Frankly speaking ...

What is it? Notebook LM is a research and study companion that helps you work with your own source material. I have been using Notebook LM for nearly a year to help prepare blog posts and do deep dives into topics that interest me. My usual workflow is simple: I collect trusted sources as documents, PDFs or web links, upload them into a notebook, then use chat to interrogate the content. From there, I use studio features to generate podcasts, video overviews, infographics, and custom reports. In practical terms, Notebook LM feels like a custom ad hoc retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tool. You upload your documents, then query it in context rather than relying on a general model response. Custom Personas The default experience keeps improving, with better templates, export options, and integration with tools such as Gemini and Google Drive. Those defaults are a good starting point, but I get better outcomes when I add custom personas. Custom personas let me control scope,...

Over the weekend, I had the chance to explore a local forest with my partner. As we wandered along the track, we came upon a variety of mushrooms and fungi sprouting from the forest floor. It was a magical moment that sparked my curiosity about these fascinating organisms. When I think of the terrestrial world, I usually picture plants as the foundational pillars of life on land. However, long before the first leaves reached for the sun, a vast, hidden network was already laying the groundwork: fungi . What fascinates me about fungi is how they exist in a category entirely their own—neither plant nor animal, yet holding the world together. Molecular evidence suggests they diverged from a common eukaryotic ancestor roughly 1.5 billion years ago (much like the deep evolutionary history I explored in my post on LUCA ). Surprisingly, they are closer evolutionary cousins to animals than plants. In their earliest days, these organisms likely lived in water and possessed flagella . But a...

1. The Problem: AI Amnesia We’ve all been there. You’re working with an AI agent, and for a moment, it feels like magic. Then, five minutes later, it forgets the architectural decision you just made and defaults to some generic, shallow solution. It’s disconcerting. The truth is, AI-assisted development often lacks discipline. We’ve moved away from rigorous systems and into "vibe coding"—just hoping the right prompt will magically give us a maintainable codebase. It rarely does. Matt Pocock nailed the core frustration: You have access to a fleet of middling to good engineers that you can deploy at any time. But these engineers have a critical flaw: they have no memory. They don't remember things they've done before. I’ve learned that the only way to keep these agents on track is to stop treating them like magic chatboxes and start treating them like disciplined (if forgetful) engineers. The fix? Agent Skills. These are modular, encoded processes that force...

Introduction: The Smartest Single Cell My interest in slime mould was piqued when I read Active Context Compression: Autonomous Memory Management in LLM Agents and learned that the design drew inspiration from Physarum polycephalum . In maze experiments, the mould prunes branches that do not lead to a reward and reinforces productive paths. That simple strategy maps surprisingly well to how we now think about managing context in large language model (LLM) systems. That connection led me to look more closely at the organism itself. Physarum polycephalum looks, at first glance, like a vibrant splash of yellow paint or a forgotten kitchen spill. Yet this "blob" is a syncytium: a single, massive cell containing billions of nuclei that share one continuous cytoplasm. It might be the world's most sophisticated "brainless" computer. What captivates me is its capacity for primitive cognition. Without a single neuron, it solves mazes, remembers past stimuli, and ...

Since 1956 one of the central goals of AI is achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Recently we have seen amazing advances in AI, but there are still important challenges to solve before we get there. In this article, I draw on the AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel report to outline what the AI community sees as the critical gaps that must be resolved before AGI can be achieved. AI is in a strange place right now. New benchmark results can make it seem as if the field is nearly solved. Yet these systems still fail basic common-sense tasks that humans manage with little effort. That gap is why true AGI still feels a long way off. In this article, AGI means an AI that can perform as well as a human across a wide variety of tasks, not just produce fluent text. The big problem is what researchers call the "Reasoning Paradox." Today's Large Language Models (LLMs) are very good at producing language that sounds like reasoning, but that is not the same as reliable for...

Years ago, as a DevOps engineer, I managed systems using various automation tools. However, for managing my own workstations, I chose Ansible and found a streamlined way to keep my Debian systems consistent without turning the whole exercise into another full-time job. What I like most about Ansible in this context is that it gives me structure without much friction. I can keep a clear separation between work and home machines; I can decide exactly which roles belong on which hosts through the inventory ; and I get useful safeguards such as ansible-lint and dry runs before I touch a live system. I also find the tooling approachable. The command line is simple, the module ecosystem is broad, and the documentation is good enough that I rarely feel like I am fighting the tool. The project itself is organised around small, isolated roles. Each role lives in its own directory under roles/ , with its own tasks, files, and variables, so a change to something like vim does not leak i...

