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Designing NotebookLM

jasonspielman.com

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disliked the author's tone: "me, me, me, me, me, me. Also somebody promote me." All this paragraphs telling us what a great job he's done and this charlatan's product (with great potential)...doesn't even save your chats. So you start discussing about something in your notes, come back and...the messages are gone. But sure come tell me what a genius you are with your 3 column layout. Charlatans, and those peop…

Lmao this is my feeling as well. Why is a 3 panel layout new? Isn't vscode essentially that?

I can’t even remember an IDE that doesn’t have the 3 panel layout.

Eclipse, xcode, PyCharm, even Visual Studio from way back when…

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#72
The idea of multiple files upload and audio creation with it does not go well with me. How does it choose which topics it should concentrate on? What is the idea behind multiple files upload on a single notebooklm project. I am struggling to understand that.

The user interface has been confusing to me. And note, I have built some projects using notebooklm https://asimov.learntosolveit.com

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for asking questions about a specific board games. It is INVALUABLE for learning very complex games. Instead of hunting through a rulebook trying to find an obscure rule, I just ask it and it answers, citing where it finds it.

Are you telling me Claude code or something couldn't do this easily too?

Claude code is... 1. Not available on my phone in a friendly form (I know there's claude web) 2. Doesn't format its answers with cited links to where what I need is found in the document 3. Doesn't have a quick, easy interface where I can upload multiple resources to a single index. You have chats but it's formatted where you're meant to have a conversation. NotebookLM is centered around "chat about these resources".

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#74
There’s a lot of great things here that I like - adaptive 3 panel structure, source viewer on left.

But I think there are a few things that I noticed about NBLM which was painful for me.

1// The three panels should be toggle based with icons on the top bar. There is no need to occupy real estate for both notes and chat together if they are not being used together.

2// The center of screen or the largest middle section should be focused on outputs and not chat. If you are focusing on creating something why should it be on the side. Especially since chat isn’t all that special a feature compared to the audio overviews, etc.

3// Information density - the buttons and icons are all too large and clunky. You are in fight for real estate because AI is helping you process superhuman amounts of information.

I think the magic of NBlM is the audio overviews, the chat based Q&A is with citation is pretty standard for all LLMs.

Also I think it only uses Gemini flash which feels like a search model - this needs to be paired with a reasoning model instead.

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#76

This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX. NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate. This post: I wanted to know what cool tho…

Really disliked the author's tone: "me, me, me, me, me, me. Also somebody promote me." All this paragraphs telling us what a great job he's done and this charlatan's product (with great potential)...doesn't even save your chats. So you start discussing about something in your notes, come back and...the messages are gone. But sure come tell me what a genius you are with your 3 column layout. Charlatans, and those peop…

Literally the only thing people cared about was Audio Overviews. NotebookLM had launched months earlier without that feature and was immediately ignored. The reason people liked audio overviews was because the voice model was amazing. This guy and the labs team had nothing to do with that. It was developed by a research team at Google Research/GDM who got maybe 1% of the credit: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/pushing-the-frontiers-... It’s amazing how these people still insist on denying the massive contribution the audio model made, which is apparent by the lack of credits or acknowledgements to the team anywhere public despite these self aggrandizing blogs and postcast appearances.

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#77

This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX. NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate. This post: I wanted to know what cool tho…

Surely there’s a German word for this - framing a weakness as if it contributed to the success. I’ve seen it in so many talks, especially from people working in big tech. Something is a success in spite of some aspect of it, and those responsible for that aspect go on speaking tours about their journey and what we mere mortals can learn from them.

Try "Lobhudelei"

Re: Designing NotebookLM

#79
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there’s a German word for this - framing a weakness as if it contributed to the success. I’ve seen it in so many talks, especially from people working in big tech. Something is a success in spite of some aspect of it, and those responsible for that aspect go on speaking tours about their journey and what we mere mortals can learn from them.

Try "Lobhudelei"

I'm a native German speaker. "Lobhudelei" doesn't fit for me, as I would rather translate it as "schmoozing" or "glazing".

"Schönreden" is the closest I can think of on the spot.

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