552: Going Deep on Nvidia Q4, Topicus Q4, Reverse Osmosis, IMAX, Gene Therapy Cures Blindness, Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough, and The Red Turtle

"When everything has an answer, you stop thinking"

If you need 10 of something, make 30. Then pick the best.

—Rick Rubin

💧🚰 🍵 The great water filter quest aka my journey through the membrane:

After doing a bunch of research, watching primer and review videos, and chatting with AIs about it (this last step should be part of most research workflows now, as long as you also ground your findings in trusted sources and double-check facts), I’ve decided to order this reverse osmosis (RO) countertop filter 👆

It’s the Waterdrop K19. This model produces room temperature water *and* hot water on demand, perfect for my 2-3x daily sencha green tea habit. The water tank can hold 5 liters/170oz, and the filter only needs to be replaced once a year.

A nice bonus: It has a UV system on top of the RO filter — the belt & suspenders approach to water purification. Costco Canada carries it at a very good price, which sealed the deal for me.

I decided to go with it instead of an under-the-sink RO system because it’s a more affordable, less complicated way to dip my toes in the RO world and see how I like it. This only required finding some countertop space while the other system would have required plumbing work and replacing my kitchen water faucet (to have a two-in-one system for regular water and RO water) or drilling a hole in my countertop to install a second RO faucet. Not a project I want to tackle at this time…

I also looked at the big honkin’ ‘Berkey’ gravity systems 👆

They look like those big stainless steel cylinders caterers use to serve coffee in a conference room. I just didn’t want that in my kitchen, and while the filtration performance seemed really good, but it still fell a bit short of RO-level filtration.

I also looked at simpler gravity-based systems like the ‘Clearly Filtered’ pitcher. Performance also seems much better than the typical Brita-style activated carbon filters, but replacement filters are expensive (especially in Canada) and the filtration still can’t match RO.

I figured I may as well pay a bit more to get full RO + hot water on demand + make it easier to switch to a glass pitcher (just in case it makes a difference, I’m not convinced either way yet — but the aesthetic experience of using a glass pitcher is more pleasant than plastic, so at least there’s that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

🎨🤖 I was messing around with the new Claude 3.7, giving it random coding tasks, like generating interactive 3D models of buildings. Somehow, I ended up accidentally designing a new logo for this steamboat with a font that matches the Podcast artwork:

Yes, that’s a little lighthouse! I kinda like it!

It’s nothing fancy. No high-design or anything, but I hope it makes the steamboat feel a bit nicer 😊

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

😎 Nvidia Q4 Highlights: Entering the Blackwell Era 🔥 🤖💰

The whole world pays attention to Nvidia earnings now, unlike when I was writing about them a few years ago, so it’s not quite as fun… But watching this AI computing Godzilla 🦖 reshape the tech landscape in real-time is too fascinating to ignore 👀

Let’s go deep and look at a bunch of highlights that stood out to me: