A Web Browser, Rick Rubin & John Mayer, Twitter Eulogy, and Three-Body Before it Gets to Netflix
Happy Friday! A weekend read and listen, a new browser I think it’s actually worth leaving Chrome for, and a sci-fi epic that will break your brain. Enjoy.
Get 📱🛍️
Arc from The Browser Company
I love to try new software. My friends call me an "app guy." For the past ~15 years, it's been pretty easy to find a constant stream of new: notes apps, calendars, email clients, messaging apps, social networks... you name it. And yet, there's been one critical piece of software that hasn't really changed since Google launched Chrome in 2008: the internet browser.
This isn't to say no one's tried to compete with Chrome since its release. But everything I'd ever tried basically looked and worked the same. So in early 2021, when I caught wind of a new startup literally called The Browser Company, I was excited. What could a fresh take on this portal to the internet we all use every day actually look like?
I managed to get an invite to a version of this startup's new browser, Arc, a bit later that year. It was... OK. Definitely rough around the edges, and not without clunkiness. But two things were special:
it was clear this wasn't another variation of Chrome -- they were grander ambitions here. This was visually clear immediately: Arc simply doesn't look like Chrome, starting with the orientation of its sidebar, tabs, and organization of them with spaces and folders.
the team behind it was deeply human, energized, and wanted to build something for and alongside their users. I was treated as part-guinea-pig, part-VIP, was onboarded via video call, and got to have conversations with the team regularly about joys, complaints, and direction.
So it was exciting to see the Browser team finally launch Arc out of private beta this week. It's now available to the public (for Mac users), and you can try it out here.
It looks and feels a little different, and will probably take a little time getting used to-- mainly due to the CMD+T navigation and vertical tab bar. But give it a try and stick with it for a couple of days. I think you'll be surprised at how natural and delightful it can be to use, especially with the tab bar hidden. Definitely try out picture-in-picture for YouTube or Google Meet. And if you're worried about extensions, don't fret: nearly all chrome extensions should work in Arc.
And reflecting on those early days, it's been fun to watch CEO Josh and team continue along the two dimensions I mentioned above:
Arc remains a bold attempt at re-imagining how the browser -- and increasingly as all the applications we use are web-based, the operating system of our computers -- might work. It's still really early: they just launched version 1.0. But they've now crossed the chasm of "why bother?" for a lot of users (100s of thousands). And that allows them to take really big swings: can the internet be more personal? What about AI-enabled extensions and improvements to websites we love? If the browser effectively is the OS, could Arc give way to a new app store? These are all big ideas and they still have a lot to get right when it comes to the basics. But they're making progress.
The team is as human as ever. Some might criticize saying before doing, but I think the Browser team's weekly shipping cadence covers the latter. And watching them tell their story along the way has been a rare treat, at least amongst software companies. I'm reminded of an old favorite: Gimlet Media's StartUp Podcast, an audio doc of their earliest days. The word "community" gets thrown around a lot these days, mostly by people who have no idea what it means to build or be a part of one. So I don't think it should be taken for granted when an app has 34,000 people volunteer to sign their names in the credits to commemorate launching a 1.0.
More than anything, Arc is a piece of software crafted by people who value taste and who love and have been deeply impacted by the internet. It's hard not to root for them.
Listen 🎧🎼
John Mayer on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
I've enjoyed several episodes of Rick Rubin's new-ish podcast. Rick interviews a diverse range of world-class people across entertainment, sports, business, science, and of course, music. I don't think I need to sell Rick's qualities as a listener, but it's always a treat to hear him ask deep questions, really listen, and 'yes-and.'
John Mayer is one of my favorite artists, a gifted and honest songwriter, and a virtuosic guitar player. He's also a joy to listen to speak -- perhaps especially so for someone who can be similarly stuck in his own head. I couldn't help but relate to John's frenetic energy during some parts of this interview, only to live voyeuristically through him as Rick anchors and counterbalances it with patience, wisdom, and peace.
It's also just a conversation between two great artists, dissecting and admiring the magic that allows creation. And so fun to hear them nerd out about The Grateful Dead as John's run with Dead & Company comes to a close (at least... for now).
