Google's NotebookLM

I played around with Google's NotebookLM to create a podcast about psychopaths created from a variety of websites and YouTube videos that I'd linked to as source material. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

Click on this Link to listen to the podcast which is 22 minutes long. It can be downloaded as a 60MB wave file. The site also creates a Study Guide, FAQ, A Briefing Doc and a Timeline. I gathered the source material rather hurriedly and obviously the more time spent in gathering the sources the better. Of course, AI could be used to help in this regard. Overall this was a fun exercise and I'm sure that I'll experiment with NotebookLM further.

ADDENDUM: Another podcast etc. was created for me on the theme of Chess Champions. I used Gemini Deep Research to gather the sources and this was the result (link).

Spreadsheets and AI

I notice that there are several sites offering spreadsheet capabilities in combination with AI so that users need very little knowledge to carry out reasonably challenging tasks like creating pivot tables. One such site that I tried yesterday was quadratic and, after signing up to the site, I copied and pasted some data from the b-table of a sequence in the OEIS. Figure 1 shows what the data looked like.

Figure 1

However, Figure 2 showed what happened when I pasted the data in.

Figure 2

This was extremely annoying and didn't make any sense. I used the site's AI to fix the problem but the fix was tedious and only temporary. The spreadsheet was determined to keep messing up those cells on rows 11 and 12. I liked the site because Python code can be inserted directly into cells but the site obviously has glitches and it's also very slow to load. 

So today I'm trying a different but similar site called Bricks. I carry out the exact same task and see what happens. At first it made a complete mess of it and lumped all the date into cell A1 where I'd pasted it in the first place. At least quadratic had enough sense to put the data into the first column. However, I asked the AI in Bricks to fix the problem and it did. Figure 3 shows the result.

Figure 3

So I was satisfied with that, although I got the message that I only had 99 of 100 trial AI messages left. I hope that's just for the day and not for all time*. To be fair Google Sheets does exactly the same thing as Bricks and then it's very hard to fix without the AI. I'm encouraged to use Bricks again for more complex tasks than the very simple one attempted here.

* It turns out the free plan is as described in Figure 4 with 30 trial AI messages a month, that's only one per day!? The premium plan of $20 per month allows 500 AI queries per month and collaboration with up to 200 team members. This seems very stingy to me.

Figure 4

Gormenghast

I'm currently rereading "Titus Groan", the first novel of the Gormenghast trilogy, and I thought it would interesting to test out Google's Gemini using the following query:

Can you describe the appearance of a fictitious person who appears suddenly and asks for directions. The description should be in the style of the characters that appear in the Gormenghast trilogy.

I was quite impressed with the response. Here it is:

A figure, seemingly extruded from the very fog that clung to the courtyard stones, materialized before me. Not quite a man, not quite a shadow, but a damp, rustling presence. His coat, a patchwork of what might have once been velvet and now resembled desiccated bat wings, draped to the cobbles, trailing a faint, earthy scent. His face, glimpsed beneath a hat woven from what looked like dried reeds and raven feathers, was a landscape of deep, shadowed hollows and jutting, bone-like prominences. One eye, a milky, opalescent orb, stared fixedly, while the other seemed to have retreated into a fold of skin, leaving only a twitching, purplish scar. His hands, gnarled and speckled with a strange, verdigris-like substance, clutched a crumpled, damp parchment. A voice, thin and reedy, like the wind whistling through a broken flute, rasped, "The... the path... to the... the Obsidian Stair? Which... which way?" His lips, cracked and blue, barely moved, as if the words were being forced through a sieve of bone. 

I'd been prompted to do this after reading an article by a writer on technology who had been mightily impressed with AI's ability to write short stories.

Second Rapid Game

My second rapid game (10 minutes with a 5 second increment) ended disastrously but I had a dominant position until I ran into time trouble. Figure 1 shows the situation before I lost my rook. I only six seconds remaining.

Figure 1

As can be seen, I'm a rook up but two pawns down. All I needed to do was to protect my rook but when seconds remain you do silly things. My opponent had the luxury of 2 minutes and 27 seconds and that made all the difference. This loss cost me a hefty 119 rating points, which seems rather excessive. and took me down to 1608 which is embarassing but it shouldn't be too hard to work my way back up provided a learn to manage my time better.

