Comment by rjurney
5 months ago
I've been using NotebookLM powered by Gemini 2.0 for three projects and it is _really powerful_ for comprehending large corpuses you can't possibly read and thinking informed by all your sources. It has solid Q&A. When you ask a question or get a summary you like [which often happens] you can save it as a new note, putting it into the corpus for analysis. In this way your conclusions snowball. Yes, this experience actually happens and it is beautiful.
I've tried Adobe Acrobat AI for this and it doesn't work yet. NotebookLM is it. The grounding is the reason it works - you can easily click on anything and it will take you to the source to verify it. My only gripe is that the visual display of the source material is _dogshit ugly_, like exceptionally so. Big blog pink background letters in lines of 24 characters! :) It has trouble displaying PDF columns, but at least it parses them. The ugly will change I'm sure :)
My projects are setup to let me bridge the gaps between the various sources and synthesize something more. It helps to have a goal and organize your sources around that. If you aren't focused, it gets confused. You lay the groundwork in sources and it helps you reason. It works so well I feel _tender_ towards it :) Survey papers provide background then you add specific sources in your area of focus. You can write a profile for how you would like NotebookLM to think - which REALLY helps out.
They are:
* The Stratigrapher - A Lovecraftian short story about the world's first city. All of Seton Lloyd/Faud Safar's work on Eridu. Various sources on Sumerian culture and religion All of Lovecraft's work and letters. Various sources about opium Some articles about nonlinear geometries
* FPGA Accelerated Graph Analytics An introduction to Verilog Papers on FPGAs and graph analytics Papers on Apache Spark architecture Papers on GraphFrames and a related rant I created about it and graph DBs A source on Spark-RAPIDS Papers on subgraph matching, graphlets, network motifs Papers on random graph models
* Graph machine learning notebook without a specific goal, which has been less successful. It helps to have a goal for the project. It got confused by how broad my sources were.
I would LOVE to share my projects with you all, but you can only share within a Google Workspaces domain. It will be AWESOME when they open this thing up :)
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