Read 📖📄
How to Blow Up a Timeline by Eugene Wei
I already shared snap highlights and thoughts on this marvelous piece on the platform in question (that is at the time of this writing, seemingly half-way through being fully re-branded to "X"... sigh). But it is so good that I wanted to praise it again here, too.
It's a piece that is harshly critical of Elon (and most people who've run Twitter, to be fair). But it's also something of a eulogy for what was, for much of the last decade, my favorite product ever, a meeting grounds for curiosity that led to some of my most important relationships, and--despite its many flaws-- a beacon of what makes the internet wonderful.
Eugene:
But peak Twitter? That’s an artifact of history now. That golden era of Twitter will always be this collective hallucination we look back on with increasing nostalgia, like alumni of some cult. With the benefit of time, we’ll appreciate how unique it was while forgetting its most toxic dynamics. Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form.
All of this past year, as a slow but steady flow of Twitter’s more interesting users has made their way to the exits, unwilling to fight to be heard anymore, or just stopped tweeting, I’ve still opened the app daily out of habit, and to research for pieces like this. But the vibes are all off. I haven’t churned yet, but at the very least, I’ve asked the bartender to close out my tab.
If Twitter’s journey epitomizes the sentimental truism that the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, then the story of its demise will begin the moment we could no longer find those friends on that darkened timeline.
The Three-Body Trilogy
A fitting recommendation for a week with alien chatter... I still remember reading Tim Urban's Wait But Why post on The Fermi Paradox in college. It's made for fun dinner party conversations and prompted weird questions over the years. For those unfamiliar, it relates to the basic scientific inquiry at the heart of SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) research: with a universe so large, where is everybody?
Over the last few months, I got to face one of the most compelling and terrifying fictionalized answers to Fermi's paradox by making my way through Cixin Liu's 2000+ page epic, also known as the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End are some of the most creative and thought-provoking content I've ever consumed, and they have filled my active and passive thoughts for the past few months. You may have heard about the series's upcoming ($200M!) adaptation for Netflix, produced by Benioff & Weiss of Game of Thrones. Before that releases in January, I'd suggest you consider the books.
They're not simple fiction to recommend, and although I've done so enthusiastically to a range of friends, family, and near-strangers over the last few months, they don't come without stipulations.
To start with the basics: these books are translated from the original Chinese and are undoubtedly hard sci-fi. They can be deeply theoretical on micro- and macro-scales. While the trilogy has some iconic characters, the real protagonist of these books is humanity itself as it faces questions of cosmic scale over the course of generations. Three Body starts quite slow, setting the table for an alternative timeline of Earth in which humanity, via a Chinese military base during the cultural revolution, makes contact with intelligent alien life.
Many who've attempted these books struggle through the first or don't even finish it, failing to even reach the sequels. This is understandable: the plot of the first and most of its characters (with one key exception) are the least interesting, and it acts more like a prequel to the action of the sequel, The Dark Forest. For those weary readers, I urge you to press on or return, as Dark Forest is the clear highlight of the series, at least as far as story goes. And things only get wilder: the series-concluding Death's End presents more mind-expanding ideas at rapid-fire pace than most fiction out there. If you're willing to go on this ride and stay open-minded, it really will carry you to the frontier of ideas about the universe and existence.
The series is far from perfect, but Liu weaves together theoretical physics, cosmology, sociology, game theory, human nature, morality, and more to do what the best fiction can: to create a lens for us to ask ourselves what is worth yearning for, what is worth holding onto, and who we want to be.
I'll leave you with a favorite excerpt from one of the first chapters of book three, Death's End. You might think of it as a summarization of the trilogy's central premise (it's ever-so-slightly spoiler-y, but you already know these are books about aliens):
“Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.”
...
"Thus, the Earth that we live on now is a home constructed by life for itself."
She asked the next terrifying question: "What about the universe?"
How much has the universe been changed by life?
A wave of terror threatened to overwhelm her.
She knew that she could no longer save herself. She tried to stop thinking, to turn her mind into empty darkness, but a new question stubbornly refused to leave her alone: Is Nature really natural?
Thanks for reading!
P.S: I tried a new video format to share an idea I’ve been thinking about that I call “social metronomes.” You can watch it here. I’d love your feedback on this idea or the format! Might try more like this.