>hack

>podcast slop

>letting the llm do it for you

there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him

i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.

The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...

anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart

Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?

The new chat interface in google meets is hilariously bad. Doesn't even load half the time.

Wave. That was more of a tech preview though I guess.

I was still using Gemini CLI even though Claude is better, just cause of inertia. Then one day it started refusing to work, saying I need to install Antigravity instead. Idk if that's an IDE or has a leaner CLI, but doesn't matter, I'm gone. I don't care how the sausage is made, don't randomly break the thing I'm using.

Banana Paper was on the shortlist

In my experience (since Notebook is still in the name), you're going to get the same emails as before, now with additional people confused about the change and what it means for them.

I would imagine it's just a branding/marketing thing so that the product is directly associated by consumers as being within the Gemini ecosystem (and thus Google) from the product name alone. NotebookLM doesn't convey that, but Gemini Notebook does.

My response is going to be about Gemini generally and less about NotebookLM.

Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.

Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.

OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].

Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).

[1]: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...

[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7

[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8

My wild guess is Google isn’t willing to play as dirty as the others wrt data acquisition.

I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.

No idea if that happened here or in google generally.

Also enshittification is slowly starting. Yesterday I asked Gemini (in the Android app) for a recommendation for an app for sound recording. Instead of it answering I got a popup to allow Gemini access to open the app store (or something like that, I didn't allow it). When I declined it just stopped the conversation. It was actually hard to get it to just reply with a list of apps. And I have an AI subscription with Google!

Yeah, it grinds my gears. They could probably have lightning speed inference and the best model if they were interested in doing so.

Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].

> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.

It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.

[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...

Language model?

Large model?

Learning machine?

The backend has changed people experience more hallucinations. You can see their subs.

They've been doing this kind of thing for at least 15 years

Technically not https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1ss53l5/halluci...

There's a lot of these in their sub.

Paper2Audio is great - and if you're looking to have more editorial control over the outputs, check out Jellypod. You can choose your hosts, publish it to a website/RSS feed, edit scripts, etc.

Yes- I'm the founder of www.Paper2Audio.com, a text to speech service focused on accurately reading complex docs to you such as research papers. Our free plan lets you generate 56 hours of audio per week, using high quality voices.

Feel free to email if you have any questions or feedback.

Readwise does this pretty well.

Google Illuminate does this. I believe it was actually a precursor to Gemini Notebook. It uses a similar podcast generating model but tuned to keep things more technical and detailed.

https://illuminate.google.com/

I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.

Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.

Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.

They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.

But they renamed Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI. And it's worse.

I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.

Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.

Allo?

Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.

Bard was a great name.

I wondered when the name change was coming because this is Google: products be endlessly repackaged and renamed, some only to be killed later.

Antigravity sucks so bad that I have started to feel that google really doesn't wanna compete, they just wanna hang in there at number 2 or 3, to just annoy the number 1 and 2.

Or maybe just a way to use chatgpt/Claude with files , and get accurate references to the page/paragraph in the source?

Best closest I stumble on is nouswise. Lets you contain an agent with even more sources and generate almost all outputs.

random idea -- driving while you drive?

How would the right format for you look like? Specially be monologue?

This may come as a surprise, but some people have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy.

you must be this guy

https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...

Years? :-)

Me:

    Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News   
    discussion about an article. 
    You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru   
    all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when 
    I'm ready for the next piece.

ChatGPT Live:

    ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting.

(I paste the link)

Me:

    Ok I pasted it. Now go.

====

For the Socratic quiz I say:

    I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me
    everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and 
    I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the
    answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually 
    arrive at the answer myself.

I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex to understand implementations/architecture etc:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.

Sundar did know about all the chat apps though. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership either, seemed like autopilot.

> You have to read the article

Nahh - pile in based on the title and what you assume the contents might be.

> Google has some serious internal problems.

I suspect it is part leadership change (sundar/kurain) and over indexing on Ai for doing the job on top of a model that is just not as good (esp flash 3.5). Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise sent me the greatest Slop Deck of all time. It was quite obvious it was Ai generated and the rep had only read a few slides of the 30+. I wonder if they are even aware after losing the sale

It's not just a rename, they broke the old one.