My response to White's initial e4 was the Pirc Defense characterised by d6. I quite like this response but need to research it further. The YouTube channel Journey to Grandmaster is promoting it heavily via a playlist of 11 videos. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

First Rapid Chess Game

My first chess game played in the rapid format resulted in a loss on time. This was unfortunate as I had a superior position. Figure 1 shows the position after Black's 37th move where his Rook checked my King. I was already under time pressure and instead of simply taking his Rook with my Knight, I retreated my King to g1. Had I taken the Rook, Black would have captured my Knight with his Queen (not his Rook) and there would have been an exchange of Queens. Black's recapture with the Rook would have resulted in checkmate.

Figure 1

In any case, I was subjected to a withering Kingside attack early on that I managed to escape from using Black's own Rook pawn for cover. Figure 2 shows the final position when I lost on time. As can be seen I was a piece and a pawn up.

Figure 2

My rapid rating is now a tentative (because so few games played) $\textbf{1727}$ and so my future opponents will be weaker than Misterx47 who was rated at 1920. He gained 3 points and I lost a massive 88 points. So I'll now work on getting my rating closer to 2000.

Shocking Chess Defeat

Yesterday I suffered one of my more humiliating chess defeats, losing four games in a row to an over-the-board player. In my defence, I was playing someone who makes a habit of playing 5 minute blitz games online and so my opponet was well practised. In contrast, I was not. I occasionally play online games against a computer with no time limit but rarely play humans online in any format.

I don't like defeats and so it seems obvious that, if I'm not to suffer further defeats (and my chess partner has threatened to return), I must raise the quality of my playing through constant online practice. To that end, I'll need to resume using lichess.org and choose a suitable time format. I think the 10 minutes with a 5 second increment is probably the best format for me. the 5 minute games I find too stressful.

I'll give it a go anyway and see how it works out. It's the best and quickest way to improve my playing and it's something that I should have done years ago. I'll use this blog site to report on my progress. I'll play on my laptop initially as I find the small screen on my phone difficult to use, although I guess this is something that I need to overcome as well. This constant play also gives me a goal, namely to improve my rating. In some ways, it's no different to playing Wordle and trying to improve my statistics for that game.

Words Ending in "O"

I got to listing, when trying to sleep, words in English that end in the letter "o". I can't remember exactly what I came up with but here is a list created right now:

• albedo 
• bravado
• chiaroscuro
• dingo
• expresso
• farrago
• gizmo
• hello
• intro
• jackeroo
• kangaroo
• lingo
• memo
• noscebo
• outro
• polo
• quarto
• rondo
• solo
• tremolo
• utero
• vibrato
• woohoo
• x
• yahoo
• zero

Here is what Gemini came up with (some might query the inclusion of "Ohio" because it's a place name but this restriction wasn't imposed in the initial enquiry):

• Alto
• Bimbo
• Chocho*
• Duo
• Echo
• Fiasco
• Go
• Hippo
• Info
• Jumbo
• Kilo
• Limbo
• Memo
• Neo
• Ohio
• Piano
• Quo
• Radio
• Solo
• Tempo
• Umbro**
• Veto
• Wido***
• Xylo****
• Yoyo
• Zero

* "Chocho" is term used in Spain that's slang for vagina! Oh dear, I'm sure Gemini had some other meaning in mind but it should have double-checked for vulgar meanings in languages other than English. 

** "Umbro" is a valorous (fortissimus) warrior-priest of the Marruvians that appears in Book 7 of Virgil's Aeneid and his role has received significant academic coverage. This word is a little arcane. My choice of "utero" is a better choice. Even though "undo" is quite common it doesn't rhyme with any of the other words and so is to be eschewed.

*** "Wido" is a Scottish slang term meaning "rogue" or "scoundrel". A better choice would be "weirdo".

**** "Xylo" is a prefix used in compound words like xylophone. There's limited choices when it comes to words starting with "x" and ending in "o".