587: Google's AI Bundle Power, Thoughts on Gemini, Apple AI Search, xAI, TPUs + Neoclouds, Anti-Credentialism, Larry Ellison & Oracle, Infrared Contact Lenses, and David Gilmour

"I’m not going to carry four phones!"

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

–Willa Cather

🗓️📋✅⏳ Here’s part three of my look-back at things I added to my life over the past few years, and how they turned out:

• 🦟🩸⚡︎ Electric device to treat insect bites: This is the one that feels the most like magic. My first reaction was: What sorcery is this?! I’m probably allergic to whatever mosquitoes inject to keep blood from coagulating, so when I get bitten, the area gets very itchy and inflamed. With this device, which just heats up the surface of the skin to 122°F/50°C, the itchiness goes away, though sometimes I need a second treatment a few days later.

  

• 🏄‍♂️ Balance board: A year later, I still love it and use it every time I am in my basement gym. It’s great to ‘surf’ a little on it between sets. I can now basically stay up on it as long as I want, and I feel it’s probably a good workout for the nervous system. I think it helped my balance/proprioception generally, which is important to avoid falls and injuries!

• 🥵🌡️ Sauna: My wife and I still love our backyard sauna. We try to use it at least 2-3 times a week. If you haven’t checked it out yet, this page by Rhonda Patrick compiles a lot of the science and best practices on sauna use (much of the research comes from Finland, where saunas are very common). The photo isn’t ours, but it’s the model we got.

• 🔆☀️💡 ‘Light therapy’ 10,000 lux lamp: I use it daily during the winter months when it gets gloomy here in Canada, and on particularly cloudy days during the rest of the year. It’s hard to be sure about the magnitude of the effect, but I think it’s improving my alertness, mood, and maybe also my sleep quality.

• 🧯🔥 🚒 Fire blanket, fire extinguisher, fire extinguisher spray can: I’ve thankfully never had to use these things, but once in a while I remind my family of where they are and how to use them. Maybe someday they’ll come in handy and help nip a small fire in the bud and prevent a much bigger problem.

• 🍳🫒 Cooking oil dispenser: A while ago, I got a squeezy bottle like you see chefs use on TV. While it was very satisfying to squeeze it, but I found it to be messy. However careful I would be, oil would always find a way to leak out and make a mess. I eventually replaced it with a 2-in-1 oil dispenser/sprayer like this:

  

  It’s a big improvement. No more leaks. I can still pour oil if I need a lot, but the rest of the time, I use the spray mode. As a result, I use way less (remember: oil is 9 calories per gram, so it adds up very quickly).

• ☕ Espresso machine, Aeropress, Baratza ESP Encore grinder: This whole setup is a homerun. My wife uses the Aeropress daily to make her coffee, and I make us espressos daily with the Breville Bambino using freshly ground beans thanks to the Baratza Encore ESP. They’ve all been dependable and I feel like we make better coffee at home than I’ve had almost anywhere.

• 🌬️🫙Airscape containers: Speaking of coffee, I also still love the ‘airless’ containers (I wrote about them here). They’re well-designed, durable, and look good on the kitchen counter. I have three for different coffee beans as I like to rotate between them (eg. Ethiopian, Colombian, Peruvian, Guatemalan, etc).

• 🔪🇯🇵 Japanese kitchen knives: Over two years ago, I wrote about wanting to get a nice 240mm Gyuto. That project has remained on the back burner since, but I haven’t forgotten. When I do get one, I’ll report back.

I think that’s enough for today. If there’s anything I haven’t written about in a while that you’d like an update on, send me an email or leave a comment, and I’ll add it to the list for next time 📝

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

📬 The Founding Story of Substack and What Happened After Elon Musk Proposed Buying It 📝

A fun, short interview with Chris Best on the origin story of Substack and what happened when Elon floated the idea of buying the company and having Chris run Twitter… and why it turned out the way it did 😬

🐢 🐇 Is Google the AI Tortoise + My Evolving Thoughts on Gemini 🤖💭🤔

As a user of technology products, there’s a real push-pull when it comes to competition. ↔️

On the one hand, competition sounds great. It pushes everyone to improve faster, and they can learn from each other, so the industry as a whole makes progress faster.

But on the other, sometimes I wish there was a single, dominant, clear winner so that I could just pick it and simplify my life. 😅

In short: Competition speeds progress for the industry in the long term, but fragmentation can hurt the experience of individual users in the short term.

Wasn’t it great when Twitter was *the* real-time text-based social network?

A one-stop shop to find almost anyone or anything.

Wasn’t it great when the iPhone was so clearly ahead that you could just buy it and know you had the top industrial design, screen, camera, CPU, GPU, modem, battery life, OS, and access to all the best apps?

How does it help me if Phone A has the best camera, Phone B has the best screen, Phone C has the best silicon, and Phone D has the best industrial design?

I’m not going to carry four phones!

I’ve noticed something a bit similar happening in my life with AI.

Early on, Perplexity was my most used AI app because others had no ability to search or were terrible at it.

Then later on, Claude 3.5 Sonnet was my favorite because it wrote better and had a good ‘personality’ with a good balance of speed, smarts, and following instructions.

Then OpenAI’s o3 dominated for a while because it was smarter, much more thorough when doing search and reasoning, and hallucinated less than the competition.

Lately, I’ve mostly been using GPT-5 in thinking mode…

BUT

I keep finding myself double-checking things with Gemini 2.5 Pro. 🤖🆚🤖

Or sometimes, I find GPT-5 Thinking too slow, and while I wait I fire up Gemini, which tends to be faster thanks to Google’s infrastructure advantage

I’m dual-wielding AIs, which is inconvenient and making my life worse in some ways, but I’ve lost confidence that GPT-5 Thinking is giving me the best answers, so I can’t help but cheat on it with Gemini Pro ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gemini 3.0: The Unipolar AI Moment? 🤔

What seems likely: When Gemini 3.0 Pro launches, it could re-unify my workflow and create a new unipolar AI world for me, at least until the next generation of models trained on the new Blackwell clusters come out.

Getting to this point with Gemini was a journey. Google’s bungling of Bard left a bad taste, and it takes a while to build trust back.

Remember the black nazis? For a while after that, it felt like Google’s models were going to be the most nerfed and straight-jacketed, because as a very profitable incumbent with a lot to lose, they were going to be very conservative, bureaucratic, design-by-committee, and careful in ways that startups with everything to gain wouldn’t be.

I’m not sure who to thank for the course correction. Maybe the early backlash gave leadership cover to un-nerf their models and really go for it. Google wasn’t first, but they got there, and the flavor of their models now feels pretty decent.

The other big factor has been UX.

A strong model is necessary, but not sufficient, for a good experience. OpenAI has been a leader on this while Google lagged with a sprawling, confusing mess of products that were badly integrated. Their UIs were pretty bad, and many of their model were available in multiple places, each with its own set of trade-offs.

For someone who simply wants to ask questions to AI throughout the day, it was a much better experience to pull up the ChatGPT app.

But never underestimate a sustained series of incremental improvements… 📈