS engineer was sued for leaking to The Wall Street Journal and The Information.

So why do people—especially those with cushy, high-paying tech jobs—risk it all to leak to the media? It comes down to three main motives: ego, disagreement with company decisions, and controlled leaks orchestrated by the company itself.

The first is about the feeing of empowerement. Working inside a company you know much more about its plans, performance and problems. Sometimes people simply want to leverage this position and feel that power. It’s almost gossip, except that they’re not just talking to their friends, but also to people whose job is reporting such things.

The second motive kicks in when someone’s unhappy with a company decision and wants to shine a spotlight on it. For obvious reasons, this specifically affects Big Tech companies with wide societal implications (so Meta and Google). What can you leak from Nvidia, how expensive their next GPU is going to be?

The iPad is in a weird place right now. On one hand, the iPad Pro M4 is an extremely powerful and futuristic piece of glass with enormous power inside. On the other, it can’t do many things supposedly professional users need and is very expensive.

There are cheaper models, but the good screen with 120Hz is reserved for the Pro, as are the best speakers (although there are reportst hese are worse than the 2018 model). This is a bit strange, considering that watching YouTube and streaming is the iPad’s specialty.

So you’re basically pushed to spend almost $1,300 for a basic iPad Pro with a keyboard. And iPads are a much better and more useful device with that keyboard—not even necessarily for work, but even replying to messages or writing down your address on Amazon becomes infinitely easier.

Jules Verne. Isaac Asimov. Greg Egan.

These are my favorite sci-fi writers of all time. Each one represents a separate age in human history and science fiction.

Jules Verne was the first sci-fi author I discovered by reading the Soviet translations of his books. He documented the age of wonders of the 19th century, where the Earth’s exploration is just about to be complete but a few remaining white spots are enough to excite the people. His stories are filled with an unshakable belief in progress a technology. “The Mysterious Island” is probably my favorite piece, a tale of a group of Americans stranded on uninhabited island with nothing but their watches and a dog collar and building a small civilization through their intelligence and perseverance. Jules’s style of lengthy vivid descriptions might feel dated, just like some of his views (too close to Kipling), and we no longer believe humans should eradicate all predator animals (although we did kill a lot of them already). But the way Verne’s stories embody the human spirit and ingenuity is truly timeless.

I hated running for most of my life. This year I ran 390 kilometers. I hope to do more next year.

Two things changed to make this happen. First, I now live right near the ocean’s embarkment, which is a great treadmill. Second, I absorbed the simple truth you can hear repeated time and time again: “Run slower”.

Paradoxically, that’s exactly what it takes.

I always thought that I just wasn’t made for running unlike some of my friends. I’d never experienced the “runner’s high”. But I still tried it, especially in my early university years. And this is where I made the crucial mistake. Probably because of Phys. Ed. I convinced myself that I need to run at 6 minutes per km. I could do this but after 2-3 km I was already tired and out of breath.

At the end of every year, news websites start publishing their gift guides (usually about two months in advance). It helps them gather extra traffic, and when you make a purchase, they earn money through affiliate links. So here’s my list of gift ideas with no affiliate links. These aren’t necessarily for someone else—you can treat yourself, too!

Sennheiser Momentum 4

AirPods have taken over the world, but good over-the-ear headphones provide a completely different experience. While most recommend the Sony XM5, I suggest you check out the Sennheiser Momentum 4, which, in my opinion, sound even better. With these, I’ve rediscovered entire genres and individual artists. I wrote a separate review here .

Added another year to my age last week.

For some reason, I wasn’t afraid of the infamous “30,” although turning 29 terrified me. After that happened, age truly just became a number.

It feels great to develop the capacity to observe yourself and think before you say or do anything. Not all old people are smart but you definitely do become a little bit smarter with time. However, at this age, many people either give up or start treating their bodies seriously and end up doing marathons or lift weight that look too heavy. You no longer have a warranty.

Omnivore was the best read-later app for most people. It was quite modern yet had a generous free tier. Yesterday the team informed the world that they got acquihired by ElevenLabs. The app will go offline and all the data will be deleted by November 15th.

It’s sad but almost should have been expected. Read-later apps are an extremely niche product, so you must be able to monetize a very small customer base successfully. I suppose the Omnivore team couldn’t, precisely because most people were drawn to the app because it was “free”.

Omnivore famously was open source. This should work as a cautionary tale for blindly trusting the “open source” label. All it means is that the code repo is out there. For this to become a viable service, someone needs to invest resources into developing it, paying server costs, and shipping mobile apps. And while subreddits are filled with people asking anyone to do this, I doubt that it will happen or be more successful than the Omnivore itself (why would it?).

I’m still using the 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018, and it’s great. Yes, it’s showing its age a little bit: the transitions aren’t as smooth, and the battery life is getting worse. Considering its age, it’s still a fantastic device.

But worst of all, Apple doesn’t have anything I can reasonably replace it with.

I was reading the review of the latest iPad mini on The Verge and it’s just sad. Yes, it’s half the price, but it’s built on outdated hardware and has a terrible screen. The new Pro with M4 is good, but if you want a keyboard, your only first-party option is a $300 Magic Keyboard. I vastly preferred the old Smart Keyboard. It was much lighter and cheaper. Basically, a cover that you can use to type if you have to. The new Magic Keyboard turns your iPad into a heavy laptop. And despite all of this, it’s still made out of this polyurethane that looks terrible in a couple of years.

In case you haven’t been following, there’s a huge drama in the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, launched a crusade against WP Engine, a company selling managed WordPress hosting and the competitor of his own entities. You can catch up on the story here .

But the funniest part of this WordPress drama is that WordPress is irrelevant.

Yes, it still powers around 40% of websites. But it’s not the future of the web. You *can* be both big and irrelevant. IBM created PCs as we know them and is currently worth $214Bn, yet nobody cares much about them. In fact, this scandal is probably the most attention WordPress received from the public in the last few years.

You see the same suspects whenever there’s a discussion of over-ear wireless headphones with noise canceling. People mention Sony WH-1000XM5 (orthodox want XM4), AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort (Ultra).

If you face the same dilemma, I recommend you try Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless. It’s an underrated pair of headphones that deserves to be on the same list. And it usually costs just $250, which is extremely competitive with other options.

What’s great about them? Sound, comfort and battery life, more or less in that order.

I have read dozens of excited reviews of Orion like these pieces from The Verge and Ben Thompson . I have also seen a comparable number of people surprised by this wave of affection, like John Siracusa in the most recent ATP episode.

And I can understand this. Orion can be an impressive demo, but it’s still a demo. A prototype. A concept car. It’s reasonable to assume that Apple might have a similar pair of glasses in their labs somewhere and faced the same cost issues. “Apple doesn’t release prototypes” .

But I think we should stop giving Apple the benefit of the doubt. It’s their job to convince us. We’re excited about Orion precisely because Meta showed them, and Apple didn’t. I honestly do not care if they have something cooking. Yes, they have a good track record overall. But I don’t believe in a second we should buy in on their secrecy. They do it for their benefit, not ours. Otherwise, it becomes a cult with blogger shamans trying to interpret the divine signs.