For some time, I have been following research on LUCA—the last universal common ancestor of all life on Earth. This short article draws mainly on recent work, especially the 2024 paper by Moody and colleagues, as an introduction to current thinking. What makes LUCA so compelling is the scale of the question it represents. This is not just another organism in the history of life, but the most recent point from which all modern biology descends. What seems increasingly clear is that this starting point was not simple in any everyday sense of the word. Many of us picture the earliest life as fragile and barely formed—a transitional step between chemistry and biology. In that picture, complexity emerges slowly over immense stretches of time. Current evidence points in a different direction. LUCA appears to have been a recognisable, free-living microbe rather than a primitive intermediate. It likely possessed core systems we associate with modern cells, including: A genetic code and...

As AI models become more powerful, they are also becoming much more accessible. I have been interested in what happens when you trade a little model accuracy for the ability to run everything on your own machine, without relying on paid cloud infrastructure. For developers, researchers, and hobbyists, that shift is useful for more than just cost. It also changes how private, flexible, and portable these tools can be. This week I spent some time trying two popular ways of running local AI models: Ollama and LM Studio . Both are open source and free to use, and both make it much easier to get started than I expected. What I wanted to understand was not just whether they worked, but how they felt to use in practice and where each one made more sense. What I like about running models locally is that the benefits are immediate. There is the obvious cost saving, especially if you are experimenting often or working through lots of prompts, but privacy matters just as much. When the mode...

Introduction This week, I experimented with Google AI Studio. The objective was to see how difficult it would be to create a web front-end for a word puzzle solver targeting games like the Nine Letter Word , NYT Spelling Bee , and Scientific American Spellements . Developing the Requirements I had several command line programs that solved the problem. Now I want a web front-end. I had used Flutter before and knew it could deliver not only a web front-end but also native desktop and mobile apps. I drafted a requirements document in Markdown and asked Copilot and Gemini to review and suggest improvements. The document covered puzzle-solver inputs, examples, expected behaviour, and UI style. For this solution, I expected a client-server architecture. You can see the initial application requirements document on GitHub. Once satisfied, I submitted these requirements to AI Studio. First Iteration The first iteration produced a functional website. AI Studio provided a mock solver ...

In 1969, computational linguistics was at an impasse. A powerful theorem suggested that neither machines nor humans could learn language without explicit instruction. J.J. Horning, with a brilliant application of statistics, shattered that assumption. His breakthrough laid the conceptual groundwork for how modern artificial intelligence, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, processes the structure of human speech. The Problem: Gold's Pessimism To understand the weight of Horning's contribution, we must first look at the "pessimism" he confronted. Before Horning, E.M. Gold had published Gold's Theorem , arguing that even simple languages could not be "identified in the limit" (learned) if the learner only saw positive examples. In Gold's model, "positive examples" are simply correct sentences ("The astronomer saw stars"). To learn which sentences are incorrect ("Saw astronomer the stars"), Gold argued that a learner ...

Back in 1999 I decided to go paperless. This was a significant challenge then as many bills were still being sent via post, and few offered digital alternatives. The challenge was doubly hard as I was (and am still) running Linux as my only operating system. These are a few of the things I had to do to make a digital office work and how things have evolved since then. The Early Days The choice of a Linux desktop meant that I had to find tools that were compatible with my operating system. This limited my options, but I was able to find open-source tools that met my needs. I used GIMP for image editing, LibreOffice for document editing, and PDFtk for PDF manipulation. My Canon printer had a built-in scanner, which I used to digitise paper documents. Canon printers and scanners are well supported by Linux. I used XSane for scanning documents. I also used rsync to maintain a continuous backup of my digital files. Saving these scanned documents and bills as PDFs on my computer w...

Imagine a future where a routine surgery or a simple infection becomes life-threatening—that is the risk antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses. Informed by warnings that antimicrobial resistance could become the next major global health crisis, I dug into WHO and Scientific American reporting to understand more... Introduction: The Shift in Modern Medicine Since the clinical debut of penicillin in the 1940s, modern medicine has operated under a luxury: the "guaranteed" cure. For nearly a hundred years, antibiotics have underpinned the risky work of routine surgeries, cancer therapies, and transplants. We have lived in an era where the primary risk of an infection was a week of discomfort, not a death sentence. However, we are now witnessing a fundamental collapse of these defences. As the historical record shows, there has always been a delicate "seesawing" balance between the drugs humans develop and the bugs that evolve to survive them. For decades, medical in...

For a consultant, the most valuable asset isn’t the hardware or certifications —it’s the knowledge. Too often, that knowledge is left behind when you move between clients. You hand back the hardware, lose access to the Jira tickets, and the internal documentation you wrote becomes a ghost in someone else's machine. Years ago I adopted a private DokuWiki that travelled with me through firewalls, tech changes, and career moves. Here is why, even in the age of LLMs, it remains an important tool. The Consultant’s Dilemma: Firewalls and "Fading" Skills Consulting is a nomadic life. You spend months deep in a client’s infrastructure, often behind restrictive firewalls where online resources are a luxury, not a guarantee. I realised early on that I couldn't rely on the client’s internal systems to store my personal breakthroughs. I needed a knowledge base that moved with me. Whether I was troubleshooting a niche Git conflict or configuring a Linux environment on a lock...