That's not a rename, though, Antigravity is a new product.

Google is kinda famous for killing a product and replacing it with a worse one, though, so not very surprising.

thanks for sharing! saving this to refer back to this

Allo, Google Talk, Hangouts Chat (not the same as Hangouts), "Meet (original)", idk maybe some other thing called Google Chat that isn't the new Google Chat, uhh my Android phone has 2 "Messages" apps so one of them is probably deprecated?

For coding, I don't think they're even number 3, anymore. Seems more like 4th or 5th (unbelievably, even Mecha Hitler seems to do better, though I'm hopeful Gemini 3.5 Pro will turn things around).

It's cumbersome to have llm duplicate all quotes and still get good response. Else you get no visibility into your sources.

1) you aren't able to listen to something safely while driving on the highway? 2) the cars pretty much drive themselves on the highway these days

Claude/ChatGPT still end up making things up when they can't find anything, notebook is much better to 99% reply based on quotes. But yes a backup is to use Claude and grep, but not quite the same.

No pricing, "call for demo". Not sure this is for personal use.

  > products be endlessly repackaged

I don't speak English at home either, so I hope this helps. It's "products are", not "products be".

I reckon the same dipshits responsible for Microsoft’s product naming in the early 2000s all moved on to Google to wreak the same havoc there.

I tried Antigravity recently with Flash 3.5, and it got stuck in a loop saying the same sentence over and over. I haven't seen this pathological behavior from other LLMs in months.

Like how many sources? And what you mean by sources (tables pdfs...)?

It could be monologue or dialogue, but it should be less full of verbal "syntactic sugar" than NotebookLM podcasts. More to the point, more detail-oriented, can pronounce math.

Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...

what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them?

and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?

why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.

Jetski is a code name.

And it was replaced (I expect, don’t know for sure) because GeminiCLI was built on a code base and language that didn’t scale in performance for what people were doing.

I should have said replace.

Not even just broke, they completely disabled people's ability to use it. Took it out behind the woodshed.

Fable in Cowork can get stuck in loops, I've had a single prompt use 83% of a session quota on a single prompt before I realized something was amiss.

Its explanation: "the wasted tokens came from re-rendering the document to verify layout after a page-orientation bug."

No, no, they’ve all moved over to Salesforce.

i’m thinking it’s an intentional turn of phrase

so for example in native English, if someone upset some people, you might say, just to be creatively different:

“oh boy. people be big mad”

it is an idiom, not necessarily officially part of the language. just saying things in a silly way to be different

“now you’ve done it… People be cryin’!”

I think it might also be an echo of pidgin English/Creole/caribbean English? Would be an interesting language dive. Ask an AI!

I have several projects with lots sources (800+). I mostly work with webpages, papers and youtube videos. It also supports mcp if you want to connect something.

Looking at the recent decades-old-brand renaming bonanza with MS Office I'm pretty sure they're still in Redmond.

I know Gemini CLI was written in JS + React. Even the public version had a very slow startup time that some might blame on the stack. But Claude CLI is a similar stack and starts instantly, so idk, does Bun really make the difference?

Internally I didn't like Gemini CLI just because it didn't have the right skills/whatever preinstalled, so it always did stuff that made sense elsewhere but not at Google, like trying to grep through the entire monorepo. Jetski just worked.

It's been sometime I have been using an app called nouswise. I switched right after they added nblm notebooks in Gemini. I knew they cannot stand another app competing with their flagship. But anyway, it do have audio recap and it definitely have way less of "syntactic sugar". I haven't tried but because it's agentic you can ask it to generate a monologue for you. But I assume you should be in deep mode. I so far only used the side bar for this.

Probably nothing good, but that's not the complaint being leveled!

> and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?

I don't see evidence of that?

Their current product naming is still terrible.They went from the Xbox, to the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.

The latest console is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X

I thought that was satire but I've googled it and you're not even joking.

...and the Ally ISN'T EVEN AN XBOX!!!!

"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""

Gaming’s home deserves to be on Linux.

I know GabeN agrees with me, and he’s worked hard to make it happen.